Cities are the stage where the world performs itself, and a laboratory for social change. At the same time, urban space is more challenged and fought for than ever. In this context, we want to create the Baumeister Topos Cities initiative, an international, cross-cultural, cross-sectoral initiative that brings together the competences that our journals represent: namely, architecture, urban development, and landscape architecture in a broad social context.
When we call our one day conference “city as project”, then this indicates that we see urban space as inherently connected to city cultures, and to the integration of the many different actors influencing our metropolises. We want to find best practices and determine pathways for future development. In Berlin, we bring together academics and practitioners from diverse disciplines and with diverse backgrounds who all work in the urban sphere as a complex social system, and who want to improve the cities we live in.