International Symposium on Urban Design

Designing Urban Design Towards A Holistic Perspective

4-5 October, 2016 

Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

METU Faculty of Architecture will host an international urban design symposium exploring multi-layered doctrines and perspectives of urban design processes on a global scale. METUDSYMP announced the detailed programme of the symposium- can be downloaded from here.

War and peace, segregation and integration, individuality and collectivity, control and emergence; within the current period of human history, almost all fundamental conditions of civilisation take place in the same domain, the city. 

Therefore, as the most prominent artefact of humankind, cities have never been considered that much central for the prosperity of future societies as before. 

In that, possible forms of the built environment that are subject to high performance in terms of security, vitality, equity and comfort are significant issues to be dealt within the field of urban design. 

As a multidisciplinary profession and research field supported by the peculiar cognition of science, art and politics on an extended domain of knowledge (i.e. sociology, ecology, history and morphology), urban design has a challenging mission to provide a comprehensive response to the contemporary agenda of our cities. 

Since 1956, when Lluís Sert opened up the discussion for a common and robust disciplinary definition during the first Urban Design Conference at Harvard, the field has still been perceived as an emerging one through its multidimensional nature which is hard to unify in an integrated framework. Along its long course to be accepted as a full-fledged discipline with its own methodology, language and theory; urban design is still designing itself by research, education and practice. 

In this sense, putting forth an updated general view on the current state of art in the field is considered necessary to set responsive and innovative directions for urban design. The required perspective is claimed to be coherently merged, retrospective and proscriptive (future oriented) approaches. 

To this end, at the 20th anniversary of its MSc Urban Design Program, METU Faculty of Architecture organises an international symposium on urban design to be held on 4-5 October 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. The main aim of the symposium is to bring researchers, professionals and educators together, to attain a rich discussion on the past, present and future conditions of urban design. 

The thematic presentations and debates within the symposium are to be conducted under the specific titles of ideology, sociology, bio-ecology, morphology, methodology, pedagogy and praxis. The papers to be submitted for the symposium are expected to cover one of these seven titles which represent the prominent areas to reflect on the principal issue. 

The symposium, in this way, is believed to steer future debates with a series of brand new generative ideas and triggering questions, if not concluding answers for designing the domain of urban design.

Keynote Speakers

Prof. David G. Shane, Columbia University

Prof. Jon Lang, University of New South Wales

Prof. Ali Madanipour, Newcastle University

Prof. Stephen Marshall, University College London

Invited Speakers

Prof.Dr. Tony Hall, Anglia Ruskin University

Assoc.Prof.Dr. Abeer Elshater, Ain Shams University

Full-Paper (extended abstracts) Submissions (closed)

Proposal for each paper should be in the form of abstract containing maximum 250 words. Abstracts should be prepared in the following format: title of the paper, author(s) name, affiliation, address, e-mail address, telephone number, keywords (three to five words) and the text. 

Abstracts should contain a summary of the highlights of the paper, a statement of the problem and the nature of approach, the aim, content, and key findings and arguments. References in the text have to be cited at the end of the abstract. 

They should be emailed to [email protected] before August 15, 2016.

Posters Submissions (closed)

The poster size is 60 cm by 120 cm in portrait orientation.

The files (“poster.ai”, “poster.pdf”) that are provided by the organization committee should be used as the template for the posters.

The font types and sizes that are provided in the templates should not be changed. Apart from those, authors are free to use any font type and size for the rest of the poster.

Accepted posters should be printed and brought to the symposium venue no later than October, 4, 2016.

A digital copy of the accepted posters should also be submitted to the organization committee on August 15, 2016 -the date of full-paper submission.

Regarding the current political situation of Turkey, METUDSYMP 2016 published a new announcement about the symposium explaining that there will be no any changes in the symposium program:

''What we experienced in 15 July 2016, that is, the political turbulence caused by a non-democratic intervention to the settled rule of law in Turkey made us very concerned about the prosperous future of our country that we still believe in. Under these circumstances, many future participants and followers from either Turkey or abroad have expressed their concerns about the current status of the organization. Regarding all these rightful concerns, we clearly state that the organization committee of METU International Symposium of Urban Design decided not to make any changes in the already announced program. This decision is supported by the fact that everyday life in Turkey is already being normalized under recent regulations and precautions thereby taken.

We also inform all the expected participants that our keynote speakers have already expressed their will to attend to the symposium in October 2016 as scheduled.

In this opportunity, we kindly remind that the due date for the submission of the papers (extended abstracts) and registration is August 15, 2016. We are all looking forward to seeing you at METU on October.''

Important Dates

Standard Registration: June 20 - August 15, 2016 

Full-paper Submission: August 15, 2016 

Symposium: October 4-5, 2016

Workshop: October 7, 2016 / Controlling Design-Design Control and Guidance 

Lectures within the scope of Workshop:

Prof.Dr. Tony Hall / Controlling Design: The Basic Tools&Techniques-The Chelmsford Experience

Prof. Dr. Nil Duruöz Uzun / Urban Transformation in Turkey: Typological Change in Residential Fabric

> via metudsymp2016.org