Cities in Motion – Centrope

Cities in Motion is a design investigation spanning two semesters, organized by the platform Geography, Landscape and Cities (GLC) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. The aim of the investigation is to better understand the relationship between urban form, mobility and projects on an urban or architectural scale. Do such projects to which we referred as “prototypes” reflect the larger context they are situated in, or inversely can they affect this context by means of a kind of urban acupuncture?

The first studio, the subject of this report, dealt with Centrope, a large region including portions of four different nation states and the cities Vienna, Bratislava, Brünn and Györ among others. The second studio was situated in Bucharest and dealt with the scale of a large city. Each studio was working with an external advisor. In the case of Centrope this was Prof. Jeff Kenworthy, an expert on issues of mobility and author of the most concise assessment of the consequences of car dependency. In Bukarest, the studio was working with Anna Rose of Space Syntax, a London based company specialized in the assessment of spatial accessibility.