Five years ago, in 2006, the new Urban Design master programme started at the Technical University of Berlin. Urban design is therefore - you may mistakenly conclude - a relatively new discipline at the Technical University. Urban design has in fact been an issue since 1799 when the so-called Bauakademie, the Academy of Architecture and progenitor of the later Technical University, was founded. Professors teaching at the Technical University of Berlin have shaped urban design in Germany over the last 100 years. In the following, I will discuss few impulses which have influenced urban design at TU Berlin.

"Five years ago, in 2006, a new master course was launched at the Faculty for Planning Building and Environment of the Berlin University of Technology: Urban Design. This course was unique in as much as it was not based on an existing course of studies. What was the background to this decision?

55 years ago, in 1956, a historically renowned conference was held at the Harvard University Graduate school of Design. Its theme was urban design, and it played a significant role in establishing the field in the academic landscape under that name. The impetus for the conference came from José Luis Sert, Dean of the Graduate School of Design. Sert had good reasons for such a venture. Through a careful renewal of the discipline, he wanted to carefully reinvigorate CIAM, an organisation of which he was a leading member and that was being challenged by Team 10 in Europe at the time. He also wanted to provide an orientation for the foreseeable post-war urban restructuring. Apart from Sert, the conference participants included Richard Neutra, Victor Gruen, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs and Ed Bacon. A review of the conference was documented in a themed issue of the Harvard Design Magazine, published in spring 2006." ...

After years of continuing reports from Dubai on architectural records being broken and new wonders of the world being built, the Western news media now rushes to announce the failure of a hypertrophic urban vision. The New York Times sees Dubai’s economy “in free fall” (02.12.2009), the Guardian speaks of a crisis of the “shrine to unbridled capitalism” (02.13.2009) and the Independent looks behind “the dark side of Dubai” (04.02.2009). The German-speaking press also was quick to proclaim Dubai’s imminent demise, for example, the Berliner Tagesspiegel, on the occasion of an exhibition of the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Künste [New Society for Fine Arts] on social exclusion, called Dubai an “image without content” (03.22.2009), the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung proclaimed a “flight from paradise” (05.02.2009), and the Stern commented, “Dubai tightens its belt” (05.13.2009). Haven’t we always suspected this would happen? The model of Dubai is yesterday’s news, the bubble Dubai has burst. The moment of the crash can be determined precisely: September 2008. After this moment the constant increase in real estate prices collapsed. Whoever reads sources about Dubai from before and after September 2008 feels he has to rub his eyes in disbelief: Are we really talking about the same city? The bright language about a permanently accelerating record and project spiral abruptly fell silent. Is the mocking discourse of failure now, however, not as premature as the blind exultation of the fairy tale city before?

The turbo pace of urban design in Dubai has slackened since autumn 2008. Real estate business is grinding to a halt. Foreign construction workers and experts are losing their jobs. The flaws of the social and economic Über-Orient are being exposed through the crisis.

After years of continuing reports from Dubai on architectural records being broken and new wonders of the world being built, the Western news media now rushes to announce the failure of a hypertrophic urban vision. The New York Times sees Dubai’s economy “in free fall” (02.12.2009), the Guardian speaks of a crisis of the “shrine to unbridled capitalism” (02.13.2009) and the Independent looks behind “the dark side of Dubai”  (04.02.2009).