Bettenhausen Commons / NHWaward 2024 | Vertical Project

^{supervised by: Prof. Dr. Verena Brehm}

In the design project "Bettenhausen Commons", building blocks of a communal neighborhood are to be designed: Which architectures and urban spaces for living, working, learning and living promote community, enable communal creation and facilitate the sharing of spaces, goods and resources?

The design area in Bettenhausen is characterized by suburban infrastructures, oversized traffic areas, industrial and commercial relics, brownfields, vacant buildings and underused open spaces and its relative proximity to Kassel city centre. It therefore offers potential space as well as various requirements for a creative, structural, open-space and programmatic transformation. Urban barriers must be reduced and new links with the surrounding area created. Programmatically, the area should be enriched and new forms and combinations of living, working, producing, learning, etc. should be designed. In the process, common relationships between the individual and society or community can and should be rethought in spatial and organizational dimensions. The changes to be designed take into account materially circular approaches, implement community strategies and create climatic resilience spaces.

The reduction of individualized demands ("reduce") and sharing are basic principles of sufficiency-oriented sustainability concepts in the design of architecture, open spaces and neighbourhoods. Communities, such as neighborhoods or "Quartiersschaften", are the social prerequisite for implementing these concepts. Communities form "ecosystems" for the success of more frugal lifestyles that also generate added value for their residents.

Interdisciplinary teams will develop and design concepts for a community-building district in Bettenhausen. The development can take place in terms of Urban Design, open space and architecture. Possible topics are

- Buildings and open spaces with multiple and flexible uses (MixtoMax)

- communal forms of living and working (co-housing/working/living)

- micro-apartments (Tiny Living)

- Shared mobility (mobile stations, mobility hubs, infrastructure of the environmental network)

- The hijacking of (residual) traffic areas and integration as part of the neighborhood

- Urban commons - communally used and managed open spaces

- Blue-green infrastructures (climate adaptation, climate resilience)

- and much more.

The design project is offered in cooperation with the Department of Landscape Architecture | Technology, Prof. Florian Otto. Approaches for the neighborhood are developed from the respective disciplinary core competencies, developed and elaborated in joint supervision and presentation sessions. Interdisciplinary collaboration between students from ASL is expressly desired.

The design project is integrated into the task of the NHWAward 2024 of Nassauische Heimstätte | Wohnstadt. The competition calls for experimental designs for the city of tomorrow using the example of the design area in Bettenhausen. The project designs can be used by the students as a basis for the competition and submitted there (submission by September 5, 2024, prize money €10,000).

The project seminar "Digital Analysis Tools in the Design Process" is offered for the design project at the FG Designing in Urban Contexts, participation is recommended.