Design for People – Städte als urbane Landschaft

Climate change is playing an increasingly important role in politics and society, particularly in urban development. In the future, the focus will be on harmonising nature and people in cities, combining construction with the cultivation of green spaces.

Prof. Andreas Kipar, landscape architect, urban planner and architect, is a founding partner of the international landscape architecture firm LAND and deals with both global challenges and local problems. For 30 years, he has been advising cities on how to take a new, nature-based approach to the built environment. Since 2009, he has been a visiting professor at Politecnico Milano, where he teaches landscape architecture and public space design, and since 2023, he has been an expert on the World Economic Forum's Task Force for Nature-Positive Cities.

In his lecture, he will discuss the green transformation of the city of Milan over the last 20 years, also referring to the city of Frankfurt, where, in addition to several urban development projects in the city centre in the 1990s, he actively participated in the Frankfurt Green Belt Project.

His goal: cities need more green spaces and greener squares, roof gardens and green facades for a better climate, so-called ‘green lungs’ that provide cooling. They need rain gardens where water from heavy rainfall can drain away to protect against flooding.