Envisioning Tommorrow’s Cities: O. M. Ungers’ Urban Reflexion addresses those visionary and experimental aspects in the research of the German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926-2007) that still today can serve as a starting point for the visions of the cities of tomorrow and that, so far, scholarly work has not sufficiently addressed.
For this end this issue of HPA focuses on Ungers’ radical vision of future cities that exceeds his rational approach to form, morphology and urban transformation to which he is too often reduced, despite his multifarious activities as a visionary architect, farsighted planner and scrupulous intellectual.
A look with new eyes at the urban visions that Ungers developed in the 1960s and 1970s, can open fresh insights into the increasingly complex contemporary urban systems – diversity, new traffic systems, climate change, biodiversity, affordable housing, land and energy sustainability – and stimulate imaginative reflections and scenarios for new urban perspectives.
Along the line of the binomial’s utopia/dystopia, ecology/biodiversity, rhetoric/humanism, universality/eurocentrism, morphology/transformation and postmodernism/posthumanism the authors André Bideau, Ioanna Angelidou, Chiara Ciambellotti, Simon Ganne and Benjamin Chavardès, Michele Caja, Eva Sollgruber, Orsina Simona Pierini and Gerardo Brown-Manrique analyse the ideas of city that Ungers’ experimented and generated in a comparison with others European design experiences.