Research and artistic development

The Institute of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape has a number of positions of strength within our professional areas; Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape. The areas are characterized by the fact that they draw on both research and artistic development; in many of the projects in close harmony.

The vast majority of our research and artistic development projects are also created in collaboration with external partners; business partners, administrations, NGOs and other research and educational institutions. Many of them are also interdisciplinary, with e.g. anthropology, sociology, health science and data science. We think we succeed best when these collaborations also involve our teaching directly. The institute's strong interest in society's spatial changes is largely driven by our research and artistic research capacities within i.e.:

City and landscape development
The spatial development of cities and landscapes and the many forces and actors that influence these extensive processes is a core area at the Institute of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape. Urban space, housing, education, experience economy, cultural values, business, density, inequality, etc. – are all also concrete, spatial conditions that cities must decide on in order to thrive and to be able to cope in the international competition for labor and jobs.

We deal with current challenges for Danish municipalities and their ability to work strategically, and we relate to the Danish planning system. In these years, we have a particular focus on how cities can work with sustainability issues such as water management, density, CO2 emissions and food production.

Food production has a decisive influence on how the landscape develops and how the cities are laid out. 

Spatial consequences of globalization
Globalization is constantly changing character, and is constantly setting new spatial and material marks everywhere in the geography and in our life world. At Institute of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape, we are particularly interested in what the relationship between city and country, and between the mobilization of the knowledge city and the depopulation of the villages, means for forms of settlement and quality of life.

Read, for example, Anne Mette Frandsen and Knud Kappel's description of 'Thick Contextualism' in connection with the conference 'Re-scaling the Rural'.

93% of all urban development takes place outside Europe and the USA. At the Institute of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape, we have for many years had expertise in settlements and urban development in the Global South, particularly with a focus on Africa south of the Sahara.

In these years, we have a major external research project with a number of international collaborators, which investigates the connection between the occurrence of insect-borne infectious diseases and housing quality in the vast informal urban areas.

Nature understanding and Nature criticism
Our lost ability to recognize ourselves as a species among other living species and our destruction of other species' habitats is apparently a significant part of the cause of the world crises.Therefore, at the institute these years we have focused on contributing to new ways of understanding ourselves as an inseparable part of a living world, of the biosphere.

2023 was again a record year, and incidents of both drought and flooding are becoming commonplace. At the Institute of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape, we research both how we can limit all our footprints on the biosphere, and how we can align ourselves in a better dialogue with the forces shaped by wind, sun and water, without extracting more inalienable natural values.

Settlement and the welfare state's spatial challenges
New ways of living together and new needs for housing for different age groups call for new knowledge about housing forms and housing architecture, and at the Institute of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape, settlement forms and housing are a core area of research, artistic development and teaching. We are also concerned with the role of housing in urban development. 

The institutions of the welfare state constantly set new spatial footprints. At the institute, we investigate how we live in and with these changing spaces, and what forms of architecture they call for: Hospitals, schools, educational institutions, homes for the elderly, etc. In 2023, we completed the externally funded interdisciplinary research project 'Dismantlings and Restructurings: Spaces of Danish Welfare'.

Sedentary work is one of the biggest health challenges all over the world. At the institute, we research how cities and urban spaces can be designed so that everyone is invited to move more, without barriers.

Visualizations, films, new forms of data and technologies
Visualization is a crucial part of the architectural profession, but is also essential tools and methods in research and artistic development at the Institute of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape. Many of the institute's employees are interested in film as an architectural and landscape architect professional medium.

See, for example, Deane Simpson and Archie Cantwell's study and critique of the land value-capture model for urban development.

Through the visualization of density and geospatial socio-economic data and data on the use of urban space collected from digital platforms (Google Places, TripAdvisor, Flickr and Airbnb), research carried out at the Department of Architecture, City and Landscape has developed tools to analyze complex urban transformation processes.

Particularly on the basis of artistic development, we investigate how new spatial data forms such as point scanning and augmented reality can be included as medializations in the development of architecture.

Didactics and pedagogy
In addition, we constantly focus on developing our professional methods and our teaching competencies, both by challenging them in research contexts, by virtue of artistic development activities and in relation to changes in the practice of our subject areas.