Given current sustainability requirements, the quality of the built cityits buildings and public spacestakes on a particular importance. Yet many municipalities complain about a shortage of experts who are capable of effectively designing cities, urban districts, and urban spaces. Building on the 2014 Cologne declaration on urban design education, Die Stadt zuerst (The City First), the fourteenth Konferenz zur Schönheit und Lebensfähigkeit der Stadt (Conference on the Beauty and Viability of the City) seeks to circumscribe the requisite professional expertise: what do urban planners need to know in order to design and realize sustainable and resilient cities? They require a solid knowledge concerning suitable street infrastructures, sizes, and shapes of blocks, plot configurations, and building types, for a start. Beyond this, they also need the ability to shape urban spaces and their surfaces so that they remain attractive over the long-term and develop characteristic local atmospheres.

• Critically examines academic teaching in the fields of urban development and urban design
• Serves as a stimulus regarding current issues such as the fragmentation of planning processes
• Contains contributions by renowned experts from both research and practice

Autorentext
Christoph Mäckler is an architect based in Frankfurt am Main, an emeritus professor of urban design at the TU Dortmund, and the director of the Deutsches Institut für Stadtbaukunst, which he founded in 2008. He studied architecture in Darmstadt and Aachen. From 1990 to 1997, he was a visiting professor at the universities in Naples, Braunschweig, and Hanover, as well as a member of the Internationale Bauakademie Berlin.

Wolfgang Sonne is professor for architectural history and theory at the TU Dortmund since 2007. He is the scientific director of the Baukunstarchiv NRW as well as deputy director and cofounder of the Deutsches Institut für Stadtbaukunst. He studied art history and archaeology in Munich, Paris, and Berlin, and has taught at institutions including ETH Zurich and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.