| The aim of the research is the development of a scientific body of knowledge for urban and regional design in the form of spatial organization principles and theoretical urban/regional models (a scientization of urban design). This aim will be pursued by means of research by design (exploratory research, heuristic approach) and design research (empirical research), supported by literature research. My underlying assumptions are: a. The structuring and design of an urban area imposes long-term conditions on societal processes, such as the opportunities people have to organize their lives in temporal/spatial respects. The functionality (in the sense of the potentially creatable user value) of proposals for the structuring and organization of the form of urban and regional designs is therefore of considerable importance. b. Urban design is a practical science like other technical sciences (i.e. a discipline whose goal is the application of science), except that it presently finds itself in a pre-scientific state, and that urban design offers less scope than other technical sciences for falsification and/or verification owing to intra-scientific, time, financial and ethical reasons. |
