insites 2019 - 2024. Landschaftsarchitektur und Transformation

This publication celebrates the 15th anniversary of the Chair of Landscape Architecture and Transformation LAT, until July 2021 still the ‘Chair of Landscape Architecture and Industrial Landscape’ at the Technical University of Munich TUM. ‘insites 2019-2024’ is the fourth volume in a series that has been produced since 2007. ‘insites 2002-2007’ offered an insight into the work at the Chair of Landscape Architecture and Design at Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover, where Udo Weilacher was appointed in October 2002. ‘insites 2009 - 2014’ portrayed the five-year start-up phase of his chair at TUM, where Udo Weilacher succeeded Peter Latz in April 2009. This was followed by ‘insites 2014 -2019’ and now: ‘insites 2019-2024’.

The five years of research and teaching outlined here were not only characterised by the renaming of the chair and a structural reform at TUM. A crisis that began in spring 2020 and was declared over by the Federal Minister of Health of the Federal Republic of Germany in April 2023 also had a strong influence: the COVID-19 pandemic. Inquisitive students and project partners from all over the world have ensured that so many excellent projects can be presented in the publication.

Three major cooperation projects that have been successfully completed and published over the past five years have been particularly enriching. The book ‘Crossing Borders - Activating Spaces’ was published in 2021 and documents the results of the third cycle of the international doctoral programme ‘Research Laboratory Space’ (2017 - 2020) under the guiding theme ‘Crossing Borders - Activating Spaces’. The Research Training Group, which is jointly organised by TUM, ETH Zurich, KIT Karlsruhe and the TUs in Berlin, Vienna and Dortmund, offered more than 20 doctoral students the opportunity to present themselves to an interdisciplinary academic field and successfully complete their doctorates. Also in 2021, the documentation of the three-year research project ‘Alpine Industrial Landscapes Transformation - trAILs’ was published, in which ten partner institutions from five European Alpine countries were involved under the direction of the Chair of LAT, funded by the European Interreg Alpine Space Programme. Last but not least, since 2021, in collaboration with the Egyptian guest researcher Dr Sara Fouad, a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the NASA scientist Dr Essam Heggy from the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California, a series of internationally highly cited specialist articles have been published that deal with the serious consequences of climate change in Mediterranean coastal regions.