Bypass urbanisms.
Design and fieldwork in a city’s fringe.

The bypass road – circumventing the city while at the same time facilitating its expansion – is a paradigm of Indian (peri‐)urban development, and of its inherent contradictory nature. But it is also a paradigm of the many vernacular initiatives that, while bypassing restrictions, re‐inscribe the subject and try to make sense of place and space.

This presentation is rooted in local fieldwork and design research conducted in the South Indian city of Chennai (Madras). Through the figure of the ‘lab’, ‘fieldwork’ and the ‘design project’, it seeks to reflect on a number of critical positions left for urban design to take up in the context of wide-spread urbanization and climate change in urban South Asia.

Karl Beelen is an architect and urban designer by training (KU Leuven, BE). He holds a doctorate in Urbanism from Eindhoven University of Technology  (NL), and has been working intermittently in Chennai (IIT-Madras) and Karlsruhe (KIT) over the past few years.

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Über die Reihe:
In diesem Wintersemester stellt sich das Institut für Stadt und Landschaft in Form einer Kurzvortragsreihe vor. Wir berichten über Forschungsthemen der einzelnen Fachgebiete aber auch über aktuelle städtebauliche Themen.

Nach einem halbstündigen informativen Input, soll es Raum für Rückfragen und Diskussion geben und einen aktiven Moment des Austauschs beim Feierabendbier initiieren. Weitere Infos siehe Aushänge.