Background workshop/design studio
Every year, a number of universities and the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for Global Heritage organize a student workshop on a current spatial heritage issue. The students come from different studies, especially landscape architecture, history, archaeology and heritage studies. They work intensively in small interdisciplinary groups to answer a question from the heritage field in a four-day session. The students use a spatial design process as a powerful tool to analyze the problem and propose solutions. The end result consists of a number of visual designs with textual explanations that propose different solutions in a creative and concise way.
Assignment
Leiden's historic city center is the economic and tourist heart of the region. Due to its dense development and often stony character, the city center is susceptible to heat stress. The question is how residents can continue to use the historic city center in the future, maintain its attractiveness, and simultaneously enhance its unique historical qualities.
The Municipality of Leiden, together with Leiden University, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, and Leiden Heritage, will conduct research into the climate challenge for the city center and the historic green and blue structures. They will then examine how these can contribute to climate adaptation and biodiversity in the future. The studenthub of the Centre for Global Heritage and Development worked on this assignment in multidisciplinary design teams of students of the Master Applied Archaeology of Leiden University, Saxxion School for Applied Science, and the mastertrack Landscape architecture and Urbanism of Delft University of Technology.
Output
The workshop took a week at the makercentrale and was completed with a presentation for eldermen and policy advisors of the city of Leiden. The project was part of Kennisstad Leiden and students were filmed for this project.
Hereby the presentation and booklet.
Film
In 2024, our design workshop was filmed for the promotion film of Kennisstad Leiden (from 3:20 min)