The cur­rent wish to live and work in urban areas is the main cause for the den­si­fi­ca­tion of city cen­tres. Thus the pres­sure on open spaces rises twofold: in­ner-city open spaces are being built on and hence slip the urban fab­ric, at the same time the pres­sure of use on the re­main­ing open spaces in­creases with the mount­ing num­ber of in­hab­i­tants. The sem­i­nar in­ves­ti­gates the re­la­tion of den­sity and open space re­flect­ing this cur­rent de­vel­op­ments.

The sem­i­nar is struc­tured in two parts: First, the top­ics of den­sity and open space will be worked on by eval­u­at­ing lit­er­a­ture. In a sec­ond step, ex­am­ples of very dense urban struc­tures and re­lated open space ty­polo­gies are to be analysed, such as Buenos Aires, Seoul, Barcelona, New York, Berlin. Among oth­ers, the urban de­sign pa­ra­me­ters, the his­tor­i­cal course of the den­si­fi­ca­tion process, the orig­i­nated build­ing and open space ty­polo­gies, key fig­ures of den­sity and so on will be ex­am­ined and con­tra­posed. Also the ques­tion of the qual­ity and func­tion­al­ity of the re­mained open spaces will be fo­cussed upon.

The den­si­fi­ca­tion process in the ex­am­i­na­tion area in Pren­zlauer Berg, Berlin, be­gins with the in­dus­tri­al­iza­tion and is based on James Ho­brecht’s plans of the city’s ex­pan­sion. Within this plan­ning, ex­ist­ing su­per­or­di­nate path and street con­nec­tions and plot di­rec­tions are being con­sid­ered. In this way, a great di­ver­sity within the blocks’ lay­outs and in the hi­er­ar­chies and di­men­sions of the streetscapes and open spaces emerges.

Green spaces, ex­ist­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties or non-as­sess­able uses, like the Jew­ish grave­yard or the water town for ex­am­ple, re­main in­cor­po­rated and largely pro­tected. Town and dec­o­ra­tive squares al­ready des­ig­nated in the Ho­brecht plan are built as planned and not over­built within the on-go­ing grow­ing process.

Com­pared to other quar­ters de­ter­mined by very even urban grids (Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Man­hat­tan), typ­i­cal and di­verse city units and neigh­bour­hoods are formed by the dif­fer­en­ti­ated urban struc­ture. The in­di­vid­ual units can be eas­ily dis­tin­guished as such and de­mar­cated from one an­other. The spe­cial open spaces like Helmholz or Kol­lzwitz Square or and streets like Met­zger or Danziger Strasse are gen­er­ally in­de­tity-es­tab­lish­ing. Fur­ther­more, con­verted his­tor­i­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing sites con­sti­tute fields of at­ten­tion in the area: in the Kul­tur­brauerei build­ings and open spaces cre­ate a catchy, al­most ‘me­dieval’ pit­toresque se­quel of spaces.