Martin Prominski
Leibniz University Hanover 

Design and artistic research in the contemporary city

Abstract 
Can you  activate urban waste lands by artistic research? How can you combine demands for flood protection with attractive open spaces along urban rivers? Is it possible to connect  biodiversity and intensive use by people in urban open spaces? The lecture discusses these questions by presenting four design and artistic research projects which dealt with public open spaces in European cities and concludes with a critical reflection of the three categories 'research into – for – through design/art'.

Biography
Martin Prominski is full professor for 'Designing urban landscapes' at Leibniz University Hanover since 2009. He studied landscape planning at Technical University of Berlin and received a Master in Landscape Architecture from Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, with the support of a DAAD scholarship. He has a PhD from TU Berlin, published in 2004 as Landschaft Entwerfen. From 2003-2008 he was assistant professor in 'Theory of contemporary landscape architecture' at Leibniz University Hanover.

He co-founded the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA) in 2006 and was an editor for it until 2010. Since 2008, he is a member of the STUDIO URBANE LANDSCHAFTEN, an interdisciplinary platform on research, practice and teaching on urban landscapes. His current research focuses on the potential of design research, concepts of nature and culture, the design of renewable energy landscapes and process-orientated strategies in landscape architecture (see for example the book River. Space. Design., published together with Antje Stokman et al. in 2012).