Social Design- Arts as Urban Innovation

Advisory Board 2026–2028:

Visiting Artist Summer semester 2026:
Urban Environment
Today, more than half of the world population lives in cities, and according to UN reports another 200,000 people arrive each day. In the next 20 years, cities around the globe will expand by 1.5 million square kilometres and in 25 years two-thirds of the world population will live in cities. In this global event we can identify the triggering factors behind tremendous restructuring processes: the transformational power of the industrial and digital revolution. This development places cities as complex, self-generating environments under enormous pressure. Through the densification and concentration of the population, economy, capital, and media, as well as culture and knowledge in urban agglomerations, both their spatial and social fabric are subject to overproportional stress.

Social Design
In order to account for this global development, new concepts are needed that address the overall process of knowledge production in society. Especially art universities are predestined to formulate these new, distinct perspectives on the inherent logic of cities and the corresponding dynamics of their processes. Artistic research can generate links between multifaceted disciplinary expertise and the problems posed by the urban realm. The University of Applied Arts Vienna (Angewandte) has therefore implemented a new master degree programme dedicated to these challenges that emerge within urban social systems and the broad spectrum of related issues.

The shaping of reality viewed on the example of urban agglomerations and contrasted with the urban context of Vienna initially forms both the field of work and the scale for the realisation of the individual projects.