Learning about the urban environment and ways to design and create it can often be a very abstract and challenging prospect for architecture and urban design students. Actual projects offer opportunities to educate about contemporary urban design tendencies. We have created a new study and research plan for last-year students at the Faculty of Architecture of CTU in Prague, which aims to tackle two contemporary educational challenges. The first challenge is the need for practical realness in design studio projects, which rarely deal with aspects such as finance, timescale, the developer, and the investor. Secondly, contemporary sustainability concepts are yet to become indispensable to urban design education and practice. Aiming to remedy that, we have designed a critical-analytical database of recent urban projects. Apart from basic information, such as authors and visual documentation, students provide additional details and confront the author's description of the project with their interpretation. They produce a critical review of the project and a multi-criterion evaluation. The focus is on sustainability, accessibility, and aesthetics, referencing The EU Green Deal 2020, The New European Bauhaus 2020, and Davos Declaration 2018. Students evaluate how successfully current urban design principles, such as mixing uses and forms, resilience, energy efficiency, creating places for people, managing the investment, and others, are applied. By confronting actual projects with these questions, students are encouraged to rethink their learned design approaches, setting them up for success in their future practice. Furthermore, the database serves as a knowledge base and reference for other faculty students.
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