The idea of urban planning and designing contributes to the growth of cities in a number of ways. Cities that have been properly planned and designed provide more room for population growth while also managing all resources to ensure that everyone living there is content. These are some of the most fundamental components of urban design and planning. With the speed at which technology is developing, there is still much that has to be investigated and put into practise in the field of urban design.
About the Institute
The KTH Royal Institute of Technology’s Centre for the Future of Places CFP was positioned at the nexus of architecture, urban planning, urban design, and urban studies. It served as an agora, a gathering place for top researchers, practitioners, and thinkers in urbanism who are pursuing solutions to the city’s major urban development challenges, with a focus on public space systems. The value of public space in the planning and upkeep of cities is crucial to the future of urbanism as we face new social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental concerns.
The CFP’s constant goal is to draw attention to the importance of public space and the public realm in urbanism and urbanisation, notably the change in focus from objects to places. We have investigated the connections between urban form, human behaviour, urban society, social life, sustainable urbanism, and housing in the wake of emerging global transformations via the multidisciplinary lens of public space as part of that goal. Additionally, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, is the “MIT of the NORTH” and the mother institution and hub of CFP.
Since its founding in 1827, KTH Royal Institute of Technology has grown to become one of Europe’s top technological universities and a significant hub for the advancement of knowledge. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden’s largest institution for technical education and research, brings together faculty, staff, and students from around the globe. KTH Royal Institute of Technology is collaborating with industry and society to develop sustainable solutions to some of humanity’s most pressing problems, including climate change, future energy needs, urbanisation, and ageing populations’ quality of life.
Research and instruction at the KKTH Royal Institute of Technology span the fields of science, technology in all its forms, architecture, industrial economics, social planning, history, and philosophy. The university’s education produces a new generation of engineers, architects, and teachers, and the inventive environment encourages adaptable solutions.
Last but not least, their top-notch connections, affiliations, and research collaborations contributed to this success and will be further strengthened by their planned collaborations with LCAU at MIT in Boston and UCL Bartlett in London.
“We continue to develop the cooperation with UN Habitat and our other university partners such as TU Wien, LSE London, University of Chicago, University of Miami and ETH Zürich.”
One of the main things the university will be concentrating on in the upcoming years is strengthening the links between research and practise by encouraging researchers to collaborate and execute their research findings realistically. Dr. Tigran is looking forward to starting and possibly running a second research lab in his career, A City Research Lab dubbed HAL, after the work at the centre where they have built the best urbanism network in the world and the best clearing house on public spaces and urban areas research.
“Cities are an amazing place with limitless opportunities, problems, challenges and source of ideas.”
The Centre and Dr Tigran have won more than 15 awards for management and leadership from organisations like CEO Europe Magazine, Finance Monthly CEO Awards, World’s Leaders Magazine Awards, ACQ Global Awards, CV Magazine Award, CIO Views Award, CIO Times Award, Insight Success Award, Silicone Review, and others.
“In my work in Academia over the last 25 years, I span and cover one of the largest urbanism networks in the world.”
About Dr. Tigran-
Dr. Tigran is a multi-degreed architect with advanced degrees in regional planning, environmental science, and urban planning and design. He has produced 10 books, over 100 research articles, and has taught aspiring corporate project managers at the master’s level for more than ten years. Additionally, he has created three master’s degree programmes and taught more than 35 graduate and post-graduate level courses. Dr. Tigran is the recipient of three post-doctoral fellowships from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, University of Michigan in Ann Arbour, and Berkeley, California.
Atheneum Scholars Press, Routledge, Rowman & Littlefield, Rizzoli, and Edward Elgar will all publish his upcoming books. He has also served as the previous director of the Civitas Athenaeum Laboratory (CAL) and the International Centre for the Future of Places (CFP) at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Dr. Tigran served as the center’s director from 2016 to 2021. The centre is a global network hub and clearinghouse for research on public spaces. He currently holds the positions of Guest Research Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge in the Norman B. Leventhal Centre for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) and Associate Professor of Urban Planning + Urban Design at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in the School of Architecture and the Built Environment.
Key Achievements of Dr. Tigran’s Journey-
Leadership is undoubtedly a challenging process of self-transformation undertaken by a person tasked with directing others towards the accomplishment of a certain corporate goal. Dr. Tigran’s experience running a research centre for five years and a lab for five years prior to that, as well as serving as the director of three educational programmes, has greatly aided in her understanding of some of these concepts. She has also taught project and strategic management, project leadership, and related topics for more than eight years.
Getting things done with the project and research team you have in place is just one aspect of a leader’s job; the team also needs to be put together in the best way possible. Competence, equality, and professionalism are important considerations, and it takes skill to understand where each person can contribute most.
“At the outset of my leadership role, I started to expand and build new networks and brake barriers of what is possible and impossible.”
In this case, a strong internal bond with the team and employees is essential and necessary for the long-term viability of the business. Gaining their respect, obtaining their trust, making friends with them, and receiving their honest feedback are all essential.
Finally, as advice to others, it is important to be able to learn from the past and from mistakes. Other important skills include having strong communication skills and developing lasting relationships on all levels; listening, understanding, and acting; optimism and risk-taking to a certain extent; reading people and adapting them to necessary tasks in the organisation; anticipating problems and thinking outside the box; and removing threats and psychopathic personalities.
The Future Looks Interesting
The institute will be concentrating more on either following the path they have set thus far or steering the ship into another, slightly less (un)charted destination after the success of a five-year sequel of the centre. The vital issue of humanising cities within emerging smart and new experimental urbanisms, as well as issues of livability, comfort, health, aesthetics of cities, and open public spaces, will be in the forefront during the next two years, it is certain.
On the micro, meso, and macro levels (home, neighbourhood, district, city, and region), we will keep looking at this.
The major problem is that cities are becoming more complicated, and problems are increasing every day as a result of numerous convergent crises that demand solutions from new ideas, technologies, and methodologies. The Research Lab – HAL The Civitas Laboratory, which will take over for the Centre for the Future of Places CFP in the coming period, will attempt to respond to these inquiries.
Tackling New Challenges of the Pandemic-
To ensure that their teams survive the pandemic stronger, leaders must use their own emotional intelligence given the severe demand on both physical and mental health. Students study, socialise, and live close to one another on university and college campuses like those at MIT, Dr. Tigran’s second place of employment, and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, which is MIT’s partner institution. Additionally, they serve as the centre for social and cultural hubs where students from different parts of the world come together and where social and human capital is created.
They had to adjust to teaching, studying, and networking online as a result of the coronavirus’s rapid spread and the unanticipated effects it has had on society. Most importantly, they had to take all reasonable precautions to protect the lives of their teachers and students. Making the most of online learning and teaching, creating systems that are both reliable and adaptable, gathering information, and using best practises have all been hallmarks of this trying time, along with excellent collegiality and camaraderie throughout.
The higher education sector has previously survived pandemics and difficult economic times, and it will do so again by preparing to be flexible, resilient, and long-lasting. Universities are better equipped than ever to give students an easily accessible online version of their courses in the network society, city of bits, and new digital age.
Innovation is the Key-
“The Centre for the Future of Places was founded to advance sustainable urban development by reorienting the urban discourse from objects to places in order to advance healthy and livable cities, within the disciplines of urban planning and urban design. Innovation is the core value, fundus, and keystone of the new Lab as it was of the Centre for the Future of Places. In order to create a more equitable, sustainable, and prosperous society, the Lab and the centre that came before it envisioned a networked community of leaders actively collaborating across industries, frontiers, and disciplines.
The Center’s mission was to define, categorise, and establish the public space as a separate academic study topic by using a comprehensive strategy. In other words, the centre organised knowledge from all fields that are concerned with public space, including urban planning, urban design, environmental psychology, urban sociology, architecture, urban economics, human geography, and others.
In order to combine the knowledge from the various disciplinary silos and link the experts within them, the emphasis on public space served as a cross-disciplinary innovation framework. This helped to create a holistic understanding of the city that serves as the foundation for practical and effective action, which will necessitate extensive international cooperation.
