About the EcoCity Design Studio

Green Fit: Ingolstadt’s Sustainable District. The project aims to re-fit the site of a former oil refinery for human habitation addressing the challenges of climate change, future oil scarcity, and global environmental degradation by way of proposing a green neighbourhood with a strong orientation towards sports outdoor lifestyles. The project also fits the economic development of the region and the desires of the Ingolstadt society to live green healthy lives in close contact with nature, recreational activities and open spaces.
The project’s objective is to fit this new neighbourhood for 6,000 residents within the surrounding nature protecting the existing alluvial forest, nature preserve, and biotopes while bringing nature to the development and providing a large compensation area. On an east-west direction, three “urban fingers” interlock with three “green fingers” of biodiversity/productive landscapes in a symbiotic relationship between ‘city’ and ‘country’ and creating a variety of cityscapes ranging from the very urban (or built-up) to the very rural (or natural). On a north-south direction, the “fingers” are intersected by four movement/activity axes. See more...

"EnergieQuartier" (Energy District), Student ideas competition, 2011.
The brief for the project asked for re-designing an existing Gründerzeit quartier (19th Century German urban blocks) in any German city to make it energy efficient, energy conserving, and energy productive. Gründerzeitquartiers are considered very energy inefficient by contemporary German building standards and in view of Germany’s policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% (from 1990 levels) by the year 2020, the Ministry released the competition in an effort to look for visionary ideas to retrofit such quartiers and raise their energy efficiency to current standards. See more...

Nassim City A contribution to the BUE's International Competition in Sustainability and Future, 2010, 3rd place.
This project was produced as an entry for the International Student Competition on Sustainability and the Future (wining the Second Prize) sponsored by the British University in Egypt and the Egyptian Government. The brief asked for visionary sustainable development proposals to be developed along a proposed national transportation corridor running north to south along the Saharan Desert, 100 kilometres west of the Nile River. See more...

Sustainable Masterplan for Berlin's Heidestrasse Area developed by students of TU Berlin in 2010.
The studio took the existing, as “sustainable development” marketed project to task and found that the meaning of “sustainability” in the current project was reduced to a limited set of sustainable elements, namely compactness, high-density, mixed-uses, and pedestrian environments, but lacked considerations for water recycling, energy production, waste management or food production. The studio brief asked to re-design the existing proposal to include all the missing elements and see how the original design would change after their inclusion. See more...