Competence Field "Metropolitan Research"
With more than 5 million people inhabiting a high-density urban environment, the Ruhr region is one of Europe’s largest agglomerations, on par with Île-de-France, Greater London, Moscow and Istanbul. Ruhr Area has a polycentric structure, boasting a number of centers that network and collaborate with each other, as well as being competitors. Moreover, Ruhr Area is a model case for the transformation of an industrial region into a service and knowledge-based metropolitan hub. In the field of transformative metropolitan research, Ruhr Area thus constitutes an ideal real laboratory for analyzing and shaping structural changes, from the scaled-down versions of individual quarters to the entire region.
In this dynamic and heterogeneous high-density urban environment, academics at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), TU Dortmund University and University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) have been conducting dedicated research into metropolitan living for many years. All three universities possess disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise, leveraging it strategically thanks to their complementary resources and synergy potentials. The UA Ruhr competence field “Metropolitan Research” marks the establishment of an internationally visible center for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary metropolitan research that bundles the complementary competencies of the three universities across all discourse communities and takes advantage of the strengths of the region by networking with third-party research organizations and industrial partners.
The "Metromap" provides an overview of the eight interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary areas of research consolidated in the competence field “Metropolitan Research” at UA Ruhr and illustrates the points where they intersect.
