Kerstin Höger

Kerstin Höger is Professor in Architecture and Urban Design at NTNU's Faculty of Architecture, Department of Urban Design and Planning, since 2009

Background
Kerstin Höger studied architecture at the TU Berlin, the MIT and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Since 1999 she works with her architectural and urban design office on complex, large scale projects such as urban revitalization areas, mixed-use and corporate developments, knowledge territories, and city development plans. Recent projects include the master planning for a new urban quarter in Trondheim, Science City Copenhagen, and the Campus of the Singapore University of Technology and Design.
Alongside her practical work, she has worked in academia for over 15 years: from 1999-2009 as scientific employee and lecturer at the ETH Zurich, and since 2009 as tenured professor for architecture and urban design at the NTNU. Kerstin has co-hosted several conferences and symposia on contemporary urban design. She is editor and author of the book “Campus and the City”, co-published by Kees Christiaanse.

Competencies
Kerstin is an expert on urban design and development. Her research and teaching projects include “Urban Waterfronts”, „Clusters and Valleys“, “International Campus Benchmarks”, "Branding and the City", and "Lima Megacity". Her most topical project is “The Adaptable City”, in which she investigates and further develops interfaces between formal and informal urbanism.
She regularly appears as a speaker at international conferences and acts as reviewer, jury and committee member at many public and private institutions. She has written for numerous specialist magazines and book publications. Amongst other accolades, she has received a Fulbright Scholarship (1996-98), the TU Berlin Diploma Prize (1999), the ETH Research Project (2004-08), a NTNU Research Grant (2010), and various urban design and architectural awards.

Concentrations
Her concentrations is sustainable urban transformation and development in regard to the traditional city, the urban landscape, and the rapidly growing megacity. Densification, conversion and renaturization of urban area, reactivation of fallow lands, transformation of our cultural landscape, growth and reversibility, networks and participation, mobility and climate change are urgent urban challenges she is concerned about. 
Her leitmotiv is to shape our urban spaces liveable, beautiful, and open. Based on the “genius loci” and context of a place, we develop artistic concepts, strategic instruments, and design rules. Societal tendencies are reflected in development scenarios and creatively integrated into robust urban design and architectural projects. Thereby, we reconcile the evolutionary forces of urban transformation with formal planning and architecture in an open urban design. In this way, high-quality urban spaces can be created, which are specific and yet responsive to their context, and thus can contribute to a sustainable transformation of our cities and regions.