Welcome to SPRING!!

April 4th 2013 - A delegation from the University of Rostow/Russia visited the Faculty of Spatial Planning/TU Dortmund University to learn more about the SPRING Programme. Dr. Katrin Bäumer gave them a presentation on philosphy, structure, and contents of this international MSc Programme. In the following discussion it became obvious once more, that SPRING functions as a best practice example when it comes to international university co-operation and joint higher education teaching concepts.

April 2013 - The SPRING student Genevieve Sevlo Sparkles (Batch 2011/12), currently studying at UACh, has attended the International Summer School ‘Lima beyond the Park’ in Peru from 18.2.-3.3.2013. The summer school was organised by the Institute of Landscape Planning and Ecology (ILPÖ) of the University of Stuttgart in cooperation with four other Universities and financed by DAAD. The participants explored different technologies, designs and methods to improve the use of the limited water resources in the Worlds second driest megacity: LIMA-Peru by adopting Water Sensitive Urban Designs

Working in Lima with a growing population of about 9million inhabitants and an annual rainfall of 9mm was not just an eye opener but also challenging and exciting. The need for a multi-disciplinary approach to managing the 21^st century urban cities was a key feature as participants were from different professions: water engineers, agriculture engineers, architects, spatial planners, social scientist, environmentalist and landscape architects.

Lima and for that matter Peru cannot be talked about without mentioning the beautiful archaeological sites, rich indigenous culture and of course good, tasty food which added to the exciting experience.

Genevieve Sparkles

November 2012 - From Nov 5 to 9, the annual SPRING Network Meeting took place in Dortmund. All the partner universities had sent their representatives, Mario Delos Reyes (Philippines), Ally Hasan Namangaya (Tanzania), Patricio Belloy (Chile), Eric Oduro-Ofori and Dan Inkoom (Ghana). The first two days were comitted to the admission of SPRING students for the next academic year and the selection of qualified candidates for DAAD scholarships, which was conducted together with the representatives from DAAD (Anke Stahl and Birgit Skailes). A focus of the following days was a discussion of scenarios and exchange of ideas about the future direction of the SPRING programme to meet anticipated challenges. These were also attended by Prof. Wiechmann, who is a member of the ISPC Board. The last day saw two lectures in the SPRING Colloquium given by Alfredo Erlwein from the Universidad Austral de Chile and Mario Delos Reyes from the University of the Philippines.

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