Eckart Lange is Professor Emeritus of Landscape at the University of Sheffield. He holds degrees from TU Berlin, Harvard University and ETH Zürich. Prior to joining the University of Sheffield in 2004, from 1990 until 2004 he was Senior Researcher in the City and Landscape Network at ETH Zürich. From 2008 to 2016 he served as a member of the scientific committee of the European Environment Agency. He held visiting appointments e.g. at the University of Tokyo and since 2017 is Visiting Professor at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai.

The research of Eckart Lange is driven by his interest in how we value our environments, how we generate planning and design interventions, how we decide on interventions in our environments and what the effects are of proposed changes to our environment. The representation of our environments, real or virtual, coupled with the sensory experiences and the perception of our environments are fundamental elements in these processes.

During the HIAS fellowship Eckart Lange will be focusing on the overarching research question how are existing, no longer existing or not yet existing natural and urban environments digitally represented in order to help communication with stakeholders, including experts and the general public. A range of empirical methods can be used to explore and to test human responses to representations of our environment including e.g. cognitive, affective, behavioural and physiological dimensions.

His collaboration partners are Thomas P. Kersten, Professor of Photogrammetry & Laser Scanning at HafenCity University Hamburg, and Frank Fehrenbach, Professor in the Department of Art History at Universität Hamburg.

Eckart Lange’s HIAS fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.