Call for Papers: RC21 2022

Deadline: 31 January 2022 | Conference: 24-26 August in Athens, Greece. Panel 26 Peripheralisation: The production of ex-centric places as an ordinary process of extended urbanisation. Conveners: Christian Schmid, Metaxia Markaki | ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Conceptualising ‘Cultural Landscape Commons’: Retracing Ecological Thinking from the Swiss Alpine Landscape to Social-Ecological Systems

This paper retraces the fundaments of the ‘nature-culture’ divide within the study of Swiss alpine ‘cultural landscape commons’, showing how this notion was shaped by early ecological thinking expressed through environmental determinism, dynamic systems, and cultural ecology. These fields of research are seen as precursors to some of the More

The Spatiality of Poverty and Popular Agency in the GCR: Constituting an Extended Urban Region

The Gauteng City-Region (GCR) in South Africa is a paradigmatic example of extended urbanization, in which the legacy of mining and apartheid continue to impact spatial practices and the experience of everyday life. The dynamics between urban centralities such as Johannesburg and regional-scale peripheries established by this legacy More

Oberstadt4D

With the spatial development concept REK, the city of Baden committed itself to an active urban development in 2019. With the consensual approval of the residents’ council, this process starts with the project «Oberstadt4D» – a cooperation between science, administration, practice and social players. The Oberstadt4D project supports More

Promoting peace and reconciliation through cooperative housing in post-conflict Colombia

The project «Peacebuilding through housing cooperatives in Colombia» aims to contribute to the peace process in Colombia and supports the foundation process of the first housing cooperative of «ECOMUN – Economías Sociales del Común». Access to adequate and affordable housing plays a key role in post-conflict peace building More

Common Water – the Alps

The Alps are not a static assemblage but a dynamic and sensitive living space. Geological and geomorphological processes formed their characteristic topography over millions of years and in so doing established the fundamental conditions for the development of Alpine culture. This is characterised by the continuous creation of More

Architectural Expertise in a World-in-Common

Architectural and urban design are activities embedded in a socio-spatial and political context. Harvard Professor of Urban Planning Susan Fainstein, therefore, challenges theories of planning—and, with that, architectural and urban design—to address these relations: how does the intervention and implementation impact the (urban) context, the (city) users, and More

An Architecture World: The Tacit in Recent Architectural Pedagogy at ETH Zurich

The tacit dimension of architectural pedagogy—which students deploy when designing, but have trouble explaining—remains understudied, beset by methodological difficulties. Existing accounts emphasize isolated studio exercises or cognitive processes, often neglecting cultural, historical, and disciplinary contexts. Meanwhile, the notion of tacit knowledge is not even entirely adequate for architectural More