For a century, highways have shaped cities, economies, and national identities. But in November 2024, Swiss voters rejected a CHF 5 billion highway expansion, signaling a shift away from infrastructure-led urbanisation. As nations worldwide double down on highway-driven growth, Switzerland’s moratorium invites us to rethink mobility, territorial organisation, More
Can housing cooperatives contribute to reintegrating former combatants into civil society? Can they evolve into a broader housing strategy for marginalised communities? What conditions are necessary for their sustainable growth within national housing systems? This research project examines the emergence of bottom-up housing cooperative initiatives by former combatants More
Durch die anhaltende Attraktivität von Städten als wirtschaftliche, kulturelle und soziale Zentren ist Wohnungsknappheit in Metropolitanräumen in ganz Europa zu einem akuten Problem geworden. Das Angebot an Wohnraum in Kernstädten konnte mit der Nachfrage nicht Schritt halten, weshalb dieses Forschungsprojekt die Auswirkungen der Wohnungsknappheit auf die umliegenden Regionen More
Während sich Familienstrukturen in der Schweiz rasant verändern, hält der Wohnungsmarkt weitestgehend an traditionellen Modellen fest. Das ETH Forum Wohnungsbau «ARCHITEKTUREN DER FAMILIE» beleuchtet aktuelle Dynamiken des Zusammenlebens und innovative Wohnformen. Expert:innen aus Forschung, Architektur und Immobilienwirtschaft diskutieren Lösungen für die Herausforderungen des sozialen Wandels.
Housing cooperatives emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Europe and played a key role in peacebuilding, reconciliation, and reconstruction in the aftermath of World War I and World War II. In recent years, following the global financial crisis, the governmental withdrawal from the housing sector and the inability More
The four-year SNSF Sinergia project “Family Custody Arrangements and Child Well-Being in Switzerland” (FamyCH) examines custody regulations following parental separation and their effects on children. Designed as an interdisciplinary initiative, the project aims to identify risk and resilience factors affecting children’s well-being. The ETH Wohnforum focuses with Prof. More
During the doctoral awards ceremony on 24 January 2025, Matthew Critchley, Rune Frandsen and Kam-Ming Mark Tam received a Silver Medal for outstanding doctoral theses. Rune Frandsen, who is currently working as Scientific Collaborator at Bundesamt für Kultur BAK, receives an ETH Medal for his doctorate, that he More
The Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies is young and evolving. While it builds on a rich research history across various chairs, its identity still continues to take shape through its doctoral community, lecture series, and biannual research colloquia. In this context, it is particularly noteworthy that the More
Amid the ongoing transformation of agrarian territories in peripheral geographies across the world through extended urbanisation, this paper delves into the persistence of peasant and pastoral strategies amidst the closing down effects of land enclosure and fragmentation.
New Ruralities (NERU) is an Erasmus+ Cooperation partnerships programme, which brings together six design units within the universities of ULB (Brussels), POLITO (Torino), UDC (La Coruña), UMinho (Braga), UACEG (Sofia) and ETH (Zürich). The Newrope chair is participating on behalf of ETH. The partnership’s aim is to generate More
A new core theory course for master’s students taught for the third time in spring 2025 argues that the list of ‘great’ cities needs to be rethought. Given the diversity of urbanisms around the world, it would be a disservice to limit one’s perspective to theoretical notions originating More
Spaces of global production are formed by a diverse set of spatial figures that result from and support a global division of labor. Spaces of global production include multinational manufacturing networks, industrial agglomerations, plantations, logistics corridors, and special economic zones.
14.10.2023–14.01.2024 | Exhibition | Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Awaska Alpa is a research project that critically explores the representation of Inga territory in the Andean Amazon of Colombia. During colonial times, the Spanish crown established the Indigenous resguardo (reserve) as a form of collective land tenure to “protect,” More
The 16th Conference of Parties of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16) took place in Colombia during the last two weeks of October 2024. The city of Cali became the main stage for intergovernmental efforts to protect nature. A key outcome of the summit was recognising the More
The acoustic quality of outdoor spaces is receiving increasing attention in planning and design disciplines. Yet, it is very difficult for non-experts in acoustics to include the effects of landscape changes on the so-called soundscape in their daily work. In the Innovedum project «Unity App for Soundscape Design More
Rooted in the tension between concrete locations and global networks, between movement and stillness, space and place, and between clusters and dispersed zones, global production landscapes are challenging to understand. Where do these production spaces originate? Who owns, designs, and manages them? Due to the opaque nature of More
Multi-disciplinarity is on the agenda for the contemporary architectural debate, and Researching Otherwise – edited by ETH-based scholar Nitin Bathla – takes a broad look at the topic. Divided into three chapters dedicated to transdisciplinary, sensory, and restitutive methods, the book presents pluriversal research projects, which range from More
Did you miss the NSL Forum and Cycling Research Board «Digital Twins for Europe’s Future Mobility», on September 4th? The video link is now available on the event website! In addition, for a quick read and an overview of the workshops, you can download the «Collective Manifesto for More
The publication features scholarly articles and interviews from leading experts working in various fields anchored in urban design and architecture. Each piece in the volume addresses the challenges and opportunities prompted by the SDG11, and by extension, the climate crisis. As a whole, the volume illuminates and showcases More
The NSL Colloquium will take place February 26-28 2025 at ETH Zürich and publishes an open call for submissions until November 8, 2024. The colloquium will investigate the relationship between the design and maintenance of living systems, seeking to cultivate practices, terminology, and theoretical insights into approaches that More
Martina Voser was a Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich from 2021. At the end of 2023, she was appointed Full Professor of Landscape Architecture. She talks about the profound changes that the Swiss landscape is facing and how her chair can develop the necessary transformation processes together with More
Methodological, epistemic, and ontological borders have long prevented landscape and urban studies from engaging in transdisciplinary dialogue, sensuousness, and affect. Researching Otherwise uncovers possibilities for deploying sensory, collaborative, and restitutive methodological tools to craft spaces for producing knowledge from pluriversal worlds. These methods connect researchers and their objects More
The Schelling Architecture Foundation awards the Schelling Architecture Prize biannually. In 2024, under the guiding principle of “Deep Transformations – Earth, Landscape, Architecture” the board of trustees has nominated three offices that leave classic professional profiles behind: Bureau Bas Smets from Brussels, LOLA Landscape Architects from Rotterdam and More