Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories and Projects

Lecture Series | 5 sessions on selected Thursdays, 10:00–12:00 | via Zoom.

This lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanization. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanization, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists. Within the programme, the five guest speakers are invited to open up perspectives on territory as Earth and the manifold meanings it embodies: Earth as a living world, a world-system, earth as soil, as land, as field, and even as dirt. By looking at the Earth and its ecologies, the guest speakers will propose novel and urgent approaches to territory and urbanization: from «Gaia-graphy» of Earth’s critical zones, and emergence of urban soil mapping as a tool in urban design, to working with «dirt» in order to develop an ethics of care and maintenance for precarious environments.

01.10. Alexandra Arènes (University of Manchester): Critical Zones: Sensors for Ghost Landscapes
15.10. AntoineVialle (EPFL): Urban Soils Mapping: Case West Lausanne
29.10. Johan Six (ETH D-USYS): Linking Soils Across the Urban-Rural Nexus
12.11. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (Harvard GSD): Arable Lands Lost Lands
26.11. Hélène Frichot (University of Melbourne): Dirty Theory: Dirt and Decolonisation

Organisation