Lost & Found Urbanities

alexander wandl

I am an urbanist and landscape ecologist interested in the territories where society’s transitions become spatially visible and contested. Energy, circularity, strategic autonomy, climate adaptation or degrowth are not abstract policy agendas: they require land, infrastructure, resources and labour, and inevitably produce winners, losers and new spatial dependencies.

My work focuses on territorial metabolism, dispersed urbanisation and the circular built environment. I am particularly interested in productive, industrial and peri-urban landscapes: places often treated as the operational hinterlands of metropolitan life, but where questions of extraction, pollution, logistics, resource security and ecological restoration collide.

I see space itself as a scarce resource. Design therefore cannot simply accommodate ever more claims; it must question which activities we want to sustain, reduce, relocate or fundamentally transform. Ultimately, this raises a more fundamental question: how do we want to survive as a species, and what territorial relationships allow other species to survive with us?

I enjoy supervising projects that connect territorial-scale systems with precise spatial interventions, from degrowth and post-extractive futures to critical raw materials, strategic autonomy and the transformation of productive landscapes. I am interested in design not primarily as an illustration of transition, but as a means to take a position on it.

Selected graduation projects of previous years:

Please, take a look at my profile at (https://research.tudelft.nl/en/persons/a-wandl) to get an overview of my research publications.