This cluster approaches design as a critical, political, spatially precise and strategic practice for shaping urbanity across scales. This entails taking a position on what is made accessible or excluded, what is protected or exposed, and which forms of everyday life are enabled or hindered through space and urban morphology.
Find here the introductory presentation of the graduation cluster:
Metropolitan regions globally face poly-transitions. The spatial reorganisation and adaptation of places and territories triggered by these transitions become political acts shaping who gains access to space, people and resources and under what conditions. Compact urban cores are commonly understood as places of diverse urban life, characterised by concentrations of amenities and diverse public spaces, as well as an energy-efficient use of large shared infrastructure. In understanding peripheries, we follow the definition of John Foot, as “places of the other”. Not only territories at the edges of cities, but also including spatial inner-urban peripheries and social-environmental conditions associated with marginality, exclusion, pollution and uneven access.
Territorial peripheries and compact urban concentrations constitute interdependent spatial, ecological and social systems. They are not merely the byproduct of metropolitan concentration and growth nor simply repositories for functions displaced from urban cores. Rather they can be read as spatial records of political, economic, and social ideals that have shaped territories across the planet. Welfare-state housing landscapes, modernist functional separation, suburban ocean of houses, logistics corridors, privatised enclaves, ecological buffers, productive zones, and infrastructures of extraction or care form a palimpsest, each reflecting distinct, and at times competing, societal visions. We understand the periphery as a mirror of society beyond dominant ideologies: its conflicts, values, exclusions, segregations aand in the relationships between built form, open space, people, socio-economic processes, and metabolic flows.
This cluster, therefore, engages with critical reading of territorial morphology across scales and its embedded social-ecological metabolism. Urbanism, understood as a projective practice, uses the relationship between form, counter-form, socio-economic processes and metabolism to interpret and transform territories. The cluster “Lost and Found Urbanities” will guide projects in exploring and reactivating overlooked, fragmented, and marginal urban conditions as spaces for public life, spatial imagination, and metropolitan transformation.
We place following challenges in particular central:
- What spatial form could enable publicness within predominantly peripheral and often privatised environments?
- What conditions create opportunities in less central places? How are these opportunities distributed across the population and species?
- How can the tension between polluted or waste-oriented peri-urban conditions and the aspiration for a “restored” periphery be addressed spatially?
- What spatial form facilitates future sustainable territorial metabolism of the periphery?
Graduation Cluster Lost & Found Urbanities 