metabolism
Birgit: “Systemic change may require alternative pathways to standardised cultural, economic, social, and spatial practices. Historically evolved systems are often deeply embedded in territories and interwoven with other processes, making them resistant to change and prone to privileging certain interests. How can systemic explorations, using methods such as pattern languages, be combined with morphological mappings to foster fairer metabolic relations between urban, peri-urban, and rural areas? ”
Alex: “There may be no single ideal spatial form. A regenerative territorial metabolism depends on how settlements, productive landscapes, infrastructures, and ecosystems connect and interact with daily activities. I would like to question whether a polycentric, compact, and dense metropolitan form should therefore remain the default spatial imaginary of sustainable development .”
Francesca: “Rather than a fixed spatial form, a sustainable territorial metabolism may require an adaptable spatial framework that reconnects flows of resources with the places and communities through which they pass. Urban design can help translate large territorial systems, water, food, energy, materials and waste, into spatial relationships that become part of everyday life. This means designing places where productive, ecological and social processes can overlap, and where communities can participate in and benefit from these exchanges. The periphery could then become not simply the space that supports the metabolism of the urban core, but an active territory where new relationships between resources, landscapes and ways of living can emerge.
