Lecture
Online

Counter­urbanisations: Repairing Territory Through Agrarian AlternativesMilica Topalović

Can we imagine a territorial project of (agro)ecological regeneration? The role of urban and territorial design has been undergoing a paradigm shift, recast from a design as enabler of urbanisation processes driving growth of cities and industrialisation of the land, toward a design that is meant to repair social and environmental damages associated with these processes. Within such emerging approaches, a designer engages with notions of sufficiency, durability, care, re-appropriation and transition of habitats and ecologies, traversing disciplinary boundaries, and working across the built-unbuilt and the urban-rural divides. Based on the work of the Architecture of Territory studio at the ETH Zurich, the talk explores contours of a possible territorial project of agroecological change based on different case studies around the world, drawing from experiences of emerging agrarian alternatives such as solidarity agriculture, the legacies of communal and cooperative governance over land, labor and resources, from changing cultures around food and waste, and from experimental scientific contributions to agroecology.