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 urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.

MY CLOUD

Your TikTok scroll, a robotaxi’s U-turn, a nation’s tax records—every byte lives somewhere in the cloud, gulps megawatts, and silently redraws territory. MY CLOUD sets out to puncture the gaseous metaphor. With four guest speakers from architectural geography, digital-economy sociology, environmental history, and speculative design, we aim to locate the cloud’s physical footprint, legislate who owns and governs it, historicise the infrastructures that birthed it, and reimagine the futures it could enable.

The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ works engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion. There will be three graded exercises that will count as proof of completion.

ARCHITECTURE OF TERRITORY—MY CLOUD is curated and organised by Milica Topalović, Yiqiu Liu, and Jakob Walter.