Lecture
OST, Campus Rapperswil

Ecologising Urban TerritoryMilica 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 progress and growth of cities, 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, reappropriation and transition of habitats and ecologies, traversing disciplinary boundaries and both built and unbuilt lands. Based on the work of the Architecture of Territory studio, the talk explores contours of a possible territorial project of agroecological change in Geneva and Zurich, 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.