TERRITORIAL ECOLOGIES

Introduction: Landscape as Contested Ground, Design as Political Intervention

If the predominant challenges of the next generation operate on a range of territorial scales and across boundaries of political states, then territorial ecologies offer new synthetic and systemic strategies of spatial intervention. In other words, the nation-state is itself a site of design, deterritorialization, and decolonization. Not only are the predominant challenges facing urban economies today—from shifting climates, resource economies, and population movements—redrawing the contours of conventional practices and the borders of state jurisdictions, they now form an extremely complex and frictional terrain of engagement where dynamic hydro-meteorological forces collide and confront fixed socio-economic infrastructures.

Through the contemporary alignment of the disciplines of landscape architecture, civil engineering, and urban planning with the fields of botany, hydrology, and geography, this studio-based course engages the territorial and temporal processes of design (and un-design) through a series of collaborative exercises leading to an advanced and sophisticated design project. With an outlay of prospective and projective scenarios, new states explore the advantages and values of weaker systems of intervention, entailing forms of de-colonization, under-development, and sub-urbanization. With a focus on multi-layered, ecological processes associated with the basic building blocks of urbanization—including plants, soils, waters—projects will engage representation as a process of design research where temporal and dynamic forms of visualization will be operationalized—in time, across a range of scales: from small, technical interventions, with large, territorial effects.

Drawing from canonical case studies and strategic projects in landscape, geography, and urbanism, the studio is further enhanced by a robust, representational program that addresses a gamut of ecological flows at different scales through the multimedia language of maps and models. Supported by digital media, visual techniques, readings, and field work, a series of weekly labs throughout the semester address the interrelated subjects of media, mapping, and modeling where the territory of time is instrumentalized as scalable, design media.

Contributing to the multiscalar interpretation of site as ‘system’ and the reformulation of physical program as ‘spatial process’, this collaborative studio-based course establishes a platform for responding to a web of different and often unknown dynamics related to regulatory frameworks, political risks, spatial vulnerabilities, contamination variables, biophysical systems, military & civilian operations, urban infrastructures, economic geographies, and terrestrial ecologies.

Advancing the political agency of ecology as dominant driver in design, this studio-based course thus involves the formulation of “territorial ecologies” where landscape operates as a synthetic infrastructure of living systems—live, lived, living, and alive—where the spatial flexibility and body politic of biophysical processes can help shape, direct, and prepare for imminent and emergent territorial complexities and spatial frictions of the 21st century.