Urban Archipelago

The Urban Archipelago studio explores the future of living, working, and producing at a time of rising sea levels and climate-change-related spatial, social, and cultural transformation. It rethinks the role of water as a foundation for the design of water-aware architectures and urban spaces. It investigates the spatial, social, and cultural aspects of water embedded in infrastructures and buildings, in institutions and policies, in drawings, music, or writing.

The studio posits that we need new public spaces that capture water-based lifestyles where newcomers, refugees, and migrants encounter citizens and where skilled employees cross the paths of service or knowledge workers. We argue that architects and urban designers need to include water awareness into their local strategies to achieve a balanced composition of the population and regeneration of residential areas, sustainable urban design and architecture, and to facilitate blue economic growth. Water is essential to human and non-human life through time and space. Architecture and urban design have a key role in bringing back water awareness and in developing future scenarios for living with water.

The studio prompts students from the MSc tracks on Architecture and Urbanism to develop strategies that connect architectural objects, urban settlements, and landscapes with water systems. Designing new architectures and public spaces for an urban archipelago asks designers, planners, anthropologists, economists, and historians to rethink the logic of research and design through the lens of water. The Urban Archipelago course focuses on water systems and natural water bodies as spaces of coexistence and conflict. New scenarios and maritime mindsets are needed to better respond to the challenges posed by social, spatial and environmental transitions.