This design studio tackles design issues revolving around the social and environmental dimensions of climate crisis and controversies in resources’ exploitation, thus adopting the angle that characterizes the whole first term of MASt, titled "Project and society". The design studio aims to address contemporary environmental, social and economic issues through a design actions capable of both, highlighting the systemic and complex tensions as well as making a synthesis between the problematization of the future of the planet and the opportunities of environmental sustainability, cohesion, equality, quality of settlements and life and justice. The ultimate goal of the design studio is to define a framework of transformative actions of projects and design practices in different dimensions, highlighting logics, power relations, governance and agency to respond to the challenges of the co-evolution of territories, from the large scale to that of the material modification of the built structures. Comprehensive studies will combine with design focuses in the dimension of settlement and micro-aggregation of buildings and infrastructures in the scenario of contemporary landscapes and territories. Thematic modules unfold against a backdrop of themes such as the capacity for settlements and societies to respond to the global changes in progress, adaptive approaches to current changes in the urban and non-urban environments, the limits of anthropocentric thinking, and design responsibility to reduce gaps and heal injustices in the scenario of contemporary territorial, social and ecological transformations. The "Architecture, society and territory" design studio contributes to the objectives of the MASt degree program by guiding students in reading critically the paradigms of sustainability in reference to different global contexts. It also deepens the ability of students to position themselves consciously with respect to the cultural processes of definition of ecological and environmental design, urban planning and other activities of transformation of the environment and the territory related to the design professions. Finally, it accompanies students in the trans-disciplinary understanding of the complex problems, of multiscale nature, faced by spatial design, urban planning, and sociology. Themes in the four design studios may range from the development of adaptive settlement models, with reference to climate change and global challenges, to nature-based solutions, intended as ecosystem services or rewilding processes; from territory co-evolution, co-management, co-design for resilience to co-production in a post-Anthropocene perspective. The forms of innovation that will be considered, according to the trajectories of each design studio, include the debate around the commons and new forms of collective, in public spaces and beyond, between design and society.

The “Architecture, Society and Territory” design studio aims to disseminate knowledge to: - Increase the understanding of the phenomena characterizing the built environment, with reference to the theories and practices of architectural and urban design, theories of environmental design, histories of projects and the social dynamics related to them. - Deal with unknown contexts, examining the multidimensional and relational complexity of ecological paradigms, seen contextually with their historical, cultural, urban and environmental evolutions. - Deal with design activities in an integrated and multidisciplinary way, by systematizing methodologies and tools of analysis and evaluation, and by developing a critical way of communicating the project options with respect to environmental and political ecology, in both the city and the building scale. By successfully attending the design studio, students acquire the skills to: - Approach the project with a knowledge base regarding theories and techniques of design, including environmental design. - Apply previously acquired knowledge, methods and tools of numerical and physical modelling to support decision-making and design processes in a renovated frame of reflections on sustainability, resilience, and the new relational model between society and nature. - Develop design hypotheses that are consistent with the characteristics of the places, the global challenges and the escalating relationships that derive from them, as well as the most innovative professional practices. - Consciously interpret and respond, by means of design, to the complexity of an interdisciplinary approach to the transformation of the natural and built environment.

The “Architecture, Society and Territory” design studio requires students to have a previous knowledge of the main issues that concern architecture and urban design; elements of architecture and city history functional to recognize layering and forms of settlements; decision-making structures, systems of powers and procedures instrumental to transformative interventions in the built environment. All topics are part of the three-year bachelor programme in architecture. Such skills and knowledge constitute the basis for the in-depth study provided for in the design studio.

The design studio provokes a critical architectural reading of the paradigms of sustainability in global contested territories embracing the ecology as a system of relations rather than a set values, the Anthropocene as problematic supra-human regime and the eco-logic global crisis as a provocation to move beyond modernity’sconfining spatial and temporal imaginaries and question the central operational foundations of architecture: capital and carbon. Within this, the studio aims to problematize the production of a homogeneous, monolithic idea of life and its spatial references at different scales. Embracing the assumption that life as such does not exist and only different forms of life are present (extractive life, racist life, exclusive life, fragile life, vulnerable life, common life, etc) the design studio pose at the center the investigation two interrelated questions: what is the architecture of a non-extractive, non-racist, non-singular life? What is an architectural suspension needed to imagine and co-design planetary inhabitation that confront the inhabitable and its naturalized condition? Rather than attempting to reveal the objective, predictive and fixed in form truth of social and ecological phenomena, the studio aims to develop transdisciplinary and trasncalar foci on developing partial, unfinished, and ongoing interventions to indeterminate problems of complexity, intersecting design research approach with critical theory and planetary thoughts. The design studio is investigating a series of extractive, racialized, securitized and colonial problem-space where social and environmental governance are reconfigured around the limits of modernity and its monist dualism that framed around the inside/outside, nature\culture and us\other divisions that structure modernist understandings of self, subject, agency, the state, politics, and territory. In each, the studio develops analytical and projective knowledge as well as spatial and morphological analysis, abandoning the rubric of “environmental governance” “sustainable development” and “resilience” opting for an ontological approach questioning how different cultural worlds and realities come into being and what happens when diverse onto-epistemologies encounter one another thinking with feminist ecologies, post-colonial and decolonial literature, political ecologies, more-then human geographies and new materialism, intellectual references. Based on that, the design project that will emerge will take the form spaces of possibilities beyond the stale dichotomies of wild/domestic, pristine/degraded, human/animal and imagining “otherwise” that see human and nonhuman actors and relationships across a diverse range of spatial and temporal scales as imperfect, amphibious and companioning species.

The design studio will be oriented to the exploration of planetary global problematics focusing on macro-territories, border regions and infrastructural issues as well as conflictive and extractive landscapes, mainly in contested geographies and not the Italian territory. The studio task is imagined as a radical escapism from the capitalist modernist deadly matrix, opening to new forms of geo-and eco-constructivist interventions, new efforts to transform both macro-scale planetary systemic dynamics (geo-constructivism) and micro-scale ecosystems (eco-constructivism). The design studio is investigating, possibly but not exclusively territories as: - Peruvian Amazonas territory: the survival urbanism of aquatic fragile ecologies around Belen and Iquitos interrogating the overlapping matrix of extractions, logistic and the survival infrastructures of the Amazonas lifelines, thatgenerates tensions with alternative human and non-human modes of inhabiting a mobile and ever-changing territory. As socio-environmental changes seem to accelerate, the co-existence of rainforest and built-form is put into question. Can an analysis of the confluence of a multiplicity of ways of living and constructing help to delineate alternative collective futures? - The border politics and the shifting grounds of inhabitability across territories that constitute the ‘Balkan Route’ through Europe exploring informal camps, fugitive inhabitation and the ecologies of violence the spatialising illegalities, solidarities, and urbanism of survival as well as the imagined form of life emerging. - The infrastructure of mobility and labour in the Bekka Valley along the border between Lebanon and Syria and the infrastructural axes of Chotura, Bar Elias and Anjar, their borders economies, agricultural speculation and forced urbanization regimes.

The design studio participants will work in groups (2-3), through a sequence of exercises, guided readings and territorial investigations organized in weeks and then will elaborate a final project. The exercises are based on the three studio disciplines and students do have to incorporate each disciplinary input in the final design project. The international nature of the design studio will allow the exploration of multiple archives and multiple interactions with a selected number of actors to better problematize the narrative as well as the project. The first part of the terms will focus on the development of new spatial vocabularies and taxonomies that cross references critical literature and territorial ecological exploration at the global scale, then the assignment will move towards a more specific project-oriented exploration that each group will be conducing and that will be then discussed in the final examination. In this phase students will have to produce maps/transects/atlases that critically represent the territories under investigation. Representations will be visual interpretation of the space, capable to identify, according to the course topics, material and immaterial devices that characterize local ecologies. Special seminars, guest lectures, specific case presentation as well as additional material will be shared.

Bollier D. and Helfrich S. (2019) Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. De la Cadena, M and Blaser, M. (2018) A world of many worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Demos T.J. (2020) Beyond the World's End: Arts of Living at the Crossing Durham: Duke University Deutinger T. (2020) Handbook of Tyranny. Baden: Lars Muller Publishers Hardin G. “The Tragedy of the Commons” in Science, December 1968, vol. 162, n. 3859, pp. 1243-1248. Hetherington, K. (2020) Infrastructure, environment, and life in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press. Fry T. (2018) Remaking Cities. An introduction to urban metrofitting. London: Bloomsbury Gallent N. and Ciaffi D. (edited by) (2014) Community Action and Planning: Contexts, Drivers and Outcomes. Bristol: Policy Press. Howe C. and Pandian A. (2020) Anthropocene unseen: A lexicon. Punctum Books. Mbembe, A. (2121) Out of the Dark Night. Essays on decolonization. New York: Columbia University Press. Malm A. (2018) The Progress of this storm. Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso Neyrat, F. (2018) Atopias, Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism. New York: Fordham University Press. Neyrat, F. (2019) The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation. New York: Fordham University Press. Nail, T. (2121) Theory of the Earth. Stanford US: Stanford University Press. Keuceyan, R. (2016) Nature is a Battlefiled. Towards a political ecology. Cambridge: Polity. OMA (2018) Palermo Atlas. Milan: Humboldt Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care. Speculative ethics in more than Human worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Tsing, A.T (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins: Princeton, Princeton University Press. The Avery review (2016) Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary. Columbia. Yusoff, Y. (2018) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis Weizman, E., (2015) Erasure. The conflict shoreline. Steilde.

Modalità di esame: Elaborato progettuale in gruppo;

Exam: Group project;

... The examinations will take place through an oral discussion (in person or remotely, depending on the conditions) in which the results of the work carried out during the semester by individuals and groups will be presented and discussed in the form of a project. The examination will also consider the inputs and readings explored during the lecture as well as the material provided.

Gli studenti e le studentesse con disabilità o con Disturbi Specifici di Apprendimento (DSA), oltre alla segnalazione tramite procedura informatizzata, sono invitati a comunicare anche direttamente al/la docente titolare dell'insegnamento, con un preavviso non inferiore ad una settimana dall'avvio della sessione d'esame, gli strumenti compensativi concordati con l'Unità Special Needs, al fine di permettere al/la docente la declinazione più idonea in riferimento alla specifica tipologia di esame.

Modalità di esame: Elaborato progettuale individuale; Elaborato progettuale in gruppo;

The examinations will take place through an oral discussion (in person or remotely, depending on the conditions) in which the results of the work carried out during the semester by individuals and groups will be presented and discussed. The examination will also consider the inputs and readings explored during the lecture as well as the material provided.

Modalità di esame: Elaborato grafico prodotto in gruppo; Elaborato progettuale in gruppo;

The examinations will take place through an oral discussion (in person or remotely, depending on the conditions) in which the results of the work carried out during the semester by individuals and groups will be presented and discussed. The examination will also consider the inputs and readings explored during the lecture as well as the material provided.