Applications are open for the ETH Zürich and EPFL joint Master of Advanced Studies in Urban and Territorial Design 2022/23 – a new, one-year, full-time postgraduate programme taught in English and held at the two Swiss schools, EPFL ENAC HRC Laboratory of Urbanism (Lab-U), Studio Paola Viganò (Autumn) and ETH Zürich D-ARCH LUS Architecture of Territory, Studio Milica Topalović (Spring).

Building an innovative urban and territorial design education addressing social and environmental challenges both within the city-territory and across wider landscapes, design and research studios form the core of the programme.

Urban and territorial design has acquired a new meaning and urgency. The future of the urban engages social and environmental imaginaries, which now extend beyond-the-city and beyond-the-human. Rather than an object, the territory becomes a subject among other subjects, and space becomes an agent of socioecological change. In this context, urban and territorial design serves as a crucial field of synthesis, inspiring and negotiating change in science, practice and governance. The design of the territorial project is understood as a possibility to explore common epistemic horizons and new biopolitical paradigms. Engaging with notions of transformation, reuse, regeneration, reparation, and transition of habitats and ecologies, the MAS will deploy the urban and territorial project as the crucial field of knowledge production across scales.

Further Information regarding the programme, eligibility, application procedure and scholarships can be found here

Migrant Journeys is a web documentation of the West African urban corridor – one of the fastest growing mega regions in the world. Along the Gulf of Guinea, spanning one thousand kilometres from Lagos in Nigeria to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, passing though the Beninese cities of Porto Novo and Cotonou, the Togolese capital Lomé and the Ghanaian capital Accra, a number of urban areas are growing together to form a remarkable polycentric corridor. Along the corridor people are on the move for all kinds of reasons. Some could be labeled refugees, economic migrants, seasonal workers or international students. But migrants are never just economic migrants or asylum seekers, rather their lives and trajectories are often a combination of both.

Four national borders cut across the Lagos-Abidjan corridor, dividing the territory between five nations. In this context national borders, drawn up by colonial powers, do not necessarily define who is foreign or a stranger within a given community. Ethnic groups, kinship groups and linguistic groups are spread over these lines. They enable a form of continuity along the corridor, maintaining connections across national borders.

“Migrant Journeys” draws on the research undertaken by Alice Hertzog in the context of her doctoral thesis “The Lagos-Abidjan Corridor - Migration Driven Urbanisation in West Africa” defended in 2020, supervised by Christian Schmid, Pius Krütli and Armelle Choplin at the ETH Zürich, in partnership with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) Global Programme for Migration and Development.