Organised by the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) Global, in partnership with the Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC)as part of Singapore Urban Science Week 2025, the two-day symposium and exhibition “Future Cities: Science, Design, and Policy for Urban Transitions” took place in early September 2025 in Singapore. The event addressed the need for a new urban paradigm in response to climate change, population growth, and resource constraints, bringing together researchers, policymakers, designers, and practitioners to explore systemic urban change.

At the exhibition and within the symposium’s Food and Territories cluster, we presented our ongoing project New Urban Agendas under Planetary Urbanization — Agrarian Change and Agroecological Transitions, focusing on Zurich and other global sites. The team shared final research findings and future directions for integrating food production, water management, ecosystem services, and biodiversity in sustainable extended urbanisation, marking the conclusion of the research programme.

At the end of June 2025, the MAS UTD presented the collective project "Agroecological Landscape Uetliberg beyond 2040" at the Showcase in the Dunkelhölzli greenhouses in Altstetten, with a public event, an exhibition and a large-scale model. The event brought together the Grün Stadt Zürich (GSZ) team, farmers, researchers, invited guests and practitioners, highlighting the collaborative ethos of the study and resulting in lively debates, fresh insights and a sense of potential.
 

The study focused on the sequence of open spaces and landscapes along Uetliberg’s eastern flank between Altstetten and Leimbach–the contact zone between forest and city–where the agricultural land borders housing estates, communal gardens, sports fields and cemeteries. The land here is predominantly owned by the City of Zurich, managed by GSZ, and leased to farmers and gardeners. With significant changes expected on GSZ’s farms in the near future due to a renewal of leases, the study came at a timely moment: the impending transformation offered a unique opportunity to develop a vision for the role of agriculture at Uetliberg’s foothills.

Sessions on Territory – Agency: Architecture in the Civil Service is a series of public debates exploring the intersection of architecture, territory, and political economy. The upcoming sessions will examine architecture’s role in the public sector, featuring practitioners engaged with or working within state institutions. Together we will debate how architecture can help advance public interest in the broadest sense—encompassing the public good, public ownership, public space, and the public sphere—amid challenges from the state, market, technology, and a growing erosion of trust in social institutions.

Applications are open for the ETH Zürich and EPFL joint Master of Advanced Studies in Urban and Territorial Design 2024/25 – a one-year, full-time postgraduate programme taught in English and held at the two top 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 lies at the core of complex spatial questions and increasing urgencies. The future of the urban engages social and environmental imaginaries, which now extend beyond-the-city and beyond-the-human. Rather than an object, we understand territory as a subject in dialogue with other subjects, and space as an agent of socioecological change. In this context, design is explored as a tool for synthesis within inter- and transdisciplinary exchange involving science, practice and governance. The urban and territorial project is understood as a means to explore common epistemic horizons and new biopolitical paradigms and as a crucial field of knowledge production across scales. Engaging with notions of transformation, reuse, circularity, regeneration, reparation, and transition of habitats and ecologies, the MAS programme embraces such a transition as a field of critical and imaginative investigation based on the principles of social and environmental equity and justice. 

Further Information regarding the programme, eligibility, application procedure and scholarships can be found at https://www.mas-utd.arch.ethz

SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. The forthcoming series aims to understand how people perceive their position—their contributions, vulnerabilities, complicities, and anxieties—in the face of the climate crisis. Shifting analysis between the planetary scale and that of the body, we will ask in what ways do built environments structure and reflect how we mobilise against the effects of crisis. Each guest speaker’s intervention will be followed by a roundtable discussion with invited respondents, students, and members of the audience.

At the end of 2018, the ETH Studio Basel Contemporary City Institute closed its doors, but the work created in the framework of this unique constellation continues to hold great relevance for architects and urban researchers. With this event, we are (re)launching ETH Studio Basel’s main publications as open access, and making them available to a broad public on a new website. Together with collaborators, assistants and students, we will reflect on our projects and experiences, discuss what we have learnt, ask what is still relevant today, and explore how we continue to develop and apply the concepts and methods of the ETH Studio Basel.

With Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Emanuel Christ, Mathias Gunz, Simon Hartmann, Manuel Herz, Vesna Jovanović, Jasmine Kastani, Bart Lootsma, Metaxia Markaki, Charlotte von Moos, Ligia Nobre, John Palmesino, Shadi Rahbaran, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, Günther Vogt, and Ying Zhou and a welcome address by Silke Langenberg, Director of Research, Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich.

Applications are open for the ETH Zürich and EPFL joint Master of Advanced Studies in Urban and Territorial Design 2024/25 – a 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 at https://www.mas-utd.arch.ethz....

SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. These sessions Urbanism in a Broken World aim to highlight emerging politics and practices of repair that aim to reduce exploitation, care for what already exists, repair what has been damaged, and conserve resources. The series will untangle how such alternatives in design education and practice have the potential to counter the condition of manifold crises.

The six Sessions on repair this spring are embedded within The Great Repair, an exhibition and publication project realised in collaboration between ARCH+ gGmbH, the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, the University of Luxembourg’s Department of Geography and Spatial Planning, and the Department of Architecture at ETH Zürich, during 2022-23. The invited speakers in the Sessions program are contributors to THE GREAT REPAIR.
The recently published ARCH+ 250 The Great Repair: Politiken der Reparaturgesellschaft serves as the departure point for the program.

The six sessions on repair take place on selected Mondays during the spring term. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a discussion with invited respondents.

In mid-February 2023, the Architecture of Territory research group presented the collective exhibition “Potential Agriterritories” at IdeasFest 2023 FOOD: Eat. Secure. Sustain. in Singapore, organised by the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) Global, in collaboration with the Singapore‑ETH Centre (SEC) and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA).

With nearly half of the planet’s land dedicated to agriculture, the urbanization and industrialization of agrarian territories have become among the most urgent challenges affecting global ecologies and ecosystems. The exhibition focused on the dynamics of agrarian territories in metropolitan regions, juxtaposing landscapes in Zurich (ongoing research since 2020) and Singapore‑Johor‑Riau (research 2015) to examine how global food regimes shape local agricultural practices and food cultures.

Highlighting the synthesising power of fieldwork and interviews for territorial studies, Potential Agriterritories posed critical questions arising under 21st-century planetary urbanization: What alternatives exist to global food regimes that shape regional agricultural landscapes and local food cultures? How can agricultural territories in the Global North, such as those around Zurich, be de‑commodified? How can plantations in the Global South, such as the palm oil landscapes surrounding Singapore, be decolonized?

Two large maps examine urbanization processes and their effects on emerging agricultural territories. Placed in dialogue, these maps juxtapose foreign and familiar agricultural practices to provoke critical reflection on regional and sustainable food production. By documenting experimental approaches such as permaculture, solidarity agriculture, and biodynamic farming, the project offered timely insights into sustainable urban‑agrarian futures.

This discussion is part of the current exhibition at Zentrum Architektur Zürich, Urban Räume, 4 Perspektiven. Postcolonial urbanism has become a major strand in critical urban research in recent years, producing new knowledge, addressing new problematics, and fundamentally changing the understanding of urban development. Scholars from different regional contexts have argued for the need to analyse the very different trajectories of urban spaces that do not conform to the hitherto dominant Western models of development.
New tools and methods of analysis have been developed, including comparative approaches for a better understanding of the diverse and complex contemporary urban world. Postcolonial approaches play an important role not only in the analysis of urbanisation in former colonies and other contexts beyond the west, but also in Western metropolises by showing how Europe itself was shaped by colonialism and imperialism. The goal of this public event is to discuss different positions and practices in postcolonial urban research with a wider audience.

A series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory focusing on agriculture. Drawing upon relationships of care and reciprocity with soil and biodiversity from the past to the present, the aim is to move beyond consumerist techno-fixes, and toward more self-sufficient and ecological land practices. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar will explore the critical agrarian questions emerging under 21st-century (extended) urbanisation. Interventions by guest speakers are followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.

This discussion is part of the current exhibition at Zentrum Architektur Zürich, Urban Räume, 4 Perspektiven. Textile and textile art hold a crucial world historical significance especially in its entanglements with urban space. The panel will explore this through a journey across space and time; Nitin Bathla and Sumedha Garg will foreground their art practice with women garment and textile workers in Delhi with the city's contemporary extended urbanisation; Miriam Bettin will explore the emancipatory quality of textile art, surveying contemporary artistic strategies of textile-based art and their antiracist, anticolonial, and queer-feminist moment; and Joya Indermühle will explore the historical entanglements between India and Switzerland around textiles, sharing reflections from her curation of the 2019-2020 exhibition "Indiennes. Material for a thousand stories" at the Landesmuseum Zürich.