Building future with cities - Studio MA2 at EPFL

 

Miriam García has participated as a visiting professor at the Studio MA2 of the Master in Architecture of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne - EPFL.

The studio adresses the urgency to approach the planning of cities under a radical vision of the future, that faces the short and long-term transformations needed to preserve the habitability of our planet. The concentration of population and the consumption of energy, goods and food in urban areas means that cities are the places where the challenge of collective survival can be addressed - while configuring the resulting social order governing our lives.

However, contemporary socio-economic disruptions arising from the digital transformation have dissolved the hierarchies imposed by space, challenging us to understand how they invalidate previous urban regulations and their implicit social pacts. The effects of these profound transformations can only be understood by redrawing cities under novel perspectives (health, well-being, urban quality, prosperity, climate change and governance).

In this context, a new information ecosystem is available (open data from public bodies and big data generated by the use of information technologies) to generate complex diagnoses and inform the urban planning process.

The visiting studio will explore several scenarios of urban transformation based on a vocabulary of futures to rethink cities along with the disciplines and tools that ultimately shape them.