Urbanization processes extend well beyond the realm of urban and metropolitan agglomerations, profoundly transforming cultivated fields, rainforests, deserts, and oceans... The scale of such processes has kept on increasing over the past fifty years. Cities have moved from being dependent on their immediate environment to drawing on increasingly extensive territories and networks, linked by intertwined and proliferating supply chains. This dependence, often asymmetrical, is ultimately altering the ecologies of the Earth.

The ability of architecture and urban planning to act on these challenges requires a precise and situated knowledge of the diversity of situations that manifest themselves outside our agglomerations, in the out-of-town, within environments that are often far from our sight, but which directly support our lives. Can we still refer to them as "rural", as being subordinate places, haunted by a past that tends to boycott their Progress? Can we still push them aside while they are jostled by contemporary dynamics of global interconnectivity and exploitation?
This year's topic is "rare earths", a term we use as a metaphor for the entanglement of architecture in the global ecological challenges. The term "rare earths" was born of an ambivalence: they are "earths", that is, chemically made of oxides like those we find on the earth's crust, available ubiquitously. They are "rare" too, because of the small quantity of metals contained within those earths, further requiring foolishly large quantities of energy for their extraction. And even more rare because of the huge amounts of them the ongoing energy transition needs to be realized and the few places where they are found in sufficient concentration to make their exploitation feasible.
How rare earths as trickster can help us reshape the current high-energy and high-consumption urban-centred master narrative into a more modest tale of how to live with the earth, reconciling those places of unbridled exploitation and resistant agency with the practices, past and present, of their peasants (a term we use here in the traditional sense of local inhabitants), human and non-human, our potential allies, to rework ourselves and our discipline adaptively? The design unit addresses this undertaking as part of NeRu (newruralities.eu), an Erasmus+ Cooperation partnerships program (2022-25) gathering six design units within the universities of ULB, Politecnico di Torino in Italy, Universidade da Coruña in Spain, Universidade do Minho in Portugal and Universitet Po Architektura Stroitelstvo I Geodezija of Sofia in Bulgaria, and ETH Zürich in Switzerland.
Dates
Créé le 12 septembre 2022