MArch UDII :

Urban Morphogenesis

 

 

The MArch UDII programme engages urban design as a computational practice to prefigure alternative models of the city represented as a complex dynamical system. The ambition of the program is to stimulate a trans-disciplinary discourse that reaches wider academic research networks as well as scientific organizations involved in the study of the city as a living system and in the development of future bio-digital technologies.

 

The program adopts computational design methods, both analogues, biologic and digital, to draw terrains of negotiation between strategic and tactical forms of intervention. Algorithmic coding enables the study of biological models and the testing of iterative, adaptive and resilient design solutions applicable to a broader eco-social domain, generating a multiplicity of responses and effects ranging scales and regimes, from the molecular to the territorial, from the quasi-instantaneous to the geological.

 

The program is strictly studio based and student's are encouraged to work in team and to engage design as a form of research; current research clusters focus on the urban application of models of collective intelligence inspired by ants, corals and slime molds, on the development of resilient and distributed bio-energy infrastructures, on the engineering of bio-digital soil remediation urban landscapes and on the material articulation of adaptive water management territories.

 

While escaping conventional urban categorization these research clusters engage specific regions that are gaining a new centrality as both producers of the resources adsorbed by existing global cities as well as receivers of the surplus to society, the human and material waste necessary byproduct of contemporary capitalist system. Current locations include the copper mining corridor in Arizona USA, the Tar Sands region in Alberta Canada and the water basin of Manaus Brazil.

 

UDII Stream Leader :

Claudia Pasquero
 

Research Clusters Tutors :

RC16: Claudia Pasquero, Marco Poletto;

RC17: Ulrika Karlsson, Maj Plemenitas;

RC18: Eduardo Rico, Enriqueta Llabres, Zach Flucker

 

Coding & Media Tutors :

Immanuel Koh, Iker Mugarra

 

History & Theory Tutors :

Emmanouil Zaroukas, Mollie Claypool