The Alpine territory faces converging anthropogenic urgencies: climate change, biodiversity loss, intensified agriculture, and tourism development. Together, these forces drive processes of defuturing, deterritorialization, and extended urbanization, eroding the socio-ecological resilience of Alpine culture landscapes. This thesis investigates how more-than-human communities in the Alps can reclaim agency under shifting climatic and hydrological regimes, by embracing water as a territorial, ecological, and symbolic actor within the culture landscape.

Set in the Lumnezia Valley (Switzerland), the research adopts a research-by-design methodology. Conceptually framed by Latour’s Parliament of Things, Nature is reconceptualized from a resource to a partner. Through mapping major and minor stories, and a systemic analysis of actors and processes, the work reveals the Alpine landscape as co-constructed by human and non-human agencies.

The core design proposal - the Water Garden - is a multi-scalar, adaptive system that positions water as a structuring medium of care, maintenance, and culture. Paired with a refuturing framework based on ontologies of care, multispecies commons, and alternative modes of exchange, the Water Garden becomes a prototype of the planetary garden: a model for
situated, relational co-existence.

The main finding of the thesis is that agency in Alpine territories is already distributed, but largely unrecognized. Through relational, water-attuned design, urbanists can contribute not by imposing futures, but by scaffolding frameworks of care and emergence, enabling more-than-human communities to actively participate in shaping their own shared, situated, and plural futures.

This report presents our proposal for “Globalisation Free Choice,” an elective course for master’s students in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft, in collaboration with The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). The course aims to explore sustainable and integrated development and its regional impacts.

During the 9 weeks of the course, a regional vision and strategy for the Greater Bay Area was prepared. The Greater Bay Area is a global centre for economic development located in the Pearl River Delta in the Southern part of China. In this report we describe how we want to instigate a paradigm shift from focusing on megaprojects to working in mega-processes. In the first two weeks we analysed the environmental, social and economic situation of the area to create a problem statement and define focus points. The next two weeks were spent in Hong Kong at the Polytechnic University where the morphological game boarding strategy was used to look at regional design in a more experimental way. We created two games - one focused on the social perspective including the liveability within the region, and the other based on the morphological perspective, looking at spatial changes. During these two weeks and during the playing of the game we defined two interesting zoom-in locations in the area.

The first zoom in location is the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, an area which is already planned to grow into an innovative tech hub. Due to the rejoining of Hong Kong with Mainland China in 2047, the border will be eliminated, opening a lot of opportunities for development. The other location is the Nansha district near Guangzhou, which lies in the heart of the delta. Major development plans consisting of various megaprojects are proposed by the Chinese government in Nansha, which will disrupt the natural cycle of the water and soil. The two zoom-in locations will be used to develop an approach to integrate the built more with the green-blue networks to mitigate floods, droughts and heat island effect.

We then returned to Delft to develop a vision and strategy for the GBA, focusing on these megaprojects and thinking of ways to change the current way in which they are executed. We used an element-based approach inspired by the book ‘the Elemental Metropolis’ to develop a strategy of working in a more agile, process-based way. We conclude the report by revisiting the entire Greater Bay Area to identify additional regions where the insights from our work on the two focus areas can be applied, aiming to create a resilient, adaptable, and liveable dynamic delta.

The EU Green Deal aims to ensure a socially just energy transition, but the shift towards renewable energies often replicates the centralized, top-down approach of traditional fossil fuel systems, negatively impacting rural areas. This report reimagines this paradigm by advocating for decentralized energy communities, particularly in regions experiencing the neglect often seen in ‘shadow agglomerations.’ It argues for a shift where decentralized energy production empowers both cities and rural areas, enabling them to attain energy self-sufficiency and ownership. The research uses a multicriteria analysis to explore the Eurodelta and Zeeland regions, forming a vision that supports the strategic development of energy communities in Zeeland and Rotterdam. This approach aims to facilitate a more spatially equitable and just energy transition, enabling regions overshadowed by major urban centers to become essential in achieving sustainable energy production, thereby reshaping the energy landscape towards a more distributed and participatory model.