Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rapidly expanding industry and an increasingly significant consumer of energy. Its growing electricity demand poses challenges to Dutch and European Union ambitions for a renewable energy transition. In Groningen, plans to develop an AI supercomputer present both opportunities and risks. This paper examines how such a project can be implemented in ways that avoid extractivist practices while fostering socio-ecological accountability and stewardship. The report explores how democratic procedures and participatory processes can involve urban and rural communities, as well as more-than-human actors, in the just development of AI data centres in Groningen. Drawing on the work of Latour and Haraway, we investigate how technological systems might be designed to remain accountable to Gaia. The political dimensions of AI are further analysed through the perspectives of Morozov, Hao, and Suleyman, while their spatial implications are considered with reference to Otero-Verzier. To understand the regional context, we combine media analysis with situated fieldwork and interviews. Scientific literature is used to assess the energy demands of AI, while its broader political implications are examined through Winner’s work on technological systems. Based on this analysis, we propose a decentralised model for data centre development, alongside the establishment of energy communities along a corridor between Eemshaven and Groningen. In this model, the data centre acts as a catalyst for regional development in energy infrastructure, mobility, and spatial densification. Technological operations are aligned with the temporal variability of renewable energy generation, while decisions regarding energy use and job prioritisation are made democratically within these communities. Rather than pursuing artificial general intelligence, this approach emphasises the development of specialised AI for the public good, in collaboration with industry experts based in Groningen’s excellence centre. Given the rapid pace of AI development and its substantial resource demands, this paper argues for governance models and spatial designs that prioritise stewardship of both technology and the landscape.

Zeeland offers significant opportunities for a sustainable energy transition. However, Zeeland is often treated as “the battery” of the Netherlands, supplying energy to more populated regions while receiving fewer resources in return. The province is also physically and socially disconnected, both from the rest of the country and internally, which results in a strong dependence on car-based mobility. This makes for the main spatial tensions of Zeeland’s future: accessibility, industrial activity, and its fragmented energy landscape.

This strategy addresses the question: How can endogenous renewable energy production in Zeeland be spatially structured to support sustainable industry and mobility transition across its communities? Our theoretical framework is grounded in socio-environmental spatial justice, with a focus on distributional, recognitional, and operational dimensions.

The proposed vision organizes renewable energy into clustered landscapes located near industrial sites, supported by an expansion of offshore wind to minimize landscape disruption. To improve accessibility and local energy production, an integrated hub system is introduced, combining shared mobility and public transport to connect dispersed villages with larger cities while embedding energy systems within mobility infrastructure. New forms of renewable energy, such as tidal and kinetic energy, are incorporated in existing infrastructure, and industries are encouraged to adopt more sustainable practices.

It is important to understand how landscapes, like the one in Zeeland, can adjust and contribute to the energy transition, without overpowering the landscape and respecting its communities. It teaches us how to not only view the energy transition as a technical challenge, but also a social one. The energy transition can contribute to increasing the accessibility of a disconnected area. This strategy can help designers understand how to include the voices of communities and stakeholders in designs.

Cities are pressured by the impacts of climate change (Nijs et al., 2019). Rising temperatures, wetter winters, drier summers and more extreme weather events demand a fundamental transformation of public space (KNMI, 2023). In the Netherlands, both national and municipal governments aim to achieve climate resilient cities by 2050, however, this ambition cannot be realised without the active involvement of citizens (Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Waterstaat, 2023). Unfortunately, there is a lack of climate awareness and visibility of climate resilient solutions (Lenzholzer et al., 2020).
This thesis addresses this gap by connecting the concepts of climate resilience, climate awareness and art and redesigning public space to create climate-aware streets. The research develops a toolbox of visible climate resilient interventions, analysed according to spatial scale, street typologies, microclimatic processes and climate extremes. To assess how awareness can be created, the study adopts and operationalises the three awareness mechanisms, experience, engagement and knowledge, derived from Iturriza et al. (2020). These mechanisms are applied to both the climate interventions and a curated set of fifteen art installations that engage with climate related themes.
The findings are combined in a climate-aware street concept, which integrates climate resilient interventions, awareness creating strategies, and art in public space. Illustrated through an archetypical street layout, the concept demonstrates how public space can be redesigned to make climate processes visible, tangible, and collectively understood. The street design concept can be implemented on various spatial contexts by a range of stakeholders, including the municipality, artists, designers and citizens, to collaboratively advance climate-resilient urban environments.

This thesis investigates how posthuman and new materialist theories can inform urban design practices that cultivate ongoing care for more-than-human actors, with a particular focus on the Meuse River. Challenging dominant anthropocentric and extractive planning paradigms, the research reimagines the river as an agential being embedded within a web of human and nonhuman relations. Through methods grounded in situated knowledge, critical cartography, and relational thinking, the project explores how designers might listen to, interpret, and translate the language of the river into the urban practice.

The project consists of three interrelated components: (1) an open-source digital Atlas for the Meuse that collects a variety of translations of the river’s agency and entanglements; (2) a physical Cabinet for Counter Narratives, a mobile table for discussion enabling collaborative reinterpretations of the Meuse territory; and (3) a Nomadic School for Designers that hosts site-specific workshops where participants co-create alternative cartographies. The three elements are designed to work together as the Cabinet travels across the river basin to facilitate workshops on-site, producing collaborative Cartographies of Dialogue that are subsequently integrated into the digital Atlas.

Together, these components translate theory into an ongoing practice of engaging-with and caring-for the places one designs with. By encouraging slow, attentive design processes and interdisciplinary inquiry, the project repositions the urban designer from master of space to mediator of complex ecologies. As the atlas expands, it gathers situated evidence that supports recognition of the river’s intrinsic rights and cultivates a sense of guardianship among those living along its basin. In doing so, the project contributes to the Rights of Nature movement from an urban design perspective, amplifying the voice of the river within the discipline and beyond.

Explore the set-up of the Alternative Atlas for the Meuse, an open-source website that is both tool and method for co-designing with the river, http://www.meuse-atlas.nl

The context of Venice is so unique that even in this first sentence a mistake is already being made. In fact, Venice should never be considered separate from its Lagoon and islands, which together once formed an interdependent ecological, social, and economic system, vital to the city’s survival. They still do, but the way this system functions has changed profoundly. Historically, the Lagoon provided essential resources, including livelihoods, and hosted critical public functions. This close relationship fostered stewardship of the territory, which resulted in the Lagoon being cared for and maintained as a vital resource.
However, modernity has profoundly altered this dynamic. The progressive loss of functions in the Lagoon and islands has undermined the central role they once played in sustaining the city and are therefore no longer seen as valuable. As a result, they are often neglected by both communities and institutions. The most problematic consequence of this lack of consideration is that it facilitates the spread of destructive practices, leading to processes of environmental degradation and socio-cultural erosion. A territory deprived of its historical, economic, and social roles becomes increasingly vulnerable to dynamics of exploitation and abandonment.
If this trajectory is not reversed, Venice, its Lagoon and its islands risk undergoing a definitive transformation: an emptied place, devoid of identity and life, increasingly losing its active population and facing irreversible ecological decline.
In the past, active human presence, through traditional Lagoon-based livelihoods and functions, provided a natural form of protection. Today, a different approach is needed.
This research explores how recognizing the Venice Lagoon as a subject of rights can open new paths for its protection. Through an interdisciplinary and spatially grounded approach, it investigates how a rights of nature framework can inform new legal imaginaries and spatial strategies, reactivating social and productive practices that contribute to a more livable and resilient future for Venice and its Lagoon.

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 thesis explores how elderly residents of The Hague Southwest, particularly those with migration backgrounds, limited Dutch proficiency, and intersecting social identities, can be meaningfully engaged in placemaking processes that support their ability to age in place. In a neighbourhood shaped by spatial segregation, political framing of newcomers, and participation models that often exclude the most marginalised, autonomy in later life is far from guaranteed.
Grounded in an intersectional theoretical framework, the study investigates how urban actors can create more inclusive engagement strategies. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted at four apartment buildings along Lozerlaan, where workshops, informal conversations, and observations revealed key barriers and facilitators to participatory inclusion. These included language and literacy gaps, mistrust, internalised disempowerment, and the need for culturally sensitive, low-threshold engagement.
The research produced four actor-specific communication products: booklets for Haag Wonen, architects, municipal planners, and residents. Rather than offering generic guidelines, these booklets function as invitations to reflect on roles, responsibilities, and the meaning of “residents” in a superdiverse city. A spatial design proposal for the Cirkelflat illustrates how fieldwork insights can be translated into architectural interventions that promote ownership, pride, and social connection.
This thesis ultimately argues that placemaking should be understood not as an aesthetic exercise, but as a relational and political process rooted in care. In times of growing polarisation, inclusive placemaking offers an opportunity to centre everyday experiences, redefine institutional roles, and design urban futures from the perspective of those most often left out.

The goal to reach carbon zero by 2050 is pushing the Port of Rotterdam rapidly replace fossil fuel with hydrogen. The transition entails many spatial, environmental and economic changes that impact some neighborhoods more than others; in particular five neighborhoods (Rozenburg, Pernis, Heijplaat, Hoogvliet North and Old Charlois) in and surrounding the port. These already disadvantaged neighborhoods will face more burdens than benefits if the transition, and the gentrification that will follow, is left without intervention.

This study investigates how the energy transition towards hydrogen can be guided to ensure a just socio-economic and spatial transformation for these existing harbor neighborhoods. Through a research-by-design study, a vision is created from the perspective of the selected transition community (harbor neighborhoods), supported by qualitative and quantitative research methods. Subsequently, a strategy is developed that takes into account the
relevant stakeholders and policies necessary to implement the vision. The vision is explained in more detail in the latter part of the report, substantiated by a timeline and its related spatial strategies comprised of four key projects.

The vision of Port Archipelago construed on four guiding themes (energy, housing, connectivity and amenities) successfully accommodates the needs of existing communities and helps them adapt to the social and spatial changes triggered by the hydrogen transition. Urban metabolism and spatial justice are weaved into the vision to fairly distribute the benefits and burdens of the gentrification that is likely to occur in the port. Spatially, the vision will enable the transition community to sustain their identities and everyday lives while at the same time embracing the spatial and environmental transformations of the port. Lastly, the Port Archipelago vision will lead to successful community regeneration by providing opportunities for the harbor neighborhoods to build the capacity to act as active stakeholders in new settings and interact with newcomers of the port.

Zeeland’s landscape is currently dominated by fossil fuel-based industries. Four big companies emit huge amounts of greenhouse gasses. As the energy transition progresses and stricter limitations to these polluters are set, they will have to drastically change their processes or phase out. Though necessary, this threatens the livelihood of these practically educated employees. To come to solutions that fit within a just transition, this research explores how spatial transformations can empower these workers.
The study uses spatial analysis, policy and plan review and stakeholder research to come to a vision of diversification of the labor market spaces and voices. This vision is worked out according to three spatial design principles: smart land use, multifunctionality, and evolving place identity. Smart land use prioritizes the redevelopment of brownfields and salinized farmland over using more unused land to develop. Multifunctionality means the use of large open spaces for more than one type of industry. An evolving place identity means that the future is built upon a past that is seen as a vital stepping stone instead of something to be ashamed of.
The results include the conclusion that for a just transition to take place, there is a need for worker-centered policies, retraining initiatives, and spatial strategies that allow individuals to choose their own pathway through the energy transition. This report presents a multisectoral and integrated strategy, working out the sectors of tourism, food production, and clean and green energy production. An expanded mobility network ties these changes together, allowing for better accessibility within and into Zeeland.
By positioning workers at the core of the transition, Zeeland can serve as an example for industrial regions navigating similar structural changes. A more diverse future will make Zeeland more resilient to both the current energy transition as well as other uncertainties and changes.

The Port of Rotterdam is currently undergoing a crucial energy transition, promoting the production of sustainable energy in the port to provide the Netherlands with clean energy. In current approaches, though, non-human species are severely underrepresented in the spatial design of the port. This makes the port inherently unsustainable because this approach destroys current ecosystems that are beneficial for the well-being of the space and the well-being of humans living and working in these spaces. (Jørgensen, 2009; Latour, 2012). This research builds on the Post-Anthropocene philosophy and expands on this concept by integrating spatial justice and an ecosystem approach into it. In this approach, we aim to create a design that considers humans and seagulls as inhabitants of one ecosystem. Based on spatial data about seagulls and humans, we create an analysis of the spatial needs of the two species. In the analysis, we also investigate differences in energy production sources and discuss which sources are spatially and ethically just. These analyses combined form the base of a just vision of the Port of Rotterdam during the energy transition. After this, we visualize the feasibility of the new vision for the port by creating a potential strategy to achieve the created vision. This strategy visualizes the timeline in which future policies and spatial interventions are represented. We zoomed in on three key projects, which we based on key principles our strategy aims to represent spatially. The report concludes with a discussion on how the research has impacted current energy transition approaches and reflects on the conceptual foundation this research builds upon. The reflection will additionally cover ethical constraints, this research’s impact on the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, n.d.), its relevance to science and society, the incorporation of public goods, and recommendations for further research.

This thesis undertakes an extensive examination of the Ligurian and Maritime Alps region, deeply intertwined with its distinctive landscape features and closely tied to its identity. Its objective is to illuminate critical aspects of this territory through meticulous observation.
Drawing from a solid theoretical foundation grounded in local literature, the study aims to outline ongoing processes while identifying key territorial characteristics. Advancing from conventional research methods, the thesis incorporates poetry and local literature to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the region.Four primary territorial subjects undergo in-depth investigation: terraced landscapes, river catchments, flora, and horticultural structures. Commencing with an acknowledgment of cultural impoverishment and the corrosion of local identity, the thesis seeks to explore the emerging sense of displacement, tracing its origins and attempting to narrate marginalized stories at risk of being forgotten. Furthermore, by analyzing the current state of the region, the investigation aims to portray the environmental degradation occurring within the examined milieu.

The proposed project builds upon the concept of caring practices, showcasing the diverse array of existing and extinguished caring practices within the region. Drawing from a defined novel methodology, the design encompasses both a tangible and intangible component.
The tangible aspect illustrates how simple, locally sensitive actions can lead to precise interventions in the area, sparking new territorial processes aimed at revitalizing a “way of life” deeply intertwined with the land, environment, and human experience, a way of life currently under threat. The expected interventions lean towards conservative and philological restoration, with the objective of mitigating the ecological drift while concurrently healing the lost identity of the landscape under examination. Conversely, the intangible aspect highlights existing practices of "mattering" and "caring" within the region, offering examples of current good practices and suggesting new ones. Ultimately, this project on matters of care seeks to underscore the need to expand conventional design methods to include the intangible aspect, laying the groundwork for a shared methodology applicable to further development and research.

This thesis investigates the urgent concerns of water scarcity and excess on the island of Crete, identifying their implications for the island's future in the face of climate change. It recognizes the interconnectedness of geological, ecological, and human systems, using water scarcity and excess as a lens to understand these relationships and improve planning and design methods.

The thesis critically examines current planning instruments used by the government and planners and argues that they often fail to capture the dynamic nature of elements like water and soil. It advocates for a more sensitive, climate-resilient approach, encouraging local communities to actively manage their environment with care. The research embraces diverse methodologies, including critical cartography, to analyze the island's complex systems, particularly water and soil processes. Fieldwork, involving observation, photography, and research, supports an understanding of Crete's physical, cultural, and environmental systems.

The research analyzes Crete's past and present through a multi-scalar approach, investigating its geological formation, topography, materiality, and cultural heritage. The project focuses on the eastern part of the island as a case study, highlighting its vulnerabilities, such as flooding, drought, and desertification due to human activities and climate change. Later, it proposes strategic interventions like water retention landscapes, natural water flow restoration, riparian buffer zones, and temporarily flooded agriculture. It also promotes soil restoration through reforestation, agroforestry, and regenerative agricultural practices.

By repositioning the relationship between landscape, water, and humans, the aim is to foster a climate-resilient future for Crete, offering insights that could serve as a paradigm for other islands facing similar challenges globally. Finally, it emphasizes the need for a shift in planning and design approaches, encouraging decision-makers to recognize the interconnectedness of human and natural systems.

Water has historically been the centre of human civilisation, with rivers serving as crucial sources of sustenance for daily life. Nevertheless, the recent multicultural impact on urban development has fundamentally transformed the perception of the river and led to its contamination due to the discharge of industrial and household trash. In Indonesia, urbanisation has caused the river to become a damaged geographical area, resulting in pollution and its misuse as a dumping ground. Contaminated rivers progressively pollute reservoir basins and risk the subsurface water aquifer, which serves as a source of residential water from wells. Furthermore, while the river possesses inherent purifying capabilities, it is unable to break down plastic effectively and instead releases microplastics into the sea, where humans and aquatic life subsequently ingest them.

The recognition of climate change and ecological crises in this Anthropocene period necessitates a profound and fundamental transformation in both tangible and intangible aspects. Hence, it is imperative to prioritise spatial modification and physical intervention with the utilisation of macro and micro territorial approaches, a comprehensive investigation of Java, particularly Yogyakarta’s river dynamics, can be conducted to gain a precise understanding of its inherent qualities. This research observed the ability to facilitate the recognition of its rights and enhance the intricate relationship between the river and human beings, in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of its characteristics and potential implications. Ascertain the spatial changes and physical impact caused by architecture, landscape, and urbanism that can contribute to the restoration of the river’s rights through borderscaping the territory.

This thesis interrogates the transformation of the Croatian coast, focusing on its identity beyond a touristic destination and examining the social and ecological impacts of tourism. The research poses crucial questions about the true character of the Croatian coast, the spatial elements introduced by tourism, and the resultant dissonances, as well as the role of urbanism and policy in these processes. Employing the proposed “tracing threads” method, this project traces and harmonizes dynamic processes across diverse systems and timescales, revealing interactions between more-than-human, human, and tourist perspectives. It emphasizes the ecological roles of elements like Posidonia oceanica meadows and the socio-economic importance of traditional practices. Conducted in Njivice on Krk island, the study proposes three main mechanisms for harmonisation: Protocols of Care and Repair, Regulative Actions, and Spatial Transformations. Care and Repair protocols derive from interdisciplinary research, informing stakeholders and guiding policy. Regulative Actions transform these protocols into planning and legislative measures, while Spatial Transformations apply these principles to physical spaces. This culminates in the sympoiesis of attraction, addressing the paradox where tourism’s allure simultaneously threatens its foundation, aiming to realign and harmonize the coast’s multifaceted landscape.

The following project falls within the Rights of Nature movement as a response to the climatic crisis. It is situated in the Alps. From the moment Hannibal managed to lead his Carthagnian army, including their elephants, through the Alps until the construction of modernist glacial skiing resorts and monumental hydroelectric power plants, the Alps have been seen as an object to be overcome and exploited. This resulted in extensive infrastructural projects throughout the whole territory and at all elevations. In order to restore the agency of this living entity, the project repositions the Alps as an active subject with their own right. Moving through three phases – listening to - speaking with - negotiating on behalf of the Alps – results in the foundation for the Parliament of the Alps, composed of a group of people which will act as guardians of the Alps, and the illustration of their most urgent project.

The site of the project is the Gepatsch glacier in the Ötztaler Alps in Austria, one of the largest and most rapidly melting glaciers in the territory. Glaciers are a record of time, connecting past, present and future. On one hand, the memory of the past – an archive of human interventions – shedding light on vernacular knowledge practices, gathered in their yearly deposited layers of ice and atmospheric particles. On the other hand a holder of meaning for the future, as their disappearance is causing major changes and challenges within the biophysical environment of diverse biotic and abiotic socioeconomic and cultural systems.

The Alps are a true representation of the web of life, as the interdependencies of each part of their ecosystem are vital for the survival of each species. Many elements contribute to it, such as their East to West orientation, their ability and responsibility to collect water from the atmosphere, store it for dry seasons and years, carry it through their veins, and share it equitably and steadily with all living beings which are dependent on freshwater to survive – from the top of the mountains to the deltas of Europe. With increasing temperatures and the further realization of infrastructural projects for the sake of European visions on green development, which often neglects local conditions, this essential role and responsibility of the Parliament of the Alps, to share freshwater democratically, is at risk.
The changing states of water, from frozen to fluid, brings with it the need for all places and ecosystems connected to the Alpine water system to adapt to non-glacially influenced conditions.

By envisioning an Alpine Ocean, which emerges from the synergy of water and soil, and empowering the natural dynamics, which were defined through the establishment of prominent characteristics of the Alpine range – erratic, connected, mosaic-like and cyclic – the transition shall secure the democratic share and availability of freshwater for all living beings, now and for future generations.

The Mediterranean Basin – defined and restricted by its own boundness – embodies a mesocosm for the network of Critical Zones containing in its dense space all the fragilities, urgencies and uncertainties that characterize living in the 21st century, while being the world’s most appropriated, militarized and instrumentalized sea. In its deep – and often intentionally obscured oceanic space – the notion of coexistence is constantly negotiated through overlapping (re)territorialization processes, accelerated climatic or geological transformations, and increased interaction between its complex human and more-than-human assemblages, especially in light of the emerging climate crisis. As the focus of urbanization shifts from the land to the sea, the question of sympoiesis and response-ability becomes central for the establishment of a counter paradigm for the worlding of the sea; opposed to the prevailing processes of domination, expulsion and colonization that accompany anthropogenic practices in the state-regime nexus. This counter paradigm arises from the understanding of borderscapes as critical in-between conditions of proximities, intensities, and assimilations whose investigational mapping can induce soft territorial acts and practices of care.

In this context, the aim of this thesis is twofold: firstly, to critically map the Mediterranean Basin painting its fragmentary portrait as a sociocultural product of interconnected and conflicting political, cultural, historical and environmental forces – while simultaneously revealing situated traces of immanence and resistance – and secondly, to experiment with soft territorial acts and practices of care in the process of deterritorialization and creation of a new common ground for the neglected Mediterranean human and more-than-human entities. To do so, the thesis project revolves around the concept of the island as an in-between space of viscosity that reconceptualizes the spatiotemporal understanding of the boundary; connected to the prototypical human territorial act. The conceptual experimentation lands to the discovery of the ephemeral volcanic formation of Julia island that becomes the speculative (re)fabulation of a conscious act of extraterritoriality bridging the natural and the praxeological space through processes of terraforming. Using Julia, then, as a synecdoche for the whole Mediterranean Basin, the project concludes by weaving an alternative model not only for the understanding and the planning of the sea but generally for the inhabitation – or more precisely cohabitation – of the ‘damaged’ planet.

This thesis is about the convergence of two boundlessly enigmatic dimensions; turbulent coastal morphodynamics of a vanishing coastline in the presence of acute geo-political conflict. The Lebanese coastline undergoes a permutation of intertwined anthropogenic and natural forces, ensuing its exponential recession, deterioration, and inaccessibility. Its geographical location on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean exposes it to powerful environmental forces that materialize as destructive storms and pose a significant susceptibility to earthquakes and tsunamis. Its ongoing history of immutable geopolitical conflict has resulted in calamitous wars and corrupt power networks, distorting entitled spatial rights and access to shore space. These problematics culminated in my endeavor to pose and decipher the following research question; How can the understanding of Beirut’s coastline as a series of extreme environmental and anthropogenic permutations inform its design agency, programming a coastal space that functions as an autonomous littoral landscape while simultaneously attaining spatial justice for its inhabitants? This project argues that it is imperative to acquire an analytical approach that anticipates the permutation scenarios and their occurrence in conjunction with one another when addressing conflicted littoral landscapes. Focus is then narrowed through the tactical selection, analysis, and design proposal of Beirut’s shores and the instances of violation along them, as a unique opportunity to address a microcosm of extremes. Through the synthesis of literature on the perception of territory, indeterminacy, temporal landscapes, and the dichotomy between man and nature, I adopt an approach through which my methods of analysis and design interventions emerge. Thorough investigations lead to the realization that the answer to such a question simply lies in the intrinsic characteristics of the littoral landscape. It possesses power in its innate attributes, which have been completely removed in the context I am investigating through the imposition of fragments on what used to be a coastline but is now reduced to this hard edge, separating two highly contrasting worlds, eliminating the transitional space in between that is necessary to exist for them to coalesce harmoniously. The objective of the project becomes about bringing back the beach; a liminal space that is neither land nor sea, a threshold zone that recognizes malleability and uncertainty in this highly conflicted context, where something so simple could be the answer to such profound complexities. I hypothesize that, in such dire conditions of extremes, achieving this goal would necessitate the adoption of an alternative lens. This lens would identify potentialities and accordingly, maximize them, while questioning the limitations of time, bending it, and treating it as a site of intervention. This is achieved through an analytical approach of cartographic and graphic interpretation, identifying which of these fragments still allow for such a threshold space of liminality to exist, and to what extent. The project would then communicate with these identifications, and accordingly determine the characteristics of this new form of beach that will manage to coexist with the extensively analyzed fragments. This is followed by a set of critical morphological actions and a series of seed interventions, directly reacting to the distinct scenarios manifesting on each fragmented shoreline while interacting with one another in concert to symbiotically generate these fragments of beach conditions as a diffused state of being. These alterations would engender tangible and intangible consequences occurring over various spatiotemporal scales. The culmination of these actions becomes a canvas through which a mere shift in perspective makes room for impact in this case of copious impossibilities.

Venice and its lagoon are a place where the imaginary and the legends of man and water are thriving.
It is a place of profound history of cohabitation and victory, where time and movement have a different definition for people than in other parts of the world. It is the urban and landscape archetype of close co-existence between the domain of inland and seaward territories.
People, culture, and traditions always remembered and respected the legend of Venice and its creation, understanding the delicate boundaries and the frontiers of encounter between inland and seaward, preserving the reached balance between them and the population sustained on it.
Nevertheless, it is possible to notice that at a certain moment, the urge of becoming modern prevailed on the equilibrium between the two domains. The need for civil society and a global view on what cities should be, brought distance between inland and seaward while letting people forget the legend of Venice.
We could say that Venice always retaliated its own identity to itself and the rest of the world, modifying its description from maritime independent power, to artistic cradle of revolutionary ideas, to petrol-chemical industrial force, to mass-consumption product. Its definition came always from within, while now, with the approach of the climate crisis, for the first time Venice must deal with powerful externalities which are going to consequently redefine the Venetian identity from the outside.
This research by design tries to remember the legend of Venice of co-existence and adaptation to its landscape, finding new possible anatomy based on the binding of Inland and seaward pressed by the climate crisis worst-case scenarios.

The Cyprus island(s) of 2022 is divided into the North and South sides, on the Turkish and Greek sides, since the war of 1974. 47 years of an intentional post-conflict (bio)political process of erasure of the pre-war shared identity between Orthodox and Muslims that leads to a series of critical socio-cultural and environmental conditions. In order to counteract the impacts of this monologue, the project proposes a process of harvesting, decomposing, and reintroducing the components of past shared identity, between the traces of a post-conflict vilified territory. So, following this process, a series of care protocols exemplify an alternative way of occupation the settlement and the landscape of these kinds of territories, for the future. The notions of time, exchange, and attachment are the key elements of these alter-protocols.
This paradigm is being assembled based on a cultural identity that is built during the years and constant current experimentation (scientific or not). An action, and reaction between human entities and other ecological elements following a biodynamic calendar. So, the protocols’ times are both linear and circular, with the random times of events revealing another kind of interrelation between the multiple components. Furthermore, it acts on an “ownerless” land, which obtains different agencies during this process. It is the shelters’ land, the survival land, the shared land, or the human-less land. The actors build their shelter, live collectively, and work with the landscape in order to co-create but also develop the paradigm of symbiosis. This system is accessible seeking to influence local actors and visitors. So, the permanent actor hosts an ephemeral actor in order to co-create together, products and art, temporarily integrating them into a new way of life. This is an expanding process, as the ephemeral visitor becomes permanent and the paradigm is embraced by more actors.