Water Culture Landscapes in the Alps
Toward more-than-human Futures in the Lumnezia Valley
J.M. Osusky (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
L.M. Calabrese – Mentor (TU Delft - Urban Design)
N. Katsikis – Mentor (TU Delft - Urban Design)
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Abstract
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.