About

Urban and territorial design lies at the core of complex spatial questions and increasing urgencies. From drivers of progress to the source of planetary hazards, the impacts of cities and urbanisation processes are being recast in the public sphere. The critical examination of anthropocentric world views, the greening of politics and economies, growing social polarisation and uneven development, protest movements and climate activism, are reflected in urban and territorial space, highlighting power asymmetries and the urgent need for alternatives. The future of the urban engages social and environmental imaginaries, which now extend beyond-the-city and beyond-the-human. Rather than an object, we understand territory as a subject in dialogue with other subjects, and space as an agent of socioecological change. The MAS programme embraces such a transition as a field of critical and imaginative investigation based on the principles of social and environmental equity and justice. Engaging with notions of transformation, reuse, circularity, regeneration, reparation, and transition of habitats and ecologies, the MAS deploys the urban and territorial project as a means to explore common epistemic horizons and new biopolitical paradigms, and as a crucial field of knowledge production across scales.