Freek Persyn: Catalogue data in Autumn Semester 2023 |
| Name | Prof. Freek Persyn |
| Field | Architecture and Urban Transformation |
| Address | Architektur u. Urbane Transformat. ETH Zürich, ONA J 25 Neunbrunnenstr. 50 8093 Zürich SWITZERLAND |
| persyn@arch.ethz.ch | |
| Department | Architecture |
| Relationship | Full Professor |
| Number | Title | ECTS | Hours | Lecturers | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 052-0709-00L | Perspectives on Landscape and Urban Transformation I  This learning unit replaces the old learning unit 052-0701-00L Urban Design I | 2 credits | 2V | L. Fink, F. Persyn, C. Schaeben | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract | In this course we will collectively explore the different actions and actors, as well as the roles and professional practices that represent and collectively shape our environment. This is the first course which is collectively organized by the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies (LUS), with the NEWROPE chair taking up the coordination. It will span two semesters. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | Through the different Perspectives on Landscape and Urban Transformation, students will learn to understand the complexity of the (urban) landscape. The various perspectives, readings and key terms will enrich and expand the vocabulary and theoretical knowledge of students. Tools for observation and activation will give students agency to observe and intervene in processes of urban transformation. At the end of the course students will be able to perceive and identify a multitude of actors and professional roles and recognize how they are overlapping, entangled and ever-shifting. Students will practice to textually and visually illustrate complex processes, including the many different stakeholders involved and the notion of time. Students will learn to reflect about and formulate their possible personal positions in relation to others. The formulated learning goals are aligned with the teaching activities, the exercises, and the final evaluation. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | The course is titled Perspectives on Landscape and Urban Transformation I+II. By bringing forward the term ‘landscape’ the course stresses the need to put the natural environment and the landscape at the core of urban thinking. Accordingly, every architect requires a basic knowledge of the landscape and nature. Also, to focus on ‘urban transformation’, instead of ‘urban design’ is a conscious choice. It comes out of the recognition that materials, energy and space are finite, which forces us to engage first with what is already there, instead of producing even more new things. This course presents designers as facilitators of complex urban transformation processes. This position requires both an understanding of a great diversity of perspectives and positions constituting a city, and of the different professional roles one can take up to detect and utilize this diversity of – specific and often conflicting – needs, wishes, ambitions and actions. In each lecture one of these perspectives is presented. The list of different perspectives presented in both semesters is deliberately left incomplete, leaving space for students to think of other perspectives, needs and desires that one could take into account when working on a design or (redevelopment) of a space. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lecture notes | Students will be provided with a reader at the first lecture. The reader for the course Perspectives on Landscape and Urban Transformation I+II is a container which holds together a collection of different hand-outs, brochures, and materials. All in all, it is a ‘bag’ and a personal organizer which invites students to fill over the course of the year. It allows them to individually structure and curate the content of the course. It is deliberately designed to be open-ended and to be individually extended and adapted. Towards the end of the semester, students will get a glossary where all key terms and concepts, presented in the various lectures, are combined. Each week students will receive a small leaflet that gives an overview of the individual lecture, as well as an additional reading. All documents can be downloaded via moodle. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Literature | Weekly handout of readings. All documents can be downloaded via moodle. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Prerequisites / Notice | The course takes place at the Fokushalle, E7, ONA Building from 18:15h-20:15h. The course will be under the formal responsibility of Prof. Freek Persyn and collectively coordinated by a core team consisting of Freek Persyn , Michiel van Iersel, Lukas Fink and Charlotte Schaeben. Students can contact: Charlotte (schaeben@arch.ethz.ch) for organisational, technical and personal questions Lukas (fink@arch.ethz.ch) for questions regarding the reader, weekly exercises and the final exam Michiel (mvaniersel@arch.ethz.ch) for questions regarding guests and literature | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 052-1121-23L | Studio Brussels: Paradox of Practice  Please register (www.mystudies.ethz.ch) only after the internal enrolment for the design classes (see http://www.einschreibung.arch.ethz.ch/design.php). Project grading at semester end is based on the list of enrolments on 1.11.2023 (valuation date) only. This is the ultimate deadline to unsubscribe or enroll for the studio. | 14 credits | 16U | F. Persyn | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract | This semester is about Brussels North, a district deeply affected by trauma. In this dramatically monofunctional district, investors and planning authorities have recently agreed on a 10% public utility within every new construction and renovation. We will use this as an entry point to question and rethink the notion of the public, as well as its mirror, the counterpublics. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | -Collaborating with a multitude of actors from different backgrounds. -Working across scales between local urgencies and institutional developments. -Creating specific spatial qualities in public space. -Identifying physical and intangible borders and boundaries that define space. -Developing your ability to improvise and adjust to a dynamic environment. -Communicating complex ideas through a performative approach to architecture. -Documenting a non-linear creative process through a mix of media. -Understanding and exploring your senses to design and facilitate dialogues. Grading criteria: 1 Clarity and Independence of Position 2 Relevance regarding the case 3 Depth of engagement 4 Representation 5 Design in Dialogue 6 Mutual Collaboration 7 Personal Development | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | Cities are sites for the extraction of profit and wealth, where capitalist delusions of grandeur materialize in the most delirious ways. Real estate, at times in collaboration with city authorities, continues to project newer and bigger developments on top of existing lived realities. In the process of enacting their fantasies, entire neighborhoods and communities are violently wiped out. Many of these processes remain ongoing, even though the wounds of past events are not yet healed. This is the case for Brussels North, a district deeply affected by trauma. The city’s economic optimism that followed the 1958 World Fair, and the establishment of the first European institutions that same year, prompted the conceptualisation of the Manhattan Plan. This urban, modernist master plan, euphorically oriented towards its American namesake, envisioned the Northern district as a business hub connected to an immense highway network. The plan was never fully realized; only two of the originally eight planned World Trade Center towers were erected, causing, however, the demolition of an entire neighbourhood and the eviction of its inhabitants. Enthusiasm fainted, forcing the city administration itself to enter some of the buildings. Such aggressive strategies of urban renewal have inevitably forced cities to become places of resistance and emancipatory struggle. Massive protests that followed the Manhattan Plan prevented authorities from pursuing further demolitions of the old city fabric. Today, Brussels North District is being reinvested in once more, with renewed optimism. How to deal with trauma? In this dramatically monofunctional district, investors and planning authorities have recently agreed on a 10% public utility within every new construction and renovation. We will use this as an entry point to question and rethink the notion of the public, as well as its mirror, the counterpublics. Being densely inhabited environments, cities carry the immanent potential of radical change due to the continuous collective reinterpretation of urban culture. Through carefully listening, observing and collaborating with a variety of local positions, we will gain a deep understanding of the complexities at play. We will become active and intervene as designers while being aware of the paradoxes of practice. Sometimes making something sets unforeseen processes in motion. We will identify underlying risks, such as gentrification, commercialization and displacement, to prevent another chapter of trauma for Brussels North. Further, we will ask ourselves: How to relate to utopian visions of the past? How to deal with the decaying and failed structures of burgeoning times? Even more so, within an overbuilt world facing ecological collapse? The studio‘s endeavour is threefold: to strengthen the students' literacy with critical spatial theory, to articulate individual positions and to test alternative architecture practices and doing so by engaging and learning with and from artistic practices. The design studio will be tightly knit with a diverse group of local actors. We will cultivate a reading club, propose interventions in Brussels and Zurich, host a symposium and curate an exhibition. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Prerequisites / Notice | group work only Introduction: 19.9.2023, 9:00 Intermediate crits:10.10.2023 / 28.11.2023 Final crits: 20.12.2023 CHF 200.-- per student (estimated costs, without possible seminar week costs) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 052-1151-23L | Architectural Design V-IX: (Student-led Teaching F. Persyn) Does not take place this semester. Please register (www.mystudies.ethz.ch) only after the internal enrolment for the design classes (see http://www.einschreibung.arch.ethz.ch/design.php). Project grading at semester end is based on the list of enrolments on 1.11.2023 (valuation date) only. This is the ultimate deadline to unsubscribe or enroll for the studio. | 14 credits | 16U | F. Persyn | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract | To follow | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | To follow | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | To follow | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Prerequisites / Notice | To follow | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 064-0017-23L | Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal methodologies for Landscape and Urban research | 2 credits | 2K | F. Persyn, N. Bathla, T. Galí-Izard | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract | Researching Otherwise is a call to craft another space for the production of knowledge. It posits that fluid epistemologies that respond to ways of decolonial, pluriversal, and more-than-human knowing can offer tools and ways for reimagining and reconstructing local worlds and transcending developmental paradigms of researching and operating. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | Research in landscape and urban studies just like in other disciplines has been subject to the act of border and boundary-making that mediates, conditions, and limits its horizons while determining its outcomes. Some of these borders and boundaries are more familiar than others. In terms of geographical boundaries, for instance, the global north-south boundary has haunted landscape and urban research shrouded under the narratives of developmentalism. However, there are other borders such as the disciplinary ones, which attempts to separate and isolate a domain from other similarly specialised disciplines. This according to Paul Feyerabend is due to the tendency of modernity whereby ‘scientific education, aims to simplify “science” by simplifying its participants.’ Then there are the methodological boundaries established due to ‘cartesian dualism’, which act in the practice and training of becoming objective, teach researchers to be content with studying the products of imagination rather than working with imaginative processes themselves. Then there is a third, onto-epistemological border which defines that the knowing subject in the disciplines is not transparent and disincorporated or untouched by the geopolitical configuration of the world in which people and regions have and continue to be ranked and configured racially. It argues for moving away from a one world ontology. Decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo and Gloria Anzaldúa have proposed for border thinking as a method for politically and epistemically de-linking from the web of imperial knowledge, which has energised a number of disobedient and anarchic traditions of researching otherwise. Researching Otherwise is a call ‘to craft another space for the production of knowledge – another way of thinking, un paradigma otro, the very possibility of talking about “worlds and knowledges otherwise”’. It posits that such ways of decolonial, pluriversal, and more-than-human knowing can offer tools and ways for reimagining and reconstructing local worlds and transcending developmental paradigms of researching and operating. Rather than rigid and closed epistemologies of knowing the landscape and the urban, this seminar promotes fluid epistemologies that respond to the incommensurabilities, radical alterities and other ways of knowing the environment. The call for researching otherwise is to deploy methodological tools such as drawing, photographing, sounding and listening, filmmaking, walking, and cartography for not only unearthing and unmasking systems of power and domination but also for researching possible other worlds and for countering the disembodiment of research and the researcher. The seminar will draw upon readings from a forthcoming publication by the same title. In terms of format, it will alternate between inputs by invited guests, reading and discussion sessions, tutorials, and peer-review. A number of input lectures by invited guests will will take the participants of the seminar into ways and methods of researching otherwise. These input lectures will be alternated with thematically organised tutorial sessions and peer-review. The seminar participants can choose to present the work developed during the seminar at the LUS Doctoral Crits organised at the end of the semester. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | The format will provide an overarching methodological meta-theme, to be defined prior to the event. One external guest critic will be invited. In this case, each presentation will conclude with a discussion round, providing sufficiently detailed feedback for every doctoral candidate. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lecture notes | 22.09 Researching Otherwise - Nitin Bathla 29.09 Walk through the brachen of Zurich - Sabrina Stallone 06.10 Imagining Otherwise: Social Movements for Livable Futures in the Sonoran Border Region - Darcy Alexandra 13.10 Transdisciplinary Action Research - Stephanie Briers 20.10 Extended Urbanisation Conference 27.10 Retreat Lively Cities colloquium with Maan Barua at Uni Liechtenstein 03.11 Publication Otherwise - Moritz Gleich & Jennifer, gta Verlag 10.11 Doctoral Colloquium 17.11 Comparative Research - Julie Ren 24.11 Border Forensics - Charles Heller 01.12 Sensing beyond the human - Nancy Couling 08.12 Doc Crits | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Literature | Barua, M. (2014) ‘Bio-geo-graphy: Landscape, dwelling, and the political ecology of human-elephant relations’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(5), pp. 915–934. Crysler, C.G. (2003) Writing Spaces: Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism and the Built Environment, 1960–2000. London: Routledge. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203402689. Eco, U. (2015) How to write a thesis. MIT Press. Geertz, C. (1973) ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 1973’. Hultzsch, A. (2017) Architecture, travellers and writers: Constructing histories of perception 1640-1950. Routledge. Jackson Jr, J.L. (2013) Thin description. Harvard University Press. Jon, I. (2021) ‘The City We Want: Against the Banality of Urban Planning Research’, Planning Theory & Practice, 22(2), pp. 321–328. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2021.1893588. Kennedy, H. (2019) ‘Infrastructures of “Legitimate Violence”: The Prussian Settlement Commission, Internal Colonization, and the Migrant Remainder’, Grey Room, pp. 58–97. Madden, M. (2005) 99 ways to tell a story: exercises in style. Penguin. Malm, A. (2013) ‘The origins of fossil capital: From water to steam in the British cotton industry’, Historical Materialism, 21(1), pp. 15–68. Malm, A. (2016) Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. Verso Books. Malm, A. and Hornborg, A. (2014) ‘The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative’, The Anthropocene Review, 1(1), pp. 62–69. Marcus, G.E. (1995) ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, Annual review of anthropology, 24(1), pp. 95–117. Narayan, K. (2012) Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov. University of Chicago Press. Queneau, R. (2018) Exercises in style. Alma Books. Shannon, K. and Manawadu, S. (2007) ‘Indigenous Landscape Urbanism: Sri Lanka’s Reservoir & Tank System’, Journal of Landscape Architecture, 2(2), pp. 6–17. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2007.9723384. Soja, E. (2003) ‘Writing the city spatially1’, City, 7(3), pp. 269–280. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1360481032000157478. Tornaghi, C. and Van Dyck, B. (2015) ‘informed gardening activism: steering the public food and land agenda’, Local Environment, 20(10), pp. 1247–1264. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Prerequisites / Notice | The participants of the seminar will be required to participate in two doctoral colloquiums; on Extended Urbanisation on 20.10 and on Lively Cities on 27.10. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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