Resourceful Cities
Since Autumn 2025, we offer a Research Studio focused on the role of resources in the history of urban design. It investigates how local and global systems of resource extraction, management and production have historically influenced the aesthetic, construction and craft cultures of cities, and explores how historical examples can inform challenges of today. What is a resource? How are resources relied upon, managed, and produced by cities? How do we in a resourceful way relate to our earth?
Within the broader scope of Resourceful Cities, students are guided in defining and elaborating their own research project to gain experience in all phases of a research project, from identifying one’s own interests up to the visualization of one’s findings. This self-defined project is expected to engage with archival and other historical sources and will be articulated in dialogue with current theoretical discussions on care, the environment and urban governance. In our studio, we emphasize architecture-specific research methods such as drawing, modeling and designing to interpret the historical source material as well as to explore the current-day potential of historical insights. The final outcome of the course is not a written text, but a studio presentation based on archival documents, own analytical drawings, and carefully scripted research narrative.
Hover Image: Zürich, Silo Swiss Mill, 2017. Photograph by Hussel Thomas. © ETH Library Image Archive
Tutors: Dr. Sebastiaan Loosen, Meitar Tewel, Natalia Voroshilova, Prof. Dr. Tom Avermaete
Students: Elisa Frondizi, Nicolaas Kleiber, Santiago Madueño, Saira Mudakarayil, Leon Schade, Eva Tschopp
In Autumn Semester 2025, the first batch of students started to address the questions of Resourceful Cities through a variety of themes. Students investigated the history of Rome’s underground stone quarries, their historical impact, their different uses over time and the current-day challenges and potential of these underground spaces. Or how water is a defining feature in Lima’s infrastructural landscape, in urgent need of more equitable distribution of access. Less tangible resources that were investigated were the role of participation in Belgian architect Lucien Kroll’s design strategies, or the social resilience of English mining communities in dealing with the closure of the mines. Another project asked how the architecture of Zurich’s asylum system can be considered a resource? Hidden from
public view and what ought to serve as temporary accommodation during administrative procedures, the various bunkers and other sub-optimal living environments are sometimes housing asylum seekers for multiple years, materializing administrative catch-22 situations into a suspension of political and urban life for its residents. The ambivalence of what constitutes a resource is shown in a project on the ownership structures of housing estates in Berlin, that when commodified as financial assets led to serious under-investment in maintenance. The fungal spores and carbon soot that testify to this under-investment, in turn served as resources to the inhabitants to rally around these material issues and organize for better housing rights.
