Knowledge: The design and research studio will provide students with the conceptual categories to address the interrelated issues of sustainability in an urbanising regional context. Based on a systemic view on the environment a focus of the studio will be a hydrological perspective on design, and the understanding of landscape as infrastructure. Form will be discussed in relation to performance as well as to space and place.

• Acquaintance and discussion of notions of watershed, region, cultural landscape as a spatial product of geological and climatic forces as well as cultural, political and economical interests and practices layered in time 
• Basic knowledge of urban-regional metabolism as a concept to describe the flows of substances and energy between and within cities and landscapes; in particular: urban hydrology and integrated watershed management (retain, clean, reuse) 
• Basic knowledge of landscape as a productive, performative layer in human systems: ecological infrastructure, ecosystem services, and regenerative agriculture; in particular: historical precedents of water management 
• Advanced knowledge of form and urban form: emergent patterns, figures and fields, dissolution and abstraction
• Basic knowledge of form as “informed” related to processes, both as a passive result of processes, and as an active modifier or catalyst of processes and flows
• Basic knowledge of an actor perspective and user-centered design practice: “everyday urbanism”

Skills: Concretely, students will develop skills to envision urbanisation projects as cultural landscapes with the goal to ensure adaptability to climate change and promote participation. Research-driven, multi-layered and multi-scalar in its scope, the studio builds the capacity to conduct a layered and visual analysis of the territorial/ regional context, the ability to reference precedents, to fuse technical and aesthetic aspects of form giving, and finally to frame and argue for a well-resolved design proposal anchored within the scale of the territory. 

• Research: Capacity to select and sort, and evaluate data from greater information quantities; ability to conduct precedent analysis and transfer
• Analysis: ability to carry out landscape and urban analysis based on map work (GIS and morphological analysis) and field work (photography, interviews); description of a territory through a synthesis of mapping, drawing, diagramming, and photography, with a special attention to hydrological systems
• Strategy: capability to develop scenarios for a watershed, development of propositions related to water flows and cycles for concrete case areas and programmes out of the strategic approach 
• Iterative design process: trial and error to find adequate solution, successive and interrogative usage of drawings (section and plans), physical and digital models, as well as texts variants, to test and develop proposals, in favour for “unsafe” experimental approaches
• Interrogative design: explicit discussion of a formal question, such as grids and figures organizing a spatial field; explicit discussion of an aesthetical question,
• Design resolution: ability to work out a territorial approach on a detailed level, including grading, planting, surfaces and textures
• Representation: capability to illustrate design through compelling plans, sections, and 3-dimensional images such as elevational perspective and collage, as well as digital and physical models
• Communication: problem definition, framing of a task within the given context of the studio; skill to verbally and visually argue for a project through telling of a compelling narrative

General competence: The studio’s underlying thesis will encourage the rethinking of urban, social and environmental challenges as opportunities to develop place-specific, lived and just spaces for the future. The studio’s main competence goal is to equip students with the ability to state ideas, translate these into form, and to apply theoretical and technical background in project work. Students will develop the adequate background knowledge to frame their projects in a larger socially and environmentally relevant context, as well as to use the project as an investigative vehicle to address professional and disciplinary questions. Both individual and group work will be trained.