the basis for developing fresh, new strategies for settlement and land occupation. The premise of the studio was therefore quite simple: Conventional approaches to urbanization are increasingly producing incomplete or abandoned settlements that have enormous social, environmental, and economic consequences. How might we use what occurred in Spain as a platform for developing new priorities and logics of urbanization that challenge these singular, monofunctional, totalizing conventions?
For the purposes of the studio, the ecology-driven design logics we were most interested in, vis-à-vis thinking about new forms of urban settlement, included the following: (1) The value of bigness, that is, the implication of use diversity and multiple micro-sets of activity within a territory and, in particular, the interface or overlap of seemingly incompatible programs and land uses; (2) Instability/Unpredictability, not as liability or something to be assuaged but rather as a condition ripe for instrumentalization as a design opportunity; (3) Limits of Control, understanding design as a participatory agent within an urban environment rather than the overseer of said environment; (4) Resilience/Adaptability, building capacity to accommodate and endure disturbances to a system; (5) Self-organization, states of urbanization characterized by often unexpected change, moving systems from simple to more complex states; (6) Interdependence or embracing the comingling of the biotic and the urban, rather than treating them as oppositional binaries; (7) Patchworks or Nonlinear organization, the simultaneous occurrence of multiple states within a whole or the rejection of the monofunctional single-state; (8) Scenarios rather than sequences, elaborating multiple potential outcomes rather than designing a linearly phased ideal state; (9) Sudden state-change, the inevitability of urban form to shift in terms of its orientation or health; and (10) Design as facilitator or catalyst, influencing or inflecting an open urban system through design intervention rather than trying to elaborate and implement a closed system.*
It is this last “logic,” the catalytic potential of landscape-driven design interventions, which is of greatest interest within this work. Rather than urbanization continuing to rely on heavy, permanent, singular infrastructural devices that control growth, the potential here is for hybrid landscape systems to be deployed as more nimble, catalytic scaffolds that influence and inflect the processes of urbanization, embracing the volatile, speculative nature of these endeavors. While in no way fully formed, it is this potential to have a greater role in the organization and deployment of new settlement that makes the question of the role of landscape-driven urbanization so ripe for consideration.
Participants in the studio included master’s students in landscape architecture, architecture, and city planning, typically in the final year of their studies. This mix of disciplinary capacities was exceptionally useful in developing more complex and sophisticated responses to the studio prompt. However, it also meant that very few of the projects could be characterized as purely a “landscape” project or an