Environment as support
Our environment is dense with constructions, but also with history, affects and images embodied in its physical stratification. Likewise, our everyday gestures and practices are interdepended with the physical environment that supports us, and vice-versa. Neuroscience, psychology and the social sciences have shown how our cognitive processes are ingrained within and supported by these resources surrounding us. At ALICE we investigate and work in situated strategies to turn these material and immaterial resources into an active support for a new form of socioecological intelligence for urban and territorial transformation.
In order to do so we emphasize an expanded and operative notion of landscape. Echoing this term’s original roots on the shared involvement between bodies, land and diverse forms of the commons, from the legal to the affective, it helps us define and work on the complex articulations between nature and the city, the material and the symbolic, the legal and the embodied, etc., and how they come together, intermingle and co-create each other.
Related areas of research:
– Architectural readings of the environment/milieu notion.
– Scaffolding and extended mind theory.
– Transcalarity and plural temporalities.
– Resiliency as socioecological practice.
– Climate justice: territory, infrastructure, architecture.
– Parallel structures, micro interventions and soft infrastructures.
– Urban densification and intensification.
– Landscape, mobility and ecological transition.
– Adaptive design strategies.