Charlotte Malterre-Barthes - ARABLE LANDS LOST LANDS

12.11.2020 Charlotte Malterre-Barthes - ARABLE LANDS LOST LANDS Approaching land as a finite resource and investigating the decline in available agrarian land, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes uses land reform in Egypt as a case study to identify urban growth as the consumer of agrarian land by accentuating the dynamics arising from relationships between land tenure, agriculture and urbanisation. Malterre-Barthes is an architect, scholar, and assistant professor of urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Principal of the urban design agency OMNIBUS, she directed the MAS Urban Design at the Chair of Marc Angélil (2014-2019), and holds a PhD from ETH Zurich on the effects of the political economy of food on the built environment, case study Egypt. She recently published Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity (Berlin, Ruby Press), and co-authored Eileen Gray: A House under the Sun (London, Nobrow), Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore (Edition Patrick Frey), and Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (Berlin, Ruby Press). The lecture is part of the talk series MY EARTH within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories, and Projects. CONCEPT AND REALISATION Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture Prof. Milica Topalović Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes Metaxia Markaki Dr. Gyler Mydyti Dr. Nazlı Tümerdem VIDEO EDITING Qianer Zhu GRAPHIC DESIGN Goda Budvytyte BOOK BINDING Michiel Gieben This lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists. MY EARTH Within the program, five guest speakers are invited to open up perspectives on territory as Earth and the manifold meanings it embodies: Earth as a living world, a world-system, earth as soil, as land, as field, and even as dirt. By looking at the Earth and its ecologies, the guest speakers will propose novel and urgent approaches to territory and urbanisation: from “Gaia-graphy” of Earth’s critical zones, and emergence of urban soil mapping as tool in urban design, to working with “dirt” in order to develop an ethics of care and maintenance for precarious environments. The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.