Stockholm Mania

Teachers: Ania Öst, Francesca Savio, Hanna Erixon Aalto

Studio Theme The Urbanism and Landscape Studio focuses on cities, landscapes, and territories in the broader context of the environmental crisis. How can we imagine a sustainable and resilient city of the future? What can the role of designers be in addressing urgent and interconnected problems such as rapid urbanization, biodiversity loss, social inequity, and severe global climate changes affecting our cities? Drawing on the nexus of ideas within landscape/ecological urbanism, resilience theory, and the environmental humanities, the studio challenges the modernist idea of the city as a fixed, delimited territory contrasting the ‘natural’ world around us. Instead, we explore landscape and ecology as organizers of urban space; as providers of catalytic urban strategies that can embrace complexity, multi-functionality, and change over time. This year the studio will focus on Stockholm and on the need for the city to grow meeting demands for housing and public infrastructure. We will zoom in on the Järva area, a site that exemplifies a contested planning situation, in which the seemingly incompatible endeavors of, on the one hand, protecting and maintaining green and open spaces, and on the other creating a polycentric, dense and more connected urban fabric, are set in opposition to one another. The studio aims at challenging this polemic praxis through the exploration of alternative city/nature relationships.

Teaching Methodology In this studio we foster a collaborative and open culture where all ideas are welcome and we reflect on real-world challenges with an optimistic standpoint. We empower students to develop a critical and systematic outlook to the urban and global issues we face through the study of hands-on, “live” problems grounded in real-world challenges. Urban design is an inclusive, reflective and, by necessity, transdisciplinary practice and we work closely with decision-makers, activists, local organizations, and experts. By combining the critical and the suggestive; analysis and innovation, we develop bold scenarios that reframe the human-nature relationship. Project 1 Research and narratives of the place We’ll investigate the complexity of the site through combining theory and analysis with artistic and bold explorations. We will work closely with actors and experts on the site, and through a series of assignments and workshops we will investigate and conceptualize existing and new interfaces for human/nature relations. Our investigation: how can the Green Wedges be operationalized as a productive, generative landscape that can be a basis for new urban living environments?

Project 2 A collective strategy Building on knowledge from P1, we will expand on dimensions of systems thinking. Through the lens of art and architecture we will explore different concepts for community and how to design resilient neighborhoods for the future that can cope with climate change. Drawing from our collection of projections we will collectively develop a communicative vision and strategic plan for the development of new relationships between Stockholm and its green wedges.

Project 3 Learning from Berlin We will travel to Berlin to study community driven green urban projects and meet out-of-the-box thinkers. Berlin has a unique history of innovative grass-roots driven initiatives both at an urban scale and on a building scale. In this project we will focus on aspects of 1) public space 2) housing/habitats and 3) production, and we will explore how overlaps and synergies of the three entities can be reimagined. Students will also develop a brief for their continued work and projects during the semester.

Project 4 Designing resilient future habitats In this final project students will develop a proposal for how a new habitat of Stockholm can develop in a resilient way. Designing a habitat includes shaping physical structures and environments for humans as well as other agents that are grown out of sustainable practices and cultures. The work will result in an exhibition. We see outcomes that reveal unexpected potentials ranging in scale from the territorial, the neighborhood, down to the detail of a home. processes, constructing new narratives of how we live together, and the implications of these in spatial practice.

Ania Öst AÖ is a multidisciplinarian with a master in architecture. AÖ combines practice with research and has taught in higher education since 2010 at KTH and at TU Graz, Austria. She is starting up the practice GAIA ark, with like-minded, focusing on reconnecting human habitats with our living environment through innovation Francesca Savio FS is an architect and urban designer. She has worked in the field of participative urban planning in Italy and Spain, urban design and architecture in Sweden, and has taught at KTH SUPD since 2017. Her work revolves around sustainable practices for urban design, the circular economy, and futureproofing urban environments. Hanna Erixon Aalto HEA is an architect and urbanist, writer and lecturer. She holds a PHD with the thesis Projecting Urban Natures and has taught since 2005 at KTH. The core of her interest revolves around finding new ways of involving a multitude of actors in the development of resilient future strategies for sustainable landscapes.

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1. Agnes Denes, Wheatfield—A Confrontation. 1982. Photo by John McGrall. 2. Recovering waterscapes, Mexico City by AA Groundlab, 2013. 3. Student project by Clas Sundberg and Thelma Dethlefsen 2021 4. MVRDV Almere Oosterwold 5. Rethinking happiness, curated by Aldo Cibic at the Venice Architecture Biennale. 2010. 4.

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