Biography

Architect-Urbanist EPFL who, since her training, has been oriented towards landscape urbanism and interdisciplinarity with ecology, in particular during a year of exchange in Sweden where she was able to follow the master program Architecture and Planning Beyond Sustainability. She worked for the Atelier Descombes Rampini (ADR) in Geneva on territorial planning and river revitalization projects, and for the Urban Planning Laboratory of EPFL directed by P. Viganò on the Metropolitan Agriculture research conducted by E. Cogato-Lanza. She is currently working on a doctoral thesis on an operational conception of the agricultural landscape revitalization project articulating ecological continuity and reterritorialization of the food system in a socio-ecological transition perspective.

PhD

Towards a territorial project for the living
Ecological networks as an urbanistic project of the agricultural landscape revitalization

The aim of my thesis is to provide architects and urban planners with operational theoretical elements on the living as a territorial project. In the context of the socio-ecological transition, we need to update the articulation of the urbanistic and ecological dimensions of the territorial project - both a research object and an operational tool for urban planning. In this context, the landscape approach to urban planning is becoming increasingly important, going beyond the built environment to encompass systems of public spaces throughout the planned territory. This phenomenon has been accompanied by the operational translation of the concept of ecological continuity into land-use planning, through ecological networks, which have become the flagship tool for maintaining biodiversity. Since then, there has been a growing interest in exploring projects for landscape structures designed as multifunctional ecological networks to support transition. However, this forward-looking approach has certain limitations, starting with the fact that transition, and in particular the maintenance of biodiversity, relies more on a cultural change linked to the transformation of the relationship between man and nature, than on an infrastructural design. Placing the living at the heart of the territorial project makes it possible to translate this new culture into urban planning.  

The aim of my thesis is to identify the principles involved in conceptualizing and implementing a territorial living project. The first principle to be investigated is that of co-designing ecological and urban continuities through the prism of the living world. The challenges of implementing ecological networks, which are particularly acute in agricultural environments, highlight the need to integrate agrarian logics upstream of such a project-based approach. The second principle addressed here is the key role played by agricultural practices in the implementation and design of territorial living projects. These first two principles call into question the nature of the current territorial project based on development, calling for the exploration of a third principle, that of the territorial living project as a process of landscape revitalization. This line of research explores the cartographic tool as a project support, making current and potential interdependencies visible.

My research is based on two study areas, the Pays de Rennes and the Greater Geneva area. Both have a long tradition of exchange between urban planning through public space and ecological networks. The thesis is based on a survey of the Rennes area (semi-structured interviews, case studies, mapping) and two research-by-design projects carried out in Greater Geneva as part of transdisciplinary collaborations. The first prospective exploration deals with the co-design of human and non-human mobility spaces. The second is part of the Circuits-Courts Agriculture Nature (CCAN) study, and aims to produce an "atlas du terroir".

Funding: SNSF Thesis Doc.CH | P0ELP1_188123 
Director: MER Elena Cogato-Lanza, architect-urbanist, researcher at the labU
Co-director: Dc. Jacques Baudry, landscape ecologist, researcher at INRAE in Rennes
Research period: 01.01.2020 - 01.01.2024