Knowledge Territories, R/Urban Ecologies

The city and the countryside have been often placed at the opposite poles, dynamic and densely populated vertical metropolises with maximum productivity on one side, and the timeless and restful countryside that promises simple lives surrounded by pristine nature on the other. As the social, political, and environmental challenges and potentials of high-density cities in the “Urban Age” are investigated more vigorously than ever, and the discipline’s renewed interest in the countryside begins to articulate the realities of the “new rural,” the studio centers its investigation on the conceptual “elsewhere,” on the space beyond the dramatic binarism of bucolic (or futuristically “hyper-cartesian”) hinterland and the endlessly growing vertical city. Exploring the complex realities of Newburgh and the Hudson Valley region—seemingly pastoral tour destinations quietly challenged by abandonment, the global logistics industry, as well as continued infrastructural and environmental complications, the work of the studio investigates the concept of “R/Urban,” or the notion of the multitudes of open relationships between, or beyond, the imaginaries of absolute rurality and absolute urbanity, and more comprehensive notions of “Ecologies” of new and networked nature, to explore the often inscrutable yet expansive territories, of spectra, of in-betweens, overlaps, and intersections. Education, shared across the year, becomes the programmatic framework of the investigation, and the studio focuses on the new spatial formats of knowledge and/in the territory in the context of increasingly extra-territorialized knowledge institutions and their typological proliferations. Tying the concerns of knowledge and territory together, the studio aims to reconsider the false divide between culture and nature, the man-made and the natural, human and non-human, and the social and the technical, and envision the possibilities of a new spatial framework of knowledge within our extremely intertwined bio-techni-socio-political and environmental milieu.