A series of Research Studios at the Chair of the History and Theory of Urban Design investigates the role of resources in the history of urban design. How are resources relied upon, managed, and produced by cities? How can historical experiences inform the challenges of today? How do we relate to our planet in a resourceful way?
Throughout history, cities have always maintained a complex and multifaceted relationship with resources. Cities are not only places of resource consumption, existing by grace of the myriad connections with the hinterland where construction materials and numerous consumer goods are resourced. Cities are also producers of resources and can even be considered a resource in and of themselves: the various political, cultural, and educational institutions they harbour serve as social resources for peaceful coexistence, for cultures to thrive, and for knowledge to be generated. Their density allows for various efficiency gains on economic, social-distributive, or ecological grounds.
What is a Resource?
Urban design as a discipline is inevitably deeply implicated in all these interconnections. Designing the city means de facto co-designing its various connections to resources. The more the resources of the earth are under pressure, the more explicitly we need to probe this multifaceted relationship between resources and urban design. Yet, resources are surprisingly hard to define: most dictionaries and encyclopedias tend to define resources ambiguously as ‘anything that satisfies human needs’. From this perspective, as human needs evolve over time, what counts as a resource is not a static given, but a cultural construct that evolves over time.
Considering today’s challenges, a series of Research Studios, a 14-ECTS MA-level course in ETH’s architecture programme, revisits the history of architecture and urban design from the perspective of resources. How have resources historically been extracted, managed, and produced? How is fair and equitable access to resources governed, hindered, or enabled? How has our definition of resources changed over time? More fundamentally, what is a resource? Is it still a valid concept, or is it part of an outdated vocabulary that fails to understand the reciprocal and entangled relationship of humans to the planet? How do we rethink this relationship through expanded notions of design to include questions of reciprocity, maintenance, care, and repair?
Rome and Lima’s Waters, House Ownership, Mining Communities, and Zurich’s Asylum System
The first batch of students in Autumn Semester 2025 have started to address these questions through projects as diverse as Rome’s underground stone quarries, Lima’s water infrastructure, the ownership structures of housing estates, the social resilience of mining communities, and the architecture of Zurich’s asylum system. A series of booklets based on these findings is currently in production.
Course tutored by Sebastiaan Loosen, Meitar Tewel, Natalia Voroshilova, and Tom Avermaete.
Sebastiaan Loosen is a Senior Lecturer at the Chair of the History and Theory of Urban Design (ETH Zurich). His research and teaching activities focus on the architectural exchanges between Europe and Africa in the context of foreign aid (1960s–80s), on Switzerland’s entanglement with global colonialism, and on questions of resource extraction.
