Designing for Resiliency: RE:GENERATE alpine-urban circularity
An experiential educational co-creation hybridizing science, design, social outdoor joy, and local people action.
What makes a mountain community and its livelihoods resilient, given the current social, economic and ecological pressures? What makes it worth living in a rural mountain community? What are community regeneration strategies in remote geographies, like mountains? How does “more nature” relate with compassion for nature, systems thinking, and acting? And how do urban and rural/alpine places interact? How does this change our awareness as visitor/tourist, and as a local? What can we learn for re-designing how we live back in the urban, in cities?
During this PhD summer school in the Italian Alps with its virtual global reach, we will discover and design approaches to these questions, merging science, design, and local practice in and from a wonderful, wild, dynamic, mountain outdoor environment – stimulating local physical action as well wherever you (virtually) participate from. The idea is to engage in a rich local “real” setting with a smaller core group of people, while carrying these experiences out into the world by virtual means, nudging local physical action and allowing basically anyone to participate, and even more so feedback some of the remote simultaneous experiences from virtual participants back to the main onsite program.
To Apply
The majority of onsite seats is reserved for the financing institutions ETH Zurich and EPFL Lausanne. In our new European cooperation on Systemic Design with the partnering institutions AHO Oslo, Technical University Delft and Politecnico Torino, we offer a limited number of onsite seats for PhD’s from these institutions as well. All other PhD students are invited for virtual participation.
The onsite number of PhD students for this summer school is limited to 15. For virtual participation we allow a maximum of 30 participants.
To apply, please register online for either onsite or virtual participation, including uploading a detailed CV and a letter of motivation (300-500 words), stating why you want to participate, how this relates to your PhD project, and how you believe you can contribute to this summer school. If you apply for virtual participation, please reflect about an urban-rural/alpine location near to you, and about a potential “cohort” to build around you as local physical support and experience network – and name both in your motivation letter.
Key Dates
April 15th: application deadline for onsite participation in Italy
May 1st: application deadline for virtual participation
(May 24) – June 5-13 – (June 25): PhD summer school (hybrid format)
June 5-13: core week onsite and virtual
May 24-June 25: entire virtual framing
Find more information about the summer school here.
For any questions, please contact the organizing team by email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Responsible at ETHZ: MRI Co-PI Prof. Dr. Adrienne Grêt-Regamey; MRI Mountain Resilience Working Group Lead Prof. (AHO) Dr. Tobias Luthe
Responsible at EPFL: Prof. Dr. Claudia R. Binder; MRI Mountain Resilience Working Group Lead Dr. Romano Wyss
Co-organized by PhD students Anna Pagani (EPFL), Ana Stritih (ETHZ) and Reto Spielhofer (ETHZ)
