Metropolitan Landscapes

Overview

The Metropolitan Landscapes programme from Architectural Association offers weekend sessions on campus and online sessions by the AA and Tec de Monterrey that includes a weeklong field trip to London, UK. 

It combines Tec’s entrepreneurial culture with the experimental tradition of the AA and looks at the emerging planetary role of metropolitan regions while challenging the notion of a ‘so called’ urban age and tackling the climate emergency.

Metropolitan Landscapes looks critically at the historical relationship between society and nature through the intricate and interdependent relation of urban dense environments and the landscapes and territories (productive, operative, logistical, extractive, etc.) necessary for it to thrive. 

It focuses on the role new design methodologies can play in creating alternative and innovative visions for metropolitan regions at a planetary, regional and local scale in close connection with a variety of disciplines: economy, planning, policy-making, geography, etc. 

The programme aims to incorporate the design profession into wider disciplinary conversations to influence policy-making and transform governance structures and the management of metropolitan regions into a creative, innovative and visionary practice to deliver sustainable and resilient models of urbanisation fit for the XXI century.

Skills Developed

• To train design professionals to incorporate design methodologies in large-scale, multi-disciplinary projects under metropolitan region contexts.

• To teach professionals to read and analyse urban processes and dynamics using landscape concepts and models with the help of mapping tools (geographical information systems, Mapbox, Kepler) and other available technologies.

• To develop a view towards these tools which is simultaneously open-minded and critical about the outcomes and potentials for their implementation in large metropolitan-scale projects.

• To develop a gradual and incremental long-term research on novel forms of cartographical representations, socio-economic analysis and urban storytelling which can be applied as design and presentation tools for metropolitan landscapes projects.

• To develop theories and techniques of critical thinking that engages with the contemporary challenges of planetary urbanisation.