Inland, seaward. The trans-coastal project.

As a modern project, territory was synonymous with the colonization of nature. Contemporary urbanism faces the aftermath of it: sea-level rise, climate crisis, displacements, soil exhaustion, ecological decay. The urban project is increasingly mediated by the frequency and distribution of extremes – i.e. flood, drought, coastal erosion, saltwater intrusion, subsidence – and the passive (eventually active) spatio-morphological, socio-ecological and political changes that follow. There is consensus on the need to be responsive to a new instability of nature/culture and the self, and yet a sense of interruption, of distance, remains at sight. A disorientation of space, time and identity.

Partial adaptation, restoration strategies (bouncing-back tactics) deliberately deviate the attention from what lays underneath the surface: the uncertainty about and the form of inhabitable land under the new climatic regime. What is the status of the territorial and urban project defined by emergence, juxtapositions and transitions in water regimes, soil, weather and forms of inhabitation? What are the material and ecological practices needed to design with—instead of against—the states of crisis? Hence, the central question is how an informed and radical re-organization of water, land/soil, built environment and societies ought to contribute to a new condition of living.

The exhibition displays a curated short selection of the work produced by the Transitional Territories (TT) Studio of the TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment and the Diploma Unit 9 of the Architectural Association, School of Architecture in the academic year 2020-2021.