Last July 2024, between the 3rd-5th, the NERU consortium met in Zürich, hosted by the ETHZ (Newrope Chair). On the first day, we could share our respective teaching experiences during the 2023-24 academic year, focusing on each other’s methodologies: how do we teach and monitor the learning process? What is being learned and how do we assess it? Even though the topics are alike across the different faculties of architecture, every partner brings in another form of attention: from the obligation to elaborate your cartography to the need to pay attention to the materiality of the built environment as a way to restore abandoned crafts and supply paths; or from the skewed position we take as designers if we start from observing the actors and practices already on place to a different way of understanding spatial change once you witness the extent to which different cosmovisions hold onto each other in the rural space (eventually forcing continuous negotiation between animist and postmodernist ways of relating to the world). During the second day, the host opened the discussion to the members of the LUS research laboratory. Several PhD fellows working on rural questions shared their ongoing research with us. The professors Milica Topalovic, Christian Schmid, and Nitin Bathla brought their critical understandings of ‘new ruralities’, questioning the validity of the opposition between rural and urban in a context of planetary urbanisation (besides the overwhelming presence of capitalist processes of accumulation and extraction undermining such distinction), or wondering about the explanatory power of the ‘new’ in ‘rurality’ as it risks being taken for an essentialist concept. In between the discussions, delicious food (harvested mostly from the rooftop) was served at the entrance of the Oerlikon facility. All in all, an exciting experience that brings us closer to the end of the project. Particular thanks go to Ina Valkanova, Sophia Garner and their collaborators Simon Oberhofer and Egle Bazaraite for orchestrating this exceptional encounter.
