Beyond the center/periphery opposition, the City-Territory concept allows to read the dispersed contemporary condition as a potential for the construction of a sustainable and innovative urban dimension, where the notion of territorial recycling/reinvestment/care reverses the idea that urbanization is just a process of waste and considers it, instead, as a "stock" and a reservoir of energy and potential.

In the frame of the "Alpine-Leman City-Territory", a vast inhabited landscape stretching along the shores of the Leman lake, the Atelier will fccus on the "Grand Genève" metropolitan area and its landscape. This large transboundary metropolis is today experiencing a strong demographic growth, exerting an unprecedented pressure on its ecosystems, especially considering the role they will play in the future and for the construction of a new form of inhabitability.

Here, particular topographic and hydrographic systems, equipment and infrastructural meshes, agricultural landscapes in transformation, open spaces and heterogeneous residential tissues have drawn over time specific territorial structures, in some cases weak or discrete, that need today to be deeply reinterpreted and re-imagined. In fact, the multiple ecosystem services that this structures provide are crucial to the reflection on the project of the ecological and socio-economic transition.

Starting from the territorial "weak structure", the design studio proposes a shift in the paradigm of territorial development focused on the growth of built space, orienting rather to an approach that places the unbuilt space at the center (Hors-Zone-à-Bâtir).

By doing this, to react to the challenges posed by the evolution of a "natural" and productive landscape, inhabited by a growing and increasingly diverse population and to question the idea and form of the contemporary western metropolis, some specific situations within the Grand Genève will be examined and will become the object of design investigations at different scales: the urban, the landscape and the living space. New forms of coexistence - between different species, populations, activities - will be made possible, constructing new spaces for the everyday life, based on strategies aimed at opening new life cycles, intensifying and adapting the inhabited landscape to climate change.

In the first semester the Design Studio will engage with the "Hors-Zones-à-Bâtir", its characteristic, actors and possible actions. In the second semester, reversing the gaze, the Design Studio will start from the existing urban fabric, its possibility to be reused, intensified and recycled.