The Care Hypothesis
Holding or Revealing a Territory – From the Greek pherein, to hold, to support, Holding (in the meaning given by Donald Winicott) is to be interpreted in terms of urban planning as a weaving of natural and cultural interdependencies and reciprocities in the making. It is about taking into consideration what already exists and will ensure physical and mental handling that holds and brings security; for instance, the natural, technical and political infrastructures that facilitate the strategic and situated establishment of a project. So how to reveal and work with the interdependencies, the co-evolutions and the metabolisms of the relationships between nature and artifact, whether in relation to legacies, to geological and geographical forces, or to climatic variations?
Historical Traces and Memory
Traces, memories, past data and values play a structuring role in inhabited milieus, interweaving material and immaterial elements that are crucial to understanding individual and collective experiences. How are continuities and discontinuities articulated?
Geological, Geographical and Climatic Forces
The idea of a structuring natural and cultural substrate is a decisive aspect in revealing a territory in movement within a broader shared geography, namely the recognition of the geological and geographical forces that animate it: climates, mountains, valleys, rivers, forests, fields... but also of productive forces. How to start and interweave different problematic and spatiotemporal scales that correspond to the re-creation of territorial figures based on the great permanences and transformations of the milieu, but also to the overall coherences determined by its resistances and resources? These issues also intersect with those linked to changing climatic conditions: how to develop adaptation strategies to cope with new risks and extreme situations (floods, submersion, drought, heatwaves, etc.)? How to anticipate and at the same time cope with the unexpected?
