Rethinking territorial concepts as a framework for climate justice, writer and educator Paul Mosley, architect Neeraj Bhatia and academic Professor Albert Pope discuss the Projective Territories Symposium (April 3-4, Kent State University - College of of Architecture & Environmental Design), which explores the formative role of architecture in addressing the evolving intersections of land, society, and ecology.

The conversations at the Projective Territories Symposium will be livestreamed: Session 1: The Erosion of Territory (9am–12pm) with Lydia Kallipoliti & Elisa Iturbe; Session 2: The Architecture of Expanding Ecologies (2–5pm) with Neeraj Bhatia & keynote Albert Pope.

FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ I would like to start with the symposium's title, specifically the often-ambiguous term "territory." How do you approach and define this notion?

PAUL MOSLEY I often find that architects use this term to refer to the reserve of nature, landscapes outside the built environment, frontiers and hinterlands, generally the areas surrounding cities. The premise of the symposium is that it's more productive for architects to recognise territory as the spatial definition of a political institution, as defined in political geography, be it a state, nation, or city. Territory is also a specific form of socially produced space, closely tied to human perception. Jean Gottman talks about this in terms of the psychosomatic function of territory, which is more than just spatial boundaries, borders, or subdivisions, but also exists in the psychology of the people living in it.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tells us that people born today are likely to experience a world that is three degrees warmer — well beyond the critical threshold needed to avoid climate catastrophe. Bruno Latour writes that the question of belonging to a territory, even in a psychological way, is in need of rethinking and careful re-description today. Architects' vague ideas about this concept will have more impact if we recognise its history and meaning within a geopolitical context. The term "territory" has a specific etymology, coming from the Latin "territorium," which means Roman universal empire. Over time, the concept of territory has transformed with changes in political and power structures, from the treaties of Westphalia and the appearance of the nation-state to map projections. The intention of this symposium is to advance the political dimensions of territory within architectural discourse.

ALBERT POPE You critiqued the idea of territory as a reserve of nature by constructing a binary between the land we occupy and the unspoiled land around us. Given the changes in the atmosphere's chemical composition, it's clear that imagining any part of the world as untouched is off the table for me. Are we then talking about the rural world? And if so, are we actually talking about factory farming, which is quite different from the urban world?

Regionalism is another way architects have approached territory, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century. The regional ideal was about decanting cities into the landscape and spreading out humanity to overcome the sins associated with urbanism. Champions of regionalism, like Ludwig Hilberseimer and Lewis Mumford, saw the fate of cities as waning and promoted this regional ideal. This perspective, however, is in need of rethinking. The regional ideal was based on a binary of nature and culture, human and non-human realms.

There are still interesting aspects of regionalism that could help us today. I've written about Ludwig Hilberseimer and his version of regionalism. The concept of psychosomatic territory, as described by Jean Gottman, is certainly worth exploring, but in light of the megalopolis, with continuous urbanisation stretching for hundreds of miles with high carbon footprints, we need to dig into these subjects to develop a new notion of territory.

PM I love that reference to the logistics of territory with corporations like Amazon and Walmart. The area of land and territory they focus on is all about moving, consuming, and selling products. They achieve this through logistics infrastructure, which are often driven by colonialism and capitalism as ways of gaining access to land.

Another key idea is territory as a form of access, in addition to its boundaries. Territory is not only about boundaries but also about accessibility.

API could throw in a bit of a bomb here. It really came up in your question: to what extent can the multiple crises of our time — political, health, housing, ecological — be addressed by rethinking land ownership systems? I made a note: "This is not my job." But I think it comes from the sense that it really is my job. Neeraj, you mentioned how a single building can be imagined to affect the territory. To me, that is our job. The larger framework is something we all carry with us.

I agree with the idea of Amazon and global capital. I like these broader pictures and rely on them. Geography is interesting to me, but in my own work, I distinguish between the theory of urbanism and a theory of urban design. Many people engage in urbanism theory, including social scientists, but I feel I'm not doing my job if I don't develop and preserve my terrain, which is design.

For me, the important focus is on design, not just urban theory. When discussing territory and regionalism, I refer to a design tradition with a design response. I've been developing the formal parameters of megalopolis, like urban spines or cul-de-sacs. It's about drilling down into megalopolis, which is comprehensive and hard to unpack, to find something relevant to design.

The larger picture is important, but it becomes the ambiance of design, the background, rather than the driver. Working on policy affects design but won't get us there directly. Design can occur under various policies and regimes. I try to step back from the larger picture to focus on what I think is my job: how to instrumentalise design and what it has to offer to the broader discussion of territory.

PM I love this question of design. Part of the intention behind bringing in figures like Viollet-le-Duc, Gregotti, and Hilberseimer is that they elevated architectural form to the status of geographic form. Viollet-le-Duc ‘architecturalised’ Mont Blanc, Hilberseimer developed settlement patterns, Gregotti explored the architecture of the territory, and the list goes on. I'd like to mention Patrick Geddes as well, which I know is an influence in your work, Neeraj. His idea of the city-region, the hyphenated compound noun “city-region,” is significant. We could also discuss Andrea Branzi's weak form, Rem Koolhaas's bigness, and so on. A key reference here is Fumihiko Maki's collective form, which is explicitly influential to both of your works. Maki spoke about master programs, not master plans. Albert, you're saying not master plans as static compositions, but master schedules, which are dynamic and temporal, reintroducing the notion of time.

KOOZ Drawing on figures like Viollet-le-Duc, Gregotti, and Hilberseimer, we are obliged to note that we are in a very different time. Understand territory in the context of an entity like Amazon, what does that mean for the architect today? How do we approach the practice of drawing, and what is the potential of redefining the notion of territory to understand it from an infrastructural and political standpoint?

NBThe question of drawing makes you realise how some of our traditional methods of drawing space are limited, given the accelerated changes and the number of complex spatial and non-spatial actors involved in creating space today. I teach a seminar at CCA where I ask students to map the spatial and logistical footprint of something simple. Something as singular as a tomato still operates across a very complex territory.

KOOZ I think it was Liam Young who says that drawing the picture of an iPhone is like drawing a system of the world.

NB The simple act of mapping the spatial footprint helps students understand what actors are involved and what kind of contestations happen in space. The negotiation between the cost of land, labour, time, and moving something is interesting. As architects, we often think of efficiencies through spatial proximity. For instance, if you're going to log wood here, the sawmill should be next to it. That seems efficient. What's interesting is how territory is currently built through negotiations that are often only efficient through the lens of capital. I've adapted my course over the years, and now students produce short films to map how space, movement and time operate across territory but also define territory. This question of time, which Maki already brought up earlier, affects everything we do in design. Traditional drawing methods are still indebted to capturing a moment in time. Are there ways to draw these things out and update them in real-time as they dynamically unfold?

Albert mentioned it's not his job to rethink land ownership systems for addressing crises. While no client asks us to rethink land, property, and ownership, we should still ask these questions. I work on policy, and in collaboration with San Francisco's Planning Department, we visualise potential impacts of policies on the city. Policy is written in abstraction and often has embedded class and racial asymmetries of power. By visualising policy impacts, we can rethink policy.

Although these questions might not be traditional for architects, our role in visualising unbuilt things can create advocacy for or against them. Could we envision a different future with just a couple of policy changes today? This approach opens up conversations for re-examining current systems. The same applies to land tenure models. If we adopted a different model, what new architectural possibilities would that open up?

Design and architecture can catalyse advocacy for a different future by visualising how people live and be. This feedback loop questions what adjustments are needed in our current systems to achieve such a future. I'm curious about Paul and Albert's thoughts on the decommodification of housing, a significant conversation currently unfolding in North American academia. Housing became a speculative act as social security diminished since the 1970s. Decommodifying property is a larger question that involves providing proper health and retirement benefits, rebuilding the social safety net, and addressing various aspects of life beyond architecture. However, by thinking through these systems and possibilities through new land tenure and building types, we can create advocacy to move forward.

PM This question of the multiple crises of our time — political, housing, and more — is crucial. One of the beautiful questions in your book, Albert, is about how in a state of polycrisis, where multiple seismic events occur simultaneously, how do we visualise our place in a world that is no longer recognisable? Architects are great at drawing – it's central to our labour. We have a key role in rethinking land ownership systems through drawing. This should shift from redefining territorial boundaries as a means of orientation rather than enclosure.

AP Neeraj is right in recognising that we live in a larger and more complex framework, and there's no way we could be effective if we tried to shut that down or reduce it to a set of abstract issues. What really made both of your remarks interesting is the role of visualising an alternative future. We won't be able to figure everything out before we project these futures. The new futures we project are triggers, just as much as a white paper, lecture, or book can be.

A lot of architects, myself included, often translate visualisation directly into drawing, and that drawing gets directly transferred into representation. However, we're dealing with something much larger than representation. We're not just producing pictures of another future; we're thinking through how that future might evolve out of today's world, find its place, and move forward. This requires a visual language, the language of architecture, and the tools — however inadequate they might be at this moment — to engage the possibilities of a future evolving out of our present.

I don't think those tools concern policy or speech-making. I insist on not defining myself as an environmentalist because I need to focus on these tools, many of which are found in history. How did Gregotti do it? How did Hilberseimer do it? The concept of collective form by Maki is interesting, but I feel like he didn't fill in the space between his architecture and the urban aspirations he aspired to in that text.

To be serious about projecting alternative futures, they have to be rigorous, and we need design tools to do that. What are those tools like? As mentioned, the master schedule is one example. What design tools can we use to project a substantial alternative, as opposed to just making images of the future that lack depth and credibility?

KOOZ That leads me back to the idea of thickness. To enable adaptive reuse systematically across these buildings, we need to design policies that facilitate such actions. This involves understanding the economic system governing real estate. When considering design, we often get fixed on one plane. Even when drawing, we seem stuck in a planar view of architecture. Instead, we need to consider the thickness, which spans multiple disciplines and scales.

To what extent can architects incorporate the idea of the ground as thickness, as Bernardo Secchi has suggested? Instead of thinking in one dimension, what happens when we consider multiple dimensions — three, four, five — and what does that add to the notion of territory?

PM I'd like to make an observation in response to that. Just last year, scientists noted, and Albert mentions this in his book, that the technosphere now outweighs the biosphere. The thickness of territory must reckon with that reality and bring our material world back into balance with the biosphere. Further changes to natural entities are inevitable. And it's more likely that these changes will be driven by policy and governance. That's why territory is so central to this question.

NB It's an interesting question about design because Albert and I share a lot of interest in how architects use design to address larger issues that might seem very abstract. What type of answer are we putting on the table and for whom? I agree with Albert's assessment that Maki's aspirations in his book versus the design projects put forward don't necessarily tie together. Maybe Maki's book reveals an anxiety about the lack of legibility in how the city was rapidly growing. The strategies of collective form in his treatise talk about how individual pieces come together as part of something bigger, reflecting a formal and aesthetic anxiety rooted in coherence.

I'm curious about what will mobilise a different ethos around ownership and ecological stewardship. In California, discussions about home insurance are causing people to question homeownership. With skyrocketing insurance costs due to wildfires and increased flood risk, should we rebuild as single family homes or shift to a renting model? This opens up questions about other models of inhabiting space, which might be more temporal and allow for shared land and stewardship.

Design will have a role as people become more willing to accept a different paradigm of living. As architects, we can think through and present alternatives, making them digestible and charting a path towards a different future. I started by saying territory is the contestations of power in space. There are also questions of control within the discipline and who is at the table making design decisions. Architects often mediate and negotiate — even between mechanical or structural engineers on a small building. But it's important to consider when these other actors come to the table. Are they there from day one, or do they join once there's something to visualise and discuss? In community engagement, bringing people in too early without design can lead to unstructured conversations. Having something on the table — even naively — can help focus the conversation and highlight what people want or don't want (I find that often it more clearly highlights what they don’t want!). We need a more diverse constituency at the table while decisions are being made. Involving a broader set of constituencies and experts is crucial. I'd love to hear Albert's opinion on working with various experts, like scientists and climate experts.

AP I want to follow up on Federica's question about the larger constituencies we're dealing with and our role in that larger discussion. Architecture and urban design are, by definition, generalist fields. We often take on the role of negotiator, trying to combine different interests into a unified resolution. But my question is always: “what can architecture bring to the table that no one else can?”

We often take on a generalist role because we see the necessity of it, but we may lose sight of what specific architectural questions can bring up. We have to be both generalists and specialists at the same time, standing up for design and the observations that design brings to the table. Too often, we put ourselves in the role of mediator, especially with community engagement. When talking to the community, I say, "You know your present better than I do. I want to talk to you about the next generation that will move into your neighbourhood. How much do you care that your city sets up a viable future for its next inhabitants?" This approach takes people out of the personal framework and gets them thinking about larger scale issues and time frames.

We understand the nature of cities — they evolve, are fluid, dynamic, and have a metabolism. We engage that process and think temporally about how a city aggregates. What are the things designers can bring to the table that would affect a future, an alternative future? It’s not always anthropology, policy, or other fields we negotiate. It’s about what design can offer that is unique and profound.

PM I would add that it's also about imagery. Neeraj, I think your work and drawings are excellent examples of how we can create drawings that exist outside the conventions of architectural representation that have existed for the last 500 years. I question whether those conventions are capable of bringing us into a future necessary to balance the technosphere with the biosphere. We've talked about the architect's role as a mediator and synthesiser, but I want to add that the architect is also a persuader. I just attended a symposium at Yale with material scientists, economists, bioeconomists, restoration ecologists, architects, urbanists, and urban designers. The designers in the room, the architects, had the most convincing visual presentations. This might be a way to convince or reach larger constituencies.

NB There's an anxiety around scale right now. Albert's work and my work both try to avoid dealing with these issues tactically. Instead, we focus on being strategic and understanding how small design elements aggregate into something larger. We often associate scale with top-down tendencies or modernism. However, we need to think about scale more mindfully. Avoiding the question of scale is problematic because the issues we're dealing with in the world require large scale thinking. How do we get comfortable thinking at scale? Aldo Rossi's Architecture in the City addressed the question of the city at scale through building and building type. This is a familiar way architects have approached scale, but we also need to engage with scale in new ways. We must be mindful not to replicate the power dynamics that our discipline has been complicit in and consider who's at the table when discussing large-scale systems. The stakes are higher when thinking about something bigger, but we shouldn't limit ourselves to operating only in small plots.There's a tidal wave on the horizon, and we need to think through scale and urgency simultaneously. We must address this anxiety if we want to play a role in thinking about alternative futures.

PM Koolhaas’s statement that“we were making sand castles, now we swim in the sea that swept them away” is going to carry a radically different meaning.

NB I want to add to Albert's point about community and community engagement. I fundamentally believe in this aspect and want more voices at the table. Any designer wants to know that what they're designing will be used and valued by the communities they design for. However, some issues we're discussing, like climate change, are very abstract and unfold over long periods of time. In America, many people live in precarity, struggling to pay rent, put food on the table, or working multiple jobs. It's tough to ask someone what they want in 5-10 years when they can't meet their immediate needs.

With money funneled to billionaires, leaving more people in precarity, there's another disciplinary challenge: how do we engage communities that don't even have their necessities covered? To be political, people need shelter and food; without these basics amenities, they're victims of the systems around them. Albert, have you found it challenging to engage long-term subjects like climate change with communities, especially those in historically redlined neighbourhoods still suffering from its legacy? Sometimes I feel out of touch asking about long-term visions when immediate concerns dominate.

AP You have to tie it to immediate and future solutions. People are interested in solving base problems while also giving their neighbourhood a better chance of survival in the future. We're working with a neighbourhood in the Houston Ship Channel, where kids are dying of cancer due to toxic air pollution. We provide a 50-year timeline, discussing how the fossil fuel industry will go away and refineries will shut down. We're not there yet, but we're taking first steps like bioremediation and planting. These immediate actions fit into a larger future scheme for Galena Park, a future they can't even imagine right now, but one in which they're genuinely interested. For me, the immediate needs can be the first phase of a much longer time frame. Even if the situation is dire, people would rather see solutions that matter to the future.

PM Today's conversations catalyse and build into a larger strategic framework for tomorrow. Even modest immediate benefits can aggregate into something bigger if you see the process unfolding and trust the institutions and governance to get you to that timeline. In times of dwindling reliability of institutions to provide stability and care, there's more anxiety about dealing with these futures. There's a lack of trust in reaching those futures, but addressing it is crucial for moving forward.

AP What we could do is say, "This is what will happen if the forces work, right?" Real political governance. Let's show you what would happen if these things actually do work, so we can then roll up our sleeves and figure out how to make them work.

KOOZ Returning to the titles of both the symposium and the exhibition: "Life After Property" and "Projective Territories." Are we stuck in an anthropocentric perspective, or can we think of territory on a more planetary scale? What other forms of life can the territory harness that might be more than human — or is your research oriented around the anthropocentric view?

PM That's a great question. My education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and being influenced by the premise of “projective” architecture advanced by Bob Somol, Andrew Zago, Sam Jacob, and particularly Alexander Eisenschmidt helped me understand the projective as a way for architecture to impose shape and define areas of land, giving way to indeterminate futures. Defining subdivision or imposing shape over an area of land produces indeterminate activities and programs. I'm interested in how that logic can exist in a more intentional way, so architecture, co-terminal with territorial form, sets up the conditions necessary for ecology to regenerate.

NB Discussing the exhibition, Life After Property, it is perhaps more anthropocentric than I would have liked. This is not intentional: the projects showcased were commissioned by various outlets, responding to specific questions tied to particular communities and sites. We examine three scales in the exhibition: the building, the neighbourhood, and the territory. The unifying theme across all projects is the notion of community control over resources and space, how governance influences this, and the role of architecture in supporting it.

At the building scale, we focus on the domestic commons; the sharing of space, objects, labour and shared governance. Many of these questions are explored through typology design. At the neighbourhood scale, two projects stand out: one examines urban commoning by leveraging mutual aid and solidarity initiatives, and the other rethinks housing typology in San Francisco to enable sharing beyond property lines. The third scale, the territory, includes projects that rethink cooperatives as well as land occupation as a form of resistance without ownership.

These projects represent recent work, serving as explorations of design techniques and critical questions. They are part of a larger study on what can be achieved at various scales and the methodologies employed. Different techniques are applied at the parcel level compared to regional scales, and this distinction is often under-theorised in contemporary urbanism.

AP That sounds fascinating. The question is pointed and provocative, suggesting that the end of property relationships could trigger a flourishing of the non-human world. There are cases where people take the rights of natural rivers to court to establish their rights to exist as coherent ecosystems. This creates a legal wedge in our anthropocentric lawmaking, bringing the non-human back into the discussion.

It would be interesting to think through how a shift in property relationships could trigger a flourishing of non-human life. This layers on top of the more anthropocentric perspective discussed with the scales. The river, after all, is not a local scale.

NB Yeah — and I think it's happening. It's called the Rights of Nature movement. They're putting legal terminology to this concept. It really comes down to our relationship with the resources around us. The separation of not seeing ourselves as part of nature, but as something other than nature, allows us to commodify nature to put it to work for us. It's a complete shift in thought to see ourselves as part of these systems. As soon as we do that, the question of regeneration, mutualism and solidarity with these systems becomes foregrounded in the design process.

Bios

Neeraj Bhatia is an architect, urban designer and founder of THE OPEN WORKSHOP in 2013 in Toronto, Canada. Now based in San Francisco, the multidisciplinary practice produces a diverse range of research projects and built works that bridge speculative research and formal design. The studio investigates how architecture and urbanism can foster social, racial, environmental, and economic equity, engaging frequently with issues of housing justice and public space. Often created collaboratively with communities, institutions, and other designers, these projects both propose and represent what the firm describes as“a collective ethos of design and forms of exchange.

Paul Mosley is a designer, writer, and educator. His architectural design and teaching focuses on renewing architecture’s urban relevance as a catalyst for environmental care. His work and writing have been published in Log, Thresholds, Architect’s Newspaper, Drawing Matter, and elsewhere. He was previously a project coordinator at Marlon Blackwell Architects, a designer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and an assistant editor at Log.

Albert Pope is the Gus Sessions Wortham Professor of Architecture at Rice University and the director of Present Future, a think-tank for urban design based in Houston Texas. He has written and lectured extensively on the broad implications of postwar urban development. His current research addresses the urban implications of climate change, and he is actively working on the formulation of new models of density in light of the extraordinary demands soon to be placed on the urban environment. His most recent book, Inverse Utopia (Birkhäuser, 2024) examines the role that urbanism must play in addressing the climate emergency.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.