Critical Environments explores the metabolic, extractive, and political geographies of urbanization, asking how design can help transform them into socially and ecologically just landscapes. In a time shaped by climate breakdown, geopolitical instability, mass extinction, displacement, scarcity, and systemic inequality, the cluster starts from a simple but urgent premise: design is never neutral. It shapes how we live together, what we value, and whose worlds are allowed to exist. This cluster invites students to work where design meets urgency, conflict, and possibility. Moving beyond logics of efficiency, it foregrounds care, repair, and stewardship across human and more-than-human worlds. Grounded in the Rights of Nature movement and informed by decolonial and environmental thought, it challenges city-centric and extractivist narratives by redefining nature not as a resource, but as a subject we live with, design with, and are accountable to.

Critical Environments Graduation Cluster

Focus & Approach

The cluster approach is rooted in socio-spatial justice and posthuman thought. It investigates socio-environmental inequality through trans-scalar and trans-disciplinary methods, understanding the material world as an active field of relations, agencies, and conflict. Key to this approach is the concept of the Pluriverse: the recognition that many worlds coexist within one earth. We ask how design can create meaningful forms of connection across differences. We propose an agenda for designing soft thresholds: spatial, institutional, and epistemic infrastructures that connect worlds without erasing their differences and acknowledge uncertainties. These thresholds enable eco-social relations and open space for multiple perspectives, values, and modes of existence to encounter one another, emphasizing intergenerational stewardship through sustainable development within the long-term perspectives

Our methods are transdisciplinary and include:

Forensic and Artistic Research: exposing hidden injustices and power asymmetries

Architectural Ethnography and OSINT: grounding design in lived realities and open-source intelligence

Critical Cartography: mapping entanglements from the molecular to the territorial

Emerging Planning Frameworks: Integral Bio and Eco-centric Environmental Impact Assessments (multiscope, multiscalar, and multi-actors perspective towards a new institutional interrelated capacities and operability).

Responsible Supervisors

Luisa Calabrese

Víctor Muñoz Sanz

Diego Sepúlveda

Programme

The cluster emphasizes research-by-design as a mode of critical inquiry. Students are encouraged to bring their own fascination or to engage with the supervisors’ ongoing research projects. Cluster activities are structured around:

Diagnostic Atlas: Multi-crisis mapping of hidden ecologies.

Theoretical and Methodological Grounding: Seminars on political ecology, STS, and Pluriversal methodologies.

Spatial Strategies: Designing multi-scalar prototypes for cohabitation.

Governance Instruments: Translating biophysical values into rights-based planning frameworks.

Filmic, Curatorial, and Narrative Practices: Using filmmaking, storytelling, and curatorial strategies to reveal hidden conditions, assemble new publics, and communicate spatial issues across multiple audiences and agendas.

Graduation projects result in spatially grounded, theoretically robust interventions that operate through both physical space and institutional policy, aiming to “stay with the trouble” while prototyping new ways of living together.

Type of master thesis

Forensic Analysis / Rights-Based Prototypes / Spatial Strategies & Restorative Designs / Institutional Interventions

Exemplary graduation projects

Schasfoort, J. (2025). Being Meuse

Terwogt, B. F. C. (2025). The glass ceiling

Bansal, V. K. (2025). Banishing or embracing

Wasswa, S. A. (2023). (Re)framing the narrative

Alzate Martinez, F. A. (2023). The Blue Heart

Literature and study materials

Schasfoort J., Calabrese L.M. (2026), Becoming with the Meuse. A dialogue on political legibility, multiplicity, and spatial design. Lagoonscapes, Venice University Press.

Muñoz Sanz, V., & Katsikis, N. (2023). Introduction: More-Than-Human Footprints. Footprint, 17(2), 3-10. https://doi.org/10.59490/footprint.17.2.7401

Sepulveda, D & Moya, D (2025) The impacts of metropolisation on socio-environmental transition, current and future challenges.

Escobar, A. (2017). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press.

Bathla, N., ed. (2024). Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies for Landscape and Urban Studies. gta Verlag.