Lecture: Crisis & Hope - Topalovich Milica

Milica Topalovic is Associate Professor of Architecture and Territorial Planning at the ETH Department of Architecture. From 2011-15 she held a research professorship at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, studying the relationship between a city and its hinterland. In 2006 she joined the ETH as head of research at Studio Basel Contemporary City Institute and the professorial chairs held by Diener and Meili, where she taught research studios on cities and on territories such as Hong Kong and the Nile Valley. Milica graduated with distinction from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade and received a Master’s degree from the Dutch Berlage Institute for her thesis on Belgrade’s post-socialist urban transformation. Since 2000, she worked on projects in different spatial scales and visual media. With Studio Basel she authored and edited Belgrade. Formal / Informal: A Research on Urban Transformation, and The Inevitable Specificity of Cities. She contributes essays on urbanism, architecture and art to various magazines and publications.

Today’s world is hallmarked by crisis: economic, climatic, environmental, sanitary, political and social. Thus, the projects and actions designed or put in place by contemporary designers and other forward thinkers and actors must take full account of this ongoing situation of emergency and plight. ‘Crisis’ comes from the Greek verb ‘krinò’, meaning to ‘separate’. It initially referred to the separation of wheat from chaff, the useful form the useless, the good from the bad. For this reason, every crisis always ushers in opportunities and seeds of change. The conference series ‘Crisis & Hope’ aims to stimulate an interdisciplinary debate on the elements of crisis but also of possibility and hope to build a better common future. Lectures will focus on how the discipline of design, and landscape design in particular, is being reviewed and reformulated in the light of the wide variety of changes we are currently observing worldwide.

This series eventually tries to shed some light on the transforming responsibility of the landscape designer within the broader frame of future oriented action.

The conference series is organized by the section of Landscape Architecture at Delft University of Technology in the context of the celebration of their 10- year anniversary of the LA MSc-track in 2020-2021. The conference is curated and organized by Laura Cipriani.

Conference schedule

1:00-1:05 pm | Welcome

1:05-1:45 pm | Lecture

1:45-1:55 pm | Discussion with Tanja Herdt and Saskia de Wit, Q & A

1:55-2:00 pm | Closing Remarks

More information

• Events are online and free of charge. The Zoom can be entered through here.
• Register here.
• For more information please contact Laura Cipriani at L.Cipriani@tudelft.nl