Architecture of Territory invites you to the final review of this spring’s design studio COMMUNES: THE VILLAGE SUISSE REVISITED.

The agricultural areas on the slopes surrounding Lac Léman are examples par excellence of a highly urbanised countryside, with educated, wealthy, and international population and businesses. These areas attract a high influx of population, mostly absorbed in the small-scale structure of villages. Still today, the commune (and the village) represents the basic spatial scale and order at which most traditional Swiss values are anchored (autonomy, neutrality, direct democracy, pragmatism, flair for order, etc). This miniature territorial universe is still readable in the map of Switzerland with remarkable, if gradually eroding clarity. But in the age globalisation, many small structures, including the commune and its village, seem to loose their importance, or change beyond recognition. Urbanisation and globalisation produce structures in the territory at much larger scales than the commune: in fact, often too large to be comprehended. This is a vague space of flows of resources, people and capital, whose dimensions span the entire planet. Precisely for this reason, we considered the meaning of locality in this semester.