Abstract
In an era defined by intertwined biosphere crises, technological disruptions, territorial injustices, and epistemic crises, urbanism can no longer be framed as a question of density, typology, optimization, mitigation, or resilience alone. Grounding Territorial Regeneration positions territory not as a passive substrate for intervention, but as a living system, as multi-scalar assemblage of human and more-than-human relations, and metabolic processes.
The symposium departs from the premise that the Anthropocene paradigm – grounded in extraction, separation, and human exceptionalism – has reached its conceptual and operational limits. Where the Anthropocene is structured by control, and externalisation, we introduce the concept of the Symbiocene, that is grounded in mutual dependence, care, and shared metabolisms. For architecture and urbanism, this entails a fundamental reorientation: away from solution-driven, object-centred interventions toward situated, long-term, and accountable forms of spatial practice that actively participate in the regeneration of territorial living systems. It shifts the emphasis from dominance to co-evolution, from extraction to reciprocity, and from isolated objects to relational assemblages. Territories are understood not as reservoirs of resources or sites of intervention, but as living, more-than-human systems, constituted through entangled ecological, social, and technical relations.
Territorial regeneration is framed a transition process of re-synchronisation between human activities and planetary boundaries. Within the Symbiocene framework, architecture and urbanism are understood as critical and design-driven operative interfaces between metabolic systems, cultural practices, and political ecologies.