Designing with what’s already there: resource‑conscious approaches in architectural and urban pedagogy

Architectural and urban design education is increasingly confronted with finite resources, planetary boundaries, and layered socio-material transformations. This seminar proposes a collective reflection on how design teaching can engage more directly with the realities of place, existing material stocks, and forms of making that do not rely on continuous extraction. Building on the site-specific approaches of Satoyama Landscapes and the everyday spatial observations developed within Atelier Bow-Wow, the event considers how fieldwork, close reading of context, and incremental interventions can strengthen the connection between design practice, land, and the already-there. Particular attention is given to methods that foreground territorial interpretation, material reuse, and the “inner rhythms” of everyday life.

Rather than framing socio‑ecological transitions as mainly technological or policy-driven challenges, this seminar foregrounds their intrinsically situated, temporal, and affective dimensions. It invites participants to consider how understanding a place requires time; time to observe its rhythms, to perceive its stratifications, and to slowly develop a form of attachment that is not filtered solely through academic or intellectual frameworks. By encouraging practices that slow down and make room for embodied experience, the seminar emphasizes the importance of reconnecting with territories, landscapes, and built environments through real contact rather than abstraction. Such an approach highlights the pedagogical value of noticing: noticing materials, their uses, their wear, spaces evolving, and communities inhabiting.

It is in these sensitive and subtle registers that resource-conscious design can open new ways of imagining socio-ecological futures, not by inventing from scratch, but by learning to work with, care for, and reinterpret what is already there. Through this lens, architectural and urban pedagogy becomes a critical space for exploring transitions that are not only ecological, but also cultural, experiential, and relational. The seminar thus positions design education as a practice capable of fostering deeper forms of environmental responsibility, grounded in attention, slowness, and meaningful engagement with the lived world.

Hosted by iiTSE (ULB) and the OpenLab.brussels (ULB+VUB), the seminar brings these questions into a shared discussion format. A presentation by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto will introduce the concept of satoyama as a point of departure, followed by a round-table exploring how such approaches might inform architectural and urban pedagogy across scales, from territorial frameworks to spatial detail.

Program Overview

• 13:30–14:00 – Coffee & Informal Networking

• 14:00–14:15 – Introduction by Geoffrey Grulois and Hera Van Sande

• 14:15–14:45 – Presentation on the Satoyama concept - Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (Atelier Bow-Wow)

• 14:45–16:00 – Round-table discussions on key themes

• 16:00–16:30 – Wrap-up & Drinks

Invited contributors to the round table

• Geoffrey Grulois – LOUISE, La Cambre Horta, ULB

• Hera Van Sande – Organiser & Moderator, Archipel

• Tiphaine Abenia – La Cambre Horta, ULB

• Laurens Bekemans – BC architects, materials and studies

• Andrea Bortolotti – Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano

Organised by

• Giulia Caterina Verga – Organiser & Moderator, SUFI, École Polytechnique, ULB (iiTSE member)

• Hera Van Sande – Organiser & Moderator, Archipel

• Laurens Bekemans – BC architects, materials and stuies

• Geoffrey Grulois – Organiser, La Cambre Horta, ULB (iiTSE member)

• Samia Ben Rajeb – Organiser, École Polytechnique, ULB (iiTSE member, OpenLab.brussels)

• Andrea Bortolotti – Organiser & Moderator, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano

• Ahmed Zaib Khan – Organiser, École Polytechnique, ULB (iiTSE member)

• Camilo Paez – Organiser, École Polytechnique, ULB (iiTSE member)

Registration: giulia.caterina.verga@ulb.be