The publication “Working on Transformation” documents and systematises the teaching experiments, undertaken at NEWROPE over the past six years.

The book grew out of lived experiences, such as student projects, research initiatives, travels, and encounters, that took place at the Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation at ETH Zürich. It is organised around four verbs – ‘to project’, ‘to experience’, ‘to sequence’, and ‘to activate’ – each representing both a learning strategy and an approach to expand the boundaries of architecture and urban transformation. It offers approaches, attitudes, and possible actions, inviting readers to imagine and implement alternative scripts, and to connect with people and environments in ways that open up space for change. The book is designed to be held close, carried around, and frequently referenced as a habitual working companion to address complex contemporary challenges.

“WORKING ON TRANSFORMATION means engaging in exploration, navigating friction, and sharing collective moments of learning. This book is a companion for that investigation. It offers approaches, attitudes, and possible actions, inviting you to imagine and implement alternative scripts, and to connect with people and environments in ways that open up space for change. The book grew out of lived experiences—student projects, research initiatives, travels, and encounters that took place over the past six years at the Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation at ETH Zürich. It is organised around four verbs, each representing both a learning strategy as well as an approach to expand the boundaries of architecture and urban transformation. While these verbs themselves are not new, we have learned that by committing to them explicitly, the depth and range of practice can be drastically expanded. Expansion here does not mean simply adding new elements, but reconfiguring established patterns and questioning the certainties that are deeply ingrained in the discipline. We see pedagogy as both a space for experimentation within the school and as an integral part of professional practice. Therefore, each verb features twice: to recount concrete experiences, and to reenact those same experiences as a living diagram. This reenactment is intentionally abstract—as an invitation to imagine your own models, your own ways of acting. Rather than providing a step-by-step manual, this companion offers these verbs as prompts. They become an open framework—meant for students and practitioners to appropriate, to experiment with, and to expand upon. In doing so, we hope you, dear reader, will find your own way to learn and transform, with and from others.

1) To Project: Understanding and reinterpreting reality

2) To Experience: Being fully present with all senses

3) To Sequence: Fostering relationships and building trust

4) To Activate: Designing through moments and sparks”

[Editors] Freek Persyn, Lukas Fink, Charlotte Schaeben, Rory McGrath

[Texts] Lukas Fink, Charlotte Schaeben, Freek Persyn

Books

Working on Transformation

Reflections

In academic discourse and practice, the urban has asserted itself as the dominant and often unquestioned model of human settlement. The city has become the primary site of inquiry and imagination. The rural, by contrast, is often understood in opposition and as a spatial condition: less dense, less built, less connected, and, implicitly, less relevant.

Yet in today’s world, so-called rural landscapes are deeply entangled in global flows of capital, labour, and information. From industrial agriculture to logistical infrastructure, rural territories are anything but marginal. They are embedded within the same planetary systems that shape urban life.

Still, rurality persists as an idea laden with tradition, nostalgia, and political symbolism. In the popular imagination, it remains the inverse of the city: slow, quiet, simple. Romanticised through social media trends like cottagecore, or instrumentalised by nationalist rhetoric, the countryside becomes a screen onto which desires for authenticity and stability are projected. At the same time, it is dismissed as backwards, underdeveloped, or outside of progress. These contradictory framings share a common thread: they treat the rural as the Other of modernity, presenting it as static, nostalgic, and deficient.

And yet, what if this condition of being “out of sync” is not a shortcoming, but a form of resistance? What if the rural can offer alternative rhythms, economies, and ways of living that challenge dominant paradigms?

Rather than untouched or pristine, the rural is precisely a space of cultivation, one where human and non-human worlds meet, often in the name of sustenance. This entanglement makes it an essential terrain for rethinking how we live with, extract from, and relate to more-than-human worlds. Looking closely at the rural allows us to develop fairer and more just models of cohabitation, grounded in practice.

IT WAS ALL FIELDS ONCE is both an exploration and an invitation. It brings together spatial practices, research, and artistic perspectives that unsettle the urban-rural binary and trace the rural where it is least expected, even within the city itself. Rather than fixating on the rural as a place, the exhibition approaches it as a condition: shaped by memory, migration, ecology, labour, and desire. It focuses on practices, relationships, rituals, and traditions, all ready to be rediscovered, reinterpreted, and reinvented.

The exhibition unfolds across two complementary venues: CIVA and TRACK. CIVA begins to assemble an archive of rural practices, rituals, and artefacts, primarily gathered during the European academic exchange New Ruralities. TRACK expands and reimagines these through an artistic lens. Situated at a train station that physically and symbolically connects city and countryside, TRACK becomes a threshold: an in-between space that brings rurality into the urban and explores its transformative potential.

This marks the beginning of a growing collection of perspectives on rurality, not as something lost or in need of preservation, but as a dynamic force full of potential.

Curated by Juan Barcia Mas, Sophia Garner, and Iva Valkanova from the NEWROPE Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation, ETH Zürich. Assisted by Charlotte Eybl and Constantin Ferst. With production support from Nemo Akkerman, Julius Baumanns, Caspar Bultmann, Nils Grootenzerink, Lauro Nächt, Zoé Rüttimann, and Manu Zaparta. With graphic design by Maria Peskina and Johanna Gratzer.

New Ruralities is a collaborative project developed within the Erasmus+ framework (2022–2025), coordinated by Nadia Casabella and Ananda Kohlbrenner (Université Libre de Bruxelles), with partners Roberto Dini, Silvia Lanteri, and Federico Coricelli (Politecnico di Torino); Marta Labastida and Cidália Silva (Universidade do Minho); Pablo Gallego and Xan Creus (Universidade da Coruña); Angel Burov (University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy, Sofia); the NEWROPE Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation, ETH Zürich; and expert contributors Jan Zaman (IdeaConsult), Stephan Kampelmann (Sonian Wood Coop), and Lucía Escrigas and Manuel Rodriguez López (RIA Foundation).

Exhibitions

IT WAS ALL FIELDS ONCE

Engagements

In the 2025 book “New Tools: Architectural Discourses on the Anthropocene,” Freek Persyn, Lukas Fink and Charlotte Schaeben of NEWROPE reflect on the “Curated Dinner” as a tool that moves beyond rigid, linear planning protocols. Prepared, set up and hosted by the chair together with students, the format bridges pedagogy and practice, by engaging with urban transformation in a collective learning process and staging dialogue as a shared spatial and social event.

The intervention took place in the contested Europaviertel in Freiburg, where 1970s building stock – often dismissed as undesirable – is facing imminent demolition. Inside a former bank hall slated for destruction, the shared meal created a temporary “soft space” for exchange among citizens, activists, developers, and architects. Through spatial props such as annotated tablecloths and the “Cabane,” the dinner unsettled fixed professional roles and enabled a more nuanced conversation about the site’s future.

Building on the understanding of architects as hosts and mediators, the “Curated Dinner” explores how performative formats can navigate complex power relations and conflicting interests. By carefully designing conversations and cultivating relationships, the project argues for a more attentive engagement with existing building stock and for integrative formats that assemble various stakeholders on common ground.

[Authors] Lukas Fink, Freek Persyn, Charlotte Schaeben

[Publication] New Tools: Architectural Discourses on the Anthropocene

[Editors] Adria Daraban, Frédéric Schnee

[Date/Publisher] Berlin: Ruby Press, 2025

Tasting Tools of Transformation

Resource