Urbanism has traditionally focused on the city as the central system of human settlement development. Both historical studies and investigations of contemporary phenomena confirm that the city is a dominant but unique constellation among the various settlement forms.
This book raises the question of urban life outside the city and juxtaposes historical examples of lifestyles that attempted to define an alternative way of life outside the city.
How does urbanism relate to areas outside the city? What ways of thinking must architecture adopt in order to find solutions for the world we live in? Under these questions on the future of the rural, a connecting thread along the whole book is the present Here & Elsewhere dialectic of the city and the countryside.
A project in Leukerbad, a famous spa town in the Canton Valais was developed parallel with the thesis book. Otium as an intellectual form of leisure forms the basis of the initial approach to create a future sustainable tourism scenario for Leukerbad. The book and the project are closely linked on the spectrum of work, that is focused on past societal conventions and proposed prototypes, together with present social and neoliberal economic situations.
The goal of the book is not to answer the question of the future of the alpine tourism, rather proposing one of many possible transformation scenarios of an existing structure, which derives from the essence of alpine tourism and city-countryside dialectical relationship.
Urbanism has traditionally focused on the city as the central system of human settlement development. Both historical studies and investigations of contemporary phenomena confirm that the city is a dominant but unique constellation among the various settlement forms.
This book raises the question of urban life outside the city and juxtaposes historical examples of lifestyles that attempted to define an alternative way of life outside the city.
How does urbanism relate to areas outside the city? What ways of thinking must architecture adopt in order to find solutions for the world we live in? Under these questions on the future of the rural, a connecting thread along the whole book is the present Here & Elsewhere dialectic of the city and the countryside.
A project in Leukerbad, a famous spa town in the Canton Valais was developed parallel with the thesis book. Otium as an intellectual form of leisure forms the basis of the initial approach to create a future sustainable tourism scenario for Leukerbad. The book and the project are closely linked on the spectrum of work, that is focused on past societal conventions and proposed prototypes, together with present social and neoliberal economic situations.
The goal of the book is not to answer the question of the future of the alpine tourism, rather proposing one of many possible transformation scenarios of an existing structure, which derives from the essence of alpine tourism and city-countryside dialectical relationship.