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Plot Lines
Territories of Play – Plot Lines
Last Updated: 2026-06-03 00:07:24
Abstract
Making a Case for Impossible TerritoriesThe seminar develops a method for reading and redesigning the legal-spatial rules that hold inhabited space together. Working in pairs, students walk a 15km line through Zürich, register the juridical thresholds it crosses, and propose the territory that would emerge if a single rule changed.
Objective
By the end of the seminar, students will be able to: — read inhabited space as a composition of juridical and political rules — analyse how contemporary forces (climate, infrastructure, migration, extraction) expose the failure of received juridical-political categories — survey a stretch of territory as a transect through its juridical composition — compose a speculative territorial proposal organised by a single founding rule — translate a juridical-spatial proposition into a panoramic scenario
Content
Every space we inhabit is held in place by rules — most of them invisible. This seminar asks: how do you make a case against them? Working in pairs, students walk a 15km line through Zürich. Each pair declares two complementary juridical layers — such as ownership, maintenance, easement, surface regime, or biotope protection — and registers every threshold the line crosses within those layers. The line cannot retrace itself; its start and end points are chosen and justified by the pair as a territorial hypothesis about the city. The walk is the seminar's empirical instrument: a survey of a failing composition. The seminar unfolds in two phases. In the first, each pair produces a transect — a horizontal-band drawing in black line and text only, combining notation, annotation, and cited regulation fragments — that renders the walked line as a legible juridical reading. In the second phase, the pair introduces a single agent into the transect: a juridical concept (such as “res nullius”, land belonging to no one, or “transhumance”, the right of seasonal movement) drawn from a curated deck of cards. The agent operates as the founding rule of the resulting territory. The deliverable is a panoramic scenario of the line recomposed under that rule: a jurisprudential plot for an impossible territory. The seminar draws on contemporary thinking around lawscape, planetary spatial conditions, and the obsolescence of received juridical-political categories. Theoretical inputs and guest lectures introduce key concepts and references. Methodological inputs support each phase of the design work.
General Information
- Language
- English
- Levels
- MSC
- Frequency
- Semesterly recurring
Examination
- Type
- graded semester performance
Registration & Places
- Max Places
- 20
Course Components
| Type | Title | Time & Place | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| seminar |
Territories of Play – Plot Lines
No course 22.10.2026 (seminar week) and in the last two semester weeks (final critiques).
|
No time listed | 2 h weekly |