Disrupting the Corridor: New Scenarios for Water/Ground Mobilities

Focusing on the Adriatic region between Albania and Italy, the summer school “Disrupting the Corridor. New Scenarios for Water/Ground Mobilities” explores how mobility infrastructures, such as the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, thermoelectric power complexes such as such as Brindisi-Cerano, and the port cities of Brindisi, Bari, Durrës, mediate flows of water, energy, nature, capital, ideas, space, and politics.

Summer School coordinators Simonetta Armondi and Agim Kërçuku’s 2025 SOM European Research Prize provides the thematic foundation.

The programme seeks to challenge and redefine what “corridor mobility” means, as well as to develop the epistemic tools for envisioning a fair ecological future. More than mere physical routes, students will interrogate corridor mobility as a material, social, and ecological infrastructure that steers hydrosocial and energetic flows. While these infrastructures often create dependence, extraction, and conflict, they can also become spaces where pathways to sustainability, justice, and care are shaped and negotiated.

Through multidisciplinary theoretical analysis, use of archival tools, spatial ethnography, and a research-by-design approach, students will develop an “Atlas of Stories” composed of relational cartographies and speculative scenarios. The aim is to produce actionable policy and design strategies to mitigate and redefine infrastructural effects and to propose innovative, context-sensitive approaches that reframe these infrastructural impacts through ecological care, spatial justice, and territorial transformation.

Collaborative summer school

The summer school is part of the Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme, bringing together students and teachers from Politecnico di Milano, ETH Zurich, TU Delft, TU Berlin, RWTH Aachen, and UPV Valencia.

Eligibility

The programme is addressed to ETH Master’s and PhD students with an advanced academic background in spatial, territorial, and socio-environmental studies, particularly those interested in infrastructure, territorial transformation, and critical spatial practices. It is specifically targeted at Design and Planning profiles (Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Urban Planning, Urban Design, Design, and Environmental Engineering) and Analytical and Critical profiles (Urban and Regional Geography, Urban Sociology, Political Ecology, and Ethnography).

scholarship

ETH students selected will receive an ETH ENHANCE scholarship covering travel and accommodation.

HOw to apply

To apply, please send a portfolio (max 10 MB), a 2-3 page CV, and one page letter of motivation to this link no later than 7 June.

More information about the programme is available here.