Title: Topioplasies: Sustainable, Resilient, and Cultural Urban Waterscapes
Chair:
Prof. Emeritus Dimitra Nikolaou
Department of Architecture
National Technical University of Athens
Abstract/Description:
Urban waterscapes are not merely physical or technical entities but complex ontological fields where nature, culture, memory, and power coalesce. Water, as a material and symbolic medium, continuously produces and destabilizes urban form, rendering the city a fluid and contingent construct.
The concept of Topioplasies, the ongoing formation and transformation of place—offers a theoretical lens through which urban waterscapes can be understood as processes rather than objects, as becoming rather than being.
From this perspective, sustainability and resilience are not fixed end states but relational and temporal conditions emerging from the interaction between human and more-than-human agencies. Urban waterscapes operate as liminal spaces where ecological cycles, infrastructural logics, and cultural imaginaries intersect, exposing the fragility of anthropocentric planning paradigms. riverbanks, coastal edges, floodplains, reveal the city as an assemblage shaped by uncertainty, adaptation, and negotiated coexistence with natural forces.
Cultural urban waterscapes are thus palimpsestic terrains, layered with histories of settlement, ritual, labor, and exclusion. They embody collective memory while simultaneously accommodating transformation, erosion, and renewal.
Topioplasies foreground the ethical and epistemological implications of engaging with water as an active agent in place-making, challenging extractive, control-oriented approaches to urban development. Instead, it calls for an attunement to rhythms, cycles, and thresholds—where design and governance become practices of care, interpretation, and mediation.
In an era of climate instability, urban waterscapes function as critical sites for rethinking resilience beyond technocratic robustness toward a philosophical understanding of adaptability, openness, and co-evolution.
Topioplasies ultimately proposes a reframing of the urban condition itself: a shift from static spatial orderings to fluid, relational landscapes in which sustainability emerges through sustained dialogue between ecological processes and cultural meaning.