Horizontality and its project: Pluralizing urbanization perspectives

Ten years ago, EPFL's Laboratory of Urbanism proposed horizontality as a critical lens for urban theory and practice. Since then, the concept has grown substantially richer through theoretical traditions developed across Europe and beyond.
This year's seminar revisits horizontality not as a closed paradigm, but as a mode of critical engagement with the socio-political, ecological, and economic processes of urbanization. It is approached as a historical, ideological, conceptual, and political question — one intersecting with territorial redistribution, accessibility, solidarity, and spatial justice amid deep socio-ecological transformation. Neither purely top-down nor bottom-up, horizontality invites reflection on spatial organization, territorial governance, and the conflicts shaping contemporary urbanization.
Rather than repeating critiques of vertical power and growth-oriented urbanization, the seminar aims to pluralize perspectives on horizontality as an open concept — one capable of generating new rationalities and spatial imaginaries for future design and socio-political agendas.