LASUR Seminar - Matias Echanove: "The Homegrown City"

Viewed from the EPFL campus, in Renens, Switzerland, the homegrown city appears like a distant reality. Locally developed, without urbanists, engineers or architects, homegrown habitats are usually seen as surviving fragments from what we once called the “Third World”—pre-industrial, backward, irrational and anachronistic. I challenge that view and argue that homegrown urbanism is a prevailing or latent condition everywhere. Drawing from cases in India, Japan, Colombia and Switzerland, I will present a practice that radically departs from the project-centric approach that currently dominates the urban design imagination. I will propose a method based on the acceptance of incremental transformation as the basis for a future that is not only more inclusive and robust, but also more efficient and beautiful.

Matias Echanove has over 20 years of urban planning and design practice in Asia, America, and Europe. He co-founded the urbz collective. His training is from the London School of Economics, Columbia University, and the University of Tokyo, informed by years of hands-on experience in neighborhoods such as Shimokitazawa (Tokyo), Bed-Stuy (Brooklyn), Dharavi (Mumbai), and Siloé (Cali). He is a frequent presenter at institutions like Harvard and ETHZ, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times and Oxford University Press. He co-authored The Homegrown City (Verso, London 2026) with Rahul Srivastava.