The event takes place every first Thursday of the month during the semester from October through December and from February through June and is open to PhD students at the Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art (HSLU), the National Institute of Design (NID), and other interested guests and PhD students from other universities.
Upcoming Event
Matias Echanove & Rahul Srivastava – “The Natural City - Urban design in practice”
Thursday, 2nd May 2024
12:00 - 13:15 (CET)
15:30 - 16:45 Uhr (IST)
The talk by Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava will present their collective practice at Urbz and draw from their study and practice in Koliwada, Dharavi: the case of a fisherfolk village in Mumbai, from the particular to the universal. It will open a discussion on participatory urban design and knowledge production based on their continuous engagement with the community over a decade. An engagement that has always expressed a spirit of exchange, of perspective and experiences between India and Switzerland. It will demonstrate how working with this community, which has ancestral connections with fishing in an urban context, becomes a spontaneous expression of local practices that are relevant to sustainable development discussions and contexts worldwide.
Matias Echanove & Rahul Srivastava are co-founders of urbz, a collective specialized in participatory urban planning and design based in Mumbai, Bogota, Paris and Geneva. They have presented their work in the form of op-eds. academic essays, exhibitions, films and lectures at forums ranging from MoMA (New York) to the M+ Museum (Hongkong), in newspapers such as The New York Times and The Hindu, publications such as the Oxford University Press and Strelka, and at universities that include ETH Zurich, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Tokyo, School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. Matias has studied Economics and Political science at the London School of Economics, Urban Planning at Columbia University and Information Systems at the University of Tokyo. Rahul has studied social anthropology at JNU, New Delhi and Cambridge University, UK. They were awarded a special Indo-Swiss Friendship Ambassador distinction in 2017.
Following the Positioning Lecture there will be an Info meet-up for the PhD Programme Eco-Social Innovation by Design. If you have any questions for the PhD programme please share them by mail to
esi@hslu.ch.