November Talks 2026 – Cecilia Furlan

Landscape as Living Agency: The socio-ecological transition produces unprecedented tensions around water, resources and inequality. Between our structures and infrastructures, landscape acts. It is a living system, material and social, with its own life cycles, memories and rights. 
Through three projects across Europe, this lecture shows how mapping and design can generate situated knowledge and ground design in a relation with landscape as a structuring living agent, rather than as a backdrop or a resource. 

Cecilia Furlan is an architect, urban landscape designer, researcher, and Assistant Professor at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU). Her research and teaching explore the interrelations between environmental dynamics, climate change, and urbanisation, with a particular focus on diffuse and peri-urban territories. She investigates the role of land and space in processes of socio-ecological transition, using circularity as a lens and mapping and research-by-design as key methodologies. Her work addresses sustainable urban development under conditions of resource scarcity, exploring how landscape and urban systems can support more resilient, adaptive, and resource-conscious forms of development. Her research examines how cities and territories can work with limited resources by rethinking relationships between land, water, infrastructure, and urbanisation. Cecilia has worked and collaborated with several European institutions, including IUAV University of Venice, KU Leuven, TU Delft, and the University of Antwerp. Her research has been funded and published internationally and exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016, 2018, and 2025. She has been a visiting researcher at UCLouvain and the University of Antwerp and received the AESOP Young Investigator Training Program Award in 2019. Alongside her academic research, she engages in urban and landscape design projects, combining research, design, and spatial practice as complementary ways to investigate and transform contemporary territories.