IAAC’s Master in City & Technology (1 or 2-year program) is a unique program oriented towards redefining the analysis, planning, and design of twenty-first-century cities and beyond. The program offers expertise in the design of digitally enhanced, ecological and human-centered urban environments by intersecting the disciplines of urbanism and data science. Taking place in Barcelona, the capital of urbanism, the Master in City & Technology is training the professionals that city administrations, governments, industries, and communities need, to transform the urban environment in the era of big data.
Agricultural landscapes often disappear from visual and political attention during conflict, overshadowed by images of urban destruction. This project uses satellite imagery to examine agricultural land in Gaza, focusing on the Beit Hanoun belt as an intersection between destruction and food systems. Through vegetation indices and bombing crater detection, the study distinguishes seasonal agricultural cycles … Read more
This proposal envisions an agent-based ecological simulation where human and non-human actors, farmers, water, soil, plants, fungi, and climate, interact within a shared bioregion defined by watersheds rather than political borders. Agricultural technicians serve as mediators between data and local knowledge. Agents are not merely data points but active participants in a living network, continuously … Read more
Case Study of Ecological Restoration, Human Presence and Design of Co-Existence Introduction Fish Tail Park is located in the center of Nanchang City, a historic city in southeastern China with approximately 6.6 million residents, has experienced rapid urban growth and high-tech industrial expansion along the Gan River. Is a large-scale ecological restoration project designed by … Read more
Oerliker Park in Zürich, Switzerland is not a natural forest that slowly emerged over time. It is a designed urban ecology: structured, calculated, and deliberately designed among buildings and former industrial sites. Even though the park may read as “natural” with its trees, parks like Oerliker are often designed primarily around human use. But parks … Read more
This project investigates Parc del Centre del Poblenou through the lens of Designing for More than Humans. The park, although permeable and vegetated, is spatially structured around human circulation and programmed activity. As a result, human occupation is continuous and dominant, while non-human life remains fragmented and residual. Through rule-based speculation, the project tests how … Read more
entrance image Started off in 1504 as a Renaissance-era fortification system, designed to resist cannon warfare. Over the years, it has undergone many reconstructions, with the latest turning it into a managed heritage park in the early 2000s (Planted rows of trees) . Ecology has played an important role in each of its eras, as … Read more
Urban space is conventionally conceptualized as an anthropocentric construct. However, non-human species continuously appropriate architectural surfaces, infrastructural voids, and vegetated fragments. Birds occupy ledges and canopy layers, insects colonize engineered soils, bats navigate nocturnal corridors along tree lines, and plants root within pavement fissures. These presences are not incidental; they reflect how spatial design either … Read more
Climate Hope, Regenerative Agriculture and Soil Restoration Up to 40% of the world’s land is degraded Poor land management and conventional agricultural practices have degraded soils, reducing their ability to store carbon and absorb water, accelerating climate change and threatening food systems. Soils store 3x more carbon than the atmosphere, but 50-70% of their natural … Read more
Developed as part of a Workshop hosted by IAAC and conducted by Buro Happold representatives, the project envisions the transformation of Barcelona’s Zona Franca waterfront into a mobility-driven, mixed-use district that balances industry, nature, and urban life. The master plan prioritizes seamless connectivity, enhancing public transport, pedestrian networks, and micromobility infrastructure to overcome the area’s … Read more
“The Amazon rainforest, often called the ‘lungs of the Earth,’ is rapidly disappearing. But this isn’t just an environmental crisis—it’s a geopolitical and economic issue. In the heart of this transformation lies [Mato Grosso], Brazil’s largest soy-producing state. Its key location fuels both economic growth and ecological destruction, leading to tensions over land use, trade … Read more
The research project imagined a tile of a underused urban plaza as a square-based petri dish to test the movement of points within the tiled surface. By defining a number of points within the geometry of the area, the density of tiles would decrease, relative to the closest point. The membrane between the ground plane … Read more
This exercise undertakes developing a shortest path simulation on varied terrains. Starting with basic point-to-point movements, I integrated agent behavior, enabling these agents to make decisions and take actions to move towards the destination point by choosing the best available option. The development of the simulation follows agent movement behaviors from two separate algorithms: Movement … Read more
THE GAZA STRIP CONFLICT Since October 7th, we have been witnesses to the atrocities of the humanitarian crisis and genocide in Gaza. Over 32,000 Palestinian people have been killed, and another 74,000 reportedly injured to date. About 70 per cent of those killed are reported to be women and children. The population of Gaza consists of … Read more
The killing of Nahel Merzouk was not an accident. The 17-year-old French Algerian boy was killed where the potential for conflict is high, in Nanterre. A young Muslim in a yellow Mercedes along the western Champs-Élysées unfortunately made Nahel a prime candidate for police violence resulting in death. His death brought about a week of … Read more
