EC(H)OTONING – the urban pluriverse

The Campus Series EC(h)OTONING the urban pluriverse is a project of the Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability – SMUS.

SMUS is one of seven Excellence Centers for Exchange and Development (exceed), funded by the GermanFederal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) via the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Its coordination unit is based at the Institute for Urban and Regional Planning (ISR) of the Technische Universität Berlin. As a global network of scholars and practitioners in the urban realm, SMUS serves as a platform facilitating dialogue and collaboration in urban sustainability research, teaching, and planning practice, addressing intertwined wicked urban problems (WUP).

The three-scales (city – region – transregional) Campus Series explores wicked urban problems (WUP) in and across 9 cities in 3 world regions—Latin America, East and Southern Africa, and South and Southeast Asia—and looks at how they manifest and entangle themselves in different (or not so different) urban spaces.

All Core Partners

structure of the campus series

After preparing the grounds and kick-off events in the nine core partner universities (2025), three Regional Campuses run in parallel in three progressive cycles (2026-2029), with the core partner universities alternating hosting roles. Running up to these Regional Campuses, each Core Partner integrates the Campus theme into student activities in their university (master class, workshop, excursion,…), after which a small delegation (scientific leads and students) from each university travels to the regional host university, where they are joined by other regional experts. At the end of each cycle, a Transregional Campus brings the discussions on a more international level, ensuring cross-pollination. Additionally, an international lecture series, a multi-phase research-based art (RBA) programme, and science communication projects enrich the Campus Series.

Each (Trans)Regional Campus produces one volume of the open access SMUS Campus book series EC(h)OTONING the urban pluriverse, which will be published by Berlin University Publishing.

This Campus Series explores EC(h)OTONING the urban pluriverse as both an analytical and methodological proposition.

The first cycle of four campuses (2026-2027) focuses on thick edges as an urban condition of overlapping processes and densely entangled zones of reverberation in space and time.