From a Latin American perspective EC(h)OTONING goes beyond transdisciplinarity, it is an exploratory extension of an ecotone. Whilst ecotones can be understood as zones of transition and tension between social, environmental and infrastructural systems, their conversion into a verb—as well as the play on the word ‘echo’—suggests a collective effort of extending the concept as knowledge-based resonances, as well as epistemologically unpacking it.

Rather than rendering fixed margins, ecotonar involves paying attention to the thick edges of the worlds: to the logics of coexistence of human and more-than-human, entanglements, transitions, conflicts, overlaps and transformations across the planetary surface. The Campus centred on exploring the verb ecotonar as a plurisensorial method for spatial studies of urban sustainability. With this in mind, the seminar ‘ecotonar: socio-environmental reverberations in Latin America' formed part of the preparatory process for the SMUS Regional Campus Latin America 2026, with 20 hours of an online seminar, for Master’s and PhD students. It concluded at the LATAM Campus, linking the discussions from the online sessions to the face-to-face activities.

The online seminar aimed to collectively build conceptual and methodological foundations for the LATAM Campus, based on an exchange between the Latin American urban contexts, namely Mexico, Chile and southern Brazil. The Campus focused on interregional group exchanges with a common focus on three attributes that helped unwrap the concept of thick edges and the ecotonal approach: TRANSITIONS, between ecologies, cultures and knowledges; STAGNATION, archaeological agencies of residual systems and energy accumulations; and TEMPORALITY, as a geological, historical, and speculative time-based analysis. The course proved to be an opportunity to strengthen a common research agenda within the SMUS network.