Paths of Resistance: Landscape Practice as Commoning

Defended in December 2023 at ETH Zürich, the thesis Paths of Resistance: Landscape Practice as Commoning pursued an independent study of Belmonte Calabro, a small hilltown in Calabria (IT), to work across scales—from high-precision territorial surveying and data collection to situated landscape practice using local material and labour. At once a specific place and a case of ongoing peripheralization, Belmonte becomes a lens through which to engage broader socio-ecological crises and histories of landscape transformation in Southern Italy.


























The work foregrounds the importance of non-state, non-capitalist spaces and infrastructures—those that emerge outside dominant frameworks of development and control. It draws a contrast between state infrastructures, many of which were implemented during the Fascist period and remain today as monuments to centralised power, and a centuries-old footpath connecting the historic centre of Belmonte to the sea. The path, maintained through communal use and repair in continual negotiation with the landscape, becomes both subject and method: a lived archive of material knowledge, spatial practice, and ecological adaptation.

The thesis proposes an ontological critique of nationalistic landscape transformation, taking the monoculture as both symptom and symbol of a broader ecological and cultural flattening. In place of imposed abstraction and standardisation, it advocates for an engagement with the situated and the specific—with existing and emergent biodiversities, the embodied territorial knowledge held in the stones of the path, and the hands that return to repair them.




























Rather than approaching landscape as a passive backdrop or resource, the work seeks to operationalize landscape practice—working with and through the territory to reframe research as an act of making. Material and labour are not outsourced but contextualised on site, grounding the project in a spatial practice that is both critical and constructive. This becomes a method of learning from the margins: toward common sense—a shared, grounded understanding of landscape—and common space—a collectively maintained field of social and ecological relation.



The thesis contributes to ongoing conversations in landscape architecture, spatial politics, and ecological design, positioning Belmonte not as a site of loss or decline, but as a terrain of possibility—where forms of resilience, resistance, and renewal are already present, if we choose to see and work with them.