This project-based seminar will explore the concept of “Anticipatory Design” as a form of action-oriented research that identifies transformative and actionable outcomes to guide the implementation of large and complex projects with far-reaching societal, territorial, ecological, and economic impacts.

As a framework for research that supports change, minimizing environmental damage while maximizing benefits for local communities and society at large, it has well-established roots in utopian experiments, particularly at the urban and regional scales that proposed alternatives to the industrial city of the nineteenth century and continued to shape urban life into the twentieth. More recently, Buckminster Fuller’s formulation of an “Anticipatory Design Science” sought systemic alternatives to universal problems, such as reframing housing and settlement as technological systems interlinked with infrastructure and energy that were reproducible and scalable globally. Similarly, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Interrogative Design practice defamiliarizes well-established urban elements, such as public squares, monuments, and institutional buildings, by giving voice and empowering those who are usually marginalized in society through light projections that capture their lived experiences.

Today, Anticipatory Design takes on a broader scope to address the multiple and converging crises of the Anthropocene. It charts the institutional and spatial ecologies at work in a pre-existing ecosystem, which it necessarily interfaces with and, more often than not, causes harm. It approaches the region as a productive landscape, as a natural ecosystem, as biodiversity source, and as a social system in transition, each of which requires the collaborative efforts of multiple agencies and their jurisdictions, scholarly design research, and the needs of local actors to foresee land-use and expansion scenarios, priority investments and infrastructure, and governance arrangements capable of sustaining benefits well into the future.

This seminar will explore the relevance of Anticipatory Design today by situating it within current environmental and social crises, specifically in the context of geopolitical conflicts over energy resources and their control, and how the negative impacts of these conflicts on local communities can be turned into positive outcomes for a long-term future of social sustainability, through economic and environmental gains.

We will use the projected increase in natural gas extraction in Argentine Patagonia as a case study. Set in Patagonia’s Bahía San Antonio–the coastal system of Las Grutas, San Antonio Oeste, and San Antonio Este in Rio Negro, Argentina–we will investigate how an energy-and-logistics boom can be reimagined as a platform for long-term regional development. As the bay emerges as the Atlantic gateway for exports from Vaca Muerta, the world’s second-largest shale gas reserve, the course asks: How can local capacities endure beyond the boom? What strategies can improve quality of life and meet social expectations? How can productive diversification strengthen long-term sustainability? What are the ecological impacts on the coastal ecosystem that is a tourist destination and home to five protected natural areas, including the Valdes Peninsula, a UNESCO Natural World Heritage site?