Aqua Incognita aims to decipher an array of design-visions capable of advancing extreme climate resilience in the water-stressed region of Valencia, SP. Spain’s original breadbasket, but growing unsustainably, this metropolis of 1.57 million is threatened by critically unbalanced water regimes. While facing its driest year on record in summer 2024, that Fall the city withstood the deadliest DANA floods in Europe since 1967. Some areas received a year’s worth of rain in only 8 hours. The devastation took a heavy toll on human life, the environment, and infrastructure. According to experts, political-economic deficiencies facilitating the encroachment of riverbeds, non-water-wise urbanization, and climate unpreparedness amplified the extreme rains. How to break free from this Sisyphean drought to flood destructive cycle?

To answer this question, the studio will focus on one of Valencia’s most strategic Critical Zones: the Horta Sud–severely impacted along its Poyo Ravine. Segregated from Valencia by the 1969 flood-control channel of the Turia River, the Horta Sud has evolved as a patchwork of urban areas that lack symbiotic relationships within their water-wise coastal lagoon and biocultural landscape, the Albufera and the Horta. The Horta de Valencia, recognized by FAO as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS), is a millennium-old agroecological system centered on a still-functioning irrigation network of gravity-fed acequias–developed by Islamic communities in the 8thC. Characterized by high agrobiodiversity, its smallholdings produce a wide array of vegetables, citrus fruits, and centuries-old rice varieties, while also supporting artisanal fishing to the south in the Albufera lagoon. The Albufera–Spain’s largest freshwater lagoon with RAMSAR protection–sits within the Parc Natural de l’Albufera. This cultural landscape features traditional barracas, alquerías, molinos and is collectively managed through irrigator communities and the Tribunal de las Aguas, Spain’s oldest water court–also with UNESCO recognition.

Our thesis is that this millennial territory holds clues towards a resilient water future in Valencia and that after unearthing it, we’ll be able to design a better relationship between its towns, the Horta, and the Albufera by changing the present water narrative. From one of invisibility, extraction, and drainage to that of mutualism, care, capillarity, circularity, connectivity, and even immersion. From a design culture that erases water to that accepting floods as part of the necessary flowing cycle. In short, creating synergies between water and life.

Building on previous work in Aqua Incognita I-IV, we’ll continue to collaborate with experts, academia, GSD and MIT alumni from Valencia, and work directly with impacted communities. With their shared knowledge we’ll use critical cartographies to decipher and reveal vulnerabilities and potentials within the urban/agricultural duality of the Horta Sud. Individually, students will project design-visions that could increase resilience for the human/non-human communities and their environment. We will receive technical support from the World Monuments Fund and the Santa Fe Institute. The latter will host us during our studio trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, a territory with a similar DNA to Valencia with acequias and floods. Two selected students will travel to Valencia in January’26 in representation of the class. 

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This studio will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 4th.