AALU research aims at developing instruments, proposing responses and investigating potentials emergent from the developmental pressures that regional networks exert on localities today. The understanding of landscape is central to this project, both for the degree of spatial control it offers to large-scale urbanism and for the way in which it allows the integration of natural processes and urban development into a sustainable artificial ecology. The landscape offers the double opportunity to reframe urban problems and recontextualize the practice in general.