Ecological thinking is the inquiry into relational processes which are concomitantly cultural and material. In this thesis, the history of the Fucino basin is used as an exemplar to theorise how spatial configurations make territorial transformations readable as shifting ecologies. Once one of the major lakes of the Italian peninsula, Fucino has been turned into a vast plateau of fertile agricultural land by a radical 19th-century reclamation. The enterprise, pursued by a Roman banker, aimed to reconstruct the infrastructure built during the Roman Empire (52 CE). This longue durée narrative allows for the tracing of the entangled permanencies of natural and societal cycles, exposing the constraints of human agency against the lake’s own persistent temporality. The enquiry develops a method grounded in the notion of ecological form: a readable configuration which is simultaneously condition and consequence in the flux of transformations across hydrological technologies, property regimes, and lived experience. Water, Land and Sweat are metonyms representing different realms. Water exemplifies the technological harnessing of vertical flows through discrete infrastructures aimed at the control of water cycles. Land, once gridded and enclosed, is commodified: the geometry of legal boundaries reduces subsistence relationships with soil to quantitative relations. Sweat signifies labour: a mediator of interspecies relationships which takes shape in the architecture of farms and rural homes. Building upon A. N. Whitehead’s ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’, these three registers ground a wider critique of modernity and its inherent abstractions of time, space, and lived experience. Within this critique, and relying on a wider timeframe, the modern history of Fucino as farmland emerges as a contingent manifestation of the hegemonic ecology of capital. Environmental history and ecological form are mobilised to contest the very possibility of ecology as a project.

Valerio is a registered architect (ARB) in the UK, holding an MPhil from the Architectural Association (AA) and a Master in Architecture from the Università degli Studi di Firenze. He has practised in both the UK and Italy, and currently serves as a Lecturer in History, Theory and Design at London South Bank University. Having previously taught at the RCA, AA and University of Greenwich, his research spans ecology, the technological apparatus of governance, and participatory pedagogy. He co-founded Common Form to investigate design as a collective practice.