November Talks 2026 – Milica Topalović, Yiqiu Liu, Martin Kohlberger

Your TikTok scroll, a robotaxi’s U-turn, a question to ChatGPT: every byte lives somewhere in the cloud, consuming energy, land, and water. This lecture traces the production of AI’s cloud infrastructure through international comparison and a focus on recent developments in Switzerland and the Zurich region. It examines how the rapid expansion of data centres is reshaping urban territories and our everyday digital lives, from the deployment of the electricity infrastructures that support data centre construction to waste-heat reuse and the power imbalances that shape decision-making in development processes.

The lecture will ask how architects and planners might critically engage with the spatial consequences of AI and explore alternatives that could shape more equitable digital futures.

Milica Topalović is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture and Territorial Planning at ETH Zurich. Her work advances territorial design as a project of social-ecological transition, grounded in an ethos of care and repair and developed through collective forms of knowledge and action. Through research, teaching, and situated collaborations, she explores alternative pathways of urbanisation, seeking to strengthen territorial equity, solidarity, and collective capacities for change.
Since 2021, she has co-directed the ETH Zurich/EPFL Master of Advanced Studies in Urban and Territorial Design. She is co-editor with Christian Schmid of Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles (2023), and co-curator of The Great Repair project with ARCH+ and Florian Hertweck (2023–present).

Yiqiu Liu is an urban researcher and architect working across critical urban studies and AI infrastructure. She holds a doctorate from ETH Zurich and a BA and an MA in Architecture from Southeast University, Nanjing. Her research traces peripheral urbanisation beyond the city, developing vocabularies and methods that transcend Western-centric models. She currently co-coordinates the SNIS-funded project The Production of Cloud, at the Chair of Architecture of Territory, ETH Zurich. She is also a research and teaching associate at TU Munich, an associated researcher at the ETH AI Center, and a selected fellow of the European Talent Academy 2026.

Martin Kohlberger is an architect and research and teaching assistant in the undergraduate design studio and working as part of the SNIS-funded project The Production of Cloud. Martin studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the ETH Zurich as well as philosophy at the University of Vienna. Martin has been architect and urban designer at Denkstatt sárl since 2025. In June 2025, he joined the Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning as part of the teaching team.