Authors:Victor Muñoz Sanz, Nikos Katsikis Pages: 3 - 10 Abstract: This issue of Footprint explores techn-natural spatialities and materialities found across operational landscapes of primary production. To the extent that these landscapes are increasingly automated and digitised, production and circulation practices are becoming more capital intensive and even less labour-intensive. While amplifying the precarity of human labour, this process relies on appropriating the work of more-than-human assemblages of machines, plants, animals and microorganisms. Central to the focus of this issue is understanding the way these processes are grounded in specific architectural and landscape configurations. In this way, we also aim to complement the debates on past issues of Footprint, offering an investigation of the impact of technological transformations beyond the concentrated landscapes of human inhabitation. PubDate: 2024-04-03 DOI: 10.59490/footprint.17.2.7401 Issue No:Vol. 17, No. 2 (2024)
Authors:Marina Otero Verzier Pages: 11 - 26 Abstract: In this essay I analyse how energy dreams and epistemologies, constructed on cravings for productivity and profit, connect the spaces that epitomise the ‘Cartesian enclosure’ with the technologies and spaces of everyday life. I examine how destructive habits of extracting, procuring and consuming energy follow predictions that assume the inevitability of growth. Estimates that, even in the face of climate catastrophe, render the need for more energy inevitable and rely on finding new fixes rather than embracing other forms of living. Focusing on the case of lithium extraction in Atacama, I address the struggles sustained by indigenous communities for their lives, sovereignty and rights. Battles that emphasise how, in what has been described as ‘green colonialism’, the development of the ‘green energy futures’ too often is to the detriment of indigenous peoples. PubDate: 2024-04-03 DOI: 10.59490/footprint.17.2.6749 Issue No:Vol. 17, No. 2 (2024)
Authors:Ali Fard Pages: 27 - 42 Abstract: Data platforms increasingly mediate the relationship of society to the data it produces and therefore form a critical layer of the contemporary link between data and urbanisation. However, the current discussion of the impact of data platforms on urbanisation is limited on one hand by an overly metaphoric articulation of platforms, which obscures the material geographies and infrastructural landscapes of data production; and on the other hand, by an administratively bounded reading of platforms, which confines the discussion to only their most visible impact in cities. In this article I argue that to fully capture the impact of platforms on urbanisation we need to overcome these limitations by examining the ‘operational landscapes’ of data production and circulation. This extended ontology of platforms positions the spatial discourse of technology in relationship with other forms of capitalist spatial production and opens up the material geographies and infrastructural landscapes of data production for critical engagement as integral parts of the sociotechnical construction of platforms. By examining the data landscapes of Northern Virginia, I illustrate how historic and contemporary forces, actor networks, and urban dynamics contribute to the construction and maintenance of the extended geography of data platforms. PubDate: 2024-04-03 DOI: 10.59490/footprint.17.2.6726 Issue No:Vol. 17, No. 2 (2024)
Authors:Inês Vieira Rodrigues Pages: 43 - 60 Abstract: The Azores is an archipelago known for its Edenic landscapes, strongly symbolised by cows grazing in vast pasturelands. These ‘natural’ scenarios, however, obfuscate technologies of ecological restoration resulting from cattle exploitation, which seem to be in a clear collision with the perception of the Azorean scenery as ‘a good way of life’. Impelled by the focus of this Footprint issue, I recently visited two farms in São Miguel Island: a medium-size dairy farm and an intensive beef farm. Through this field inquiry, in this article I intend to problematise the fabrication of productive farming landscapes or, rather, the production of cowscapes. The current livestock political vision appears as twofold: a restorative ideal, promoting the ‘return to’ a supposed bucolic state; and the synchronization of livestock activities through the reconfiguration of the terrain, machines, animals and work. The triad efficiency-optimisation-specialisation might be symptomatic of the current path in the archipelago, within which extensive farming translates into an increased farmland footprint. After all, more efficiency requires more pastureland. Ultimately, the contemporary Azorean cowscapes perpetuate the loss of resilience in global food systems, and the island is only the beginning of the evidentiary trail. PubDate: 2024-04-03 DOI: 10.59490/footprint.17.2.6702 Issue No:Vol. 17, No. 2 (2024)
Authors:Hans Hortig Pages: 61 - 76 Abstract: In this article we investigate plantation agriculture as a technology aimed at extracting natural resources, utilising unpaid labour, and installing regulatory authority. Using the oil palm plantation territories of Johor State in Malaysia – a core zone of palm oil production, manufacturing and export – as a case study, we ask how more-than-human assemblages enabled the expansion and refinement of oil palm plantations in Malaysia and contributed to the material transformation of the territory. We also explore how plantations can be mobilised as an analytical device to study the urbanisation of territory through agro-industrial production. To explore those questions, we present three episodes of more-than-human involvement in assembling oil palm plantation territories in Johor. Through the conceptual frame of the operationalisation of territory, we bring into dialogue literature on the Plantationocene with critical urban studies and the history of urbanisation. PubDate: 2024-04-03 DOI: 10.59490/footprint.17.2.6703 Issue No:Vol. 17, No. 2 (2024)
Authors:Charity Edwards Pages: 77 - 96 Abstract: The enormity of the ocean presents as an unusual physical obstacle that complicates claims for spaces being urbanised well beyond the traditional container of the city, such as the focus of this discussion: the Southern Ocean. Though commonly perceived as a pristine wilderness at the end of the earth, the ocean surrounding Antarctica has been imbricated in planetary-scale processes of urbanisation since the late eighteenth century, so the absence of this oceanic volume from twenty-first-century urban debates is troubling. Representations of the Antarctic as remote and disconnected from cities do nothing to contribute to a critical discussion of its ocean volume, technological histories or ongoing colonial settler imaginaries. Instead, attention might turn to codifying what the ocean increasingly contains by way of urban processes and, ultimately, what might be offered by confirming extended forms of urbanisation operating on and, importantly, through the earth. In this article I re-present the Southern Ocean via comparative cartographies and critical image-making to cross-examine what its occlusion signifies for the planetary reach of urbanisation. For underneath the machinery of extraction and exploitation lie significant questions regarding representations of the urban as they manifest outside conventions that overstate ‘the city’ as central to urbanisation. PubDate: 2024-04-03 DOI: 10.59490/footprint.17.2.6750 Issue No:Vol. 17, No. 2 (2024)
Authors:Katerina Labrou, Christos Montsenigos Pages: 97 - 108 Abstract: The term ‘planetary garden’ was coined by Gilles Clement to refer to the privileged site of the planetary mixing of species that is managed by humans. In the face of the ongoing environmental collapse, we envision the garden as a new locus for symbiotic attachment and original exchange between human and non-human ecologies. Drawing on the garden metaphor, we discuss the conceptual and ecological impacts of human stewardship of the environment. Recognising ecosystems as changing fields of social and technical interactions, we evaluate how conservation strategies shift in tandem with these changes. We explore the influence of emerging technologies on human understanding of natural ecosystems and on societal approaches to conservation. Envisioning the future, we are mapping out the need for human-centric technologies to foster new forms of agency between humans and their environments. While any technological promise does not come without ethical and technical challenges, we advocate for ecological intelligence (EI), a spatialised human-AI collaboration scheme, as a critical condition for reimagining and upscaling conservation practices in the Anthropocene. PubDate: 2024-04-03 DOI: 10.59490/footprint.17.2.6731 Issue No:Vol. 17, No. 2 (2024)
Authors:Alexandra Arènes, Axelle Grégoire Pages: 109 - 122 Abstract: This visual essay discusses an object-map of Paris basin soil and subsoil, commissioned for the Element Terre exhibition within the Architecture and Landscape Biennial 2022 (Versailles, France). To create this map, we contacted actors and researchers whose work is related to soil: earth scientists, materials specialists, and human habitat specialists. Using a model from the book Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps, we designed a specific reference system, the ‘soil’ model, to map entities, movements and conflicts in the underground environment(s). The resulting map aims to reveal what is going on beneath our feet, what is hidden from view, to go beyond representations that are limited to the surface. PubDate: 2024-04-03 DOI: 10.59490/footprint.17.2.7089 Issue No:Vol. 17, No. 2 (2024)
Authors:Gréta Tekla Gedeon, Sebastian Gschanes, Anna Tüdős, Judit Szalipszki , Emese Mucsi Pages: 123 - 134 Abstract: Walk Under the Midnight Sun is a large-scale carpet installation originally designed for the Hungarian Pavilion of the 2023 Venetian Architecture Biennale, part of an exhibition proposal by Fuzzy Earth design studio and BÜRO imaginaire curator collective. The project invites the public to explore the entangled historical, social and architectural relationships within greenhouse cultivation practices. The protagonist of the installation is a regionally unique capsicum cultivar, the Hungarian wax pepper, known in Hungary as the Cecei paprika. The themes of the exhibition were inspired by Fuzzy Earth’s ‘Not Quite a California Wonder’ research project. PubDate: 2024-04-03 DOI: 10.59490/footprint.17.2.7086 Issue No:Vol. 17, No. 2 (2024)
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