Ostalo
M4: Operational Landscapes: Towards an Alternative Cartography of World Urbanization
Urban Theory Lab
Sažetak
In what sense do we today live in an “urban age”? This idea is frequently invoked by scholars, policy-makers, planners, designers and architects, usually with reference to the proposition that more than 50% of the world’s population now lives within cities. But, can the nature of our urban world be understood and mapped exclusively with reference to the growth of cities and their populations? In our current work, the Urban Theory Lab (urbantheorylab.net) turns this proposition upside-down and inside-out by speculating on a radically alternative mapping of contemporary planetary urbanization. Rather than focusing our attention on large population centers, we investigate urbanization from the point of view of its putative “outsides,” the zones that are commonly represented as rural, remote, wild and/ or untouched by human impact. What happens to our cognitive map of the global urban condition if we focus not on the global cities or mega-cities of the world, but on the wide-ranging sociospatial and environmental transformations that are currently unfolding in supposedly “remote” or “wilderness” regions such as the Amazon, the Arctic, the Gobi desert steppe, the Himalayas, the Pacific ocean, the Sahara desert and Siberia, and even the earth’s atmosphere? To what degree are such zones now being integrated within a worldwide fabric of urbanization? How are they being restructured and enclosed to support the energy, water, material, food and logistics needs of major cities? Through a combination of historical analysis, critical geopolitical economy, geospatial data visualization and conceptual experimentation, this research aims to extend the analytical and political horizons of urban theory into these “extreme territories” of urbanization.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
185560
URI
Datum izdavanja:
1.7.2015.
Posjeta: 1.189 *