The Reworking of Landscapes of Extraction

Abstract

With the realities of ongoing urbanization, food and water scarcity, depleting energy resources and environmental degradation, regionalism is reemerging as a critical framework to study the forces and actors that shape our contemporary landscapes. Within this context, this paper focuses on Reassembling Flows; the winning entry of a recent international design competition entitled “Transiting Cities — Low Carbon Futures (2012)”. The project envisions a dynamic spatial arrangement of interconnected flows of industrial processes, ecological systems, and cultural networks. By visualizing and designing the various overlapping actors, loci and activities on a regional scale, Reassembling Flows capitalizes on currently discarded waste products and transforms them into valuable resources. Here, the emphasis shifts from designing fixed and hard infrastructures to strategic interventions that activate latent potentials of already existing landscape structures.

Keywords

Anthropocene / Regionalism / Landscapes of Extraction / Reassembling Flows

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press