The Nomad, the Technologist: A 21st Century Steppe Fable

Abstract

This project is a projective fable in video format that positions political fiction as a design project. As primitive accumulation, production and landscape ecology are the driver of markets and economic structure, the project unpacks the contrasting ecologies of Mongolia’s steppe to China’s agricultural land use, establishing the connections between market forces and landscape architecture. The Nomad, The Technologist began with field research in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, examining sites of resource extraction across the Steppe — from the mines of Oyu Tolgoi and Erdenet to areas representative of Mongolia’s unique forms of transient urbanization in Ulaan Baatar. This project of design fiction moves through a series of proposed infrastructural elements that are agile and mutable depending on seasonal fluctuations of economic needs, using air fields, hangars and traditional landscape elements such as naleds (intentionally created ice shields) to envision an ecology of labor that is tied to an ecology of the Steppe. Seeing this proposal as factual narrative, the video ends in the far future of 2020 but using contemporary conditions and political situations of today — China’s battle against desertification and the Steppe as a mechanism to protect food security and a market economy based on agriculture.

Keywords

Steppe / Markets / Political Economy

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press