f Horror geography

In this issue of Design Ecologies (DES), we turn to the notion of horror geography – a term that captures the affective, ecological and existential consequences of our entanglements with the built and unbuilt environments in crisis. Horror geography is not a genre but a condition. It refers to the haunted geologies of industrial extraction, the systemic displacements of human and non-human actors, and the uncanny recurrence of trauma in landscapes long thought ‘developed’. As the climate emergency intensifies and our planetary systems approach irreversible tipping points, architecture must contend with forms of space and time that resist conventional control. This issue gathers a set of transdisciplinary contributions that expand architectural thinking towards the affective, the intuitive and the speculative. Drawing is no longer confined to representation – it becomes a durational and metaphysical act, as seen in Sixth Street Revisited, my own contribution to this volume. Here, the architectural drawing becomes a recursive ecology, drawing from memory, fieldwork and layered temporalities to resist closure and embrace resonance. Across four editorial themes – ‘Ecological Design Visions’, ‘Notational Design Visions’, ‘Instructional Design Visions’ and ‘Aesthetical Design Visions’ – contributors examine spatial practices that confront horror not as spectacle, but as an epistemic rupture. Whether in childhood hauntings, post-industrial moorlands or haunted cities like Berlin, these works ask what it means to design in the face of uncertainty, trauma and irreversibility. Chris Speed and Rusaila Bazlamit explore supernatural space in horror cinema as a cross-cultural geography of childhood perception, sacred time and colonial trauma. Laura Bowie navigates Berlin’s haunted urban fabric via the ‘shudder of the eerie’, drawing on Derrida and Mark Fisher to foreground spectral architectures. Emma Colthurst responds to Dartmoor’s degraded ecologies through Michel Serres’s concept of turbulence – positioning material disorder as a site of possibility. These contributions do not offer comfort or mastery. Instead, they operate within what philosopher Nick Land calls ‘ill-defined niches’ – zones where spatial logics collapse into atmospheres, fragments and forces. As DES continues to define itself as a space for experimental design practices, horror geography offers not only a critique of current spatial paradigms but also a methodology for architectural thought under conditions of extreme precarity. This is not a call to retreat into pessimism, but an invitation to practise with attentiveness, imagination and embodied speculation. We invite submissions that explore these conceptual tensions and challenge the instrumental legacies of architectural representation. How can architecture speak with – not for – the damaged terrains we inhabit? How might speculative drawings, radical notations or affective rituals open new forms of action and relation? Architecture, as we explore in this issue, is no longer only about building – but about sensing, attuning and intervening in the messy, layered and often terrifying ecologies of the Anthropocene.