Design Ecologies - Horror Geography, Jun 2025

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.

This article explores horror geography as a conceptual and methodological framework in architectural design – examining the relationship between human activity and the environment through an ecological lens. Horror geography attends to the affective, ethical and ecological consequences of human intervention in the land, situating architectural drawing not as representation, but as a site of temporal, intuitive and metaphysical engagement. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration in his book, Time and Free Will (2003), and the cinematic strategies of David Lynch, I propose a practice of architectural drawing that resists linear interpretation and embraces intuition, temporality and metaphysical uncertainty. My approach challenges conventional design paradigms rooted in clarity, precision and outcome-driven processes, advocating instead for models and drawings as speculative, durational and interpretive tools.

This article examines how horror cinema constructs sacred and profane geographies through the lens of childhood temporal consciousness and supernatural encounters. Drawing on both western Christian and Islamic traditions, we argue that children’s temporal innocence – their inability to fully conceptualize or measure time – functions not as a deficit but as a unique perceptual capacity. This innocence renders them attuned to alternative temporalities that modernity suppresses, positioning children as privileged witnesses to supernatural phenomena. Horror cinema leverages this perceptual gap to create ‘chronological trauma sites’ – spaces where modern time discipline breaks down and supernatural entities emerge. Our central argument is that horror films mobilize children’s disconnection from standardized temporal regimes to interrogate broader tensions between secular modernity and sacred worldviews. The article also examines how horror’s spatial imaginaries are shaped by differing religious conceptions of sacred geography. Western Christian traditions privilege linear temporalities and marked sacred sites, while Islamic cosmology recognizes the ongoing permeability between material and spiritual realms, especially in domestic and threshold spaces. These divergent frameworks produce distinct horror geographies that are revealed through architectural anomalies, disrupted routines and malfunctioning timekeeping devices. Finally, we reflect on how gender mediates access to these temporal geographies. By drawing together horror film theory, religious studies and cultural geography, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of how horror cinema imagines alternative temporalities and contested sacred spaces – spaces where the supernatural offers a counter-narrative to the hegemonic control of modern time.

This article explores the agency within a city’s topography haunted by the past – specifically the latent (hi)stories ever-present in Berlin. Berlin has long been the focus of attention for those interested in the relationship between urban space and politics; the events and consternations of global politics were, and are, etched into the very surface of the city, often threatening to break through any attempts to clarify or contain its past. Using Fischer’s (2016) concept of the ‘eerie’ and the ‘weird’, this article explores the residue of trauma in the built, fragmentary, and ‘empty’ spaces of Berlin. The analysis posits the individual and the city as haunted (see philosopher Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, 1993 in which he posits that the present is haunted by the ghosts of lost futures) entities and considers the role of the individual in translating the past in the present moment – what, then, does this mean for the designer, historian, resident and visitor? How can we acknowledge the complexity of possible pasts, presents and futures, within our cities, whilst negotiating identity, need, and the continually changing nature of urban life?

In this article, I challenge humanist narratives of agricultural stewardship and hylomorphic models of making, as I develop new systems of thinking and making with dynamic landscapes. I apply Michel Serres’s concept of turbulence to the dynamic materiality of the Dartmoor Commons in Devon, as I focus on Serres’s tensioned notion of order(ings) and disorder(ings). I explore how material disorder among the landscapes of Dartmoor can ‘make-visible’ fluid materiality through dramatic and contingent instances of turbulence. This material disordering can be observed in the acidic, marginal soils of the moorland, which are tensioned with the ordering material processes – human and more-than-human – utilized in the observed farming and grazing practices as practices of ‘making-with’. Ordered materiality can incorrectly appear as inert or passive; however, all materiality is fluid, relational and agentic, as the ontology of new materialism underlies these explorations. The Dartmoor Commons is an ecologically damaged moorland that is losing biodiversity and living matter due to centuries of overgrazing, which is now compounded by the uncertain effects of undergrazing. By ‘making-visible’ this disorder, turbulence provides a way into the fluid materiality of our world that simultaneously demonstrates the danger of losing matter and species that is potentially irrevocable. ‘Making-with’ the damaged moorlands offers a modest and partial recuperation of Dartmoor’s landscapes, which is urgently required at vast material, ecological and political scales for our interdependent survival. In this article, an interdisciplinary approach traverses the dynamic matter of the Dartmoor Commons, as situated by two cattle farmers’ practices, Ben and William.