Design Ecologies - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020

For the Black body, water is a topological condition that has been a medium for European colonialism and the construction of race illustrated in the earliest fifteenth century Portuguese nautical master charts depicting the latest knowledge of African coastlines by the transport of enslaved Africans to the shores of the ‘new world’ in North America, South America and the Caribbean, as a means of delineating spatial separation through segregated water fountains, swimming pools and beaches in the United States and South Africa; by the forced migration of people of colour due to sea-level rise and disastrous typhoons and hurricanes such as Irma, Maria, Harvey and most recently Dorian – all the result of global climate change induced by centuries-old pollution in the industrialized nations of Europe and North America; by the lack of access to clean drinking water not only in former European colonies in Africa but also in cities such as Flint, Michigan and Newark, NJ, and to the paucity of water and severe drought in places like the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde as well as Cape Town, South Africa, formerly colonized by the Dutch and the British. Water as a line from coloniality to climate change represents the spectacle of vulnerability within the quotidian condition of Black life and its indigeneity and diasporic formation linked by a vicious history of imperialism and colonization. The topology of water refers to not only geometric properties of water in terms of its liquidity, flows, movement and capacity for infinite temporal and morphological containments but also the cultural landscape of water defined by relationships of power that do not so much change but take up new guises of privilege and subjugation.

Contemporary architectural practice posits the City as an agglomeration of built fabric and its resultant spaces; congruent theories of place attempt to discern opportunities and create methodologies to engage with and inhabit this fabric. These theories of urbanism are reacting to a socio-economic culture that demands precision, rationality and above all clarity, producing a spatial realm increasingly branded, deracinated and politically circumscribed – clearly defined, delineated and described. Architectural pedagogy is often troubled because of its service to colonization: form serving image, function slaved to economics, space subsumed into spectacle. The City, though, is fluctuating, multifunctional and elusive – demanding a conceptual entanglement of impermanence and incompletion. To explore the gap between professional practice and intuitive inhabitation, the Urban Islands project was developed. Urban Islands is an independent intensive studio programme run for two weeks each July on Sydney’s Cockatoo Island. The studios are run by emerging architects selected from around the world, and engage master’s students from six different Australian universities, in an environment meant to unsettle, unmoor and ultimately, enlighten. Deliberately eschewing linear and hermetic modes of studio discourse and instruction, the programme instead adopts strategies of wandering and migration to create an immersive investigative environment. Urban Islands utilizes narrative, fiction and a hermeneutical approach to education to re-theorize the studio. Subsequent re-readings and misreadings of place offer its participants agency in determining their roles in that space, as well as allowing for new ways to both measure and mark the earth. This article outlines the constituent conceptual concerns informing the programme, illustrated by select examples of work that enmesh analytical theory and creative design practice to propose an expanded geography of the city, one of excisions and allegory and, most importantly, one wide open to interpretation.

When Edward Said spoke of an ‘imaginative geography’, it was both to question the geographic positions adopted as part of colonial accounts and to posit the role of imagination itself in the construction of geographies. For Said, the ‘dramatic boundaries’ of imaginative geography are at once abstract and mobile, and yet might constitute ‘a form of radical realism’. The discourse is thus at once about perspective, position and the empirical (and imperial) imposition of that which is speculative, literary and fluid. But it is also about the unmediated engagements of radical realism and a form of geography we can only imagine. This article turns to the imaginative geography of islands and takes three islands as its departure point. The first is the island of Gilles Deleuze’s article ‘Desert islands’ (2004), an island ‘toward which one drifts’. The second is the island of absent subjectivity that is explored in Jean Baudrillard’s extended essay Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2009). The third island upon which this article fixates is perhaps more archipelago than island. It is the spomeniki that are dotted over the landscape of the former Yugoslavia. These monuments were largely commissioned by Josip Broz Tito and built across the 1960s and 1970s and into the early 1980s to mark the places where the battles of the National Liberation War (Second World War) had occurred and where concentration camps had once stood. These monuments sit as odd and haunting gestures. Many sculptors and architects were involved. Some spomeniki are anchored and sit heavy on the landscape, as one might expect of memorials, and others appear to launch themselves towards elsewhere. Some are small and unimposing, and others at a scale well beyond the human body. Some are well tended, and others have faded into oblivion. This article turns specifically to the spomenik at the Valley of Heroes, Tjentište, designed by the sculptor Miodrag Živović and completed in 1971. Like all the spomeniki, this monument has endured further war since its erection. This magnificent fractal concrete form marks the Battle of Sutjeska, but rather than fixate upon a singular geo-historical moment, it appears more likely to take flight. I will argue that this magnificent sculpture is perhaps engaged in what Baudrillard calls ‘the art of disappearance’.

Understood as anisotropic in structure, variation in timber form was traditionally accommodated and often elevated in strategic applications. However, contemporary applications of wood act to suppress the value of timber’s integrated material composition, treating wood simply as mass to be divided and reassembled into homogeneous building components. Influenced by a series of mechanical inputs, including self-loading, wind loading and structural damage, wood is actively developed during its growth as a complex structural material whose internal composition serves not only as a tree’s metabolic infrastructure but also as its load-bearing structure. In this way, trees adaptively respond to the unique conditions of their environment in a manner that architecture regularly fails to, given the latter’s preoccupation with prescribed formalism. Understanding the efficiency with which trees are able to develop their forms and evenly distribute mechanical stresses across their surfaces is an area of research that has architectural potential but has not been widely explored. While concepts of standardization and regularity fit well into a model of measured global commerce, they do little to take advantage of the unique material potentials of wood in design. Furthermore, board-form components fail to speak to the anisotropic structure and integrated growth of wood fibre in a self-optimized, adaptive organic system; the internal grain structure of wood embodies the structural forces running throughout the tree. Acknowledged as embedded structural optimizations rather than structural defects, these non-standardized patterns can be treated as forms to be praised rather than avoided, integrating the autonomy of the non-human world into the design process. Thought of this way, one could argue that wood is, in fact, superior to homogenized building materials in its highly material efficient, adapted biomechanical structure, developed free of human labour.

This article explores nomadic site occupation as a form of planetary colonization involving both human and non-human agents. Conventional understandings of temporary occupation are often humancentric with little attention paid to the disruption of extant site ecologies and processes. The latter are particularly pressing concerns in nomadic settlements located in precarious landscapes. Taking the latter as its focus, this article engages the earth as an agent resisting its own colonization in the Australian-licensed squatter settlement known colloquially as Tin City. Located within the largest mobile sand dune structure in New South Wales, Tin City is an assemblage of several self-built fishing shacks accommodating a nomadic population. Its occupants engage in a daily battle against the shifting sands that threaten to subsume their temporary homes. Located in an area of significant indigenous heritage, the Tin City settlement has become a tourist attraction shrouded in local lore. Current discourses about it and its architectures generally focus on its unusual aesthetics, its contested sociopolitical histories and its ecology, with some discussion on the impacts of European colonization on the sand dune’s dynamic geomorphology. To concentrate on the latter, the article develops and deploys the posthumanist conceptualization of the earth posited by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani in his ficto-critical text Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Negarestani ascribes the earth with sentient and agentic capacity, whilst the nomads who traverse its surfaces become the penultimate planetary colonizers. Tin City’s occupation thus becomes a story of colonization and resistance narrated by the earth itself, and a reminder that the production and consumption of architectural forms does not need to be confined to that which is conventionally human.