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    Jason W. Moore

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    New Geographies 06Grounding Metabolism

    EditorsDaniel Ibaez & Nikos Katsikis

    Editorial BoardDaniel DaouAli FardTaraneh MeshkaniPablo Prez Ramos

    Founding Editors Gareth DohertyRania GhosnEl Hadi JazairyAntonio PetrovStephen RamosNeyran Turan

    Advisory Board Eve BlauNeil BrennerSonja DuempelmannMohsen MostafaviAntoine PiconHashim SarkisCharles WaldheimJames Wescoat

    Editorial Advisor Melissa Vaughn

    Design Labs AdministratorEdna Van Saun

    Graphic DesignRob Daurio & Chelsea Spencer

    Copyright 2014 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All

    rights reserved. No part may be reproduced without permission.

    Printed in Cambridge by Universal Wilde

    Logo Design by Jean Wilcox

    Distributed by Harvard University Press

    ISBN 978-1-934510-37-7

    www.gsd.harvard.edu/newgeographies

    New Geographies is the journal of Design, Agency,Territory founded, edited, and produced by doctoralcandidates in the New Geographies Lab at theHarvard University Graduate School of Design. NewGeographies presents the geographic as a designparadigm that links physical, representational,and political attributes of space and articulates asynthetic scalar practice. Through critical essaysand projects, the journal seeks to position designsagency amid concerns about infrastructure,technology, ecology, and globalization.

    New Geographies 06Grounding Metabolismhas been made possible by grants from theGraham Foundation for Advanced Studies inthe Fine Arts and the Aga Khan Program at theHarvard University Graduate School of Design.

    All attempts have been made to trace andacknowledge the sources of images. Regardingany omissions or errors, please contact:

    New Geographies LabHarvard University Graduate School of Design48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138

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    002 Daniel Ibaez & Nikos Katsikis Editorial

    010 Jason W. Moore Toward a Singular Metabolism:

    Epistemic Rifts and Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology

    020 Erle C. Ellis Ecologies of the Anthropocene:

    Global Upscaling of Social-Ecological Infrastructures

    028 Peter Baccini Understanding and Designing the

    Metabolism of Urban Systems

    038 Timothy W. Luke Urbanism as Cyborganicity: Tracking

    the Materialities of the Anthropocene

    052 Roi Salgueiro Barrio, AanyaChugh & Maynard LenPetried Metabolism as Urban Artifact:Tells and Articial Topographiesin the Khabur Basin, Syria

    062 Sabine Barles Urban Metabolism: Persistent

    Questions and Current Developments

    070 Matthew Gandy in Conversation with Daniel Ibaez & Nikos Katsikis On Circulations and Metabolisms:

    Challenges and Prospects

    078 Volker M. WelterThe Valley RegionFrom Figure ofThought to Figure on the Ground

    088 Hadas A. Steiner After Habitat, Environment

    098 Ken Tadashi Oshima in Conversationwith Daniel Ibaez & Nikos Katsikis

    On Metabolism and the Metabolists

    108 Douglas Spencer Nature Is the Dummy:

    Circulations of the Metabolic

    114 Felipe Correa & Toms Folch Resource Extraction Urbanism and

    the Post-Oil Landscape of Venezuela

    122 Rahul Mehrotra & Felipe Vera Ephemeral Urbanism: Learning

    from Pop-up Cities

    132 Paola Vigan Territorialism I

    140 Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy Hassi Messaoud Oil Urbanism

    150 Reinier de Graaf / OMA Moscow after Moscow

    160 Vicente Guallart Barcelona 5.0: The Self-Sufcient City

    166 Philippe Rahm Toward a Thermodynamic Urban Design

    174 Kiel Moe The Nonmodern Struggle

    for Maximum Entropy

    184 Pierre Blanger Ecology 5.0

    188 Daniel Daou & Pablo Prez Ramos Projective Views on Urban

    Metabolism: Conference Postscript

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    GroundingMetabolism Editorial

    by Daniel Ibaezand Nikos Katsikis

    Nikos Katsikis is an architect and urbanist, and aDoctor of Design candidate at the Harvard Gradu-ate School of Design (GSD), currently completing hisdissertation, From Hinterland to Hinterworld. At theGSD he is research associate in the New GeographiesLab and in the Urban Theory Lab. At the GSD he hasalso organized conferences on Urban Metabolism(2014), Regionalism and the Mediterranean (2013)and The Limits of the Urban (2012) and is on theeditorial board of New Geographies. He holds a pro-fessional degree (2006) and a Master in Architecture(2009) with highest distinction from the National Tech-nical University of Athens. Some of his recent workincludes contributions to MONU (2014), Implosions/ Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbaniza-tion edited by Neil Brenner (Berlin: JOVIS, 2013), andthe forthcoming pamphlet with Brenner, Is the WorldUrban?: Towards a Critique of Geospatial Ideolo-gy (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2014). He is a Fulbright andOnassis scholar.

    Daniel Ibaez is a registered practicing architect andurbanist. He is a Doctor of Design candidate at theHarvard University, research associate of New Geog-raphies Lab, research manager at the Urban TheoryLab GSD, and co-director of the design rm Margen-Lab. He holds a Master in Architecture (ETSAM, 2007),Master in Advanced Architecture (IAAC, 2007), anda Master in Design Studies in Urbanism, Landscapeand Ecology with distinction (Harvard GSD, 2012). Hisdissertation research, Metabolic Urbanism, seeksto frame the design disciplines in relation to broadersocio-ecological interdependencies through cross dis-ciplinary research on urban metabolism. He is co-editorof a forthcoming book Third Coast Atlas (Actar, 2014)and Thermodynamics Applied to High-Rise and Mix-UsePrototypes (2013) and is on the editorial board of NewGeographies. Some of his academic grants and awardsinclude the Fundacin La Caixa Fulbright Fellowship,the Real Colegio Harvard Complutense Scholarship andthe Harvard GSD Dimitris Pikionis Award.

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    NG06Grounding Metabolism interprets urban metabolism as an inherentlygeographic condition, investigating the possibility for a redenition ofthe context for design in a manner that can grasp both the uidity ofmetabolic processes and their geographical engraving on the earth. 01

    Although design has been always tempted by the need to position itself in relationto a larger context, the engagement with (and even the denition of) this contexthas proved increasingly challenging. This situation results not only from theincreasing complexity of urban environmentsthe traditional locus of design inter-ventionsbut also from the need to grasp their expanding social and environmentalinterdependencies across the earth. In what could be characterized as a conditionof generalized urbanization, increasingly diffuse agglomeration patterns blendwith a dense mesh of infrastructural networks and are strongly interwoven withexpanding zones of production, supply, and disposal that cover the whole planet. 0

    Where does the synthetic geography of inhabitation end? Is it just decaying withthe density of population and built-up space, the transport corridors and the com-muting belts? Or does it have to include the operationalization of a series of oftendistant but socially and ecologically interdependent territories? The vast zonesof food production, resource extraction, energy production? The systems of res-ervoirs and hydroelectric dams? The logistical spaces of trade and circulation?

    Within this condition of planetary socio-environmental transformation, theconcept of urban metabolism has gained inuence among scholars anddesigners, suggesting an analytical basis for gauging the continuous ows ofenergy, material, and population exchange within and between cities and theirextensive operational landscapes. Metabolic approaches to urbanization promiseto interweave these diverse locational contexts, allowing the investigation of theinteractions among social and ecological processes in the production of urbanenvironments, and potentially enabling designers to address a broad array ofprocesses operating at multiple spatial scales. Most contemporary discussionson urban metabolism, however, have failed to integrate formal, spatial, and mate-rial attributes. Technoscientic approaches have been limited to a performativeinterpretation of ows, while more theoretical attempts to interrogate the socio-political embeddedness of metabolic processes have largely ignored their spatialregistration. NG06Grounding Metabolism suggests the need for a more explicitand systematical exploration of the geographical imprint of metabolic processes.

    But the geographic structure of the metabolic organization of urbanization hasbeen increasingly elusive over at least the last century. Historically this relation-ship was conned to a contiguous regional scale, with towns or cities co-evolvingin a state of social and ecological interdependence with their surroundinghinterlands. Successive waves of capitalist development, the proliferation of worldtrade, and the development of transport infrastructures have resulted in a gradual

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    socio-metabolic upscaling. Under contemporary globalized urbanization, cities appearmore connected to the planetary system of production and exchange than to theirsurrounding territories. Dissolved in the operations of logistical networks and globalsupply chains that reshufe them across distant territories, metabolic processesthus often appear largely ungrounded, detached from any geographic association.

    This underlying tension between the uidity of ows and their materialization ingeographical patterns of human occupation of the earth has long characterizedthe engagement of designers and urbanists with questions of urban metabolism.Since the beginning of the twentieth century, designers have sought to concep-tualize and respond to the metabolic reorganization associated with the diffusionof metropolitanism. For inuential urbanists such as Patrick Geddes and LewisMumford, metropolitanism suggested an exploitative operationalization of theearth that was leading to a socially and ecologically unsustainable specializationof regions, reducing them to mere utilitarian links in a world system of exchange. 03

    From Geddes valley section to Mumfords ecological regionalism, models withevident spatiality, where social and ecological processes were interpreted geo-graphically, promoted the return to putatively more balanced, spatially conned,and self-sufcient regional forms of metabolic organization. This tension betweenthe increasingly globalized metabolic ows and the specicities of their geographicembeddedness is further revealed in the projective attempts of Benton MacKayeand Ludwig Hilberseimer. 04 Through his new exploration, MacKaye suggestedcharting the global system of resource circulationdominated by the forces ofindustrial capitalismuncovering its inefciencies and thus allowing a reshapingof metabolic patterns according to the logics of natural geography. Conversely,Hilberseimers new regional pattern proposed to counterbalance the predominanttendency of regional specialization through a less interdependent redistribution offunctions with respect to the geographic terrain. This effort to (re)establish a moregeographically informed territorial paradigm that would regulate or conne meta-bolic ows continued to be a major concern in several important strands of postwardesign thinking. Examples of such engagements include the models of human asso-ciation across geographic scales developed by Team 10, or the subsequent work ofIan McHarg and his ecological interpretation of the valley as a geographic unit. 05

    This geographic appreciation of metabolism gradually dissolved, however, underan increasingly technoscientic paradigm that dominated most post-World WarII approaches. The fascination with a systematic interpretation of ows and theexploration of technological solutions fueled some of the most striking architec-tural utopias of the second part of the 20th century. The projects of the Metabolistgroup explored the translation of an organicist interpretation of circulation andadaptation into megastructural formations that organized and colonized territo-ries. At the same time critical interrogations of the fascination with technology,networks and ows started questioning the detachment of architecture from theground, as in the projects of Archigram. A series of ambitious efforts and method-ologies started focusing more on the global management of ows rather than onthe organization of territories. The work of Buckminster Fuller explored the agencyof design as a tool for the scientic representation and eventually manage-ment of the global ows of resources and commodities. Fuller even advocated acomplete redenition of design practices, shifting their focus from the physicaldesign of geographic space to the organization of the space of ows. 06 Aroundthe same time, the large-scale simulations of the Club of Rome reports, which

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    built upon Jay Forresters work on systems dynamics, reconstructed the worldas a dynamic system interrelating population, resources, and development. 07 These ambitious efforts reect the uncritical optimism associated with a generaltechnoscientic paradigm that largely transformed urban metabolism from aquestion of territorial organization to one of ecological analysis and coordina-tion of stocks and ows. The inuential work of Eugene and Howard T. Odumsimplied the complexities of cities and regions to a set of topologically inter-related functional elements that were measured exclusively as a transformationof energy. 08 In 1965, Abel Wolmans seminal text on The Metabolism ofCities called for planning to focus on the analytical investigation of ows ofenergy and material associated with the function of urban environments. 09

    Along these lines, under the recent paradigm of sustainable development,a tremendous amount of quantitative research has been generated in theenvironmental sciences to model urban metabolism. The standardization ofmodels and indicators, such as material ow analysis or the urban footprint, hascontributed to an unprecedented statistical proling of the metabolism of cities andregions exposing the scales, dimensions, and dynamics of contemporary systemsof inhabitation. 10 These approaches have remained largely descriptive, however, andblind to the underlying socioeconomic tensions associated with their geographicalembeddedness. Metabolic interdependencies are rarely investigated as sociospatialconstructs, but are simply presented as naturalized elements of organic ecosystems.

    Over the last two decades, a set of inuential critical approaches has addressedexactly this problematique . Stemming mainly from neo-Marxian urban geog-raphy and political economy, the concept of metabolism has been reappropriatedin a dialectical manner that attempts to analyze the spatial complexities ofmetabolic processes in ways that also capture their social, natural, political,and technological hybridities. 11 These approaches have contributed to anunderstanding of metabolic processes as historically contested elements of asocially and ecologically unequal exchange within successive waves of capitalistdevelopment. Although they have been instrumental in reintroducing geographyand overcoming the society-nature divide, they have been rather reluctant tosupersede inherited territorial categories such as that of the city. Consequently,such approaches have contributed only weakly to a novel understanding ofextended patterns of urbanization. 12 Although both technoscientic and criticalapproaches to urban metabolism have been inuential in design discourse, theyhave yet to be meaningfully connected to an appreciation of the formal orga-nization of the expanding urban fabric, and concomitantly, to the constructionof more socially, politically, and ecologically viable models of urbanism.

    Within this context, contemporary design disciplines have been rather myopicin addressing the geographic dimensions of metabolic processes. A series ofpreoccupations, operating in parallel or in combination, seem to characterize theengagement of design with processes of urban metabolism. A fascination withthe uidity of metabolic processes has led to the privileging of design conceptsfocusing on adaptability, indeterminacy, and exibility rather than the often scle-rotic nature of urban fabrics, infrastructures, and territories. At the same time,within the broader sustainability paradigm, the increasingly widespread concernwith quantitative questions of performance and efciency tends to prioritizeenergy, material, and climatic optimization and thereby to marginalize the agency

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    of design. Finally, there has been a tendency for a morphological fetishization ofmetabolism. This attitude has foregrounded a metaphoric interpretation of uidityand organic forms, undermining the possibility of grasping the complexities of ametabolic interpretation of context. Meanwhile, an important series of more ana-lytical engagements has emerged in contemporary design research. On the onehand, a thematic approach has been invested in investigating specic metabolicprocesses, charting for example the ows of food, waste, water, and energy. Onthe other hand, a more territorial approach has engaged with specic functionalsites of metabolic activity, such as landlls, mines, agricultural elds, and ports.Although their often-groundbreaking cartographic and diagrammatic investigationshave been successful in surfacing the complexities of metabolic processes, theyhave yet to adequately address the full potential of their projective dimension.

    Grounding Metabolism interprets design as a geographic agent that, althoughreexive to the spatially transcendent systems of ows and processes, is still focusedon the physical conguration of human occupation on the ground. As a result, anyvaluable interpretation of context needs to be connected to this specic operation. Nomatter how expanded it can be, as urbanization continuously reshapes the planetaryterrain, design has eventually to be connected to a site-specic formal appreciationof geography. For this reason, Grounding Metabolism foregrounds the geographicalimprints of metabolic processes. Instead of a seamless, ethereal, and malleablespace of ows, we aim to reveal a different, thick, heavy, and lengthy process ofmetabolic reorganization of the earths surface operating at various paces and scales.

    We argue that the more seamless and continuous the global metabolic system ofexchange becomes, the more it is engraved in a geographically discontinuous organi-zation of the earths surface. As urbanized regions expand and thicken, extending theirmetabolic reach, they become increasingly interdependent with the developmentof specialized regions of service and supply (agricultural regions, resource extrac-tion zones) and a densifying mesh of connectivity infrastructures that enables theincreasing volumes of exchange. As this process unfolds, it results in the productionof a series of distinctive and rather sclerotic fabrics of urbanization. The articulationof these fabrics, however, is becoming increasingly splintered as the differencesinherent in the specicities of natural geography are coupled with the uneven pat-terns of capitalist development. 13 At the same time, almost all elements of this fabricare revealed as parts of a multiplicity of metabolic cycles operating at a series ofboth spatial and temporal scales, from the building to the planetary, from the daily tothe geologic. On an hourly and daily basis, settlements and infrastructure systems,buildings and cities, ports and highways, dams and pipelines, mines and oil rigs,agricultural lands and irrigation networks, landlls and waste treatment plants are allare parts of a dynamic metabolism of people, energy, water, nutrients, etc. At longertime frames, they are themselves artifacts of a process of not only capital investmentbut also the reorganization of materials and resources that have often been relocatedfrom distant lands, and as such of a longer-term geo-metabolic alteration of the earth.

    Grounding Metabolism offers a promising yet challenging proposition. It does notsuggest adopting any sort of metabolic determinism in which conditions on theground are seen as the mere reection of metabolic processes. Nor does it aimto reintroduce any sort of geographical determinism in which the organization ofmetabolic processes is derived from the specicities of natural geography. Rather, itaspires to uncover the complexities behind the historically path-dependent, socially

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    are interwoven with a series of critical approaches [ Moore / Luke / Gandy ], aimingto shed light on the social and political dimensions of metabolic processes thatare often obscured behind the abstraction of technical models. Under the lens ofurban political ecology, these contributions highlight conceptual, theoretical, andetymological challenges in the construction of a hybrid socio-natural, geographi-cally embedded interpretation of metabolism. These approaches also offer variedperspectives on the dimensions and challenges of the contemporary conditionof global metabolic upscaling. In parallel, design questions are introduced earlyon with a set of historical examples attempting both a design investigation ofthe formalization of metabolic processes [ Salgueiro, Chugh, and Lon ] and morescholarly explorations of seminal design approaches and concepts that domi-nated the past century [ Welter / Steiner / Tadashi Oshima ]. The last part of thevolume brings together a diverse set of critical texts [ Spencer / Blanger ] anddesign investigations highlighting various attempts to engage with the territorialdimensions of metabolism. These include projects highlighting the emergence ofneglected territories of design in the vast networks of global hinterlands [ Correaand Folch / Ghosn and Jazairy ] as well as studies of the challenges of reorganizingpost-metropolitan forms of urbanization [ Vigan / de Graaf ]. Moreover, they fore-ground certain urbanistic attitudes to questions of self-sufciency, ephemerality,material sourcing, and performativity [ Mehrotra and Vera / Guallart / Rahm / Moe ]

    In this way, Grounding Metabolism offers a compilation of preliminary notes,positions, and projects to open up relevant questions for designers. It buildstoward an understanding of a contemporary design context that is not merelybeing upscaled but is in constant circulation through the weaving together of amultiplicity of variegated geographies.

    Notes

    01. The investigation of the potentials of a geographic approach todesign has been central not only among the New Geographieseditors but also in research undertaken in the New GeographiesLab at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design underdirector Hashim Sarkis (www.research.gsd.harvard.edu/nglab).See also: Hashim Sarkis. Geo-Architecture: A Prehistory for anEmerging Aesthetic, Harvard Design Magazine 37 (2014).

    02. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid have recently embarked onan investigation of planetary urbanization, stressing the needto connect analytically concentrated agglomerations and theirextended operational landscapes, an agenda already generatingconsiderable research in the Urban Theory Lab, Harvard GSD(www.urbantheorylab.net). See also: Neil Brenner and ChristianSchmid, Planetary urbanization, Urban Constellations (2012):1013; Neil Brenner, ed., Implosions/Explosions: Towards aStudy of Planetary Urbanization (Berlin: JOVIS, 2013).

    03. Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction tothe Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics(London: Benn, 1968); Lewis Mumford, Regionalism andIrregionalism, Sociological Review 19, no. 4 (1927): 277288.

    04. Benton MacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy ofRegional Planning (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,1990); Ludwig Hilberseimer, The New Regional Pattern(Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1949).

    05. Alison Smithson, ed., Team 10 Primer (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1968); Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (New York:American Museum of Natural History, 1969).

    06. Buckminster Fuller, U.S. Industrialization, Fortune 21, (2

    February 1940): 5057; Buckminster Fuller and John McHale,World Design Science Decade, Document 4 (Carbondale, IL:World Resources Inventory, 1965).

    07.Donella H. Meadows and Dennis Meadows, The Limits to Growth:A Report for the Club of Romes Project on the Predicament ofMankind (New York: Universe, 1972); Jay W. Forrester, WorldDynamics (Cambridge, MA: Wright-Allen Press, 1971).

    08. Eugene Odum, Ecology and Our Endangered Life-SupportSystems (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associated Inc., 1989).

    09. Abel Wolman, The Metabolism of Cities, Scientic American213, no. 3 (1965): 179190.

    10. See, for example: Peter Baccini and Paul H. Brunner,Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); William Rees and MathisWackernagel, Urban Ecological Footprints: Why Cities CannotBe Sustainableand Why They Are Key to Sustainability,Environmental Impact Assessment Review 16 (1996): 223248.

    11. See, for example: Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and ErikSwyngedouw, eds., In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecologyand the Politics of Urban Metabolism (London: Routledge, 2006);Matthew Gandy, Rethinking Urban Metabolism: Water, Space,and the Modern City, City 8, no. 3 (2004): 363379.

    12. Hillary Angelo and David Wachsmuth, Urbanizing UrbanPolitical Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism,International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2014).

    13. Steve Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism:Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and theUrban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001).

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    New Geographies 08Island Geographies will reviewthe ecological potential of the idea of island. Asa master metaphor, the island has been a fecundsource of inspiration in philosophy and sciencethroughout history. From Mores Utopia to Darwinsevolutionary theory, the insights derived fromisland thinking are commonly extrapolated acrosselds and scales. Ecology is no exception: someof its most recurrent tropes (e.g.. niche, patch,footprint, and carrying capacity) relate to notionsof limits that the island epitomizes. The appeal ofthe island metaphor lies in its capacity to frame andsimplify the complex and seemingly unbounded.But while the recurrence of the island speaks of itsgreat explicative prowess, it can be argued that theconcept is undergoing a crisis. In times of worldwideenvironmental concern, upscaling ideas derivedfrom island thinking to the planetary scale of theAnthropocene constitutes a nontrivial operation.Yet ecologys current privileging of processes andows over form and objecthood, and globalizationsmotifs of openness and interconnectedness, seem tochallenge the relevance of the island as a cognitivedevice for territorial description and intervention.New Geographies 08 will explore the new limitsof islandness, while gathering examples thatreassert its relevance for the design disciplines.

    With New Geographies 06Grounding Metabolism , the second generation ofNG editors introduces a series of three volumes that question the dimensionsand materialities associated with the geographical registration of the complexand multi-scalar social, technical, and environmental processes that constitutecontemporary urbanization. In volumes 0 to 5, the primary aim of the journal wasto foreground the emergence of the geographic as a paradigm that would allowdesign to provide a broader, more engaged, and more dialectical response tocontext. This investigation revealed that as designers are increasingly compelledto shape larger scales and address complex urban and ecological issues, theydepend increasingly on social, economic, and ecological interpretations of space.While these interpretations typically embrace the dynamism of processes, ows,and networks, they seem to have overlooked their material imprints on geographicspace. This series addresses the apparent disjunction between veriable aswell as speculative relations among processes, ows, and networks (which hasdominated contemporary debates on urbanization) and their geographical imprints,whether designed or simply inherited in the physical organization of territories.

    New Geographies 07Geographies of Information willinvestigate the emerging spatial hybridities of informa-tion and communication technologies (ICTs). Whetherexplicitly stated or not, contemporary understandingof these technologies is organized around a set ofhybrid conditions, dealing with issues of materiality,scale, territory, and spatial politics. Digital informationtechnologies possess physical and virtual materi-alities, articulated through hardware and softwaresystems. Contemporary communication networksboast physical and human geographies, and generateincreasingly intertwined public and private spaces.Yet within contemporary design discourse ICTs arerarely thought of in spatial terms, instead most oftenconceptualized as merely a ow to be mapped, aservice to be included, or an always available cloudof information to access. ICTs and their networks ofdistribution nonetheless possess an uneven geog-raphy and a set of intersecting spatialities that forma latent but essential aspect of the contemporaryprocess of global urbanization. Operating at local andglobal scales and reecting social and environmentalprocesses, this geography of information generates anew set of relationships between people, territories,processes, technical systems, and physical objects.New Geographies 07 is interested in the imbrications,hybrid forms, recombinant practices, and the murkyin-between spaces that attempt to articulate theinherent hybridity of this geography of information.

    Forthcoming