After modern: The cosmogram of anthropocene - Landscape-in-transition and design for the uncertain in the critical zone

Abstract

The detachment of contemporary human life from the ground condition is one of the defying features of the present momentum. The idea of Modernity defined within the frames of rationality and reason became the only possible concept within our imagination that can support our existence as humanity. Its core idea is centered around the notion of progress as the fundamental condition for individual human growth. Nature, with all its complexities and inherent logic beyond human perception, is, therefore, simplified to be seen only as the resource and/or pastoralized rationalized image of the human-controlled entity. The disciplines of urban planning and design, while interacting directly with the ground surface, are barely informed by the ground conditions as for now. The aim of this work, therefore, is to bring the achievements of the so-called terrestrial turn of contemporary discourse into the discussion on operational mode of planning and design.

The theoretical framework of the thesis is developed on the application of the concept of the Critical Zone, reinforced by the central notions of actor-network theory and object-oriented ontology onto the phenomena of landscape in its discursive, physical, and representational dimensions. Bruno Latour, the central figure in the discourse, defines the Critical Zone as the thin crust of the Earth accommodating all the known terrestrial life in the Universe; the dangerously important ground point to start any discussion of mankind’s future in the age of the emerging climatic catastrophe. The statement of the acute importance of embedding oneself into the complex interweaving networks of objects with the central focus on the landscape as the spatial prerequisite for these processes to unfold is, therefore, the aim of this work.

The city of Kiruna in Swedish Lapland is chosen as the site for the speculative visualization of this aim. The ongoing relocation of the city center due to the land subsidence caused by mining of the biggest iron ore body in Europe leads to the expansion of the landscape-in-transition between the mine and the urban fabric – the deformation zone. The design intervention is centered around the aim of bringing it to the focus of perception as the representation of the Critical Zone in Anthropocene – the terra fluxus as the starting point of the global ecological discourse in the age of polycrisis in an opposition to the municipality’s approach of covering the change of the ground condition by using the conventional land use and urban design practices. With the condition of uncertainty as the design driver, the intervention takes place along the planned demolishing limit of the city center, emphasizing the spatial and temporal disjointment between the urban and the natural. Informed by the man-made geological transformations and its conflicting relations with the urban fabric, the intervention results in the speculative landform structure that reacts on and visualize these tensions. The waste rock of mining processes is chosen as the construction material of the landform. Together with the existing waste rock deposits along the mine, the landform sets in frame the fluctuating territory turning it into the manifestation of the New Ecological Thinking – the cosmogram of the Anthropocene landscape as the discursive platform for imagining the new scenarios of coexistence.