What turns landscapes into landscapes of pressure is, in the first place, a map—a scaled register of the territory in which the simulacrum of an envisioned project is set. What matters for the project, its promoters and its investors is the territory’s location: the coordinates, proximities, political context, municipal boundaries and infrastructures previously set in it. What is also important is its supposed availability; its emptiness and its disposition to be filled; its quality of being a remnant, a terrain vague seen as a receptacle of promises, possibilities and expectations, as Ignasi de Solà-Morales wrote.[1] What does not matter is the territory’s idiosyncrasy—its inner logics, historic traces, gradations of rurality and productivity as such. As pure surface and constructible land, it is subject to the logics of the global economy and consequently converted into an object of speculation. Its contemporary context is globalization, which increasingly bypasses the national state and, therefore, effects an integral reconfiguration of the urban scale.[2]
Full content is available only for registered users. Please login or
