Rania Ghosn Livres

In the Age of Environment, the scale waste management is geographic all while often relegating such undesired matter to invisibility as matter out of place. Geographies of Trash reclaims the role of forms, technologies, economies and logistics of the waste system in the production of new aesthetics and politics of urbanism. Honored with a 2014 ACSA Faculty Design Award, the book charts the geographies of trash in Michigan across scales to propose five speculative projects that bring to visibility disciplinary controversies on the relations of technology, space and politics.§§The book reclaims the materiality and spatiality of municipal solid waste systems.§The research-design methodology and book structure adopt a threefold approach, 1) to§conceptualize the spatial issues; 2) to chart relations of trash and space in Michigan across different scales; 3) to speculate on alternative strategies, rituals and imaginaries that reclaim trash as matter in place. Geographies of Trash proposes five situated yet generic architectural strategies of trash-formations throughout the American territorial grid. By making trash visible and formal, the project aspires to engage disciplinary debates on waste systems in architectural urbanism.

" ... we propose to reflect on the on the spatial conditions of oil and seek disciplinary linkages to position design's agency amid contemporary concerns for energy infrastructure, ecology and globalization." -- P. 7.

How do we make sense of the Earth at a moment in which it is presented in crisis? Geostories is a manifesto on the environmental imagination that renders sensible the issues of climate change and through geographic fiction invites readers to relate to the complexity of Earth systems in their vast scales of time and space. The book is organized into three sections -terrarium, aquarium, planetarium, each of which revisits such devices of wonder that assemble publics around representations of the Earth. The series of architectural projects becomes a medium to synthesize different forms and scales of knowledge on technological externalities, such as oil extraction, deep-sea mining, ocean acidification, water shortage, air pollution, trash, space debris, and a host of other social-ecological issues. Through design research, Geostories brings together spatial history, geographic representation, projective design, and material public assemblies to speculate on ways of living with such legacy technologies on the planet.