Reassembling the Remote by RMIT Landscape Architecture

REASSEMBLING THE

REMOTE

AN ONTOLOGICAL ENQUIRY INTO ALTERNATIVE DEGROWTH ECONOMIES AND MODES OF HABITATION WITHIN WESTERN AUSTRALIAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S REMOTE LANDSCAPES. EDWARD KERMODE

PRIMARY SUPERVISORS: ZOE LOOMES

PROBLEM

“At the very root of the current climate crisis lies the concept of property; a pervasive apparatus of governance that, for centuries, has dispossessed communities of their sources of sustenance, supplanting the ethos of care with one based on exploitation.”

APPROACH

“Unlike activities such as gardening or woodworking, where something concrete is made by direct contact with the material, the architect operates on reality at a distance, and through the mediation of abstract systems such as notation, projection, and calculation. Indirect contact is necessary counterpart to the larger scales of intervention.”

VISION

By de-enclosing social goods and restoring the commons, we can ensure that people are able to access the things that they need to live a good life without having to generate piles of income in order to do so, and without feeding the never-ending growth machine. In this sense, degrowth is the very opposite of austerity. Whilst austerity calls for sscarcity in order to generate growth, degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary”

Aureli, P. & Giudici, M. (2019) “Islands: The Settlement from Property to Care” in Log Journal, 1, vol 49. New York, USA: Anyone Corporation: p194

Allen, S. (1999) “Infrstructural Urbanism” in Points and Lines, New Jersey, U.S: Princeton Architectural Press, p172

Hickel, J. (2018, December 11) “Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance’, Local Futures: Economies of Happiness. Retrieved at https://www.localfutures.org/degrowth-a-call-for-radical-abundance/

Acknowledgements: There are countless people to thank for the support they have offered over the course of the year long project, particularly given the unprecedented transition into online delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The teaching and pastoral support I have received from both staff and fellow students has been second to none throughout this year, even whilst many of themselves were experiencing some of the most isolating and draconian lockdown measures in the world. I would like to express a massive thank you to Zoe Loomes who has been one of the heavyweight of my project throughout this year, offering both constant academic and pastoral guidance beyond her duties as a tutor. Zoe’s ability to understand my project at times where it was beyond incoherent, and to then provide me representational and design precedents for it ,has been a significantly appreciated, and for patience to do so has been second-to none. To Alban Mannisi, who has been instrumental in pushing me theoretically and being a 24/7 sounding board for my ideas, proposals, and complaints that challenged the boundaries of landscape architecture discipline - I can acknowledge I am not the easiest of students to deal with. I am beyond grateful for the opportunity he has given me to present at the Archifest 2020 Singapore conference. To Tom Black, Elise Northover, and Kyle Black - argueably one of the three major fundamental tutors in beginning my final year project trajectory through the role of the map as a design tool, as well as the introduction to Deleuzian thinking through notational methods. Having come from an architecture background feeling a bit disillusioned with the lack of economic and political critique within practice, these three have allowed me to explore these themes throughout my time at RMIT where it would not be possible at other landscape institutions in the country. To Philip Belesky - for briefly teaching a computational mapping tool seminar that has provided a backdrop to my approach in the project. The gap of using computational tools in landscape architecture was a significant reason as to why I chose to study at RMIT and nonetheless has been pushed forward throughout this project. It is a field I plan on pursuing further after graduation and I’m fortunate to have been taught by him in a discipline where computational knowledge is difficult to find. Being an ontological enquiry, there was a bit of irony in that I found myself having my own ‘ontological’ crisis in regards to the value and agency this project within the discipline of landscape. Moments of self-doubt were frequent and without the support of the tutors listed above the conclusion of this project would not have been possible.

$1,800,000,000 OPTUS STADIUM BHP BOARDWALK CHEVRON PARKLAND

UNREHABILITATED MINES

MINING WASTE

POOR HOUSING INFRASTRUCTURE

$10,000,000 BHP WATER PARK, PERTH

~<$700 MEDIAN INCOME IN NORSEMAN (NICKEL MINING TOWN)

ABSTRACT

Quick schematic collage of the traces our work as landscape architects leave, despite crowning ourselves as environmental stewards of equality

By acknowledging the role of landscape practice within Brenner and Schmid’s theory of ‘extended urbanization’, the project posits that today’s climate catastrophe cannot simply be addressed through traditional market-led forces in the urban arena. The epoch of the Anthropocene is an urgent signal for designers to shift away designing within settings of excessive consumption (cities) and instead regions embedded within, and shaped by, landscapes of production and extraction - areas often remote, deliberately out of sight, and subsequently excluded in the today’s hegemonic architectural agenda towards high-density and ‘sustainable’ city living. Equitable climate action through design should not only address the reimagination of cities but also its hinterlands, where structurally declining remote communities reliant on intensive agricultural and mining economies, are becoming increasingly vulnerable to volatile market conditions and worsening climatic events. By employing cartographic and computational methodologies as design research techniques, the project intends to challenge today’s spatial dogmas of property and economic value by offering alternative self-sufﬁcient territories of habitation situated within remote Western Australia’s post extraction and production landuses.

PURPOSE [WHY?] The research intent behind this document is to present ideas on how today’s remote settlements, often driven by economies of extraction and production, may begin to reconﬁgure their territories in relation to more self-sufﬁcient modes of habitation within increasingly volatile market conditions and environmental degradation. At the core of this vision is the critique of private property and its structural issues in relation to today’s increasing spatial inequities. Thus, the document aims to be a catalyst in generating deeper discussions about how landscape architecture practice may shift away from traditional urban -centric procurements facilitated by hegemonic neoliberal planning agendas, and rather situate itself in offering more liberating and equitable propositions for living in remote areas most vulnerable within today’s declining global economy and environment.

FUNCTION [WHO?] The document serves as a primer and a speculative series of strategies for how Western Australia’s existing mining and agricultural settlements may reassemble itself in response to a post-production and post-extraction future – and beyond the status-quo economic solutions of ‘tourism’ that are often associated with the attempted regenerative efforts of these towns. Instead, landscape architecture design methodologies are deployed to speculate how novel spatial contracts in Western Australia’s remote regions can live beyond the reliance of a commodity-based economy, and towards one that can live within its own means and care-driven access to its local resources. The process of challenging private property boundaries through design research techniques intends to offer alternative ways of reading value in the landscape, thus reconstructing new territorial practices of landuse and habitation for structurally declining towns to realise how degrowth can become an opportunity in living more appropriately to the conditions and parameters within their own surroundings and resources.

STRUCTURE [WHAT?] The document will read in a way that reads in a declining scale, from the scale of territory to the scale of dwelling. The main components of the publication is split up into three speculative ontological reframings of remote landscapes within the primer: repair, reconfigure, reappropriate. At the core of the design research is the acknowledgement of map-making as a design tool, in both protocolizing and instrumentalizing the radical propositions put forward. The research acknowledges the abstract and often ‘private’ language that is not as easily accessible for people unfamiliar with landscape architectural mapping methodologies. However, the discipline’s specific techniques of the field, as a means to dissolve, reframe, and question mechanisms of property, is necessary if we are to not only regain political agency as built environmental professionals, but to offer more optimistic proposals beyond the constraints of capitalism and its impact of today’s ‘crisis of imagination’ (Trotter, 2018).

00 | INTRODUCTION

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 0.1 ABSTRACT // A POLITICAL ISSUE OF REPRESENTATION 0.2 AN ENQUIRY INTO REMOTENESS 0.3 A CRITIQUE OF URBAN-CENTRIC PRACTICE: AN ONTOLOGICAL ISSUE 0.4 A CRITIQUE OF GROWTH: SPATIALISING ALTERNATIVES 0.5 AN ISSUE OF TERRITORY: VALUE AND ECONOMY 0.6 AN ISSUE OF DWELLING: CONCEPTIONS OF HABITATATION 0.7 DEGROWTH: A THEORETICAL APPROACH

DESIGN FRAMEWORK 1.1 MAP-MAKING AS TECHNIQUE: FIELDS, PROTOCOLS, AND INSTRUMENTS 1.2 PROJECT APPROACH - LANDING IT WITH STAKEHOLDERS IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

DETERRITORIALISATION 2.1 AN ISSUE OF PLANNING AND BOUNDARIES 2.3 DETERRITORIALISING REMOTE LANDUSE: REVEALING INTENSITIES 2.4 DETERRITORIALISING LAND DEGRADATION: REVEALING INTENSITIES 2.5 HYBRIDISING LANDUSE - TESTING THROUGH FIELDS

REPAIR EXPLOITED LAND

DEGROWTH

3.1 RETERRITORIALISING REPAIR BASED ON LAND CONDITIONS

PROTOCOL

3.2 NEGOTIATING REPAIR BEYOND PROPERTY BOUNDARIES

INSTRUMENT

POST-PRODUCTION

3.3 INHABITING EROSION AND DEPOSITION

FIELD

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CONTENTS

REFLECTION 6.1 MAPPING REMOTELY: BEYOND THE BIOPOLITICS OF REMOTE SENSING 6.2 INFLUENCING THE ONTOLOGICAL: EXHIBITION 6.3 FUTURE BUSHFIRE ENGAGEMENT WITH TRADITIONAL CUSTODIANS

APPENDIX

BRIEF

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A SPATIAL CONTRACT FOR REMOTE AUSTRALIA

MARK MCGOWAN

Coming off the back of an ever-worsening global recession from the impacts of COVID-19 and compounding bushfire events, WA Premier Mark McGowan has shocked the country with announcements of a new radical economic ‘spatial contract’ for regional Western Australia. The Premier has called for greater funding for mining companies to expand further in the most inner depths of the state, previously too remote and economically unviable for extraction, recognising the importance of Western Australia’s renewable energy resource in a time where import prices and trade tariffs begs belief. The rhetoric leans similar towards Scott Morrisson’s celebration of the ‘Quiet Australians’ – however, without the smugness an common political emphasis on ‘new jobs’. Rather, the Premier has advocated for dwindling remote towns to transform from settlements of economic scarcity to economies of abundance, by redfining ‘economy’ in its entirety. Extending on Bataille’s definition of a general economy as opposed to a restricted one (see framework), these town’s economies become framed through the flow and exchange of resources, rather than purely monetary terms.

“Unlike many regional structure plans Western Australia has delivered in the past, this one is different” the Premier announces, “Economic growth, and its associated terms of sustainable development, is never something to frown upon - We still aim to deliver our UN goals of reducing inquality and onnvative infrastructural and technological advancements thorugh an economic lense but an economy interpreted differently, as we acknowledge that economic growth can never last forever.These frameworks will not recognise the inevitability of market decline as an opportunity for self-sufﬁency and autonomy for remote communities. The strategy will work with miners, farmers, conservation groups, communities – focusing on how, together, we can achieve equitable access to our state’s excess supply of resources by working not on, but rather with, the land itself..”

RECONFIGURE REMOTE SETTLEMENTS

REAPPROPRIATE MINIMAL LANDUSE

4.1 REFRAMING SCARCITY AS ABUNDANCE

POST-CIVILIZATION

4.2 RECONFIGURING VALUE THROUGH LANDSCAPE DYNAMICS

5.2 EXTRACTION WITHOUT EXPLOITATION

POST-EXTRACTION

4.3 COMMONING THROUGH WATER COLLECTION

5.3 HOUSING AS INFRASTRUCTURAL AGENT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

5.1 IDENTIFYING SALT LAKES AS ABUNDANCE

0.0 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Whilst many projects often start with a particular issue within a specific site context, my enquiry began rather as a reaction against the urban-centric and market-led work that our discipline mostly operate within. Having worked for large international practices in London and Melbourne, there was a personal platform as an aspiring practitioner to explore how landscape architecture might operate beyond the traditional boundaries of the market; finding ways of understanding of how, as landscape architects, can offer alternative ontologies for some of the most economically and environmentally vulnerable communities. What good are we, as ‘environmental stewards’ against the political forces driving climate change, if we are merely designing ‘green-washed’ parks or infrastructures that are often privately financed by the very institutions facilitating today’s accelerating climate catastrophe? Whilst landscape architecture as a discipline cannot solely solve these deeply engrained socioeconomic and cultural issues, we have an ethical responsibility to at least acknowledge our complicity in financing spatial inequalities via values of economic growth – and to more so reveal alternatives in how we may begin to practice beyond design as a commodity, and rather one as a genuine service of delivering care.

00 | INTRODUCTION

$1,800,000,000 OPTUS STADIUM BHP BOARDWALK CHEVRON PARKLAND

UNREHABILITATED MINES

MINING WASTE

POOR HOUSING INFRASTRUCTURE

$10,000,000 BHP WATER PARK, PERTH

~<$700 MEDIAN INCOME IN NORSEMAN (NICKEL MINING TOWN)

INTRODUCTION

Quick schematic collage of the traces our work as landscape architects leave, despite crowning ourselves as environmental stewards of equality

Landscape architects can, and should, no longer kid themselves that the profession’s hegemonic focus towards the scale of urban-centric ecomimetic parks and green infrastructures can offer any type of planetary agency, in achieving solutions to today’s widening spatial inequalities and climate crisis. To ignore the structural mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism driving these ‘urbanisation’ projects is to be complicit towards how these works’ processes are embedded within more extractive and territorially uneven processes beyond what many conceive as the ‘urban’ boundary. To believe that designing these projects are responding to AILA’s biodiversity and climate change emergency declaration, is like believing pain-relief medication is a cure for a deeper-underlying malignancy - a temporary solution that fails to reveal the roots of a systemic issue signifcantly more large and complex. By understanding landscape through Brenner and Schmid’s frameworks of extended urbanization (2015), the project acknowledges that today’s climate catastrophe cannot simply be addressed through traditional market-led forces in the urban arena. This epoch is an urgent signal for designers to shift away designing within settings of excessive consumption (cities) and instead regions embedded within, and shaped by, landscapes of production and extraction areas often remote, delibrately out of sight, and subsequently excluded in the 21st century’s architectural fetishization of high density living and urban growth.

design is political “How landscape architecture intersects with structural conditions of practice is a real and important question. But those conditions are still less important than the structure of political systems... We should recognize that design’s developed procedures of non-solutionism are uniquely useful in this moment.” Holmes, R. (2020)”The Problem with Solutions”, viewed at < https://placesjournal. org/article/the-problem-with-solutions/>

We need to reveal that equitable climate action cannot solely come from reducing the consumption of the urban citizen, but instead a reconfiguration of structurally declining remote communities of extractinon. These towns, previously reliant on intensive agricultural and and mining economies are becoming increasingly vulnerable to volatile market conditions, and worsening climatic events. Spatialising alternative economies for such remote regions in decline is needed. These areas need one that isn’t based on static econometric principles of growth divorced from the land, but rather one that is deeply responsive to the dynamically changing economic and environmental landscape - responsive to its decline and renewal through values of maintnance, care and repair. Landscape Architecture needs to move beyond its focus on formal urban interventions and instead a return to landscape planning beyond the false dogma of growth, and towards one of degrowth. Through this agenda, the research project situates itself in landscape practice’s ability to reveal, and subsequently reconfigure, the cartographies of the urban in relation to the spatial (re)organization of its remote hinterlands; a design enquiry into alternative spatial contracts for socio-economically declining remote areas in order to live self-sufficiently within its abundance of resources, instead of their current landscapes of economic scarcity.

XXL

0.2 | INTRODUCTION: AN ENQUIRY INTO REMOTENESS

Da win (12.4634 (12.463 2.463 S, 130.8456 E) Darwin

Wyndham (15.4825 S, 128.1228 E)

Port Hedland (20.3107° S, 118.5878° E)

1 E)) Dampier (20.6582 S, 116.7151

Geraldton (28.7774° S, 114.6150° 0° E)

Perth (31.9505 S, 115.8605 E)

Bunbury (33.3256 S, 115.6396 E) E Esperance (33.8608° S, 121.8896° E)

Port Lincoln (34.7240 S, 135.8611 E)

Adelaide (34.9285 9285 S, 138.60 Albany (35.0275° S, 117.8840° E)

Portland (38.3609 S, 141.6041 E)

Number of small towns (pink intensity) in remote Australia in relation to the num of mines (orange intensity)

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WHAT IS REMOTENESS? 1. the state of being distant from something else, in particular from the main centres of population. 2. lack of connection with or relationship to something. 3. Remoteness, according to the Accessibility and Remoteness Index of Australia, categorises areas based on road distance measurements from over 12,000 populated localities to the nearest Service Centres in ﬁve size categories based on population size.

Townsville (19.2590 S, 146.8169 E) To

WHY REMOTENESS? 2%

of Australia’s population remote or very remote areas, which equates to more than 500,000 people

Brisbane (27.4698 S, 153.0251 E)

~160,000

of West Australians live in remote or very remote areas, having the 2nd highest proportion of remote population compared to Northern Territory

Newcastle (32.9283 S, 151.7817 E)

Sydney (33.8688 S, 151.2093 E)

007 E) 00

mber

36%

Melbourne (37.8136 S, 144.9631 E) Geelong (38.1499 S, 144.3617 E) Hastings (38.3060 S, 145.1890 E)

Launceston (41.4332 S, 147.1441 E)

Hobart (42.8221 S, 147.3272 E)

<$500

of Western Australian’s economy was contributed by the mining sector, speciﬁcally from the extraction of iron ore. The 100 Local Government Areas (LGAs) with the lowest median household incomes are almost exclusively remote (and rural/regional)

What if economic and geographic remoteness became an opportunity to establish novel forms of more selfsufﬁcient economies of degrowth?

0.3| INTRODUCTION: A CRITIQUE OF URBAN CENTRIC PRACTICE

DESIGNING FOR THE REMOTE

AGENCY

The project serves as an extension of Lateral Office’s enquiry of the ‘expanded role’ of architecture beyond ‘form-making’ and instead one towards ‘spatial programming’. The framework endgendered within this research posits the landscape architect’s skillset to set up alternative spatial contracts for living remotely (“scripting alternative outcomes”), and to subsequently reveal territorial conditions for mediating inevitable conflicts within these contracts (“negotiating contingencies”). However, whilst the representation of territory for Lateral Office is to operate within it and (re)design, Reassembling the Remote instead looks within a Latourian lense to approach unmaking of remote settlement and economies as a design move in itself - the dissolution of political and property boundaries as to reveal alternative modes of collectively understanding and negotiating space.

UNMAKING

A QUESTION OF AGENCY: UNMAKING ECONOMIC PARAMETERS

def: organization “To organize is not, cannot be, the opposite of disorganizing. To organize is to pick up, along the way and on the ﬂy, scripts with staggered outcomes that are going to disorganize others... Instead of isotopy, it is heterotopy that wins out” Latour, B. (2019) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press: p393

def: subtraction “If subtraction is part of a system of exchange, a function of an active organization of construction and destruction, it is also a positive tool of space making.” Easterling, K. (2003). Subtraction. Perspecta, 34, 80–90.

def: composition Non hierarchical compositions cannot guarantee an open society or equality in politics. Democracy, it has been said, has less to do with the ability to do things as with the ability to undo things. Allen, S. (1999) “Infrstructural Urbanism” in Points and Lines, New Jersey, U.S: Princeton Architectural Press,. p103

XXL

URBANISM BEYOND THE URBAN(E): AN ONTOLOGICAL ENQUIRY FOR THE REMOTE

def: ontology “...formal representation of knowledge in which concepts are described by their meaning and their relationship to each other” Gruber, T. 1993 “Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing” in In International Journal Human-Computer Studies 43, p.907-928 The rural as a resource to be commodoﬁed - same old narrative of growth. (Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/arts/design/rem-koolhaasguggenheim-museum-countryside-exhibition.html)

If we acknowledge that socio-economic spatial displacement and environmental injustices are largely occurring within remote regions of Australia, then why hasn’t the ﬁeld of architecture and landscape architecture properly approached this issue as a structurally spatial one? There is an underlying urgency to remind the profession that market-led solutions have so far failed to resolve today’s pervasive market-driven issues. Similar to the way a chemical equilibrium works, small amounts of ‘tactical urbanism’ approaches cannot complete a full reaction before it is commodiﬁed and captured back within a capitalist framework. Rather, such interventions need to be challenge the economic spatial paradigm entirely by working to dissolve and move beyond the parameters and instruments of capitalism – the very notion of private property itself. This inquiry into exploring alternative mechanisms in which landscape may operate in regional, and economically marginal, areas, was motivated by Koolhaas’ discussion of the rural as a new territory for architects to explore. Whilst he raises necessary provocations about the idea that half of the world still remains in such areas, the opportunities he envisages the rural are engaged with

economically-framed programmes such as the museum, the data centre, the tourist town – programmes that are, at its core, products of the territorially uneven processes of extraction and consumptionthat are significant impacting the economic and environmental wellbeing of these towns. I am a fan of OMA and in particular Reinder De Graaf’s critical awareness of his own practice as a tool for financial speculation. However, if such spatial inequalities evident in today’s cities have been facilitated by forces of the market – why should we begin to believe that similar market-led approaches can sufficiently address problems of structural decline regional towns impacted by the same problem? It is through this pervasive critique of architecture’s recent commodofidied narrative towards designing for the rural that sets up ontological inquiry into how degrowth practices are spatialised, and represented, within structurally declining remote regions, as a means to reveal and tackle socio-economic equities driven by the boom and bust modes of production/extraction economies.

0.4 | A CRITIQUE OF GROWTH

DEGROWTH WITHIN A LANDSCAPE LENSE Extending it through a critique of its anthropocentric approach

def:

“a society of degrowth will have to organize production for its life, and for this reason to reasonably use the resources of its environment and to consume them through tangible properties and services. It will not be done in the iron corset of scarcity, out of needs, in economic calculations or by homo œconomicus. Rediscovered frugality makes it possible to rebuild... a society of abundance on the basis of... an infrastructure in which technology and tools are useful ﬁrst and foremost to create practical values” (Schneider, Kallis, Martinez-Alier 2008)

principles:

Economic Degrowth is an equitable down-scaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level, in the short and long term. (Schneider, Kallis, Martinez-Alier 2008)

how:

DEGROWTH

• Possession instead of ownership • Sharing what you can • Free contributions to the commons instead of equvalent exchanges • Openness and voluntariness

XXL

extension:

def:

DEGROWTH PRINCIPLE: COMMONS “The commons is understood as an assemblage of ﬂuid, dynamic processes that take place in shared contexts and spaces... to talk of commons and commoning is to embrace a different ontological framing.”

EMERGENT FORMS OF HABITATION

CHALLENGING PROPERTY

Helfrich (2017) describes the importance of commoning as a self-organising social process that is always incomplete, openended and dependent on a particular context and social conditions. If this is the case, then this description, lo and behold, sounds very similar to the values we are taught in our landscape architecture discipline and thus presents a signiﬁcant opportunity within our ﬁeld to explore how our profession can spatialise and develop these forms of habitation beyond market-led outcomes.

Hardt and Negri (2009) discuss the commons as not only regarding open access to natural resources and space, but also language, social practices, and modes of sociality that can contest the republic of property - and thus a new kind of resistance to capitalism that is not necessarily a direct political or economical opposition. The conception of the commons as as the spatialisation of the process of doing things together, rather than a formal space, is a trajectory in which landscape architectural methodologies can perhaps be well suited to perform through cartographic techniques - the terms of access in which “are constantly negotiated amongst different actors” (Abmann et al. 2017).

CRITIQUE: POSTHUMAN By acknowledging that the “reiﬁcation and territorialisation” of property has resulted in the land “divorced from other ecological and social entities with which it is networked, concealing and naturalising the power relations imbued therein”, questions arise towards how land ownership can perhaps move beyond the enclosure of cadastral boundaries towards more inclusive, equitable, and accessible conceptions beyond solely monetary value. Brown et al. have opened up discussion on how the territorialization of property has largely excluded, or failed to acknowledge, the “invisible roles that animals have been performing” in regards to contemporary property formations. As such, the study of animal territories may offer new ways of thinking how land ownership may move beyond the demarcation of private property towards one that operates within a multiplicity of ﬁeld conditions - a spatial contract that is continuously broken and (re)

formed, mediated through landscape architectural methodologies that allow the land to be constantly realigned to the ground its situated within and the planetary forces of climate change. The agency of landsape forces is thus an avenue that needs to be acknowledged and facilitated beyond pre-existing defintiions of degrowth as merely a ‘down-scaling of production and consumption’ for the benefit of ‘human wellbeing’ as defined by Schneider et al. Perhaps it is a question of the ‘upscaling’ of production beyond ‘human consumption’; a novel framework that can acknowledge, facilitate and encourage ecological behaviours in degraded landscapes (soil behaviours, natural wind erosion etc) as to regenerate into self-sufficient ecosystems in which humans do not consume within scarcity, but rather co-exist within them.

0.5 | AN ISSUE OF TERRITORY: VALUE AND ECONOMY

AN ISSUE OF TERRITORY:

TERRITORY

Territory as deconstructing framework

WHAT? “Territory can be understood as a political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain... Understanding territory as a political technology is not to deﬁne territory once and for all; rather it is to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it was understood in different historical and geographical contexts. Territory is a historical question: produced, mutable and ﬂuid” Elden, S. (2010) “Land, terrain, territory. Progress in Human Geography,” vol. 34, 6, pp799-817.

WHY? “The system and structures of settler urbanism, including the technocratic standards of design disciplines and spatial orders of projects, need to fundamentally change... bodies cannot be separated from their territories.” Bélanger, P. (2020). No Design on Stolen Land: Dismantling Design’s Dehumanising White Supremacy. Architectural Design, 90(1): pp120-127.

HOW? “The frame is what establishes territory out of the chaos that is the earth. The frame is thus the ﬁrst construction, the corners, of the plane of composition. With no frame or boundary there can be no territory, and without territory there may be objects or things but not qualities that can become expressive, that can intensify and transform living bodies. Territory here may be understood as surfaces of variable curvature or inﬂection that bear upon them singularities, eruptions, or events.” Grosz, E. (2008) Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth: pp12-13

00 | INTRODUCTION

A RECONFIGURATION OF ECONOMY Reterritorialising an economy from growth to degrowth

Capdivela, P. (2018). “The Interior City. Inﬁnity and Concavity in the No-Stop City”. Retrieved at http://oa.upm.es/30573/1/INVE_MEM_2013_172670.pdf: p131

Whilst Bataille’s central notion of the excess is founded upon pretty nebulous falsehoods about solar energy, and the expenditure of it towards ‘luxurious’ social behaviours, it nonetheless provides an initial catalyst In thinking how ‘non-productive’ excesses, within the lense of a general economy, can offer radical but necessary transgressive opportunities for regional territories to be more appropriately assembled in accordance to its remote site’s endemic land conditions; beyond the urban-centric biopolitical organization of subdivided property boundaries based on generic monetary principles. The celebration of such an organization has been explored by Andrea Branzi of Archigram, remarking that the importance of excess in the “weak + diffuse city” where energies of society would be overﬂowing every possible designed form of containment (Rice & Littleﬁeld, 2014). Whilst Branzi is obviously discussing this theory in the rising role of consumption values within cities, his comments remain relevant in the cyclical socio-economic instabilities of post-production/extraction settlements that aren’t supportive, or synonymous, with the outdated rigid infrastructures and property demarcations within these towns.

By acknowledging Bataille’s frameworks of a ‘general’ economy and alternative notions of value as a starting trajectory, how can the techniques of landscape architecture practice offer a way forward into challenging economic structures of property within remote regions thus giving new ideals of value beyond monetary terms, and instead values that are more closely aligned with the repair and remaking of land in post-production and extraction territories? Helen Thomas argues that the ‘process of making architectural drawing embodies potential that is not immediately obvious’, in which it can give ‘access to a non-rational and creative state’ thus challenge hegemonic structures of knowledge and thought’ (Thomas, 2020: p131). Perhaps the investigation of these towns’ mining waste, degraded agricultural land, and decrepid housing infrastructures, can be seen as sites for testing Bataille’s ‘non productive expenditure’ - a way of redistributing excess energy into restructuring the way remote towns operate through new forms of commoning.

0.6| AN ISSUE OF DWELLING

AN ISSUE OF DWELLING:

DWELLING

Notions of dwelling as revealing modes of habitation WHAT? “Dwelling means thinking, but a form of thinking that is aware of its answerability. Dwelling... unfolds into sparing and preserving. The places we inhabit lead to habits, and habitus, sets of structuring dispositions that ground the homology between human ways of being and their natural and social environments. Wolff-Michael, R. (2010) “Dwelling, Building, Thinking: A Post-Constructivist Perspective on Education” pp27-317.

WHY? “The genuine scope of the ethical is not limited to the human or even the sentient; it extends to the whole of entities. It concerns the bearing through which we comport ourselves towards entities, how we hold ourselves in relation to the being of entities, and how we are in turn ourselves held by our being. It concerns whether we dwell poetically upon the earth.” Foltz, B. (1995) Inhabiting the EarthL Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature; pp.161-169

HOW? “We dwell not when solve the problem of displacement, but when we recognize this problem as its own solution. Displacement makes dwelling possible and dwelling exists only when we sever our connection to place... Rather than alienating us from place or afﬁrming our rootednedness in a place...” Lahiji, N. “We Are Already Dwelling” in The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture Bloomsbury p64-65

SPATIALISING HABITATIONS Beyond property

The concept of habitat as a design ecology within architecture is nothing new - French Greek architect George Candilis spoke about how habitat is a conceptual and semantical tool for understanding “speciﬁc private dwelling practice, and its cultural, climatic and territorial surrounding”, speciﬁcally in ho regards to the overall environment in which “humanity” dwells. However, whilst this discourse within was and still provides a useful platform approaching designs of territories that understand architecture beyond as an isolated function, it nonetheless falls in the familiar trap of an anthropocentric and urbancentric approach – and continues to be written within an urban discourse (see van dan Huevel 2020). In order to approach how territorial inquiries may bring about new spatial understandings of dwelling within remote areas, the notion of habitat, or rather habitation (aka to habit), is a theoretical position in which designing/mapping new forms of collective ownership are tested beyond property boundaries. Extending on Lefebvre’s comments on habituating as useful ‘functional, multifunctional and transfunctional’ activity in building upon an ‘urban ecological lexicon (van Huevel p33), this

concept can argueably be more useful in reorganising remote territories based on relational flows of population and socio-economic decline, instead of static boundaries of property valued by urban-centric financial institutions. Habitat as a concept, when being understood from outside of investigated territory, obviously reeks of colonial overtones – and never so more explicit when being understood through techniques of surveying and map-making, both through analytical and generative methodologies. I can’t stress enough how much this has rattle me throughout the year-long investigation, which has constantly been pulling me into questioning the outcome of this project and reflecting on my role as a landscape architect attempting to reveal or challenge alternatives to structural issues facilitated by Western and colonial thought in the first place. Thus, this enquiry can no longer be stressed more as a provocation or platform to reveal how we as built environment professionals may approach territories beyond abstract paradigms of economic growth, and instead ones more sufficiently aligned with the landscapes we are situated upon.

1.0| DESIGN METHODOLOGY

0.1 DESIGN METHODOLOGY

Markers articulate the territory while allowing for openness, freedom, and emergence; designing in markers means to bring in time - to talk about the present while being oriented into the future... they guide territory production as a process of constant becoming. One could argue that the world is overly marked, demarcated, divided, and appropriated. Is it really necessary then to mark it out even more in order to set out to discover the possibility of something new? Most likely not. Thinking design through markers is even more than with making and territoiralizing concerned with unmaking and deterritorialising. Prezelg, B. (2016) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Unfamiliar Territoryâ&#x20AC;?, viewed on March 2020 at < http://barbaraprezelj.com/research/>

01| DESIGN FRAMEWORK

SPATIALISING DEGROWTH: Map-Making as an operative design tool MAP AS FIELD PROPERTY

DESIGN AS POLITICAL FIELD: ANDREA BRANZI

GROWTH

Whilst I disagree with the Marxist ideological logic running through many of Archizoom’s work, as well as their urban-centric focus, their designs nonetheless provide a starting point to investigate how the grid becomes a tool for generating design conditions rather than the outcome itself, beyond market subjectiﬁcation of property as a bounded commodity and rather one that dynamically interacts with one another. BOUNDARIES

NETWORK

FIELD

MAP AS PROTOCOL DESIGN AS MATRIX: CEDRIC PRICE If we understand degrowth as not the alternative, but rather a matrix of alternatives which re-opens a space for creativity by raising the heavy blanket of economic totalitarianism (Latouche 1986), then design propositions must spatially be informed by a matrix of options - rather than a holistic vision. Cedric Price’s cybernetic thinking, evident throughout his “Fun Palace” and “Potteries Thinkbelt” proposal could provide platforms in thinking how open frameworks can offer new ways of organising, and subsequently assembling, territories of degrowth.

DEGROWTH

NETWORK

MAP AS INSTRUMENT

BOUNDARIES THROUGH MARKERS

POSSESSION/ COMMONS

DESIGN AS INFRASTRUCTURE: SMOUT ALLEN A core element of Smout Allen’s practice is the reworking, or reinterpreting, of ‘landscape’ through architectural production. Their work delves into ignored themes of agriculture and the ‘countryside’, exploring how land has been shaped within strategies of mechanisation, irrigation, and inhabitation. A technique of which they test these enquiries is through the hybridisation of drawing and modelmaking, often speculating on alternative infrastructural interventions that both simultaneously respond to and shape dynamic environmental conditions upon environmental surroundings of which they are situated.

XXL

LANDSCAPE AS POLITICAL FIELD “loosely bound aggregates characterized by porosity and local interconnectivity, overall shape and extent are highly fluid and less important than the internal relationship of parts, which determine the behavior of the field . . . field conditions are bottom-up phenomena, defined not by overarching geometrical schemas but by intricate local connections”

LANDSCAPE AS MATRIX PROTOCOLS a speciﬁc mapping format that reads reality in a protocolized way, regulating the transmission of information between different aspects of reality based on a series of design rules. They inform a design by determining the issues, the decision loci, and the control parameters.

Cedric Price’s “Fun Palace” and “Potteries Thinkbelt” (currently being investigated further) are precedents that serve as a catalyst about reorganising landscape systems based on matrix methodologies

LANDSCAPE AS INFRASTRUCTURE

INSTRUMENTS An instrument-map is a tool for the speciﬁc resolution of design aspects that have been problematized from noncartographic approaches. Such issues within the project may include problems of water scarcity that cannot necessarily be mapped with existing data, but is assumed in remote Australia’s climate.

3. Frame

6. Faggots/Groynes

4. Buoys

5. Hulks

8. Beams/Arcs

1. Timber Props

2. Gardens

Tracings of Smout Allen’s “Retreating Village” and assembling them into a kit of parts; bringing understands into how drawing allows slippage between plan, section, axonometric.

02| DESIGN FRAMEWORK

SPATIALISING THE APPROACH XL

TERRITORIAL ENQUIRY OF REMOTENESS AND

A commitment on behalf of an agent towards the institution to adhere to its norms and moral responsibilities

EXTRACTION

ISSUES

PRODUCTION

1) SOCIAL CONTRACT:

S2 KAlSi3O8 PbS

PHASE 1: LA AS CONTRACT GENERATION A provisional organization of expressions that produce objects, or forms, according to a code or particular format (Berardi 2014, p136)

PROTOCOL COMMUNITY

VULNERABILITY

L ORGANISATION

LA AS CONTRACT-MAKER

An organisation involves the arranging of elements, or entities, in such a way where they strictly follow a format that enables automated processes to operate between them, rather than allowing autonomous mechanisms within each individual component.

Critique of property and urban-centric practices of growth as solution

IMMATERIAL CODING

OWTH DEGR CO MM O

POSTEXTRACTION

CARE

ESS ACC

POSTCIVILIZATION

POSTPRODUCTION NCY CIE FFI SU

MAP-MAKING AS PROTOCOL

MY NO TO AU

ABUN DA NC

2) MEDIATION: The intervention of a third party in order to facilitate the resolution of a dispute between two parties

ECONOMY

MAP-MAKING AS INSTRUMENT

OWNERSHIP

Hybridising and negotating various landuse objectives

PHASE 2: LA AS MEDIATOR EMERGENCE “the surfacing of a concatenation that did not exist before” through “the autonomous expression of an unprecedented form” (Berardi, 2014: p191)

INSTRUMENT

LA AS MEDIATOR ASSEMBLAGE Paraphrasing the works of Deleuze and Latour’s ANT, an assemblage describes a collection of things that are organized themselves as to respond to not just them as a whole but in response to their individual functions - thus not responding to a particular format (organization) but responding dynamically between each themselves and a group as a whole

RECONFIGURE

REPAIR

RETREAT

ALTERNATIVE NOTIONS OF DWELLING REMOTELY

MATERIAL NON-CODING

XXL

IDENTIFYING AGENTS WITHIN REMOTE WESTERN AUSTRALIA

BRIEF GOVERNMENT

With increasing pressure on effective economic resource allocation and support within remote regions of Western Australia, the government seeks to identify structurally declining towns in the state and to spatialise new forms of self-sufﬁcient economies beyond the reliance of boom-bust- cycles inherent within modes of extraction and production. The landscape architect is called in to speculate upon how remote communities may inhabit their own regions beyond economic value and one more tied to equitable access to their resources.

MINING

With the renewable energy market expected to increase dramatically in the coming decades, big mining companies are aware that groundwater discharge back into salt lakes may be an issue in surrounding conservation areas regarding groundwater contamination. Mining companies thus seek of novel ways of how such discharge may be effectively dealt whilst allowing for for conservation and extraction practices to co-exist.

AGRICULTURALISTS

Tired of an exclusive market and increasingly frequent and severe environment events impacting their agricultural yield, many small farm landholders are inclined to leave their land behind. However, the stoic attitudes many of these farming communities have demonstrate their deep ties and pride associated with the care of their land - an opportunity to engage with regenerative ‘agrarian’ practices that allows them to live more self-sufﬁciently as a collective, rather than as competitiors

COMMUNITY

With inevitable population decline and lack of available tourist and mining jobs, the livilihoods and cohesion of remote commnuities is gradually becoming fractured and inactive. Such communities express an interest in how such regions can be reinvograted through new forms of labor beyond a global market that has failed to look after them - and with it a new sense of collective belonging.

02| WESTERN AUSTRALIA LANDUSE CONTEXT: CONFLICTS

0.2 XL

Landuse map of Australia - note the large amounts of minimal use, native titel and nature conservation areas in its remote parts despite being deeply affected by mining activity.

If we are to begin addressing spatial inequities within remote parts of Western Australia then we must ďŹ rst acknowledged the issue of current landuse (LAS) as a representational concern. As mentioned by Williamson (2008), landuse boundaries have been facilitated through cadastral surveys in identifying and subdividing land into registry systems as to support practices of land trading for both government and private actors. Thus, if we acknowledge that the act of making these boundaries are merely biopolitical tools in creating development or growth, then we can understand as to why these frameworks urgently need to be challenged when we are dealing with remote regions that inevitably face structural decline . This then becomes a representational issue in how landscape architectural techniques can reveal alternative modes of landuse within an economy of degrowth, beyond the parameters of the market, through the deterritorialization of these boundaries more closely attuned to the landscape itself; speciďŹ cally Western Australiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s erosive and saline landscape that is problematized as an economic issue with areas of production and extraction. Map-making becomes a key operation in pursuing this investigation by becoming both an analytical and generative design tool.

XXL

02| WESTERN AUSTRALIA LANDUSE CONTEXT: CONFLICTS

AN ISSUE OF LANDUSE PLANNING

Finding intersections of mining, conservation and agricultura landuse as a site where these boundaries practices can perhaps hybridise within remote degrowth economies

AGRICULTURE: WESTERN AUSTRALIA’S WHEATBELT With increasing issues of drought, water security, lower soil fertility, salinity - and compounded with increasing tariffs and price votality, many agricultural areas in Western Australia are struggling to stay aﬂoat. Particularly within the eastern Wheatbelt and south east coast, many farmers are increasingly vulnerable to decreasing economic mobility and environmental catastrophes. The intensive production of crops unsuitable for the soil and water retain on this land thus signals an urgent call to rethink how failing agricultural land might be differently occupied and repaired - particularly those living in remote regions with lack of other economic opportunities.

MINING: WILUNA-NORSEMAN GREENSTONE BELT Something has to be said about how resilient Western Australia’s economy has been to global market collapses due to its diverse portfolio of gold, and other rare earth minerals within its still underexplored greenstone belt - at the time of writing, Australia’s impact by COVID-19 has been largely unaffected due to WA’s mining industry. However, the management of its mining populations during times of economic decline have been shameful considering the huge amounts of profit generated by such ventures, and consistently leave behind towns to fend for themselves once the economic opportunity has dbeen exploited and dried up. Remote towns currently going in structural decline are in desperate need of reconfiguration and maintenance, and new forms of community engagement and labour that operate beyond the shortage of economic opportunities. Given many of these towns are situated adjacent to old mining sites, wastes, and areas of geologic significance, there is surely some available material to be gleaned from that can be of value for self-sufficient forms of energy production.

CONSERVATION: GREATER WESTERN WOODLANDS Sitting in between and amongst Western Australia’s intensive regions of production and extract exists the Greater Western Woodlands region (only named 15 years ago), known as one of the largest and healthiest woodlands in a Mediterranean climate remaining on Earth. The boundaries establish the region as a carbon sink storing over 950 million tonnes of carbon stored in the vegetation and soil. The conﬂicting intersections of mining and agricultural activites only begin to reveal the vulnerability of this landscape to negative anthropocentric impacts – uncontrolled bushﬁres, overgrazing, and biodiversity decline to name a few. Its remoteness and subsequent ‘economic unviability’ can perhaps indicate its land tenure allocation; 60% of its area as unallocated Crown Land (UCL), 20% of the area as pastoral leases often with impacts of overgrazing, with the remaining 20% of the land allocated as various types of Conservation protection classes. How can this region be cared for in a way that simultaneously gives back to the many remote communities associated with this landscape?

XXL

02| STATEWIDE STRATEGY 112.00 -11.00

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128.00

129.00 -11.00

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

PILBARA

GOLDFIELDS -ESPERANCE

MID-WEST

-12.00

-13.00

-13.00 MINING 36% of STATEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S GDP

-14.00

CRITICAL COMMODITIES

Fe Tn Mn

Fe Au Cu

Ni Au Cu

FORECAST GROWTH: ++ POPULATION: 60,000

-15.00

-14.00

FORECAST GROWTH: POPULATION: 60,000

FORECAST GROWTH: + POPULATION: 52,000

-15.00

-16.00

-17.00

-18.00

-19.00

-20.00

-20.00 PORT HEDLAND -21.00

-21.00

-22.00

-23.00

-23.00 NEWMAN -24.00

-24.00

-25.00

-26.00

-26.00 WILUNA -27.00

-27.00

-28.00

STATE BARRIER FENCE

-28.00 LAVERTON

LEGEND -29.00

-29.00

Density of abandoned, existing and proposed nickel mines or deposits

WUBIN Minimal landuse area graded depending on proximity to salt lakes

-30.00

Existing Conservation Zones within or intersecting minimal landuse areas

-31.00

KAMBALDA

-31.00

Rotated conservation zones as potential extension of areas

-32.00

PERTH Salt lake areas (seasonal)

NORSEMAN Towns along major transport corridors: outline indicates population size relative to BUNBURY each other (on a logairthmic scale)

-33.00

ESPERANCE

-34.00

ALBANY

-35.00

-36.00

-36.00 112.00

113.00

114.00

115.00

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SALT LAKES AS OVERARCHING CURATORIAL STRATEGY Future landscape of extraction and production is inevitable as mining stakeholders venture out further into the depths of the outback where it is often seen unhospitable for human inhabitation, particularly given the ever increasing demand for rare earths and lithium/nickel mienrals associated with renewable energy production. However, mining’s current narrative of pillaging without rehabilitation is no longer acceptable with McGowan’s government – he takes note of the importance of how humans must have a more transactional relationship in the way the treat the land, similar to the Aboriginal Australians have had on their unceded land for more than 50,000 years. Areas of historical mining activity have subsequently suffered both environmental and economic degradation, and are thus in urgent need of revitalisation beyond the generic ‘tourism’ interventions no longer valid in a COVID-19 society. Hybridising territorial relationships between mining and conservation become key to developing such strategies, understanding that the two can no longer be seen as binary ‘conflicting’ landuses, but rather a holistic system with interacting spatio-temporal negotiations. The application of field conditions revealing existing nickel sites, mining waste, conservation boundaries, and minimal landuse areas, allows for the de and reterritorializing of how previously separated policies can begin to be spatially reconfigured as markers of disposition operating between one another. An alternative spatial paradigm emerges where both mining and conservation operations can work alongside over one another. The density of field conditions, overlaid on minimal landuse areas often aligned with both geographical and economical remoteness, are revealed through field operations - allowing for the government to zoom in along the Norseman-Esperance corridor where a post-extraction economy, beyond monetary means, is necessary for the structural longevity of these outback settlements.

XXL

03|STATE-WIDE STRATEGY

LAYERS: SALT LAKES

Salt Lakes

Conservation landuse and minimal landuse, with darker squares proxomity to resource rich salt lakes.

Nickel mine intensity and distribution throughout Western Australia

XXL

Testing new connections of conservation based on prxomity to salt lakes through rotation

03|STATE-WIDE STRATEGY

SALT LAKE NETWORK AS CURATORIAL STRATEGY: HYBRIDISING EXTRACTION, PRODUCTION & CONSERVATION

NORSEMAN

DUNDAS NATURE RESERVE

FRANK HAHN NATIONAL RESERVE

GRIFFITHS NATURE RESERVE

GRASS PATCH

ESPERANCE

XXL

DETERRITORIALISING SALT LAKE BODIES INTO FIELD NETWORK IDENTIFY With the majority of Western Australia’s salt lakes having already been charted and extracted for its Li-Ni-U-K rich mineral supplies, what seemingly remains left are much smaller salt lakes that run along, and between, the salt lake’s ancient paleolithic drainage network. A Grasshopper script is employed to identify the smallest 90% salt lake bodies in the state, that may have previously been ignored due to the low economic yield because of their remote locations, insigniﬁcant size and lack of groundwater. However, these untapped salt lakes explore potential for nearby remote communities to engage with as a renewable resource. A Grasshopper script is employed to identify the smallest 90% salt lake bodies in the state, revealing that many of these lakes are often sited within vast minimal landuse areas and the edge of the Wheatbelt’s agricultural regions – areas where existing townships are experiencing population and structural decline.

CONNECT The extracted salt lakes, represented through boundaries that falsely construct their characteristics as static/permanent rather than dynamic/temporal, are subsequently deterritorialized into a network of overlapping lines. New corridors are created by which new hybrid mining-conservation practices can be operated upon, and between, the salt lakes. The network raises questions of how infrastructural mining typologies, such as tailing sites and landﬁlls, can co-exist within new conservation corridors.

ASSIGN The intersection of these lines, and the resulting density of these points, are calculated and reterritorialized into ﬁeld markers and conditions. The size of these markers indicate a new set of values between these salt lakes – a value that reveals a more intense area for connectivity between these salt lakes between operated upon. This generated some questions in how communities might accest this network based on ﬁeld values, if we are to speculate that a network of higher number of connections may perhaps be more resilient towards anthropogenic/terraforming interventions.

03|STATE-WIDE STRATEGY

DETERRITORIALISING LANDUSE 121.500 E

32.000 S

121.000 E

122.000 E

122.500 E

122.000 E

122.500 E

RECONFIGURE

32.500 S

REAPPROPRIATE

33.000 S

REPAIR

33.500 S

121.000 E

121.500 E

XXL

LANDUSE LAYERS

Intensity of agricultural parcels

Intensity of salt lake landuse

Intensity of areas with lack of conservation and minimal landuse.

Intensity of mining activity (Both mines and prospecting points)

03|REGIONAL STRATEGY

DETERRITORIALISING LAND CONDITIONS 120.500 E

121.000 E

121.500 E

122.000 E

122.500 E

32.000 S

123.000 E

32.000 S

NORSEMAN 1

32.500 S

2 33.000 S

33.000 S

SALMON GUMS

3 33.500 S

33.500 S

ESPERANCE

120.500 E

121.000 E

121.500 E

122.000 E

122.500 E

123.000 E

TERRITORIAL TYPOLOGIES 1

SALT LAKE MINING NETWORK BUSHFIRE AFFECTED AREAS 2020 EXISTING CONSERVATION LANDUSE UNEXPLORED MINING TENEMENTS

THICK SALT LAKE MINING NETWORK LITHIUM MINING OPERATIONS SMALL AGRICULTURAL PLOTS UNEXPLORED MINING TENEMENTS

SALT LAKE MINING NETWORK LARGE AGRICULTURAL PLOTS MILDLY EROSIVE SOIL

REVEALING ISSUES OF LAND DEGRADATION IN REMOTE REGIONS

In a landscape susceptible to increasing frequency and severity of wildﬁres, how can Western Australia’s abundance of salt lake landscapes offer a new scenario for a settlement typologies of retreat – a momentary escape both from the hyperobjects of climate change and the global mining economy?

On more successful agricultural land where plots are larger and less prone to wind erosion, how can prospective mining stakeholders engage in extraction that offers economic and environmental return for farmers?

On smaller agricultural land that is rife with wind erosion and littered with ephemeral salt lakes, how can the procurement process of plots into mining tenements be reimagined in a way that works with the erosive landscape and restore habitat from cleared vegetation?

“infrastructures and flows of material have become more significant than static political and spatial boundaries . . . familiar urban typologies of square, park, district, and so on are of less use or signifcance than are the infrastructures, network flows, ambiguous spaces, and other polymorphous conditions that constitute the contemporary metropolis” Alex Wall, “Programming the UrbanSurface,” in Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).

XXL

03|REGIONAL STRATEGY

TERRITORIAL TEST: PROCESS OF ACCUMULATION

GRASS PATCH

How may landscape interventions offer new ways of dissolving property boundaries within agricultural land parcels?

XXL

TEST: PROCESSES OF SUBSTITUTION TRANSFORMING MARGINAL AGRICULTURAL LANDUSE INTO HYBRID-MINING CONSERVATION LANDSCAPES ND

GRASS PATCH

[OFFSET]

[LAYER]

[EXTRACT]

As agricultural parcels are accumulated based on their area, a 800m buffer zone is required as per government rules for to prevent human interaction with sulphide dust inevitable within nickel extraction procedures. Surrounding agricultural farms that are within the perimeters of these buffer zones are subsequently transformed into conservation parcels through ‘carbon farming’ initiatives.

These buffer zones overlap one another over time, often over existing or past mined areas. The spatial contract requires that buffer zones are to be invested with a certain amount of rehabilitation/conservation labour in order to improve both the soil condition and wind erosion susceptibility exacerbated by agricultural production. Foreseen zones where buffer zones do not overlap become markers for temporary settlements, thus establishing new N-S infrastructural links towards the coast as mining exploration expands eastward.

Overlapping buffer regions are deterritorialised into ﬁeld conditions, revealing a new distribution of conservation practices throughout the failing Wheatbelt regions. Adjacent agricultural landowners are subsequently encouraged to contribute to this growing conservation territory as the beneﬁts of carbon-farming are revealed more explicitly.

CARBON FARMING AND PHYTO-MINING “It’s 2030 and landscape architecture studios around the world are filled with speculative metal-harvesting plant designs—contaminated landscapes laced with gardens of hardy, sap-producing trees— even as industrial behemoths, like Rio Tinto and Barrick Gold, are breeding proprietary tree species in top-secret labs, genetically modifying them to maximize metal uptake. Weird saps accumulate in iridescent lagoons. Autumn leaves glint, literally metallic, in the sun. Tiny metal capillaries weave up the trunks of black-wooded trees, in filigrees of gold and silver. The occasional forest fire smells not of smoke, but of copper and tin.” Manaugh, G. “Forest Accumulator”, viewed 24th May 2020 at < http://www.bldgblog.com/tag/mines/>

03|REGIONAL STRATEGY

ONTOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS OF DEGROWTH: HABITATIONS OF REPAIR, RECONFIGURATION, AND REAPPROPRIATION FIELD def:

REPAIR to put something that is damaged, broken, or not working correctly, back into good condition or make it work again. to return to one’s country; frequent or habitual visiting of a place.

def:

RECONFIGURE to change the structure or arrangement of something NORSEMAN

Abbotshall Gold Mine [-32.24236,121.70936]

Mount Dean Mine [-33.35231,123.6259]

DUNDAS

def:

REAPPROPRIATE employ or adapt something for a use different from its original purpose

Phoenix Gold Mine Under Care [32° S , 121° East]

INSTRUMENT PROTOCOLS

XXL XL L M S XS

AREAS OF LOW DEPRESSION ARE EXXAGERATED TO CREATE EVAPORATIVE BASINS AND RESDISTRIBUTION OF SUBSOIL

CASCADE OF SALT COLLECTION PONDS PROVIDE ENERGY AND INFORM FUTURE LOCATIONS

MOBILE HOUSING INFRASTRUCTURES ASSEMBLED VIA WIND DIRECTION AND INTENSITY

03|RECONFIGURE 121.500 E

32.000 S

121.000 E

122.000 E

122.500 E

122.000 E

122.500 E

RECONFIGURE RECON NFIGURE NFIGURE NF

32.500 S

REAPPROPRIATE REAPPR R EAPPPPPPROP ROP R O E

33.000 S

REPAIR AIIR A R

33.500 S

LEGEND INTENSITY OF AGRICULTURAL LANDUSE INTENSITY OF MINING ACTIIVITY (EXPLORATION/PROSPECTING/MINING) DENSITY OF AREA WITH CONSERVATION LANDUSE VALLEY HAZARD AREAS INTENSITY OF SALT LAKE AREAS

121.000 E

121.500 E

XXL

SITE: NORSEMAN [32.1978° S, 121.7789° E]

0.5 Whilst Norseman and its surrounds has been one of the longest running mining town in WA for nearly a hundred years, the town is in economic decline due to mining inactivity, and subsequently access to these food and water through commodified and outdated infrastructural services becomes difficult and scarce. How can the town’s transition into a degrowth community, away from the reliance of market-led services, be revealed through new operations of territorial reconfigurations? What if the abundance of mining waste, salty groundwater, and vacant lots were the conditions to test new modes of commoning beyond values of property?

RECONFIGURE def: to change the structure or arrangement of something

03|RECONFIGURE

REVEALING LAND RESOURCES: RECONFIGURING AN ECONOMY BASED ON THE LAND

NORSEMAN

Abbotshall Gold Mine [-32.24236,121.70936]

Mount Dean Mine [-33.35231,123.6259]

DUNDAS

Scotia Gold Mine Active [-32.69978,121.70833]

Phoenix Gold Mine Under Care [32° S , 121° East]

NORSEMAN

Phoenix Gold Mine Under Care [32° S , 121° East]

Abbotshall Gold Mine [-32.24236,121.70936]

DUNDAS

IDENTIFY

Areas of exposed outcrops, often associated with mining exploration and areas of rockhole distribution.

Intensity of exposed outcrops and saprolite often associated with water collection

Areas of dense vegetation based on intensity

XXL

NORSEMAN

Phoenix Gold Mine Under Care [32° S , 121° East]

Abbotshall Gold Mine [-32.24236,121.70936]

Mount Dean Mine [-33.35231,123.6259]

Phoenix Gold Mine Under Care [32° S , 121° East]

Abbotshall Gold Mine [-32.24236,121.70936]

Mount Dean Mine [-33.35231,123.6259]

DUNDAS

CONNECT + OFFSET

Create new corridor for agriculture/ mining intervention based on saprolitic distribution

Intensity of mining activity

Areas of bare soil based on intensity

DUNDAS

CONNECT

Identify areas for mining in between agricultural areas that can then be reconstructed as conservation corridors

03|RECONFIGURE

NORSEMAN: A TOWN IN POPULATION AND ECONOMIC DECLINE

DAM

OUTDATED INFRASTRUCTURE LAKE COWAN

50% VACANT PROPERTIES

POOR HOUSING STOCK

MINING TAILINGS

XXL

A QUESTION OF MINING WASTE: AN ABUNDANCE OF WASTE IS A WASTE OF ABUNDANCE OPERATING BETWEEN AGRICULTURAL AND MINING LANDSCAPES: PRODUCTION/EXTRACTION SPATIAL CONTRACT: RENT THROUGH VOLUME

rent reassemble

MT DEANS PEGMATITE FIELDS

disassemble

expanding mining tenement

3 5

1 4

LEGEND

For every tonne of copper extracted 99 tonnes of waste material must also be removed... gold extraction is even worse! Source: https://www.safewater.org/fact-sheets-1/2017/1/23/miningandwaterpollution

IDENTIFIED SAPROLITIC GROUND AND ROCKY OUTCROPS

ROTATING KEYLINE PLANTING (REGEN AGRICULTURE)

LANDUSE THROUGH SUBSTITUTION

TYPICAL MINING SETTLEMENT

1 2 3 4 5

ROTATE REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURAL PLOTS EVERY 5-7 YEARS THROUGH BURNOFFS MINING WASTE TO BE REDISTRIBUTED WITHIN PAST AGRICULTURAL PLOTS FOR PHYTOMINING PHYTOMINING PLANTATIONS BURNED THROUGH SMALL SCALE BIOMASS GENERATOR + COLLECTED MINERALS ACCUMULATED AND STORED. ‘HOUSING AS INFRASTRUCTURE’ TO REASSEMBLE AROUND MINING WASTE AND LAKES PIT LAKES SLOWLY FILL UP FOR FUTURE FLOATING SOLAR FARMS AND WATER EXTRACTION

1 square = 100x100m

The accumulation of mining landuse parcels is visibly rooted in the expansion and charted mechanisms of today’s resource economy – 10 year exploration licences, often leading into 30-40 years of extraction that intermittently come in and out of maintenance. What is often not revealed, however, is the displacement of the ground into limitless tailing landfills – invisible to the urban citizen that contributes to the consumption of the minerals extracted, yet visible to the remote communities that are endowed the responsibility of taking on this unrefined, excess mass without the economic rewards they deserve. Tailing sites and landfills accumulate into property that currently offers no economic, social or environmental value to the vulnerable communities that take them on, and are instead privatized into assets, bought out by multinational waste corporations , by which remote councils end up paying for themselves. Landfills and waste disposals thus become an opportunity for landscape architects to intervene when addressing that abundance of waste coming out of these mines is, in fact, a waste of abundant matter yet to be more cleverly integrated in its productive capacity to enable self-sufficiency in volatile remote economies rooted in mining’s boom-and-bust activities. A critique of the mechanisms of private property is crucial here – the allocation of 2D bounded parcels for waste is insufficient when acknowledging the immense volume that is accumulated, dispossessed and displaced from WA’s limitless extraction operations. Through mapping as a design tool, redistribution of mining waste as a state-wide infrastructural corridor is explored through the deterritorialization of landuses into field conditions and networks – as a terraforming landscape project that treats waste as an energy-rich commons for the communities it traverses.

gypsum Inactive Scotia Gold/Nickel Mine

saprolite saprolite

bedrock

03|RECONFIGURE

IDENTIFYING AREAS OF INTERVENTION: DETERRITORIALISING VACANT LOTS

IDENTIFY (BOUNDARIES)

CONNECT (NETWORK)

XXL

IDENTIFYING AREAS OF INTERVENTION: DETERRITORIALISING LANDSCAPE VALUE

IDENTIFY (BOUNDARIES)

CONNECT (NETWORK)

03|RECONFIGURE

BUILDING DENSITY

PROJECTING FURTHER DECLINE: DETERRITORIALISING ECONOMIC WORTH

+10 YEARS

+20 YEARS

+30 YEARS

XXL

FIELD CONDITIONS FOR DEGROWTH RECONFIGURATION

03|RECONFIGURE

PROTOCOLS OF RECONFIGURATION: SODIC SOIL BEHAVIOUR AS ORGANISING PRINCIPLE

ERODED SOIL

VEGETATION COVER

ACTIVATION OF SODIC SOIL