The question then became whether molecular or atomic “populations” of all natures…would continue to bombard the existing people to train it or control it or annihilate it—or if other molecular populations were possible, could slip into the first and give rise to a people yet to comeDeleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
The conditions addressed by the AA’s Landscape Urbanism programme — the nascent tourist economies of the United Arab Emirates, sites of environmental and so-called ‘natural disasters’, and the phenomenal scale and speed of industrialisation and urbanisation underway in China — invite other formulations of urban morphology, environmental dynamics, and socio-economic process to those employed in the decampment model by Charles Waldheim in his account of a post-industrial, post-Fordist North American city like Detroit.
These other sites are not abandoned and depopulated zones produced in the wake of mobile capital, but territories in the thick of the turbulent conditions of urban transformation and realignment it produces as it moves across the planet. In these zones mobile capital runs head on into the resistance and friction of existing ecologies, which are always, as Guattari has outlined, environmental, social and subjective. As such they render questions of building, architecture, inhabitation and populations a place of importance absented from other currents of Landscape Urbanism.
If such conditions, and the opportunities they present, are to be addressed through the medium of landscape, in its fullest sense, then some account of how landscape can be thought in relation to the subject and the built environment is required.
This lecture addresses these conditions through their historical precedents and a critical account of how they have been modelled and how they might be thought and practised.
