ARTD6323 (2027-28)
Ecologies and Policies of Space
In this module, you will learn how to critically examine the political and ecological implications of how space is produced, governed, and experienced. You will research key theoretical and systemic frameworks of political ecology and spatial justice to evaluate how these impact urgent global issues such as climate breakdown, urban inequality, and territorial fragmentation. You will use critical thinking, ideation, and design analysis to propose spatial strategies that seek to reveal, resist, or reconfigure these conditions. On this module, you will build a vital vocabulary to analyse the spatial implications of design decisions within cross-cultural case studies, political, and environmental contexts.
You will be asked to investigate ecologies, policies and politics of spaces in which we undo our structural knowledge and instead absorb learning at the intersections. Specifically, we will consider the design of spatial, political, and social systems that are uncharted, marginalized, uninhabitable, or rapidly shifting, and where traditional knowledge fails and new, often speculative, frameworks emerge.
Spaces investigated will include, but are not limited to the urban, the empty, the ruined, spaces in the ecosphere, spaces of surveillance, digital and AI space, utopic and dystopic space, and spaces of the future – science fiction, extraterrestrial space, and post-anthropic realms.
This module highlights the production of ignorance, the "slow violence" of environmental change, the policies and practices of spaces in our late Anthropocene and our struggle as designers to define and connect and imagine the unknown in the post-Anthropocene.
