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How can we map the urbanization of the planet? In confronting this question, the Urban Theory Lab interrogates hegemonic ideologies of the “urban” condition and their embodiment in putatively authoritative data on population, land cover, and land use. Reversing the conventional, city-centric metageography of urbanization, which emphasizes the spatial concentration of human activities, our work explores the role of operational landscapes beyond the city (zones of agriculture, extraction, forestry, and fishing), as well as planetary geopolitical and logistical infrastructures, as essential supports for urban life. From this point of view, the geographies of contemporary urbanization encompass much of the planet, including apparently remote areas, wildlands, and oceans, as well as subterranean zones (mines, waste dumps) and satellite orbits. Cities are not only producers of value, but entropic black holes that consume surpluses produced elsewhere and dissipate waste into the planetary biosphere. Non-city spaces are, correspondingly, the metabolic foundations and “sacrifice zones” of planetary urbanization.
These visual speculations are intended to explore the analytical and imaginative work that can be done through the critical (re)deployment of geospatial data to subvert triumphalist, city-centric narratives and visualizations of contemporary urbanization. By illustrating how radically divergent cartographies of an urbanized planet can be constructed using readily available forms of spatial and environmental data, our work seeks to interrupt the authoritative, scientific “aura” that often pervades conventional engagements with geospatial information. Rather than offering a photographic, mimetic or objective “capture” of ground-conditions, our visual interventions invite viewers to question their own cognitive maps of contemporary urbanization, and to imagine new urban worlds that might more fully embody our collective aspirations.