EL
E.L. Longhin
info
Please Note
<p>This page displays the records of the person named above and is not linked to a unique person identifier. This record may need to be merged to a profile.</p>
2 records found
1
We live in a state of false abundance—a condition first articulated in the nineteenth century and later expanded through contemporary ecological critique—in which the apparent prosperity of modern consumption depends upon the systematic depletion of soils and territories that sustain human and more-than-human life. This depletion is structured by global markets demanding cheap food, labor, energy, and raw materials, and is enacted through extractive mining, industrial agriculture, infrastructural expansion, and large-scale construction. By abstracting material origins and obscuring ecological thresholds, extractive regimes normalize exhaustion while disproportionately burdening structurally marginalized communities.
Against this backdrop, cities and landscapes are not only shaped by depletion but actively reproduce it. Depletion forms the soils we become-with and co-produce, just as it conditions our design practices—whether acknowledged or not. It also shapes our collective future as climate change, climate-induced migration, and territorial instability demonstrate that environmental damage accumulates rather than resolves itself. Yet the study of soil—its cycles, dynamics, and transformations—has largely remained outside the core of design curricula and practice. Depletion therefore demands a reframing of disciplinary agency. As landscape architects, urban designers, artists, and thinkers increasingly turn their attention to soil and its exhaustion, this issue seeks to amplify emerging interdisciplinary thought and support the articulation of design’s agency under conditions of depletion.
This issue of the Journal of Delta Urbanism reframes (soil) depletion as a spatial, political, and material design inquiry. It calls for repositioning designers not as managers of decline, but as actors capable of tracing, engaging, and transforming depleted conditions. Drawing on contributions spanning research, practice, and dialogue—and grounded in a critical reading of present realities as a basis for imagining desired futures—the issue proposes three interrelated modes of engagement: designing with, within, and beyond depletion. Each mode repositions design differently: as a practice of tracing and critique (with), as a propositional engagement with existing constraints (within), and as a transformative imagination capable of challenging dominant paradigms (beyond). Together, they move from diagnosing the processes that produce depletion, to operating within its constraints, and ultimately to envisioning pathways capable of reshaping them. ...
Against this backdrop, cities and landscapes are not only shaped by depletion but actively reproduce it. Depletion forms the soils we become-with and co-produce, just as it conditions our design practices—whether acknowledged or not. It also shapes our collective future as climate change, climate-induced migration, and territorial instability demonstrate that environmental damage accumulates rather than resolves itself. Yet the study of soil—its cycles, dynamics, and transformations—has largely remained outside the core of design curricula and practice. Depletion therefore demands a reframing of disciplinary agency. As landscape architects, urban designers, artists, and thinkers increasingly turn their attention to soil and its exhaustion, this issue seeks to amplify emerging interdisciplinary thought and support the articulation of design’s agency under conditions of depletion.
This issue of the Journal of Delta Urbanism reframes (soil) depletion as a spatial, political, and material design inquiry. It calls for repositioning designers not as managers of decline, but as actors capable of tracing, engaging, and transforming depleted conditions. Drawing on contributions spanning research, practice, and dialogue—and grounded in a critical reading of present realities as a basis for imagining desired futures—the issue proposes three interrelated modes of engagement: designing with, within, and beyond depletion. Each mode repositions design differently: as a practice of tracing and critique (with), as a propositional engagement with existing constraints (within), and as a transformative imagination capable of challenging dominant paradigms (beyond). Together, they move from diagnosing the processes that produce depletion, to operating within its constraints, and ultimately to envisioning pathways capable of reshaping them. ...
We live in a state of false abundance—a condition first articulated in the nineteenth century and later expanded through contemporary ecological critique—in which the apparent prosperity of modern consumption depends upon the systematic depletion of soils and territories that sustain human and more-than-human life. This depletion is structured by global markets demanding cheap food, labor, energy, and raw materials, and is enacted through extractive mining, industrial agriculture, infrastructural expansion, and large-scale construction. By abstracting material origins and obscuring ecological thresholds, extractive regimes normalize exhaustion while disproportionately burdening structurally marginalized communities.
Against this backdrop, cities and landscapes are not only shaped by depletion but actively reproduce it. Depletion forms the soils we become-with and co-produce, just as it conditions our design practices—whether acknowledged or not. It also shapes our collective future as climate change, climate-induced migration, and territorial instability demonstrate that environmental damage accumulates rather than resolves itself. Yet the study of soil—its cycles, dynamics, and transformations—has largely remained outside the core of design curricula and practice. Depletion therefore demands a reframing of disciplinary agency. As landscape architects, urban designers, artists, and thinkers increasingly turn their attention to soil and its exhaustion, this issue seeks to amplify emerging interdisciplinary thought and support the articulation of design’s agency under conditions of depletion.
This issue of the Journal of Delta Urbanism reframes (soil) depletion as a spatial, political, and material design inquiry. It calls for repositioning designers not as managers of decline, but as actors capable of tracing, engaging, and transforming depleted conditions. Drawing on contributions spanning research, practice, and dialogue—and grounded in a critical reading of present realities as a basis for imagining desired futures—the issue proposes three interrelated modes of engagement: designing with, within, and beyond depletion. Each mode repositions design differently: as a practice of tracing and critique (with), as a propositional engagement with existing constraints (within), and as a transformative imagination capable of challenging dominant paradigms (beyond). Together, they move from diagnosing the processes that produce depletion, to operating within its constraints, and ultimately to envisioning pathways capable of reshaping them.
Against this backdrop, cities and landscapes are not only shaped by depletion but actively reproduce it. Depletion forms the soils we become-with and co-produce, just as it conditions our design practices—whether acknowledged or not. It also shapes our collective future as climate change, climate-induced migration, and territorial instability demonstrate that environmental damage accumulates rather than resolves itself. Yet the study of soil—its cycles, dynamics, and transformations—has largely remained outside the core of design curricula and practice. Depletion therefore demands a reframing of disciplinary agency. As landscape architects, urban designers, artists, and thinkers increasingly turn their attention to soil and its exhaustion, this issue seeks to amplify emerging interdisciplinary thought and support the articulation of design’s agency under conditions of depletion.
This issue of the Journal of Delta Urbanism reframes (soil) depletion as a spatial, political, and material design inquiry. It calls for repositioning designers not as managers of decline, but as actors capable of tracing, engaging, and transforming depleted conditions. Drawing on contributions spanning research, practice, and dialogue—and grounded in a critical reading of present realities as a basis for imagining desired futures—the issue proposes three interrelated modes of engagement: designing with, within, and beyond depletion. Each mode repositions design differently: as a practice of tracing and critique (with), as a propositional engagement with existing constraints (within), and as a transformative imagination capable of challenging dominant paradigms (beyond). Together, they move from diagnosing the processes that produce depletion, to operating within its constraints, and ultimately to envisioning pathways capable of reshaping them.
Journal article
(2023)
-
Sophia Arbara, Elena Longhin, Simbarashe Chereni, Maryam Naghibi, Luca Iuorio, Juliana Goncalves, Fransje Hooimeijer
The undisputable human influences on the Earth’s system demand an urgent change of ways and transitions in human systems to sustain a healthy society in the future. Addressing the urgent climatic transformations in deltaic areas, this paper is an attempt of the Delta Urbanism research group at TU Delft to set the line for new (integrated) research inquiries by design and investigate fundamental, experimental, and strategic & operational responses to the existing prospects for action as a way to create collaboration between various sectors. These prospects for action are targeted at four critical fronts (climate, urban, governance, cultural) based on trends and challenges that deltaic areas are facing and to which coherent spatial strategies are needed. These fronts together need a research response to enable the making of the delta of the future through the power of interdisciplinary design. This perspective or prospect is established through six lines of inquiry that are elaborated in the paper. The central question is “how can the research field of delta urbanism provide a transformative ‘prospect for action’ to establish strategic pathways toward a resilient Delta future, where assertion and proof are synergized”? The discussion of the six lines of inquiry, which effectively address the four critical fronts, explores how they are poised to deliver fundamental, experimental, and operational outputs for further research and action.
...
The undisputable human influences on the Earth’s system demand an urgent change of ways and transitions in human systems to sustain a healthy society in the future. Addressing the urgent climatic transformations in deltaic areas, this paper is an attempt of the Delta Urbanism research group at TU Delft to set the line for new (integrated) research inquiries by design and investigate fundamental, experimental, and strategic & operational responses to the existing prospects for action as a way to create collaboration between various sectors. These prospects for action are targeted at four critical fronts (climate, urban, governance, cultural) based on trends and challenges that deltaic areas are facing and to which coherent spatial strategies are needed. These fronts together need a research response to enable the making of the delta of the future through the power of interdisciplinary design. This perspective or prospect is established through six lines of inquiry that are elaborated in the paper. The central question is “how can the research field of delta urbanism provide a transformative ‘prospect for action’ to establish strategic pathways toward a resilient Delta future, where assertion and proof are synergized”? The discussion of the six lines of inquiry, which effectively address the four critical fronts, explores how they are poised to deliver fundamental, experimental, and operational outputs for further research and action.