With demand expansion and consumption stimulation as fundamental policies for economic growth, China's culture of consumerism has evolved into not only an economic strategy but also a dominant social ideology and a driving force of urban and regional development. In the era of accelerated platformisation, platform corporations exemplified by Alibaba have expanded their influence and established an oligopolistic platform economy that has already reshaped and continues to reshape the culture of consumerism by transforming consumption behaviors, habits, and values. As a result, the production of space and social relations is undergoing a radical transformation.

Building on this premise, this research adopts the Stack as its primary theoretical and design framework to investigate the computational system of the Alibaba corporation in China, with Shanghai serving as a case study. It examines how planetary-scale computation, as manifested through both physical and digital infrastructures, reconfigures geodesign systems across multiple scales, from the territorial allocation of productive resources and the structure and configuration of urban space to human-machine interaction. In doing so, it reveals how Alibaba digital biopolitics facilitates the restructuring of market environments and conditions human subjectivity.

In the design and strategic section, this research further addresses the ethical dimensions of biopolitics within the context of accelerated platformisation. It explores the potential of an affirmative digital biopolitics as a new paradigm, one that centers on the exploration of human futures. In this model, experience becomes a product for customers to consume in the pursuit of a better self, while platform technologies serve as mediating infrastructures that sustain the operational system and enable the enhancement of individual subjectivity. Based on this paradigm, the study speculates a utopian vision of alternative models of production and consumption within the Stack, and envisions future cultures of consumerism shaped by ethical computation and emancipatory spatial and interaction design that foreground situation construction. ... Read more

The Netherlands has created a large nitrogen pollution problem in its soils, which is harming biodiversity. By intensifying and industrialized farming, by importing animal feed for dairy production and fertilizer for crop farming, too much nitrogen has accumulated in the soil. Consequently, ecological processes are disturbed due to eutrophication (over-feeding of nutrients), from which only a few species profit, causing other species to lose the competition and cease, with detrimental effects on reliant other species.
This project explores how this intensive/industrial farming can be substituted by more sustainable alternatives in which creating and maintaining biodiversity is key. An alternative system is proposed based on the spatial intergrading between cities and protected natural areas with typologies that focus on balancing food production and biodiversity creation. This alternative system is then detailed concerning the small-scale effects it has, the necessary process of policy creation and the necessary systemic changes as preconditions for a successful execution. The transformation design is developed along a framework of values which are reflecting on current best practices in the discipline of urbanism touching on issues of planetary boundaries, justice and transitional thinking.
Our key takeaways are to keep the city and adjacent areas productive, close to where consumption of goods is high but also where functions like education and food markets can be sensibly integrated. Further from the city and closer to already biodiverse and protected areas of the Nature Network Netherlands (NNN), the gradient leans more towards focussing on the creation of biodiversity. Humans and non-human species can find their thriving space on the gradient, food production is still an integral part as well. By creating a system in which farmers are working together, and are guided to create this balance on their farms and are paid for their efforts and the services they provide to society, they can be encouraged to change their farming practices for the better. ... Read more