Operational landscapes, Situated futures

Abstract

West Africa’s extraction landscapes sit at the centre of a global supply chain whose costs (degraded land, polluted water, displaced communities, foreclosed futures) remain locally borne while their benefits accrue elsewhere. Dominant responses to this condition, from large-scale initiatives such as the Great Green Wall to project-level rehabilitation, remain grounded in a positivist planning paradigm that treats degradation as a technical problem and leaves the extractive relations of ecological unequal exchange intact. This thesis takes the bauxite-mining region of Boké, Guinea, as the operational landscape through which to develop a different response.

It works from the position that planning and design for such places must be situated, anchored in the specific ecological, historical, and lived realities of the territory and the designer rather than abstracted from them. Drawing on the theoretical frame of the planetary mine, and on planetary boundaries and spatial justice as the terms of evaluation, the research moves through situated analysis, scenario-based futuring and value-based assessment. Four plausible futures are developed and compared through transparent criteria against the thesis’s goal and vision, on the basis of which Loconomy, the scenario most aligned with a just redistribution of the commons within planetary boundaries, is selected for design.

The decisive turn in the thesis comes through situated fieldwork. By indulging in the territory rather than abstracting from it, relations between human and more-than-human actors became legible as mutually reinforcing rather than competing, opening design pathways no positivist method could have surfaced. Situated knowledge thus allowed the design to live with the context rather than against it.

The design proposes a regional system in which bauxite remains relevant but extraction is slowed to the pace of ecological regeneration. A preserved coast is put to productive use through fishing, salt, and oyster-based closed loops that double as living breakwaters and tidal energy infrastructure; urban cores are held within fixed limits and given distinct regional roles; the railway is repurposed for people and regional produce; and a countryside of sequential mining is interleaved with ecological preservation and staged soil regeneration. Localised production sustains a trans-regional balance rather than a single export flow. This is one possible trajectory, proposed rather than prescribed, the situated outcome of this research, the designer, and the lived realities encountered.

Backcasting from the selected scenario then translates the design into an actionable roadmap, within which a set of no-regret measures is identified: actions advantageous across all four explored futures and therefore worth enacting whichever one unfolds. The thesis argues that the most transferable contribution is not the design itself but the situated, accountable way of arriving at it: a practice that positions the urbanist as a translator of situated perspectives more than as the architect of a ready-made end-state master plans.