Technical Lands: A Critical Primer maps the political and spatial logic of a largely untheorised category of landscape — the technically designated zone — from demilitarised borders and disaster exclusion areas to prisons, extraction sites, airports, and spaceports.
About This Book
What unites a nuclear exclusion zone, a prison yard, and a spaceport? According to this collection, it is their shared designation as “technical” — a political act that renders land inaccessible, invisible, and exempt from ordinary democratic scrutiny. Rather than treating these sites as incidental byproducts of modernity, Technical Lands argues that their proliferation under neoliberalisation is deliberate and consequential. Drawing together contributors from across disciplines and geographies, the book interrogates how the aestheticisation of these landscapes functions as a rhetorical veil, enabling surveillance and hypervisibility while foreclosing debate about governance and production. An essential reference for landscape urbanism, political geography, and critical spatial theory.
Key Features
- 256 pages of critical essays and interdisciplinary spatial analysis
- Edited by Jeffrey S. Nesbit and Charles Waldheim
- Case studies spanning disaster exclusion zones, demilitarised zones, prison yards, industrial extraction sites, airports, and spaceports
- Published by Jovis, ISBN: 9783868597042
What You’ll Discover
- How designating land as “technical” is fundamentally a political act — one that divides, marginalises, and renders territory invisible to public discourse
- The paradox of anti-visuality: how the rhetoric of technology simultaneously conceals these landscapes and enables intense surveillance and hypervisibility within them
- How highly aestheticised representations of technical lands are deployed to resist scrutiny of their governance and productive functions
- Why the scale and complexity of technical lands has accelerated alongside neoliberalisation, and why their theoretical contours remain contested and underexamined
About the Author
Jeffrey S. Nesbit and Charles Waldheim serve as editors of this collection, bringing together authors from a diverse array of disciplines, geographies, and epistemologies to theorise the meaning and increasing significance of technical lands. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 256
- Dimensions: 243 x 170 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783868597042
- Publisher: Jovis
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Landscape architects, urban theorists, political geographers, and researchers working at the intersection of critical spatial theory, governance, and the politics of land designation.