NEW GEOGRAPHIES journal aims to
examine the emergence of the geographic —a new but for the most part
latent paradigm in design today—to articulate it and bring it to
bear effectively on the agency of design. After more than two
decades of seeing architecture and urbanism as the spatial manifestation
of the effects of globalization, it is time to consider the expanded
agency of the designer. Designers are increasingly compelled to
shape larger scales and contexts, to address questions related to
infrastructural problems, urban and ecological systems, and cultural and
regional issues. These questions—previously confined to the domains of
engineering, ecology, or regional planning—now require articulation through
design. Encouraging designers to reexamine their tools and develop
strategies to link attributes previously understood to be either separate
from each other or external to the design disciplines, those questions have
also opened up a range of technical, formal, and social repertoires for
architecture and urbanism. Although in the past decade different versions
of landscape and infrastructural urbanism have emerged in response to
similar challenges, this new condition we call “the geographic” points to
more than a shift in scale. Much of the analysis in architecture, landscape,
and urbanism—of emergent urban mutations and global changes on the spatial
dimension—comes by way of social anthropology, human geography, and
economics, and the journal aims to extend these arguments by asking how the
design practices can have a more active and transformative impact on the
forces that shape contemporary urban realities. As the synthesizing role
that geography aspired to play among the physical, the economic, and the sociopolitical
is now being increasingly shared by design, New Geographies is
interested in new associations or linkages between the social and the
physical, the form and the context, the very large and the very small.
Through critical essays and design projects, the journal aims to open up
discussions on the expanded agency of the designer, agency both as a form
of capacity in relation to new techniques and strategies, and as a faculty
of acting, power, and disciplinary repositioning.
NEW
GEOGRAPHIES
welcomes
submissions of essays, research and projects. The themes of the forthcoming
issues will be announced on our web site. Materials submitted are subject
to editorial review and/or external reviewing. Submissions may be sent via
email to: newgeographies@gsd.harvard.edu.
