LA+ GEO

GEO – Earth – is a word that simultaneously signifies something vast and elemental. It refers to both the planet on which we live and the soil that sustains us. GEO is the physical and representational bedrock of landscape architecture – the foundation of many disciplines from which we draw our knowledge. Geography, Geology, and Geometry, in particular, are fundamental to our discipline’s intellectual core. And now, we seem ever more entangled in GEO as some scholars across the sciences and humanities argue that humans should be recognised as agents of change at geologic time scales.

LA+ GEO includes interviews with the celebrated author of After the Map, William Rankin, author and citizensensing visionary Jennifer Gabrys, and New Zealand based media artist and author Janine Randerson with guest editors Karen M’Closkey and Keith VanDerSys explore site surveying and sensing technologies as part of an expanded toolkit for landscape architects to bring environmental patterns down to earth and into view.

Other notable points are from Designer Robert Gerard Pietrusko who reveals the covert militaristic agendas of early aerial land cover interpretation, Geographer Matthew W. Wilson revisits the rise of critical cartography within geography in the 1980s and ‘90s.

Media scholar Lisa Parks describes the politics of vertical mediation by recounting the importance of activists’ use of drone-captured video to document both the protests against the construction of an oil pipeline through tribal lands, as well as the aggressive countermeasures taken by law enforcement to squelch the protests.

Jeffrey S. Nesbit and David Salomon, rocket launch pads provide a vehicle to unpack the relationship between terrestrial and extra-terrestrial territories. Geographers Douglas Robb and Karen Bakker caution against the voyeuristic tendencies enabled by the satellite gaze.

Through illustrated “Geostories,” Rania Ghosn imaginatively engages the “global commons” of outer space and oceans. Designer Matthew Ransom examines the tension between grassroots organisations and fracking industries in Pennsylvania. Author and activist Lucy R. Lippard takes us on an aerial journey across the United States. Historian and geographer B.W. Higman traces our modern predilections towards flatness.

Through a remaking of Eugène Violletle Duc’s Mont Blanc studies, landscape architect Aisling O’Carroll exposes the imposition of geometric rationalisation on nature. Noah Heringman revisits the sublime in 18th-century landscape design, offering parallels to today’s Anthropocene discourses about environmental depletion and Shannon Mattern examines how rocks are collected, examined, and displayed as objects of spectacular brilliance – objects that ultimately reflect back on us by illuminating the histories of oppression embedded in their extraction.