Socioplastics 11825 The City Depends on Distant Landscapes
A city depends on territories that rarely appear inside the conventional limits of its plan. Watersheds, quarries, transmission corridors, agricultural regions, waste landscapes and coastal landing points support urban life across distance. HinterlandSubstrate maps these material dependencies while treating the places that provide them as inhabited territories with their own histories and claims. Ashley Carse studies infrastructure and ecological politics around the Panama Canal. Nicole Starosielski follows the material routes of undersea networks. Erik Swyngedouw examines water, power and urbanisation, while Anne Whiston Spirn reads ecological processes within urban landscapes. Their work helps connect visible urban form with the infrastructures and environments on which it relies. Those connections distribute costs and authority across jurisdictions. A study could trace the sources and destinations of water, energy, food, construction materials and waste for one city. Maps, supply records, field observation and local interviews would identify where flows pass, who manages them and how benefits and burdens are distributed. The atlas would describe the social and ecological conditions of each territory, then show how urban decisions affect those relations. HinterlandSubstrate broadens urban analysis through a documented geography of dependence. It supports planning that recognises connected landscapes and the communities sustaining them. The city becomes more fully understood when its material relations remain visible across territorial boundaries. Such a map can support procurement and land-use decisions by connecting urban demand with the conditions of production and disposal.
REFERENCES
Carse, A. (2014) Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Spirn, A.W. (1984) The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design. New York: Basic Books.
Starosielski, N. (2015) The Undersea Network. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Swyngedouw, E. (2004) Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html