The Terraforming

Benjamin H. Bratton
July 2019

For Sascha

PREFACE: THE TERRAFORMING

This short book was written in July 2019. Each titled paragraph can be read by itself, but the sequence does matter. It is dense with ideas but each will be, I hope, expanded through The Terraforming urban design research program at Strelka Institute in Moscow. This book serves as its opening brief, manifesto, salvo. It is a polemic against dominant modes of planetarity and to inadequacies in how critical philosophy and design seek to confront them.

The title refers both to the terraforming that has taken place in recent centuries in the form of urbanization, and to the terraforming that must now be planned and conducted as the planetary design initiative of the next centuries. The term “terraforming” usually refers to transforming the ecosystems of other planets or moons to make them capable of supporting Earth-like life, but the looming ecological consequences of what is called the Anthropocene suggest that in the decades to come, we will need to terraform Earth if it is to remain a viable host for its own life. The next Strelka education program will explore the implications of this proposition for urbanism on a planetary scale, a venture that is full of risk: technical, philosophical, and biological. To do so means neither a blank-page reset nor risk-mitigating incrementalism, but a projective encounter with uncannily superfunctional necessity.

The research program will consider the past and future role of cities as a planetary network by which humans occupy the Earth’s surface. Planetarity itself comes into focus through orbiting imagining and terrestrial modeling media (satellites, sensors, servers in sync) that have made it possible to measure climate change with any confidence. We will explore a renewed Copernican turn, and how the technologically-mediated shift away from anthropocentric perspectives is crucial in both theory and practice. Any Copernican turn is also a trauma, as Freud once suggested, but this one demands from us more agency, not less.

The implications of this shift for urban planetarity are perhaps counter-intuitive. Instead of reviving ideas of nature, we will reclaim the artificial — not as in fake, but rather designed — as a foundation which links the mitigation of anthropogenic climate change to the geopolitics of automation. For this, urban-scale automation is seen as part of an expanded landscape of information, agency, labor, and energy that is part of a living ecology, not a substitute for one. As such, the focus of urban design research shifts toward the governance of infrastructures that operate on much longer timescales than our cultural narratives.

What kind of urbanism will the program propose? An urbanism that is pro-planning, pro-artificial, anti-collapse, pro-universalist, anti-anti-totality, pro-materialist, anti-anti-leviathan, anti-mythology, and pro-egalitarian distribution. It starts with a different set of assumptions: the planet is artificially sentient; climate collapse mitigation and pervasive automation can converge; the concept of “climate change” is an epistemological accomplishment of planetary-scale computation; automation is a general principle by which ecosystems work; necessary fundamental shifts in geotechnology are likely to precede necessary fundamental shifts in geo-politics; “surveillance” of carbon flows is a good thing; energy infrastructures based on long-term waste cycles are desirable; the ecological cost of “culture” is greater than that of science; planetarity requires philosophy in and of outer space; speculative design must focus on what is so deeply functional as to be unlikely; and that, finally, the future becomes something to be prevented as much as achieved.

Our research is prefigurative, but more so as simulation than symbolic performance. It aims to contribute to a viable plan, but also to the refusal of bad ones if necessary. That said, we bet that what may seem like the obvious and assuredly “good” position is, in fact, probably not. The program is based in Moscow and the vast and quickly changing expanse of Russia’s territory is our site condition. From here, we look out into space, and from space back down to Earth to orient what planetarity should mean. The questions of geotechnology, geoeconomics, geonomos, and geoecology are situated between the world as it appears to us and how we appear to the world as it gazes back at us through the technologies we’ve made.