The Terraforming

The Terraforming (Strelka Press, 2019. 127 pages) is a manifesto for The Terraforming urban design research programme at the Strelka Institute in Moscow. It is a narrowly targeted polemic against dominant modes of planetarity and a rejoinder to inadequacies seen in how critical philosophy and design seeks to confront them. "The Terraforming" is the comprehensive project to fundamentally transform Earth's cities, technologies, and ecosystems to ensure that the planet will be capable of supporting Earth-like life. Artificiality, astronomy, and automation form the basis of that alternative planetarity. Planetarity itself comes into focus through orbiting imagining and terrestrial modeling technologies --satellites, sensors, servers in sync-- that have made it possible to measure climate change with any confidence. The books explores a renewed Copernican turn, and how the technologically mediated shift away from anthropocentric perspectives is crucially necessary in both theory and practice.