Technical Lands

This event is a round table conversation amongst authors and editors of the recently released volume, Technical Lands: A Critical Primer (JOVIS 2023).

Designating land as technical is a political act. Doing so entails dividing, marginalizing, and rendering portions of the Earth inaccessible. Technical lands are co-extensive with political and physical boundaries instrumentalized by their exceptional status. Their remote location, delimited boundary, and active management occlude their visibility. Technical lands include disaster exclusion and demilitarized zones, extractive industry sites, airports, and spaceports, among dozens of other typologies. Despite the recent emergence of a discourse on technical lands, our understanding of these geographies remains unclear. Technical Lands: A Critical Primer assembles authors from a diverse array of disciplines, geographies, and epistemologies to illuminate the meanings of these spaces. 

Jeffrey Nesbit, co-editor of Technical Lands, is an assistant professor of Architecture at Temple University. He is an architect, urbanist, and founding director of the research group, Grounding Design. 

Charles Waldheim, co-editor of Technical Lands, is the John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture and Co-Director of the MSD program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. 

Shannon Mattern, contributor to Technical Lands, is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies and the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. 

AL McCullough, contributor to Technical Lands, is on the executive coordinator for strategy at Taproot Earth, a climate and racial justice non-profit in the Gulf South.

Robert Gerard Pietrusko, contributor to Technical Lands, is an associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and the founding principal of Warning Office, a design research studio.

Billy Fleming contributor to Technical Lands, is the Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the climate justice think tank, the Climate + Community Institute. 

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.