No abstract

During the late 1970s, Catalan architect Manuel de Solà-Morales focuses his research on understanding territory as an architectural construct. Influenced by post-war French urban geography and, especially, by the Italian debates about the città-territorio and Henri Lefebvre’s notion of total urbanization, Solà-Morales seeks to define methods of territorial analysis and description with the purpose of understanding how architecture can contribute to articulate an urbanized territory. The crucial piece of this intellectual quest is the research ‘La forma d’un país’ (‘The Shape of a Country’), an atlas in which the production of maps is simultaneously understood as an act of territorial description and territorial design. In Solà-Morales’ terminology: maps are already ‘plans’; their conception needs to move from the ‘literal’ to the ‘literary’. The goal of this article is to interrogate this cartographic project, by asking what its value is both within Solà-Morales broader theorization of territorial production, and for a contemporary understanding of the relations between architecture and territory.

Este artículo explora el valor que las nociones y estrategias espaciales pueden tener para transitar hacia una sociedad poscapitalista. La expansión planetaria del capital, conocida habitualmente como globalización, ha estado acompañada por la extensión planetaria de la urbanización, hasta el punto de que ambas resultan inseparables. Como ha sido reiteradamente teorizado por geógrafos y urbanistas como Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey o Manuel de Solà-Morales, la urbanización no es una súper estructura cultural, sino un factor de producción que ha actuado como motor fundamental del desarrollo capitalista. La posibilidad de una sociedad poscapitalista requiere, por lo tanto, cuestionar la idea de urbanización y desarrollar categorías alternativas. Este artículo examina la noción de territorio y el valor del diseño territorial como agentes de cambio que permiten desarrollar una biopolítica positiva y nuevos vínculos entre condiciones y singularidades locales, procesos y problemas globales.

Invertir la mirada: los vacíos metropolitanos como elementos estructurantes del territorio de Estocolmo

This paper analyses the extended urbanization of oil production in Siberia in order to test Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s theory of planetary urbanization. According to these authors, the intensification of the urban process triggered by the consolidation of global neoliberalism since the early 1990s, has transformed the planet into a situation of total urbanization. In their view, this planetary condition can be measured by the incorporation of former remote wilderness such as the Amazon, the oceans, the deserts or Siberia within urban circuits of production (which they label under the notion of extended urbanization). In this article we test if Brenner and Schmid’s hypothesis applies to the Siberian case. With that goal, we develop a diachronic historic and cartographic analysis which shows first the incorporation of Siberia to the Russian Empire, second the consolidation of East Asia-Russia commercial circuits, and third the conceptualization of Siberia as primarily an area for resource extraction. Such analysis leads us to define three historic spatial regimes for the whole Siberia, the last of which we study in relation to the notion of planetary urbanization. Our study compares the geographies of oil production in the region first during the Soviet period, and then, following Brenner and Schmid’s chronology, after the 1990s. The article concludes that the latter phase certainly implies an unprecedented intensification of extended urbanization and the incorporation of Siberia into trans-scalar global circuits of production. Finally, in order to analyse the relation between this process and the consolidation of neoliberalism we develop a synchronic study and mapping of the operations of two oil companies: a public one, NOC ROSNEFT, and a private one, LUKOIL. We conclude that both are similarly invested in creating the trans-scalar geographies of uneven development that characterize neoliberalism.