Atlas of Material Worlds
Mapping the Agency of Matter for a New Landscape Practice
- 366 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Atlas of Material Worlds is a highly designed narrative atlas illustrating the agency of nonliving materials with unique, ubiquitous, and often hidden influence on our daily lives.
Employing new materialism as a jumping-off point, it examines the increasingly blurry lines between the organic and inorganic, engaging the following questions: What roles do nonliving materials play? Might a closer examination of those roles reveal an undeniable agency we have long overlooked or disregarded? If so, does this material agency change our understanding of the social structures, ecologies, economies, cosmologies, technologies, and landscapes that surround us? And, perhaps most importantly, why does material agency matter? This is the story of the world's driest nonpolar desert, pink flamingos, and cerulean blue lithium ponds; industrial shipping logistics, pudding-like jiggling substrates, and monuments of mud; galactic bodies, radioactive sheep, and the yellowcake of uranium.
Put simply, this book dares readers to see the world anew, from material up. Atlas of Material Worlds offers this new relationship to our host environment in a time of mounting crisesâaccelerating climate change, ballooning socioeconomic inequality, and rising toxic nationalismâuniquely telling materialist stories for practitioners and students in landscape, architecture, and other built environment disciplines.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- 1 Uranium Big Bangs: Metal as Metaphor
- 2 Lithium Tracing the Green Energy Paradox across Battery, Body, Landscape, and Cosmos
- 3 Crude The Bakken Fossil Fuel Frontier
- 4 Clay Spies in the Making: Imperial Oil Economies and the Geographies of Mediterranean Food
- 5 Sand 825 Miles: or, How to Make a Beach
- 6 Mud And its Meaning in a Port Town
- 7 Metabolite Material as Physical History of a Relationship
- Conclusion
- Afterword
- Author Bios
- Index