Harvard Graduate School of Design
MLA Core III Studio
Coordinator
From Offshoring to Near Shore: Littoral Landscapes at Work
2020 - 2025
Category: Teaching
Since the 18th century, cheap fuel, cheap labor, and cheap nature have laid the foundation for settler wealth in North America. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the economic logic of “fossil capital,” as argued by Andreas Malm, coupled industrial power generated by fossil fuels with wage labor. Fossil capital has led to rising temperatures, melting ice, and decreased biodiversity—and the uneven distribution of effects on human populations. In New England, the techno-ecological landscapes that once supported everyday life—e.g. productive fisheries, forests, and fields—have been transformed by the market orientation of fossil capital. Relocated overseas and fragmented by urbanization, socially productive landscapes have been romanticized, miniaturized, and historicized.
Through systems thinking at multiple scales, the studio explores how productive sectors will migrate due to climate risk and how these “left behind” landscapes can support dignified climate futures. These design propositions demand a paradigm shift from landscapes that are discrete and transactional to those that foster a commonwealth of human and natural labor.