Johanna Just - Böcker

The pilot issue of DELUS offers a range of diverse insights into landscape and urban questions. It introduces new methods to unpack multiple worlds and narrate manifold stories. The contributions range from unraveling histories of land-body relations through recipes with Luiza Prado de O. Martins, following living fossils and their mythical counterparts with Christina Gruber, working with communities to examine extractive environments with Karin Reisinger, exploring postnatural aesthetics with the Institute for Postnatural Studies, to recording wastelands with Sandra Jasper and developing speculative curricula engaging with overlooked forms of knowledge with Federico Pérez Villoro. As a collection, these contributions address the complex relations between humans, non-humans and their environment across time and space.

Ecology and design This new issue of DELUS: The Journal of the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies, entitled “Chasing Water,” brings together contributions on the topic of water. Nine essays invite us to explore different manifestations of the element. DELUS uses the term “chasing” to highlight the role of water in shaping and sustaining landscapes and urban environments, and the ongoing efforts to direct its course. From the transformation of English moorland and marshland to intricate irrigation systems in the Mediterranean and to the ecological impact of water harvesting schemes in Chile and Australia, each contribution explores the ways in which water is tracked, obstructed, or contained. “Chasing Water” vividly reflects the contradictory challenge of capturing, storing, and distributing the element in a world where it is theoretically abundant, but in many places inaccessible.