New Geographies – serie

Digital information and data flows permeate every aspect of our society. Within this context, design extensively avails itself of the technological bounty of advanced digital tools. Yet beyond these tools, the fluidity of digital information and the seemingly immaterial nature of communication dominate most discussions. Understanding the contemporary networks of information and communication as inherently geographic, Geographies of Information attempts to realign design’s relationship to information and communication technologies (ICTs) by expounding on their multiscalar complexities and contextual intricacies. From the impact of digital social media on political action and the rise of predictive technologies in speculative real estate to new ways of mapping temporal conditions of a site and the evolving role of information in how designers see, understand, and act on space, ICTs exert critical influence. This issue of New Geographies examines the forms, imprints, places, and territories of ICTs through spatially grounded and nuanced accounts of the hybrid conditions that ICTs generate, the scales at which they operate, and how this production of space is manifested in both advanced and emerging economies.

As a master metaphor, the island has been a fecund source of inspiration across many domains. From More’s Utopia to Darwin’s evolutionary theory to Ungers’s archipelago, insights derived from “island thinking” are commonly extrapolated across diverse scales and fields. The appeal of the island metaphor lies in its capacity to simplify the complex and frame the apparently unbounded. Yet the concept seems to contradict current mainstream thought and practice in geographic and design fields. The globalization motifs of openness and interconnectedness, and ecology’s privilege of environmental processes and flows over forms and boundaries, both challenge the pertinence of the island as a cognitive device for territorial description and intervention.New Geographies, 8 proposes an epistemological pulse between, on the one hand, the ultimate loss of the exterior implied in planetary upscaling of territorial interpretations (toward an idea of the world as a whole) and, on the other hand, the need to rearrange new boundaries in an environment viewed through the process-oriented lens of ecology. An “atlas” of islands, New Geographies, 8 explores the new limits of islandness and gathers examples to reassert its relevance for design disciplines.

The commons as a contested political idea has been continually articulated and reproduced in many disciplines and in relation to specific historical and geographical contexts. Since the 1960s, the concept of commons has started to play an increasingly important role in the field of urban studies. While commons are usually perceived as the material spaces of the city such as streets, parks, public spaces, etc., they are also perceived as the immaterial public realm—including subaltern and mainstream culture, knowledge, language, and modes of sociality. As the commoning process continuously involves the substance of urban spaces, be it physical or virtual, the concept of commons has actively contributed to reshaping spatial imaginaries such as urban islands, archipelagos, and thresholds.This issue of New Geographies proposes the concept of commons as a mode of thinking that challenges assumptions in the design disciplines such as public and private spaces, local and regional geographies, and capital and state interventions. It expands the production of space as the commons into a planetary territory all the way from the intimate and subjective scale of the body to the connected material and immaterial spaces. In doing so, NG 12 aims to foreground the significance of political thinking in the process of space production, and invites to imagine alternative social relations and modes of urbanization.