Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning

Technical Lands: A Critical Primer

Patents and physical geography have paralleled each other for more than

six centuries. The systems, modules, instruments, strategies, material

processes, and devices disclosed in patents transform landscapes, construct

sites, and are integrated into the everyday environment. Patent law, and the

bureaucratic infrastructure that supports the global patent system, also

have geographical dimensions through the management of sequential

innovation, transfer of technology, and strategic initiatives at the intersection

of innovation and environment. The agency of patent law and patented

technology is particularly relevant today, as environmental systems and the

infrastructure of urban landscapes become more technologically advanced,

networked, logistical, and integrated, simultaneously expanding the disciplinary

scope of environmental design and planning disciplines while challenging

conventions of representation and praxis. This chapter explores

the geographical dimension of patents, representations of technology and

environment in patent documents, and the patent system’s role in creating

knowledge infrastructure and anticipatory governance for future planetary

management. Together these interconnected themes and histories offer a

critical reflection on the history of environmental

Modern ideology strips water of its sociocultural and political contexts, reducing it to the scientific abstraction of H2O. This reductivist approach to water has erased longstanding ontologies and physically transformed America's aridlands to advance modern political and economic agendas. By studying the 1947 proposal for the Orme Dam and the Yavapai Nation's forty-year resistance to it, this paper reveals the interconnected relationship between modern ideology and the design, development, and management of the environment. I also suggest that the inclusion of alternative ontologies can inspire the design of more just and resilient environments.

In recent decades, programmatic design activations have successfully rejuvenated many underperforming urban parks and vague sites. Nevertheless, the innate ephemerality of the landscape also leaves it susceptible to over-activation and loss of resilience and future possibility. Framed by this vulnerability, the article contributes a landscape-based interpretation of existing architectural and urban theories of vagueness and temporary use. Upholding of the potentiality of a site - even if not visibly active or productive - is agued to exhibit valid use-value within the contemporary accelerated urban context. The article cultivates landscape mechanisms for maintaining and propagating uselessness and neutralising existential threats to the openness of a site.