Progressive Geographies

This looks interesting – issue 2 of The State, on Speculative Geographies. Some pieces are available online, and you can buy the complete issue as a pdf for $5, but the material object looks interesting in itself, aside from the content.

This time around, we selected 15 projects that interrogate the futures of place. Together, they present diverse interpretations of ‘speculative geography,’ realised across urban, rural and temporal fabrics. Topics range from psychogeographic meanderings through Kathmandu and the psychic topography of New York, to displacement and belonging in Accra and the Spanish Canary Islands. Others look to planned cities in Brazil and in a mysterious totalitarian state, Indonesian arts education, the cartographic sonics of mortgaged real estate, and placehacking London’s skyline. A third category considers virtual terrains, with pieces on the socially mediated red carpet, and the need for a new politics to go with our increasingly weird techy futures. And lastly, the purely speculative: a corpus of networked lighthouses in New Zealand, an Afghan agricultural belt-made-machine, a carnivalistic, biosynthetic robot zoo and what would have happened if the atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin.

Thanks to Oliver Belcher for the link.