Paper short abstract:

Taking a former Soviet training ground as example, the contribution will critically assess the repurposing of old military sites in the context of Germany’s energy transition – a process also known as conversion – and discuss the relationship between cold-war history and renewable energy futures.

Paper long abstract:

Lieberoser Heide is not only Germany’s largest desert but houses the country’s biggest solar park. Until the beginning of the 90s, the site was occupied by the Soviet military and deployed as a training ground to rehearse a potential third world war against NATO. However, after Germany’s reunification the area was passed back to the local government and later on parts of it were leased to an investor in return for clearance of mines and other weapons and toxins in the ground.

While military operations destroyed the forest that used to cover the site, they also brought back a landscape that is considered premodern featuring many species, both of flora and fauna, that are considered to be extinct, soon to be extinct, and very rare. This “favourable destruction,” as it is referred to by nature conservationists, is now at danger because of renewable energy development on site.

The contribution will critically assess the repurposing of old industrial and military sites in the context of Germany’s energy transition – a process also known as conversion – and discuss the relationship between cold-war history and renewable energy futures. The overwriting of memories stored in the landscape is seen as essential for making place for a brighter future. At the same time, Lieberoser Heide not only provides a window into Germany’s post-war history but challenges the notion of military sites as death zones.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the paradigmatic changes needed to revive sustainable river catchments. It considers how water infrastructures throughout river catchment areas can be decomposed and remade to create flourishing ecological corridors that benefit all of their human and non-human inhabitants.

Paper long abstract:

With settlements in many parts of the world located alongside them, rivers have a long history of infrastructural control. In the UK, water mills harnessing their power were followed by efforts to redirect water into irrigation and industrial activities. Catchment areas were cleared of forests and wetlands and drained to extend farming and urban areas. Rivers’ stone and gravel deposits were quarried not only to build towns and cities, but also to canalise their flows and construct flood defences. Pollution from these activities flowed back into waterways and contiguous marine areas. Drinking water was abstracted from rivers’ vulnerable (but cleaner) upper reaches, while dams and reservoirs impeded their flows to assure water supplies for an ever-growing human population.

All of these processes redirected water into supporting human needs and interests, prioritising these at the expense of the non-human species sharing river catchments and equally dependent upon reliable water flows and good water quality. It is now clear, with alarming levels of species extinctions, failing ecosystems and an obvious environmental crisis, that such inequality is not sustainable.

Focused on the unbuilding of water infrastructures, this paper explores the paradigmatic changes in thinking and in practice that are needed to revive sustainable river catchments. It considers how, with more imaginative visions of human-non-human partnerships, water infrastructures throughout river catchment areas can be decomposed and remade to create flourishing ecological corridors that benefit all of their human and non-human inhabitants.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will reflect on the hopes and practices of educators and state officials with (and despite) the material and social legacies of education technology (EdTech) policies in Colombia. 

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines repair practices and utopian discourses when implementing education technology (EdTech) policies in Bogotá, Colombia. Since the beginning of the XXI century, national EdTech policies have pursued the goal of economic development through total technological appropriation, that is, access to and consumption of Internet and computers by public school students all over the country to include them in the global digital economy. These policies have generated a public-private infrastructure that sustains the lifecycle of thousands of laptops and other electronic and digital devices, such as 3D printers, DIY robots, learning software, and drones. The lifecycle includes the buying, delivery to public schools, and after a few years of use, the collection and disposal of those technologies. However, such neoliberal fantasy and Fordist process have also sedimented a legacy of failure: unaccomplished indicators, cut-off budgets, and (literally) tons of electronic debris that cannot be repaired or recycled. This paper focuses on the practices and perspectives of public officers, private contractors, and schoolteachers in Bogotá. They try to work through and with those processes of failure and decay by engaging with trendy EdTech terminologies (i.e. Maker Culture, STEM Education), repairing old electronic parts, and coping with state practices of corruption while thinking about their work as doing ‘good’ for the country’s future. Drawing on the concept of utopian impulses (c.f. Prince and Neumark 2022), the paper asks how different moralities inhabit the legacies of techno-neoliberal state policies and what forms of futures grow in the interstices. 

Paper short abstract:

In 2018, Morocco inaugurated Africa's first high-speed rail line (LGV), a project saturated with visions of future prosperity. Using the LGV as an entry point, this paper examines the afterlives, aftermaths, and alternatives to the enduring appeal of mid-century planning and development regimes.

Paper long abstract:

Capitalizing on its comparative political and social stability in the region, the Moroccan regime has been attracting global and regional investors with the promise of spectacular ‘megaprojects’ that aim to radically transform local natural, economic, and social landscapes.

Inaugurated in 2018, Morocco’s (and Africa’s) first high-speed rail line (LGV) is considered a flagship project within this landscape. Built alongside the existing but decaying Atlantic commuter rail corridor originally put in place by the French colonial regime almost a century ago, this 2-billion-euro infrastructure has become invested with political, ideological, and strongly affective meanings related to a shared - yet constantly deferred - future of material abundance and social prosperity, even as it violently displaced informal housing communities and created fatal disruptions along the existing rail network.

Drawing on ethnographic and desk research conducted since 2018 with rail users, engineers, urban planners, and social activists, in this paper I focus on and unpack the future-oriented politics, promises and routine frustrations the LGV has helped channel. In order to elucidate the discursive power and broad appeal behind official visions of high-speed progress, I place the development of the LGV within the longer genealogy of colonial and post-colonial modernization projects and agendas.

Using the LGV as a salient ethnographic entry point, this paper thus offers an investigation into the afterlives, aftermaths, and enduring political currency of mid-century planning and development regimes. Against this, it highlights local initiatives that are trying to un-make and redraw narratives of the future in lateral and creative ways.

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces architectural and engineering experiments with low- or carbon-storing materials, showing how they reflect tensions between technocratic and vernacular traditions of imagining ecological futures in an era of capitalist degradation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper sketches the landscape of “green building” in North America (and beyond), in particular the sometimes-contradictory imaginaries that have emerged around the use of low carbon materials. As solar power and high-performance design standards like the “passivhaus” create the possibility of buildings with net zero "operational energy," the new frontier is in reducing “embodied carbon”—the "upfront" emissions generated by extracting, processing and transporting the materials themselves. Cementitious alternatives like fly ash create possibilities for a less energy intensive concrete, while biogenic materials like wood, algae, and hemp may even act as temporary but crucial stopgap carbon sinks. Industry stakeholders are developing sophisticated auditing tools and standards to calculate the net embodied carbon of buildings, while companies, some funded by venture capital and even the US Military, are developing modular construction systems and other commercial applications. These high-tech interventions contrast with the equally swelling “natural building” movement, which involves vernacular construction using straw bale, cob, adobe, and that foregrounds sensory affects and overall experience of dwelling as an experiment in counter-culture. Such divides between technocratic and vernacular modes of low carbon building recapitulate deeper tensions in the history of ecological design, and resonate with contemporary debates surrounding eco-modernism and small-scale localism. Questions of race, degrowth, and environmental justice cross-cut this dialectic.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Rjukan, an ‘unbuilt’ post-industrial town in Norway, seeks to ‘readjust’ (‘omstille’) itself towards a future that is inhabited by the past. I focus on hydrogen production as it reflects the possibilities and challenges that the town is facing – currently and historically.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how Rjukan, an ‘unbuilt’ post-industrial town in Norway, seeks to ‘readjust’ (‘omstille’) itself towards a future that is inhabited by the past. I focus on hydrogen production as it reflects the possibilities and challenges that the town is facing – currently and historically.

In the late-1920 the production of hydrogen in Rjukan played an important role in readjusting the production of synthetic fertilizer in order to make it more profitable and competitive. As testament to this and to the town's industrial heritage, a decommissioned hydrogen machine was reassembled in the Norwegian Industrial Workers Museum in 2021 using blueprints from the museum’s archive, and the expertise of a senior industrial worker. At the same time the company Aker Horizons planned to create a new hydrogen factory at Rjukan to feed the coming demand for ‘green’ energy. The plan is a response to what in Norwegian discourse is called ‘grønn omstilling’, which translates to ‘green transition’ – or more directly to ‘green readjustment’. The hydrogen factory, in general terms, will depend on the same electro chemical process as in the 1920s and use existing infrastructures as well as buildings from the town’s industrial heydays.

“Unbuilding the future” in this paper refers to how the green readjustments and future imaginaries conflate and make us of narratives and material structures of past industrialisation. Rather than constituting a definite and clear break with the past, the future of ‘green’ hydrogen production in Rjukan brings with it historicities of a great industrial past.