Presentation short abstract

To discuss the hypothesis of conservation as design, this presentation asks how protected areas can be read as operational landscapes of a global conservation regime, considering global and situated conservation geographies as interconnected with the rhythms of planetary urbanization.

Presentation long abstract

Building on literature on planetary urbanization, critical design theory, and critical conservation studies, this paper examines how conservation strategies can be examined not only as managerial practices of control, administration, and protection of life, but also as design operations embedded in the genealogy of nature–society spatial relations. It argues that protected areas function as operational landscapes of a global conservation regime, interconnected with the rhythms of planetary urbanization rather than existing as performative enclaves protected from urban–industrial expansion. Focusing on Brazilian environmental spatial policies, I will explore the hypothesis of conservation as design through illustrative global, national, and extra-state cases, including the global 30×30 target, the territorialization of carbon-credit projects, and state-led production of conservation units as devices of extensive urbanization. These examples reveal how conservation geographies are designed through territorial planning, legal–spatial instruments, as well as socioenvironmental activism that mediate ecological, political, and economic interests at multiple scales. By tracing the interconnections between situated conservation practices and global design logics for nature protection, the paper highlights the defuturing effects that emerge from the entanglements of conservation with contemporary forms of extractivism and greenwashing, thereby reproducing colonial dispositions within global environmental narratives. Bringing political-ecological debates on conservation into a spatial research agenda foregrounds the extensive conditions of urban life in the face of planetary challenges of climate mitigation and adaptation, with the potential to rehearse novel gazes into conservation geographies and contribute to a broader understanding of contemporary urbanization processes.