Presentation short abstract

In Istanbul’s post-industrial wetlands, water buffalo and herders generate ecological repair beyond formal conservation. Their daily practices create novel ecologies and challenge baselines, revealing post-industrial pastoralism as a mode of multispecies landscape stewardship.

Presentation long abstract

In the post-industrial wetlands of Istanbul, ecological regeneration unfolds not through formal conservation programmes but the daily herding routines of water buffalo and the migrant herding communities who care for them. These wetlands - formed through decades of coal extraction and reshaped by state-led speculative megaprojects amid accelerating climate volatility - are productive landscapes that preserve the city’s last remaining pastoralist practices and host ecological assemblages that do not fit established conservation categories. Rather than restoring an imagined historical baseline, buffalo actively generate novel ecologies that unsettle distinctions between conservation and production, pastoralism and rewilding, and human and nonhuman modes of landscape stewardship.

Drawing on multispecies ethnography, critical spatial practice, and participatory fieldwork undertaken as part of CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA Water Buffalo Commons, the research examines post-industrial pastoralism as a situated form of landscape repair. It interrogates how different knowledge practices - buffalo and herders’ inherited ecological memory, municipal land-use classifications and state imaginaries of infrastructural modernity - compete and converge in defining what is worth restoring, and who is allowed to imagine the future of peri-urban landscapes undergoing rapid transformation. Water Buffalo Commons proposes a framework of “post-industrial repair”: a future-oriented approach suited to landscapes where baselines are irretrievable and futures remain uncertain. It argues that post-industrial pastoralism offers a critical vantage point from which to rethink coexistence - not as a stable condition, but as a prefigurative practice emerging within uncertainty. Through buffalo-led landscape repair, new forms of multispecies governance and ecological futurity come into view.