The Terraforming

This short book was written in July 2019. Each titled paragraph can be read by itself, but the sequence does matter. It is dense with ideas but each will be, I hope, expanded through The Terraforming urban design research pro­ gram at Strelka Institute in Moscow this book serves as its opening brief, manifesto, salvo. It is a polemic against dominant modes of planetarity and to inadequacies in how critical philosophy and design seek to confront them.
The title refers both to the terraforming that has taken place in recent centuries in the form of urbanization and to the terraforming that must now be planned and conducted as the planetary design initiative of the next centuries. The term "terraforming" usually refers to transforming
the ecosystems of other planets or moons to make them capable of supporting Earth­like life, but the looming ecological consequences of what is called the Anthropocene suggest that in the decades to come, we will need to terraform Earth if it is to remain a viable host for its own
life. The next Strelka education program will explore the implications of this proposition for urbanism on a planetary scale, a venture that is full of risk: technical, philosophical, and biological. To do so means neither a blank­page reset nor risk­mitigating incrementalism, but a projective encounter with uncannily superfunctional necessity.