Designers are increasingly compelled to shape larger scales and contexts, to address questions related to infrastructural problems, urban and ecological systems, and cultural and regional issues. These questions, previously confined to the domains of engineering, ecology, or regional planning, now require articulation through design. Encouraging designers to reexamine their tools and develop strategies to link attributes previously understood to be either separate from each other or external to the design disciplines, those questions have also opened up a range of technical, formal, and social repertoires for architecture and urbanism. Although in the past decade different versions of landscape and infrastructural urbanism have emerged in response to similar challenges, this new condition we call “the geographic” points to more than a shift in scale. Much of the analysis in architecture, landscape, and urbanism—of emergent urban mutations and global changes on the spatial dimension—comes by way of social anthropology, human geography, and economics, and the journal aims to extend these arguments by asking how the design practices can have a more active and transformative impact on the forces that shape contemporary urban realities.
