Deserts

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Notes

1 Today, deserts cover 33 percent of the land surface of the planet, including cold and hot deserts on every continent (considering 41.3 percent of the global surface as drylands, UN-Habitat estimates a total of 2.1 billion people living in deserts, with a growth rate faster than that of any other ecozone). With climate change and its resultant migrations, this arid geography’s extent, form, and population will shift dramatically in the coming decades.

2 See e.g. Samia Henni, Deserts Are Not Empty (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022); Léopold Lambert, “The Desert: Introduction,” The Funambulist 44 (November–December, 2022); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Catrin Gersdorf, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction of America (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009); Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge–London: The MIT Press, 2016); and the work of the Desert Futures Collective at the Yale MacMillan Center, (https://desertfutures.yale.edu).

3 Danika Cooper, “Drawing Deserts, Making Worlds,” in Henni, Deserts Are Not Empty, 82.

4 Abdessamad El Montassir, Galb’Echaouf, 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ersela Kripa

Ersela Kripa is an associate professor and Director of Texas Tech University Huckabee College of Architecture – El Paso and Director of Projects at POST (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies). Located on the U.S./Mexico border, she maps trans-border ecologies, urbanism, and infrastructures, exposing binational systems of control that affect human rights. Kripa is a registered architect and co-founder of the research and design practice AGENCY. Kripa’s book, FRONTS: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World (Oro Editions, 2020), written with Stephen Mueller, uncovers the geography of codependence between the global security complex and the urban morphologies it simulates. Her awards include the Rome Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, and an Emerging Voice award from the Architecture League of New York.

Francesco Marullo

Francesco Marullo is an associate professor at the UIC School of Architecture interested in the relations between architecture and abstraction, labor, and the space of production. He holds a Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture from the Delft University of Technology and The Berlage Center and is a founding member of the research collective The City as a Project. He co-authored Tehran: Life within Walls (2018); co-edited The Architecture of Logistics (2018); contributed to the volume Work, Body, Leisure (2018) and The Contested Territory of Architectural Theory (2022); and recently edited a thematic section of Log (2022) on the North-American deserts. A selection of his writings will soon be translated as Arquitectura Gènerica y Trabajo Vivo (2023).

Stephen Mueller

Stephen Mueller is an associate professor at Texas Tech University Huckabee College of Architecture – El Paso, and Director of Research at POST (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies). Located on the U.S./Mexico border, he maps trans-border ecologies, urbanism, and infrastructures, exposing binational systems of control that affect human rights. Mueller is a registered architect and co-founder of the research and design practice AGENCY. Mueller’s book, FRONTS: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World (Oro Editions, 2020), written with Ersela Kripa, uncovers the geography of codependence between the global security complex and the urban morphologies it simulates. His awards include the Rome Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, and an Emerging Voice award from the Architecture League of New York.