Open call: For Planetary Governance

Strelka Institute’s The Terraforming program is an interdisciplinary design research think-tank convened to preemptively address the issue of planetary urbanism. The name refers to the need to fundamentally transform Earth’s cities, technologies, and ecosystems to ensure that the planet will be capable of supporting Earth-like life. Artificiality, astronomy, and automation form the basis of that alternative planetarity. For this, the question of governance—knowing, modeling, mobilization, regulation, distribution, enforcement—comes to the fore. This determines how some futures might be prevented so that others can be composed and realized.

For Planetary Governance is an open call for papers, projects, and research related to the topics of planetary governance, and how they are now and will continue to affect urban life, systems, and futures. 

This collaboration between The Terraforming and Strelka Mag intends to solicit original and provocative outcomes that engage with the context of a (possibly as-of-yet non-existent) “governance” in multiple guises—legal, political, cognitive, computational, linguistic, protocological, biological etc.—and through it, our capacity for collective autocomposition. 

This initiative will feature ideas and projects that are surprising, pragmatic, unconventional, and honest—even if productively controversial. We presume that the work that most directly confronts the implications of today is full of risk. 

Below are some of the themes that we invite the participants to explore—as prompts rather than instructions or strict categories—for potential submission. We invite departures from these starting points. The inquires for other geopolities are not against governmentality but on behalf of its reimagining, not the end of history but a long-delayed synthetic beginning.
 

Populations will consider the question: where will the people go? During the pandemic everyone was resorted back into their country of passport, but this “great filtering” only highlighted how artificial that logic is, and how much alternatives are both needed and possible. The status of “citizenship” is under the microscope, as it multiplies, is replaced or fortified as a human filter. 

Zoning Earth will examine the myriad ways that the planet is formally sub-sectioned, spatially and temporally, by borders and timezones for example, and how these together produce a surplus of abstractions. Once more we are interested in alternatives to the present arrangements, and also how the urban planning logic of functional zoning might be applied at planetary scale. 

Positive Biopolitics will reveal how the aesthetic dichotomy between technological and social institutional responses is fictitious: during the pandemic, the best responses were based on both. It is necessary for a society to be able to sense, model, and act back upon itself, and for it to plan and provide for the care of populations. The implication of this experiment in comparative governance is that a positive and planetary-scale biopolitics is not only necessary, it is also possible.

Space Law will explore how twentieth-century space programs discovered Earth as a planet (more than a world). Earth is, after all, in space: we are in space right now. And so, what is its law? Even if geotechnologies will determine geopolitics more than the inverse, the legal architectures of planetary governance are not just an outcome, they are also the medium through which that determination would flow.

Modes of Planetarity will expand our work on “the planetary” by explicitly staging a confrontation between two modes of “planetarity”—the philosophical and the astronomic—so as to consider how each could, and should, correspond with and reinforce the other. As each departs from the “Global” as a static plane, their intersection may give us models by which insights on the geologic, geochemical, and astronomic reality of the planet more directly inform uncertain questions of how to organize it and inhabit it.

You can read more about the themes of the open call here. Submit your proposal through this form by April 10.  

For a deeper dive into the topic, read “‘New World Order’: For Planetary Governance” by The Terraforming Program Director Benjamin Bratton.