This project combines engineering, bioscience, intellectual history and sociology to generate new understandings and strategies for sustainable technologies in arid landscapes. Naturally arid, saline landscapes have been dissected and disarticulated, and new connections created, through massive irrigation projects and extractive regimes. The arid landscapes of Eastern Africa and Western Asia, our primary research sites, have been defined, for over a century, by the promise of engineering that could transform them.
The project examines the generative, extractive and transformative capacities of eco-technologies and focuses on three specific technologies: solar energy, wind farming and desalination. The aim of the project is to integrate and contribute to ongoing initiatives that mitigate the effects of climate catastrophe in Eastern Africa and South Asia. The project’s outcomes will integrate research and development work around specific technologies to create robust and sustainable models in the face of resource scarcity and contamination.
We will use data from past and present eco-technologies and trace experimental and trial installation, industrial scaling, global supply chains and sequential obsolescence. A key aspect of the project’s vision is to study landscape adaptation: the varied means by which discrete eco-technological materials are re-made and re-situated within dynamic social-environmental matrices.