Cyborg Landscapes: Intersections of Technology and the Environment in the late 20th and (early) 21st centuries

• In Event: Envirotech Histories

Abstract

In this presentation, I’ll consider the notion of the cyborg, extended to the study of landscape in the history of technology. The term “cyborg”, as a human (or animal)-machine organism, emerged from cybernetics and human-machine discourses in the 1950s and 1960s. Donna Harraway adopted this term in the 1980s and 1990s, presenting the cyborg as a boundary transgressor; a figure which may “suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (Harraway, 1985, 1991). In recent decades, scholars of landscape architecture, urbanism and geography have spoken of the city as a cyborg (Swyngedouw, 1996), of cyborg urbanization (Gandy, 2005), or of cyborg landscapes understood through the interactions between infrastructure, ecology and society (Lokman, 2017). These works all suggest the cyborg as a powerful figure, opening the door to a hybrid understanding of nature and technology. Drawing from these discussions, I develop a framework for thinking of cyborg landscapes which contextualizes sites of interest within urban infrastructural processes and broader ecological systems, establishing their roles as interfaces for land use and technology. A specific case-study is examined: the re-development and greening of the Ile Séguin, Trapèze and Pont des Sèvres industrial lands in Boulogne-Billancourt, France.

Author

• Sophie LeBlanc, University of Toronto