Atlas of Material Worlds: Mapping the Agency of Matter for a New Landscape Practice

Atlas of Material Worlds is a highly designed narrative atlas illustrating the agency of nonliving materials with unique, ubiquitous, and often hidden influence on our daily lives. Employing new materialism as a jumping-off point, it examines the increasingly blurry lines between the organic and inorganic, engaging the following questions: What roles do nonliving materials play? Might a closer examination of those roles reveal an undeniable agency we have long overlooked or disregarded? If so, does this material agency change our understanding of the social structures, ecologies, economies, cosmologies, technologies, and landscapes that surround us? And, perhaps most importantly, why does material agency matter? This is the story of the world’s driest nonpolar desert, pink flamingos, and cerulean blue lithium ponds; industrial shipping logistics, pudding-like jiggling substrates, and monuments of mud; galactic bodies, radioactive sheep, and the yellowcake of uranium. Put simply, this book dares readers to see the world anew, from material up. Atlas of Material Worlds offers this new relationship to our host environment in a time of mounting crises—accelerating climate change, ballooning socioeconomic inequality, and rising toxic nationalism—uniquely telling materialist stories for practitioners and students in landscape, architecture, and other built environment disciplines. 1. Uranium. Big Bangs: Metal as Metaphor. Denise Hoffman-Brandt 2. Lithium. Tracing the Green Energy Paradox across Battery, Body, Landscape, and Cosmos. Matthew Seibert 3. Crude. The Bakken Fossil Fuel Frontier. Collen Tuite and Ian Quate 4. Clay. Spies in the Making: Imperial Oil Economies and the Geographies of Mediterranean Food Kristi Cheramie 5. Sand. 825 Miles: or, How to Make a Beach Rob Holmes 6. Mud. And Its Meaning in a Port Town Brian Davis 7. Metabolite. Material as Physical History of a Relationship. Elizabeth Hénaff “Matthew Seibert’s An Atlas of Material Worlds reorients us by asking us to consider the earth from the perspective of seven materials—uranium, lithium, clay, crude oil, sand, mud, and metabolite—seven nonhuman protagonists whose fascinating stories take us far from home and deep into our own bodies. Through radical cartography, image, and text, Seibert and his fellow landscape architects map out alternative, non-utilitarian, non-anthropocentric ways of thinking and being in our world, that, if we take this new materialist sensibility seriously, may just lead