Metis technoscience scholar Michelle Murphy proposes and describes the concept of “alterlife” as “life already altered, which is also life open to alteration. It indexes collectivities of life recomposed by the molecular productions of capitalism in our own pasts and the pasts of our ancestors, as well as into the future.” How might landscape architects and allied disciplines engage with alterlife as a concept, and the waste relations—chemical, material, and spatial—produced by capitalism and its past, present, and future trajectories?

In this studio, students used Boeing, a multinational corporate empire, local employer, landowner, polluter, policy influencer, economic driver, environmental manipulator, among many more roles, to interrogate the ways in which its political ecology (how and why power relations and economic structures drive environmental change) has transfigured socioeconomic and environmental systems locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. For over 100 years, Boeing has been a core Seattle employer and a national and international innovator. Over the last 1-2 decades, however, it has moved portions of its operations and jobs to other states, and experienced waning support due to a series of catastrophic and malfunctioning events associated with its aircraft. This speculative studio asked: what happens to the land, economy, and workforce if Boeing leaves Seattle? What happens to the other lands, from manufacturing plants and airports to airplane boneyards, in the wake of Boeing’s afterlife? How do we engage with the alterlife produced by Boeing? And most importantly, what do reparations for the community look like?

In all projects, students used research to inform design decisions, and implemented design as a mode of research to test ideas, form new relations, and reconsider seemingly disparate systems and processes as interconnected, integrative, and cyclical.

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Acknowledgements

Design Studio Students: Grace Brennan, Chanel Chang, Sarah Chu, Chris Copeland, Camille Forrest, Joe Minsky, Jingyao Wu, Peiyao Xiao

Reviewers: Seyyada Burney, Alicia Kellogg, Vincent Javet, Ashley Ludwig, Lynne Manzo,  Elizabeth Umbanhower, Ken Yocom