California’s Central Valley is haunted by a long history of landscape transformation. In 2023, 130 years after Tulare Lake – or Pa’ashi, as it is known to the Tachi Yokut Tribe who once lived there – was drained for agricultural purposes, it came back to life. Tulare Lake was once the US’s largest freshwater body west of the Mississippi. After California’s integration into the United States in 1850, the US government, along with settlers, used drainage techniques developed from European colonisers and enhanced by the steam power of the Industrial Revolution. The exposed land was then placed in private hands. 

But in early 2023, California experienced heavy winter storms followed by large-scale snow melt from the Sierra Nevada mountain range north of the Central Valley – both products of climate change-related phenomena. Water began flowing back into the Tulare Lake basin at a rate that the parched soils could not absorb and the drainage systems could not manage. Within weeks, arable fields of pistachio, cotton, and tomato were submerged. The historic lake was making a comeback. 

By the end of June 2023, Tulare Lake receded into history again, for now. A combination of state agencies implemented measures, including diversion and pumping, to move the water away from arable fields.

The flooding, however, prompted conversations about ecological and social justice in the region. There are calls from tribal and community leaders to turn parts of the lake into wetlands, with the aim of easing flood dangers, providing habitat for wildlife, and restoring the ancestral waters of the Tachi Yokuts. 

Tulare Lake is just one example of a rural landscape that was transformed by the displacement of native people and the technologies of the (long) Industrial Revolution for the purposes of agriculture. Today, many of these landscapes – particularly those that utilised drainage – are reaching the end of their design life and in doing so are disrupting established perceptions of ruralities. 

Correcting the rural record 

There has been a tendency to falsely conflate rural landscapes with nature, in opposition to the urban as the site of culture and technology. This perspective ultimately deprives ruralities of agency and imagination, depoliticising their past and future, and perpetuating their status as peripheries and sites of extraction for the urban “centres”. 

Architects and researchers are now challenging this narrow understanding of rural areas and urban-rural relationships, aiming to change the way we imagine non-urban futures. Their efforts are enabled by rapid advances in the accuracy and accessibility of open satellite imagery sources. The development and rollout of super-resolution models that use machine learning technologies to generate increasingly high-quality images from satellite data is making it possible to analyse rural landscapes in new ways. This information has been utilised across a multitude of sectors, from navigation to urban planning, as well as journalism and scholarly analysis. 

There has been a tendency to falsely conflate rural landscapes with nature, in opposition to the urban as the site of culture and technology.

Satellite imagery also enables greater visibility of remote areas and large privately owned land, both of which have been somewhat off-limits to analysts of the countryside and agricultural areas for decades. As Nathalie Pettorelli, a senior fellow at the Zoological Society of London, puts it, satellites “provide you with the opportunity to monitor the Earth globally and monitor aspects of biodiversity that were very much neglected before.”¹ 

Land grabbing then and now 

Some of the most forward-looking work using satellite imagery is coming from the field of architecture. The modelling skills that architects are trained in have harnessed the power of the “open source revolution” to develop new forms of analysis that hold truth to power. The Forensic Architecture project, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, is a key example of this developing praxis. This team of researchers investigates states and corporate entities using a practice that centres around the geolocation of data and the building of navigable 3D digital models and interactive maps. 

Since its establishment in 2010, Forensic Architecture has investigated cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world. This includes the policies of European, national, and international authorities in relation to migration across the Mediterranean and the conduct of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers during Israel’s war in Gaza. 

One of its ongoing investigations focuses on the ecological destruction of Namibia’s grasslands from a human rights perspective. The researchers used a combination of historical photographs and oral histories to create 3D vegetation maps of the landscape in an area called Hatsamas, 60 kilometres east of the capital Windhoek, prior to the German colonisation that took place in the late 19th and early 20th century.² 

The researchers then used the same process to generate vegetation maps for the earliest available aerial images from 1972 and up-todate satellite imagery from 2023. They used these maps to create an interpolated map series in which each frame represented a year. With a video game modelling tool called Unreal Engine, they then created a navigable 3D model for each frame, which allows for an immersive and visual representation of the combined environmental and social repercussions of colonial policies, land use practices, and suppression of Indigenous lifeways. 

This research project from Forensic Architecture shows how novel modelling and visualisation techniques can make the relationships between environmental degradation and human rights violations much clearer than previously possible. In the Namibia context, the 3D models the researchers produced show that the genocide that began with German colonisation in South West Africa was not a single event but an unfolding process that evolved in a wider global political context, from imperial land grabbing through military campaigns to more insidious forms of dispossession and landscape degradation. 

The research also reveals the continuity between colonial and genocidal practices and the ongoing environmental and ecological destruction in non-urban areas. Landscape transformations that began with land grabbing, often at the hands of imperial forces, can be seen through these new methods as processes that escalate and evolve, first through military campaigns and later through the development of global trade and commerce systems. These systems perpetuate both the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the idea of non-urban landscape as a site of extraction. 

The military-agricultural complex 

The research that organisations like Forensic Architecture are carrying out reflects a growing interest in rural areas, one that is shared by landscape and building architects, as well as planners. The 2019 exhibition Taking the Country’s Side, commissioned by the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and curated by French philosopher and architectural historian Sébastien Marot, confronted the constructed division between the country and the city through an exploration of the formal links between architecture and agriculture. 

Formed of 42 panels, a large chronological frieze, a compass of scenarios, and a collection of short films, the exhibition emerges from Marot’s teaching on environmental history. Marot makes the case that agriculture and architecture both emerged from a move towards the domestication of plants and animals, and humans, during the Neolithic Revolution (10,000 to 12,000 years ago). This, as American political scientist James C. Scott highlighted in Against the Grain (2017), is the critical period during which humans became increasingly sedentary and, as a result, began to build and design landscapes and dwellings in a more permanent way. 

Both Scott and Marot document how agriculture, the planning of non-urban environments, and the design of social systems are intrinsically linked in pre-history and continue to shape our understandings and uses of non-urban landscapes to this day. 

Marot’s exhibition further elucidated the links between the military industrial complex and non-urban landscape design, highlighted by Forensic Architecture’s research in Namibia, through the integration of French agricultural engineer and critic Mattieu Calame’s research into nitrogen.³ 

Calame’s work highlights the significance of biochemical research in the 19th century that discovered the importance of nitrogen in plant growth. Bones are a key source of nitrogen, and this discovery led to gruesome campaigns from industrialised nations, in particular England, to pillage nitrogen reserves from catacombs and battlefields around the world to replenish the soil they had impoverished through monocultural farming practices. 

The efficacy of nitrogen in improving soil quality for industrialised farming led to a race by chemists to identify methods of converting atmospheric nitrogen. This was finally achieved in the early 20th century with the Haber-Bosch process of ammonia synthesis, which made possible the production of ammonia-based artificial fertilisers. The technique was, however, very energy-intensive and was first used on an industrial scale during World War I for the production of munitions. This military-industrial process was then refi ned and redeployed for agricultural purposes in the second half of the 20th century. 

The new techniques in visualising and modelling non-urban landscapes make clear the links between military processes and agricultural industrialisation in the 20th century. In the period after World War II, tanks were repurposed as tractors, munitions production sites were transformed into a new pesticide and fertiliser industry, airfields and bunkers were converted into farms and farm buildings. 

Focus on the countryside 

Taking the Country’s Side didn’t just focus on the past. Much like Forensic Architecture’s research, it aimed to use its historical criticism to present new ways of imagining the future of rural landscapes. In particular, it presented a future scenario in which new rural commons disrupt the idea of the city as the primary site of democracy and civil life. Marot argues that this commonplace idea of the urban as the home of participative politics obscures a complex system of older rural practices, including issues around the management of common land. 

Marot drew on ideas from permaculture and agroecology to critique the metropolitan zeitgeist in which cities imagine themselves as the height of culture without understanding their interrelationships with the territories and life worlds that they depend on for resources. The idea of the future of the countryside, as a producer of both cultural and political material and resources, is also central to the Dutch radical architect Rem Koolhaas’s work on rural futures. 

In his 2020 Guggenheim exhibition Countryside, The Future and the accompanying book Countryside, A Report, Koolhaas explores the importance of ongoing social, cultural, and aesthetic transformations across the non-urban surface of the globe from an architectural perspective. As a key player in debates around the mass movement to urban areas in the 1970s and 1980s, Koolhaas is uniquely positioned to critique the underexploration of the rural. His work since 2020 asks important questions about what happened to the places that those who moved to the city left behind. 

From the mid-20th century, the world’s population has been rapidly urbanising. In 1960, more than 60 per cent of the global population lived in rural areas; by 2007, the distribution of rural and urban residents had equalised, and since then the share of people residing in urban areas has surpassed 50 per cent of the total population. Despite this, the non-urban presently accounts for 97 per cent of the world’s surface and is home to just under 50 per cent of the human population. 
 
Our focus on cities is likened by Koolhaas to the model of the relative sensitivity of the human body, where some areas – like the lips and eyes – are engorged and overrepresented and others – such as the hips and shoulders – are shrunken and under perceived. The revolution in satellite imagery and methodological advances in modelling are opening new opportunities to even this field by making visible and explorable vast areas of terra incognita that, since the 16th century, have been cut off from public access, use, and imagination by colonial projects both internal and external. From Namibia to the Scottish Highlands, these new methods and technologies are opening the countryside to the imagination in ways that have never before been possible. 

Intermediate places 

Koolhaas alerts us to the rapid transformations that are now occurring in the countryside. Far from the pastoral idyll, today’s countryside is the laboratory of the future, characterised by new patterns of ownership and seasonal migration, new vernacular architectures of data centres, wind and solar infrastructure, and smart farms, and new populist and right-wing ideologies. The city seems static in comparison.  

Like Forensic Architecture’s research, Koolhaas’s team utilised a mixed-methods approach, using open-source satellite data to investigate the non-agricultural rural. They chose an area of rural Holland, north of Amsterdam – arguably the image par excellence of a post-Enlightenment agricultural landscape – and created a detailed inventory of a 12-by-3-kilometre strip comprising several villages and the areas between them. 

Far from the pastoral idyll, today’s countryside is the laboratory of the future. The city seems static in comparison.

They discovered a new kind of rural landscape, characterised not by agriculture but by its “intermediate” status. By combining satellite imagery with other open-access data concerning business and economic activity as well as traditional ethnographic techniques, the researchers found an important gap between the appearance of, and everyday life within, non-urban areas. This is a place where the surface appearance of the place has no relation to what is happening at ground level, where former farm buildings are transformed into yoga studios and art museums, and workers’ cottages house white-collar commuters.  

Koolhaas and his team uncovered two interlinked transformations occurring simultaneously in this site. The area is increasingly appealing to young urban people attracted by a narrative of authenticity and nature; at the same time, farmers are diversifying their enterprises by relying more heavily on technological automation and reducing the labour time they dedicate to farming. This research highlights the intermediate nature of the countryside in our contemporary moment, where new forms of production and extraction are being laid on top of older geographies of power. 

Newly in possession of the rich visual data afforded by satellite imagery and the software advances of the open-source revolution, architects are uniquely positioned to help us understand what is occurring and what is at stake in the rural transformations that are underway. Their training in the philosophy and history of design of place allows them to identify where old patterns are being reproduced and to visualise these in accessible ways.  

The increasing geometric perfection of farming is one such form, highlighted by Koolhaas, that is of particular importance for debates around sustainable futures. With increased automation, we see higher standardisation of farming equipment and practices across the globe. There is also an ongoing entrenchment of the dynamics outlined in Forensic Architecture’s study of the Namibian context. Colonial processes of land grabbing and the development of extractive industries, from farming to mining for the military-industrial complex, are giving way to capitalist projects that use the same language of form. This is a utilitarian pattern visible across non-urban landscapes the world over, from missile sites to data centres, wind farms, and industrial agricultural areas. It is an architectural vernacular of rigour and functionality that hints at a wider totalitarian logic. 

Designing futures 

In my own research into present-day agricultural regions built on former wetlands, I have found the same grid-like system of monocultural fields sprawled across low-lying flatlands from East Anglia to California’s Central Valley.⁴ There are clear links between this form and the factory. In his writings on the shifts associated with the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution, Marx identified steam power as a key driver of capitalist labour organisation. Steam power, however, was not only used to mould society on the factory floor of urban areas; it was also a productive force that facilitated the draining of wetlands (deemed “waste” areas in Western European thought) through pumping machinery and allowed for an acceleration in the wide-scale transformation of these landscapes into industrial agricultural regions. 

These drained areas often act as key sites for food production and, as such, occupy simultaneously central and peripheral space in the national imagination. They are given nicknames such as “the breadbasket of Britain” in the case of the Fens in eastern England, or “America’s Salad Bowl” in California’s Salinas Valley. These sites are home to some of the most productive and high-value land in the world, yet the people who inhabit them experience economic, social, and environmental health issues that are intimately entangled with the landscape transformations that redesigned wetlands as agricultural powerhouses in the image of the factory. 

The work of Koolhaas, Marot, and Forensic Architecture highlights this form as a hyper- Cartesian order imposed on the countryside from the 16th century, when the sensuous was divided from the intellectual by Enlightenment philosophy. This has resulted in a formal landscape architecture characterised by the geometric lines of the military-industrial complex. 

The work of architects is imperative to imagining new ways of creating sustainable life worlds.  

The drained wetlands of my research are all reaching the end of their design life: the soil is degraded through ever-intensifying production, and the low-lying land is subject to flooding as a result of rising sea levels and increased snowmelt. The work of architects is imperative to imagining new ways of creating sustainable life worlds in these regions.  

This work is particularly important when we consider the design of sustainable futures. If our wind and solar farms continue this landscape vernacular of grid-like geometric forms, then we risk repeating previous extractive colonial processes. Perhaps the most valuable contribution that architecture can make is the synthesis of the large scale into questions about liveability, not only for human life but also for the ecosystems in which we exist. 

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1. Augusta Dwyer (2021). “A boom in satellite technology is revolutionizing the way we see the Earth: And the data is opening new doors for landscape management and restoration”. ThinkLandscape / Global Landscapes Forum. 19 April 2021. Available at: https://thinklandscape.globallandscapesforum.org/51523/a-boom-in-satellite-technology-is-changing-the-way-we-see-the-earth/ ↩︎
2. Forensic Architecture / Forensis (2025). “The Environmental Continuum of Genocide in Namibia”. Forensic Architecture Investigation.
   15 August 2025. Available at: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-environmental-continuum-of-genocide-in-namibia. ↩︎
3. Sébastien Marot & Matthieu Calame (2020). “Inaugural lecture of the exhibition ‘Agriculture & Architecture:
   Taking the Country’s Side’”. EPFL / Archizoom. 26 February 2020. Available at: https://www.epfl.ch/campus/art-culture/museum-exhibitions/archizoom/inaugural-lecture-sebastien-marot-matthieu-calame/ ↩︎
4. Rowan Jaines (2022). “The Social Life of Agriculture: History Passes into Setting”. Discover Society: New Series 2. Available at: https://discoversociety.org/2022/03/09/the-social-life-of-agriculture-history-passes-into-setting/. ↩︎