Call For Submissions: SCENARIO 7 Power

We are happy to announce the open Call for Submissions for the next issue of Scenario Journal. This upcoming issue will explore the power dynamics of energy transitions, in the context of tackling climate change; it will look at the ways in which power and issues of equity course through our social, political and technological systems. We’re looking for pieces that take on the topic of power and energy, using authentic voices to present these layered topics from a variety of perspectives, looking back to history or imagining a radically new future. We’re interested in socially provocative, architecturally strange, infrastructurally driven projects. We’re looking for well-researched, vividly illustrated writing that helps us see landscapes and communities in a new light. Please submit your provocations.

If you haven’t had a chance to dig into our last issue: SCENARIO 6: Migration, we think you’ll enjoy it. Content, as always, is open-access and free of charge.

Submissions Due: May 24, 2019

Addressing climate change will require a wholesale reimagining of society and economy. It is a design challenge of unparalleled scale and scope, demanding that we rethink how we produce energy, build cities, grow food, manage land, and transform labor. This, of course, is not just a conversation about energy infrastructure or carbon pricing.

Infrastructure is always political, and energy transitions have always been contested, pitting established players against upstart technologies and new coalitions. The effects on communities are similarly uneven, resulting in unequal access to economic opportunity, to decision-making, and to environmental harm. How can a radical reimagining of energy infrastructure create opportunities for an inclusive and participatory conversation about climate change and social justice? Who has the power to talk about infrastructure, and who gets left out? Can designers play a meaningful role in amplifying diverse voices and generating nuanced proposals for a more socially and environmentally just future?

Of course, the design community has its own issues with power, inclusivity, and equity. Can designers hope to participate in this conversation if we don’t address our own problematic relationship to power?

SCENARIO 7 welcomes the submission of critical essays, provocations, and design projects that explore the relationship between climate action, energy infrastructure, and social justice.

Submission Requirements:

  • Design projects and photo essays should have a clear and focused text no longer than 1000 words, accompanied by 10-15 images.
  • Article-based submissions should be no longer than 2500 words.
  • We prefer to receive submissions as Microsoft Word documents with images embedded with the text. All sources and citations should be clearly indicated and included as footnotes or endnotes according to the Chicago Manual of Style.
  • Send submissions to mail@scenariojournal.com, with ‘Submission′ in the subject line. Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
  • Please alert us if work has been previously published or if it has been submitted simultaneously to another publication.

This issue of Scenario Journal is being made possible by the support of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Newest Issue Explores Migration And Across Scales And Geographies

We are pleased to announce the launch of the latest issue of Scenario Journal — SCENARIO 6: Migration.

This issue, long in the making, tackles this pressing and loaded topic through a range of disciplinary perspectives, reflecting on a diverse suite of fascinating stories of migration: of people, of animals, of plants, of materials, of habitats and climate zones, of coastlines and entire urban regions.

Migration is a fundamental process that sustains communities, but it also represents some of our greatest social anxieties. As such, it has become difficult to speak of migration of any sort without entering a semantic minefield. This issue dives headlong into the contentious vocabulary of migration, investigating it at a variety of scales and in a variety of places.

SCENARIO 6: Migration brings together critical essays, projective design proposals, rich photo pieces, historical research, and speculative fiction. Contributors include Steven Handel, Karl Kullmann, Ian Caine and Derek Hoeferlin, Traumnovelle, Wim Wambecq and Bruno De Meulder, Roland Kays, Alex Klatskin, Fadi Masoud, Maria Gabriella Trovato, Tami Banh and Antonia Rudnay, Mike Yengling, Audrey Burns Leites, and Eduardo Rega.

The full issue of SCENARIO 6: Migration is available online, free of charge. As always, Scenario Journal is committed to creating open access content for diverse audiences on topics central to our global urban condition. We hope you enjoy reading it and pass it on to your friends and colleagues.

Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner
Editors-in-Chief // Scenario Journal

SCENARIO 6: MIGRATION – Coming Soon

  
At long last, we are getting ready to release SCENARIO 6: MIGRATION later this month. Since we put out the call for submissions just over a year ago, a cascade of current events around the world has prompted us to reassess the theme and reinforced for us the timeliness and urgency of this topic. From the U.S. election to a profoundly changed political climate in Europe, to increasingly visible changes in natural systems facing the early effects of climate change, migration is all around us. The topic is a complicated one, and there were some elements and perspectives on Migration that we were keen to include in the issue. We felt we needed more time to properly address the breadth and urgency of the topic of migration. We are excited to be putting the finishing touches on this issue as we speak and think you will enjoy it. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, let us share with you some of the stories from around the internet that we are reading, watching, and listening to, all of them reverberating in one way or another around the many facets of the topic of migration–of people, of animals, of materials, of landscapes. Enjoy!

 
What we’re reading:

This stunning and brutal account of human trafficking and Nigerian girls risking everything to make their way across the deserts of Libya to reach Europe. Fleeing Boko Haram. Probably not what architects mean when they talk about adaptive reuse. Photographer Richard Mosse talks about repurposing a camera made for long-range battle surveillance to show humanity in refugee camps. Forensic anthropologists document the human tragedy of immigration through the remains of 550 bodies found in a single county in South Texas. Trump’s wall may also impact thousands of plant and animal species. Saltwater migration is already killing coastal forests at the leading edge of climate change.

The planning and construction of detention centers in rural areas effectively robs detainees of their right to an attorney. How Washington blew its best chance to fix immigration years ago. On those days when America seems heartless, know that this small town welcomes 1,500 refugees a year. While Americans envy the generosity of kinder Presidents, some Canadians doubt the #WelcomeToCanada campaign. Trump’s Paris climate agreement speech, annotated by an expert in energy and foreign policy. Why scientists are bad at explaining climate change.

Immigration is changing languages and people are modulating how they use the term migration. Globalization and industrial agriculture have created an unprecedented microbial migration. Pronghorn antelopes learn to use highway overpasses on the first federally designated migration corridor in North America, while the Department of Transportation wonders if grizzlies, fish, and monarch butterflies may benefit from highways. Tracing human migration through music and nocturnal bird flight through acoustic monitoring. And in Somalia where nomadic tribes migrate in search of water and pasture, climate change is acting as the catalyst of conflict and displacement.

 

What we’re listening to:

The language of human migration is ever-shifting and political: migrant, immigrant, asylum-seeker, and refugee. The journey of an unaccompanied minor from Honduras to the United States. 99% Invisible’s excellent two-part series on the history of Sanctuary Cities.

 

Happy exploring,

Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner
Editors-in-Chief // Scenario Journal

 

Image credit:  An aerial view of Za’atri refugee camp, Jordan. Photo by United Nations Photo.

Scenario 6: Migration – Open Call Closing Soon

Fisk 3
This has been a year of migration, in what promises to be a new normal of shifting populations and whole landscapes responding to changing climate and grinding conflict. We would like to remind our readers about our current Call for Submissions, which closes next week on May 28th. SCENARIO 6: Migration is seeking critical essays, provocations, and design projects that explore the relationship between migration patterns and our designed landscape.

 

The open call prompts us to think about the spatial, social and environmental impacts of flows, habitats, coasts, borders, and populations on the move: Is promoting connectivity always the answer, or does it make native populations more vulnerable to invasion? Which flows do we want to encourage, and which to block? Stirred into motion by the stresses of historic planetary change, how can populations on the move keep up, and what kind of assistance can design offer?

 

We hope you will consider submitting. Full submission details can be found at https://scenariojournal.com/submit/

 

Call For Submissions: SCENARIO 6 Migration

We are pleased to announce the open Call for Submissions for the next issue of Scenario Journal. This upcoming issue will explore the patterns, processes and repercussions of migration. We are looking for pieces that take on topic of populations on the move, from a variety of perspectives, regions, species. We’re interested in socially provocative, architecturally strange, ecologically driven projects. We’re looking for well-researched, vividly illustrated writing that helps us see landscapes and communities in a new light. Please submit your provocations.

If you haven’t had a chance to dig into our last issue: SCENARIO 5: Extraction, we think you’ll enjoy it. Content, as always, is open-access and free of charge.
S6_Call For Submissions

.

Deadline: May 28th, 2016

Populations move. Plants disperse genes by way of seeds and pollen; wetlands accrete and erode; animals forage, mate, roam. Humans leave their homes in search of work, land, education, safety, and opportunity. Migration is a process by which organisms track resources, discover, and escape. The patterns of migration reflect spatial and temporal changes in the landscape. Species also shape the environment as they move through it.

The design of our cities can facilitate or inhibit migration. All interventions in the built environment have cascading effects across the ecosystem. Patterns of movement rely on complex networks of relationships and drivers that can easily be disturbed, or enhanced, by a dam, a highway, a border fence, a subdivision, a grove of trees, a feral cat. How do we make sense of these relationships? Is promoting connectivity always the answer, or does it make native populations more vulnerable to invasion? Which flows do we want to encourage, and which to block? Stirred into motion by the stresses of historic planetary change, how can populations on the move keep up, and what kind of assistance can design offer?

SCENARIO 6 welcomes the submission of critical essays, provocations, and design projects that explore the relationship between migration patterns and our designed landscape. As designers, planners, politicians, and ecologists shape urban and regional landscapes, what role will the ever-shifting flow of populations play?

Submission Requirements:

  • Design projects and photo essays should have a clear and focused text no longer than 1000 words, accompanied by 6-10 images.
  • Article-based submissions should range in length from 1000 to 4000 words.
  • We prefer to receive submissions as Microsoft Word documents with images embedded with the text. All sources and citations should be clearly indicated and included as footnotes or endnotes according to the Chicago Manual of Style.
  • Send submissions to mail@scenariojournal.com, with ‘Submission′ in the subject line. Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
  • Please alert us if work has been previously published or if it has been submitted simultaneously to another publication.
Image (above) by Abhijit Shylanath

.

 

SCENARIO 5 Is Published

Postcards-OutlineText

We are pleased to announce the launch of the latest issue of Scenario Journal – Scenario 5: Extraction.

Extraction sustains our society. We rely on energy to power the technology in our lives but are disconnected from the landscapes that must be exploited to yield that energy. We dig and blast materials to construct and repair the physical infrastructure of our towns and cities, but rarely pause to think about the origin of the gravel, concrete, stone, and steel that comprise the built environment.

This issue of Scenario Journal explores a range of extraction landscapes, and the networks that sustain them. The pieces in this collection bring us to the sites of extraction of a range of materials (coal, oil, water, gravel, slate, cement, phosphate, copper and gold, as well as more intangible materials like wind, fish, and solar radiation). They tie together the materials and spaces of extraction with the underlying processes and flows that drive these landscape transformations. Collectively the pieces in this collection present extraction as a condition rooted in history, yet actively transforming the future of the landscape, and along with it communities, economies, technology, and equity.

Extraction collectively represents humanity’s most drastic and lasting imprint upon the geological and ecological patterns of the Earth. By looking closely at the relationship between resource consumption and networks of extraction, we aim to highlight the reciprocal nature of these paired landscapes, and to give designers, artists, planners, engineers, and urban citizens a spatial vocabulary for taking collective responsibility for landscape transformation.

Scenario 5: Extraction brings together critical essays, projective design proposals, rich photo pieces, historic research, and speculative fiction by Bradford Watson and Sean Burkholder, Gavin Bridge, J Henry Fair, Frank Matero, Guy Trangoš and Kerry Bobbins, Claudia Bode, Rob Holmes, Lauren Sosa and Christie Allen, Neyran Turan, Neeraj Bhatia, Nicholas Pevzner, Jamie Vanucchi, Elizabeth Yarina, Matthew Wiener, and Alexander Breedon.

The full issue of Scenario 5: Extraction can be found free of charge on this site. Its been a pleasure working with such a talented group of authors. We hope you enjoy reading this issue, and share it with your friends and colleagues.

Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner
Editors-in-Chief // Scenario Journal