Reworlding: Planetarity and Future Imaginaries

Professor Tim Waterman

1-2pm, Wed 28 January 2026

Budden Lecture Theatre, School of Architecture

Earthliness, worldliness, and globality all provide different frames for thinking about life on our planet. They also provide different frames for ‘worlding’—the creation and maintenance of shared mental worlds that both arise from and result in earthly landscapes of everyday life. This talk will range from landscape representation and colonialism to utopianism and resistance to show how crucial it is to understand and remake ways in which worlds are made in the architectures. These are worlds not merely found in buildings—edifices, landscapes, infrastructures—but inside our heads. The project(s) of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and globalisation are the product of shared geopolitical imaginaries propagated through literature, the arts, science, and politics. Enlightenment ideas which were at once poetic and romantic, toxic and destructive, created the framework for building the liberal and biblical ‘city on a hill’ in the New World, while laying waste to whole continents, peoples, and ecologies. These utopian ideals shaped both city and countryside through processes of building and plantation, but also through the disindigenation of landscapes, ecocide, and genocide. The tools and techniques of empire-building have been ways of bringing new worlds into being which can, despite their terrible legacy, model the world-making imaginaries needed to bring about the scale of earthly transformation required for human and ecological survival in the face of the triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and fascism 2.0.