Primer on the Primer

Cambridge, MA

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AN APOCATOPIAN PRIMER

❻ Spring 2024

⓿ A Primer on the Primer

An Apocatopian Primer is an ongoing list of climate reading, hosted on Places Journal. Many of the titles are produced within the design disciplines. Others are works of fiction and non-fiction from around the globe that might inform acts of design. This list challenges the idea that designers are somehow apolitical or work within a disciplinary silo that isolates them from broader societal issues. The title of the list, An Apocatopian Primer, is borrowed from China Miéville’s essay, “The Limits of Utopia.” Miéville warns that utopias can be part of, and organized within, unjust societies and systems. In order to dismantle these systems, we first need to understand them. This understanding includes basic climate science, law, economics, and how the design disciplines are complicit, an idea that Jesse M. Keenan elaborates on eloquently in his chapter on a “Climate Core” for landscape architecture in Rosalea Monacella and Bridget Keane’s excellent edited volume, Designing Landscape Architectural Education: Studio Ecologies for Uncertain Futures. An Apocatopian Primer is an incomplete and growing reading list for designers interested in expanding their knowledge of the climate crisis, and also ecological thinking and speculative design for a more just future.

An Apocatopian Primer

PUBLICATION

Long Beach Is...?

Suburban Large-Lot Tinkerscape

The Sparrow in the Marsh

Cryptomeria: Climate Change, Cultivation, and Culture

Cannabis Communitas

How Fruit Orchards Blossomed in a High Desert Park

How to be Seaworthy

Preppercraft: Speculative Fiction from the Usable Past

To the Disciplinary Divide

Wild Yam: The Rhizomes of the Pill