Infrastructure space and the global periphery: Keller Easterling in conversation with Andreas Lechner and Cameron McEwan

The conversation with Keller Easterling is part of our Peripheries-Peripherocene special issue of The Journal of Architecture. In this conversation, Keller Easterling frames the exploding, de-densifying urban periphery, projected to cover an area the size of India by 2050, as a landscape of both privilege and precarity. She discusses free trade zones as calculated departures from urbanity and democratic process, and spatial products as repeatable formulas constituting a new layer of the earth's crust. The discussion explores infrastructure space as counter-history to twentieth-century urbanism, the misleading rhetoric of "free" trade, and Easterling's idea of active form as protocol rather than fixed form. Easterling argues for pedagogical shifts that give spatial knowledge prominence across disciplines and rethinks architecture's role amid global infrastructural transformation.