The Negativity of Place: Capital Accumulation and Ecological Limitations

Humanity has achieved planetary scale influence without planetary scale understanding. The historical conceptualization of space has created a rootless understanding of place to the extent that local concerns occurring within place are overruled by the concerns of those who are situated at a distance with an assumption of authority and the resources to dominate conflicts. The rationality of place is conceptualized abstractly to fulfill a particular objectivity that resembles more of an imposition rather than an understanding situated within the social and natural dynamics of a locality. The historical assumption of terra nullius, that land is uninhabited and available for exploitation, remains intact and in use despite many costly attempts by those who reside in that land to contradict this. Framed within the context of anthropogenic climate change, its perceptions, and the struggles surrounding it, this thesis examines, with the help of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and Hannah Arendt’s politics of space, the relationship between the dynamics of capitalism and its inherent social and natural placed-based limitations. What the contemplation of these dominated places reveals is that another way of understanding the built environment is struggling to emerge