Dérivations #11 : Des nouvelles du sous-sol

Issue 11 of Dérivations explores the relationships between living environments and extraction, with a particular focus on mining and fossil fuel extraction. The abundance of resources available at the surface depends in part on the exploitation of these “ghost hectares” extending beneath the ground, whose resources our societies consume.

Architecture, cities and infrastructure depend on these flows of materials and energy. Yet their extraction also requires the existence of “sacrifice zones” at the surface, which deserve to be considered alongside the developments they make possible — something that rarely happens.

In Belgium, a century and a half of intensive coal mining has left behind impoverished territories that are still struggling to recover almost half a century after the closure of the mines. And yet these territories, like the Global North as a whole, continue to benefit from the colonial practices that have shaped, and continue to shape, global trade. These systems enable resources to be drawn from other ghost hectares and sacrifice zones, increasingly distant from the places where those resources are consumed and transformed.

Starting from the cities and architecture of the Global North, this issue takes us to the peripheries of the planetary metropolitan space: the territories of extraction, where those who live there struggle to negotiate their conditions of existence in the face of the violence inflicted by activities from which they derive only marginal benefits.