Is it possible to continue imagining an asymmetrically broken future without addressing the historical urgency of reparations? If gentrification is the means by which historically accumulated wealth reenacts its racial history in our present spatial reality, then why has a decade-plus of concern about gentrification not already generated wider speculations about redistribution and reparations? What if reparations do not require inventing processes of wealth transfer from scratch or tracking people in new ways, but rather redirecting flows and patterns that are already here? What if reparations and gentrification are similar processes, running in reverse directions?

Some of the earliest and most enduring civilizations emerged and thrived through the desert, where they have been subject to the forces of environmental racism for centuries. The contemporary desert is a physical and conceptual battlefield where spatial conflicts pose existential threats to human and non-human life. The desert is a site of divergent and often diametrically opposed spatial typologies, from nomadic camps to military bases, ancestral cities to agricultural civilizations, industrial complexes to illegal resorts, utopian communities to logistical epicenters. The  desert, in this light, is not ‘absent’ or ’empty,’ but a site of abundance co-opted by violent occupations, extractive campaigns, and colonialist expansions, exacerbating violence across the most contested regions of the planet.

We suggest that the desert demands renewed attention. Today, deserts cover 33% of the land surface of the planet, including cold and hot deserts on every continent. With climate change and its resultant migrations, the extent, form, and population of this arid geography will shift dramatically in the coming decades. It will encompass new territories, attracting new settlements, assembling new constituencies, demanding new approaches to scholarship, pedagogy, and design in the drylands.

Deserts are sites of immeasurable vastness, entangled with deep time and the magnitude of the earth, host to numerous forms of living from minerals to insects, from plants to animals and humans. Beyond reductive readings of deserts as conceptual abstractions or conditions of scarcity, this issue seeks to unravel a wide-ranging diversity of resources beneath the deserts’ alleged homogeneity—a productive drive for life instead of indifference. Perhaps, in this moment of extreme climatic changes, global warming, and mass extinctions, the desert might offer an opportunity to question the principles of our unsustainable ways of living and to suggest different strategies of coexistence between humans and non-humans, life and non-life.

Imagining this issue as a non-linear constellation of ecological, cultural, logistical, and critical interpretations, we encourage contributions considering the desert as not only a condition against the logic of occupation and displacement, violence and extraction, precariousness and erosion, but also as an enduring place of cultures, rituals, poetics, mythologies, imaginaries, alliances, and forms of living that call the desert home, thriving and resisting entropic tendencies: lessons for an alternative understanding and a radically different future.

We are looking for different contributions able to unveil the diversity and complexity of the desert ecosystem through a multiplicity of voices and perspectives. Essays might address how design and pedagogical practices theoretically and critically articulate the notion of desert within the global environmental and political crisis. Designs, instead, might focus on specific projects by authors and/or their students that investigate, research, or speculate upon the desert and its multitudinous expressions of life (human and non-human). Narratives might focus on sharing brief material or cultural histories—or more personal, direct, and experimental story- telling—which often exceeds disciplinary requirements. Finally, (Cartographic) Images may include provocative visual material able to render, describe, analyze, and map the desert in its ceaseless condition of becoming.

The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is February 6, 2023. Accepted articles will be published in issue 77:2 (Fall 2023). For author instructions please consult: https://www.jaeonline.org/pages/submit.