Ben Platt

Ben is a cultural and historical geographer with an interest in landscapes and art, design/architecture and politics of the ‘more-than-human’. His MPhil (Geography) research, at the University of Cambridge, looked to untangle the relationship between speculative fiction and the cinematic landscapes of the so called ‘Anthropocene’. Extending this interest towards the urban landscape, his PhD study looks to analyse the intersection of (post-) apocalyptic aesthetics/imaginations, ecological design or architecture – entropy, morphogenesis, non-design etc – and new operations of power in this putative ‘epoch’. Do projects or spaces that extend agency beyond the human function to delimit forms of agency that are not seen as ‘acceptable’? Is this a new form of environmental power? If so, how does it operate? How does it link to the imaginative horizons, landscapes and aesthetic structures of the Anthropocene? In working through these questions, he looks towards the spontaneous spaces of urban nature – wastelands in the margins of capitalist urbanization – as spaces of aesthetic disruption and political possibility.