When the Earth Breathes: An Anthology of Volcanic Urbanism

Abstract

Malpaís. A Spanish word used in volcanically-active landscapes to refer to the new basalt terrain that solidifies after an eruption. It translates literally to “bad country”, and it is defined as a “sterile, arid surface”. This thesis looks at the Tajogaite volcano, the most recent eruption in La Palma, one of the youngest of eight islands in the oceanic volcanic arc formation of the Canary Islands. It positions this event not as a unique site but as a manifestation of a network of bureaucratic colonial imaginaries that still operate within a disaster relief framework that exists in volcanic landscapes throughout the world. Together, these imaginaries draw an unyielding binary narrative about volcanoes as purely destructive entities, and further dismiss the porosity that exists between the geos, the bios and the polis. Igneous landscapes, through the production of new basalt floors, rich soils and ocean intrusions, traverse and redefine property boundary lines and national coastlines, which extends beyond plan views and into sectional shifts. This project aspires to spatialize the temporal moments of one volcanic eruption, questioning, ultimately, how the ownership of materials in flux, along with their transformations, can reframe our imagination of a city-volcano production that frames both as ephemeral, ever changing entities. Through ten allegories, cities are positioned inside of the geological realm, and are de-centered to contextualize them within a volcano’s lifespan. The first five stories describe the current framework, while the other half become allegories through which architecture and urbanism are leveraged as tools through which to understand the earth’s movements at different scales, temperatures and states of matter, in order to provide an alternative imaginary to current answers to the question of volcanic urbanism.