Depletion

Abstract

We live in a state of false abundance—a condition first articulated in the nineteenth century and later expanded through contemporary ecological critique—in which the apparent prosperity of modern consumption depends upon the systematic depletion of soils and territories that sustain human and more-than-human life. This depletion is structured by global markets demanding cheap food, labor, energy, and raw materials, and is enacted through extractive mining, industrial agriculture, infrastructural expansion, and large-scale construction. By abstracting material origins and obscuring ecological thresholds, extractive regimes normalize exhaustion while disproportionately burdening structurally marginalized communities.

Against this backdrop, cities and landscapes are not only shaped by depletion but actively reproduce it. Depletion forms the soils we become-with and co-produce, just as it conditions our design practices—whether acknowledged or not. It also shapes our collective future as climate change, climate-induced migration, and territorial instability demonstrate that environmental damage accumulates rather than resolves itself. Yet the study of soil—its cycles, dynamics, and transformations—has largely remained outside the core of design curricula and practice. Depletion therefore demands a reframing of disciplinary agency. As landscape architects, urban designers, artists, and thinkers increasingly turn their attention to soil and its exhaustion, this issue seeks to amplify emerging interdisciplinary thought and support the articulation of design’s agency under conditions of depletion.

This issue of the Journal of Delta Urbanism reframes (soil) depletion as a spatial, political, and material design inquiry. It calls for repositioning designers not as managers of decline, but as actors capable of tracing, engaging, and transforming depleted conditions. Drawing on contributions spanning research, practice, and dialogue—and grounded in a critical reading of present realities as a basis for imagining desired futures—the issue proposes three interrelated modes of engagement: designing with, within, and beyond depletion. Each mode repositions design differently: as a practice of tracing and critique (with), as a propositional engagement with existing constraints (within), and as a transformative imagination capable of challenging dominant paradigms (beyond).  Together, they move from diagnosing the processes that produce depletion, to operating within its constraints, and ultimately to envisioning pathways capable of reshaping them.