From Extractive Infrastructures to Heritages of Co-Production. Architectural Design as a Situated Practice for Re-Composing Historical Productive Landscapes

Since the second half of twentieth century, numerous historic productive landscapes have been confronted with the emergence of the nature-resource paradigm, which reduces the territory to a mere support of extraction. This mindset, rooted in appropriation and exploitation practices, redefines productive chains, territorial relations and the relationships between production and the environment, contributing to widespread forms of social and ecological injustice. The paper addresses this problem by reinterpreting these landscapes as the result of progressively marginalised or denied processes of co-production between human and more-than-human agents. Starting from this reinterpretation, the notion of “heritages of co-production” is introduced as an innovative heritage category, situated within historical productive landscapes, capable of integrating ecological, social and spatial justice, overcoming approaches that privilege visual and aesthetic readings of the landscape, so deeply rooted in the fields of its protection and transformation. This perspective highlights the extractive qualities that characterise many historical supply chains today and the spatial-relational conditions upon which historical co-production processes are based, which are too often denied in the contemporary world. In this context, the paper identifies and discusses some design practices that critically address the extractive transformation of historical productive landscapes. At the same time, it recounts the experience of the Mussels Tales design workshop, a field experiment in which the co-productive dimension of a historical supply chain is taken as a central element in the reasoning related to heritage and landscape transformation. The study of practices and the analysis of the results of the experiment reveal architectural design as a situated practice of recognition, reactivation and re-composition of the heritage of co-production.