Koolhaas’s countrysidean urgent exploration of a long-neglected realm and its sublime beautythe rural, remote, and wild territories we call countryside , or the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities, make up the front line where today’s most powerful forces climate and ecological devastation, migration, tech, demographic lurches are playing out. Increasingly under a cartesian’ regime gridded, mechanized, and optimized for maximal production these sites are changing beyond recognition. In his latest publication, rem koolhaas explores the rapid and often hidden transformations underway across the earth’s vast non-urban areas.Countryside, a report gathers travelogue essays exploring territories marked by global forces and experimentation at the edge of our consciousness: a test site near fukushima, where the robots that will maintain japan’s infrastructure and agriculture are tested a greenhouse city in the netherlands that may be the origin for the cosmology of today’s countryside the rapidly thawing permafrost of central siberia, a region wrestling with the possibility of relocation refugees populating dying villages in the german countryside and intersecting with climate change activists habituated mountain gorillas confronting humans on their’ territory in uganda the american midwest, where industrial-scale farming operations are coming to grips with regenerative agriculture and chinese villages transformed into all-in-one factory, e-commerce stores, and fulf...
