This essay examines the transformation of Lieberoser Heide, a former Soviet military base in eastern Germany, into one of the country's largest solar parks. Framed as a model of sustainable redevelopment, the project exemplifies how the energy transition repurposes landscapes marked by contamination, militarisation, and abandonment. Drawing on fieldwork and visual ethnography, the essay traces how economic rationalities of productivity and efficiency overwrite ecological and historical complexities, turning damaged terrains into assets. It argues that conversion simultaneously performs acts of reclamation and erasure, recasting toxic legacies as opportunities for progress while obscuring the uneven material and temporal residues of destruction. By employing infra-red imaging, I show how spectral visualisation techniques render visible the persistence of ecological life within the landscape, revealing the entangled afterlives of violence, repair, and renewal in the making of sustainability.
This article draws on the "substantive landscape" to illustrate the non-innocence of the term "community" used in international law to denote groups with collective and place-based rights in land. It examines the transnational and racialised dimensions of the legal concept of "community" in post-apartheid Namibia, with emphasis on the Rehoboth Basters - whose multiracial origins defied Eurocentric and apartheid typologies seeking to make a clear boundary between "nation" and "native". Drawing on historical scholarship, doctrinal analysis of historical laws, and archival research and original interviews, this article argues that there is a durable and ongoing collusion between international and national scales of law-making manifested by the strategic (mis)recognition of communities. This reifies colonial and apartheid ontologies of African collective personhood and obstructs international law's ability to act as a catalyst for place-based justice and decolonisation.
This paper explores how urban public space mediates migrant integration and belonging through the lens of bittersweet identity and polynomial design. Based on ethnographic approaches in multiple megacity sites, it reveals how migrants' social identity and place attachment/belonging as place identity and place integration emerge in affective, cognitive, fragmented and sometimes contradictory forms. With such bittersweet identities, migrants use solitude, nostalgia, anticipation and fleeting togetherness within unevenly maintained spaces fabricated by layered power relations. Urban public space can foster positive affects through 'de-identification' and non-human elements. Introducing polynomial design as a metaphoric urban grammar, the paper conceptualises urban public space as composed of high- and low-order influences, proposing approaches to understand and respond to the contingent, partial and hopeful processes of place-based belonging and urban integration.
