The New Geographies journal has a decade-long history of challenging and redefining earthly spaces under capitalist urbanization. New Geographies 11: Extraterrestrial primarily extends this inquiry of cultural and physical territory into the vast extra-orbital cosmos. Extraterrestrial is often interpreted as the unknowable beyond, as distinct from our lives and landscapes on earth. First used in nineteenth-century literature, extraterrestrial describes what is “of or from outside the earth or its atmosphere.” However, when considered critically, a curious epistemological device emerges. The term reveals those spatial interactions between the surface of the earth and the layered or “extra” conditions added to, and projected from, the earth’s surface. New Geographies 11: Extraterrestrial foregrounds political urgency, revisits histories, mines the fictional, and asks questions of extraterrestrial imaginations. It counters notions of “otherness” and instead interprets the extraterrestrial as a spatial realm that is constructed by cultural imaginaries, technologies, politics and economics.

Jeffrey S. Nesbit is an American architect, urbanist, and a doctor of design candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is founding director of the experimental design group Haecceitas Studio, research fellow in the Office for Urbanization. His research focuses on processes of urbanization, infrastructure, and defense landscape. Nesbit is currently studying the historical spaceport complex on the disciplinary ends of architecture and imagination. Nesbit has written a number of journal articles and book chapters on infrastructure and urbanization and is co-editor of Chasing the City: Models for Extra-Urban Investigations (Routledge, 2018) and Rio de Janeiro: Urban Expansion and the Environment (Routledge, 2019). He holds a master’s of architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and bachelor’s of science in architecture from Texas Tech University.

Guy Trangoš is a South African architect, designer, urban researcher, a doctor of design candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is a founding partner in Meshworks Architecture and Urbanism, and a research fellow at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory. His doctoral research investigates the infrastructural, spatial and political implications of large science projects on landscapes and society. Trangoš has written for numerous publications including Folio, Perspecta, Scenario Journal, The Architectural Review, City Journal, Canadian Architect, Architecture South Africa, and coedited the book Movement Johannesburg (2015). Trangoš holds a master’s in city design and social science from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a master’s of architecture (professional) from the University of the Witwatersrand.

The mission of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design is to advance the professions concerned with the planning and design of buildings and landscapes, together with their urban, suburban, and rural settings; and to matriculate students poised to challenge the conventions of design and transform the built environment in an increasingly complex and competitive global landscape. New Geographies is a student-edited journal founded in the Fall of 2008.