1st Edition

Cybernetics and the Constructed Environment Design Between Nature and Technology

By Zihao Zhang Copyright 2025
288 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

288 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

288 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Grounded in contemporary landscape architecture theory and practice , Cybernetics and the Constructed Environment blends examples from art, design, and engineering with concepts from cybernetics and posthumanism, offering a transdisciplinary examination of the ramifications of cybernetics on the constructed environment. Cybernetics, or the study of communication and control in animals and... Read more

Introduction: The Upscaling of the Cybernetic Imagination  Part 1: The New Machine in the New Garden  1. A Transformation Formula  2. The Technology-Nature Edge: From Pastoralism to Anthropocene  3. The Human-Technology Edge: From Ready-made Artefacts to Dematerialized Humans  4. The Human-Nature Edge: The Three Waves of “Nature Study”  5. Posthumanism, Co-Production, and Assemblage  Part 2: Posthumanism, the Environment and Intelligent Machines  6. Searching for Nonhuman Agency  7. From Nonhuman Agency to Speculative Ontology  8. Coproductive Intelligence  Part 3: The Cybernetic Environment  9. Cybernetics and Landscape: From Uncertainty to Opportunity  10. Reframing Cybernetics  11. Sensing as Coding: The Episteme of the Digital Age  12. The Rise of Intelligent Agents: A Non-Model-Centric Paradigm  13. Actuating Leads to Attuning: Cultivated Wildness  14. Cultivated Wildness and Speculative Ecology  Conclusion: Design and Cybernetic Environment

Biography

Zihao Zhang is a designer, educator, and scholar in landscape architecture. He currently serves as an assistant professor and interim director of the landscape architecture program at the City College of New York.