Countryside, A Report
AMO, Rem Koolhaas
Guggenheim/Taschen, March 2020

Paperback | 4 x 6-1/4 inches | 352 pages | English | ISBN: 978-3836583312 | $25.00

Publisher's Description:
The 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 regenerativ...