Editorial

World-Ecologies in Formation is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture, and Yale School of Architecture, within the context of its 2026 J. Irwin Miller symposium. It features contributions by Sandra Díaz, Anna Dyson, Jane Mah Hutton, Lydia Kallipoliti, Indy Johar, Sanford Kwinter, Mae-ling Lokko, Kiel Moe, Peter Osborne, and Katie Ulrich.

Architecture has conventionally drawn its boundaries around the building, its site, and the life cycles of its materials. Such boundaries have traditionally determined which relations are internalized as value and which are externalized as cost. Yet the materials that constitute buildings are only temporary residents along commodity frontiers, the zones where new sources of cheap land, labor, energy, and raw materials are brought into production. These frontiers reach back to distant sites of extraction and forward to sites of disposal.1 As can be seen in twenty-first-century climate change patterns, biodiversity decline, and pollution rise, such externalizations do not make consequences disappear but distribute them unevenly, across geographies and generations.

Jason W. Moore’s perspective of world-ecology offers both a method and an object of analysis for reading architecture beyond these boundaries—as a site where “cheap natures,” in the form of raw materials, energy, and labor, enter as circulating capital and are provisionally fixed in buildings that function as fixed capital, commodities, and financial assets.2 As a method, world-ecology reads history through what Moore calls the “web of life,” a nature that includes humans rather than an external environment society acts upon, rejecting the Cartesian binary of “society” and “nature” that he argues persists even in critical theories of the “metabolic rift.”3 As an object, it names capitalism itself as “a way of organizing nature, “a large, integrated system of power, capital and nature” with its own divisions of labor, modes of reproduction, and logics of accumulation.4 In this light, capitalism systematically devalues both human and non-human lives: through property law, state power, violence, science and technology; along lines of race, gender, and labor; and in the built environment, where these relations take material form.

Framing “world-ecologies” in the plural aims to broaden the conversation around both historical and contemporary systems that have either persisted in parallel with capitalism, emerged within it, or grown out of it. And to position world-ecologies as being in formation is to assert that these patterns are neither natural nor fixed. This opens a platform for theories from fields such as ecology, agriculture, anthropology, political economy, materials science, architecture, and design to be placed in conversation with each other rather than resolved into a single framework, and for new interdisciplinary methods to engage the complexity of ecosystemic approaches across material practices.

A shift towards ecologically embedded practices that remain accountable to the labor and resources they draw from, rather than treating them as external inputs, can safeguard biodiversity and repair the deep rifts caused by extractive design practices. Yet there is risk in design’s own responses becoming new instruments of capitalist ecological regimes. Scaling biobased materials, for instance, may open new commodity frontiers in the fields and forests that supply them, while regenerative design, when it overlooks the unequal positions from which people and places enter its supply chains, may reproduce the class, labor, geography, and knowledge hierarchies it seeks to address. Rather than confronting the root causes of ecological and social inequity as planetary justice demands, such approaches may simply reorganize extractive logics.

Reparative lifecycle models also risk replicating extractive mechanics if they are constrained by the current narrow accounting structures that externalize complex ecological and social impacts. Instead, an information architecture is required that is capable of capturing a metabolic choreography, one that can interactively “listen” to, and intersect with, the messy, un-commodified physics of the biosphere. For these new modes of representation seeking to re-embed building lifecycles within the web of life, the central dialectic resides in the friction between adequately representing the complex co-production of human and other life forms, while maintaining the need for actionable, strategic legibility. Resolving this tension requires a shift towards relational, multiscale cartographies that are informed by the intertwined flows of energy, labor, and ecosystems. 

As the era of “cheap nature” nears its end, it is worth questioning what new “ecological regimes” are emerging or being rediscovered today, ones in which living beings are valued within a network of reciprocal relationships rather than as inventory of capital stock. As decarbonization, the emerging low-carbon economy, and the race for critical minerals reorganize power, capital, and nature once more, the built environment—where embodied energy accounts for a growing share of the sector’s emissions—remains a primary site where this reorganization takes hold.