Technical lands are spaces united by their exceptional status-their remote locations delimited
boundaries secured accessibility and vigilant management. Designating land as technical is
thus a political act. Doing so entails dividing marginalizing and rendering portions of the
Earth inaccessible and invisible. An anti-visuality of technical lands enables forms of
hypervisibility and surveillance through the rhetorical veil of technology. Including the
political and physical boundaries technical lands are used in highly aestheticized geographies
to resist debate surrounding production and governance. These critical sites and spaces range
from disaster exclusion and demilitarized zones to prison yards industrial extraction sites
airports and spaceports. The identification and instrumentalization of technical lands have
increased in scale and complexity since the rise of neoliberalization. Yet the precise
theoretical contours that define these geographies remain unclear. Technical Lands: A Critical
Primer brings together authors from a diverse array of disciplines geographies and
epistemologies to interrogate and theorize the meaning and increasing significance of technical
lands.
