Archipelagic technonatures: The urbanisation of the ‘global biodiversity hotspot’

Résumé :

This paper develops the concept of archipelagic technonatures to analyse how urban infrastructures are reshaping the geographies of global conservation. We focus on climate-controlled biomes in Paris and Zurich that simulate Madagascar's rainforest ecosystems. These enclosed environments function as infrastructural nodes in a trans-situ regime where endangered ecologies are displaced, reconstructed and managed across geographically discontinuous but functionally integrated sites. By tracing how species, climates and conservation expertise settle in and circulate through these biomes, we show how climate itself is rendered programmable as an object of governance. Using archipelagic thinking to extend insights from urban political ecology and infrastructure studies, we argue that these biomes constitute a postcolonial material topology of conservation. They transform endangered life into curated, atmospheric and data-generating forms that sustain urban authority over planetary ecologies while reproducing North–South asymmetries. Yet they also create experimental ‘truth spots’ where ecological reconstruction techniques can be tested and circulated. The concept of archipelagic technonatures foregrounds this ambivalence: infrastructures that both expose inequalities of displacement and open possibilities for more relational modes of conservation across unsettled, multi-sited landscapes. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on ecological urbanisation, climate governance and the technopolitics of nature in the Anthropocene.