Undoing Iceland? The pervasive nature of the urban

This chapter follows the work that the Basel-based studio laba (Laboratoire Bâle, Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) carried out on Iceland during the academic year of 2014-15, with the aim of creating a ‘territorial constitution’ for the industries of the island. The Swiss group of researchers and architects base their analysis on the premise that nature has become artificial through the growing pervasiveness of the urban and the increasingly cultural quality of nature resulting from growing conservation efforts, and ultimately that planet Earth is a human product. Indeed one of the markers of the Anthropocene is the ever growing pace of urbanization and the growing percentage of the world’s population living in urban centres. Globally 54 per cent of the world’s population resided in urban areas in 2014. In 1950, 30 per cent of the world’s population was urban, and by 2050, 66 per cent of the world’s population is projected to be urban (United Nations, 2014).