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Christopher Alton

Contract Instructor

ChristopherAlton@cunet.carleton.ca

Christopher Alton is a designer and researcher with a focus on mine afterlives and critical conservation related to mining, interested in how territories are communicated and transformed across and through extractive infrastructures and landscapes. As a PhD candidate at Waterloo University, he is developing a historiography of Canadian land use planning through the lens of material movement, and he has taught courses at Waterloo, Toronto Metropolitan University, and with the Centre for Biocultural Landscape and Seascape (CBLS). With OPSYS Landscape Infrastructure Lab, he was project manager and lead researcher for the Canadian Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale of Architecture. He is a co-founder of the Beyond Extraction collective.

Publications

With Zannah Matson and Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon eds., “Architecture and Extraction.” Special issue, Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada (forthcoming, 2024).

With Eric Robsky Huntley and Zulaikha Ayub (2022). “Conjuring the Planetary Mine: Counter-Mapping the Heart of Extractive Capital,” Thresholds 50: 239-255.

Education

PhD Candidate in Planning, Waterloo University 

MDes Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology, Harvard GSD (2014)

Burpl Toronto Metropolitan University SURP (2011)

Recent Courses

ARCH 4105 Theories of Landscape Design