Contaminated Ecologies

The Contaminated Ecologies evening lecture brought together researchers, designers, and policymakers to reflect on the workshop outcomes and explore how an experimental mapping methodology can reshape understanding and governance of ecological crises.

From Panama to Rotterdam

Theodor Reinhardt presented a cartographic methodology first developed in a research project at the TU Delft, where together with Tomasz Dudek, Karolina Krajčíková, Margozlata Łysik and Ana Mendica they conducted research on shifting economical forces, colonial-extractive practices and ecological complexities in the territory of the Panama Canal. The workshop held on the 20th of November applied this same methodology to the local context of Rotterdam, focusing on the port and its surroundings, applying the developed collective cartographic method to a case of similar large-scale infrastructural development in the local estuarine landscapes.

Entanglements and limits of conventional mapping

The lecture contrasted modernist, linear causality (A causes B causes C) with the non-linear entanglements characteristic of ecological systems understood as the sum of relationships between entities within a territory. Attempts to diagram these systems often fail: over-simplified maps erase crucial relations, while ultra-complex diagrams become illegible and therefore ineffective.​

The workshop was set to address this challenge: how to develop methodological tools that retain complexity without losing accessibility. Numerical indicators and risk assessments, while necessary, were critiqued for turning territories into interchangeable, quantified objects that reproduce top-down, sometimes colonial, modes of control.​ Participants were instead invited to study processes in the territory through multiple post-anthropocentric lenses, focusing on relations and dynamics instead of types and categories.

Drawing on Bruno Latour’s shift from “matters of fact” to “matters of concern”, Theodor Reinhardt argued for abandoning the God’s-eye categorisation of fixed layers (“nature”, “infrastructure”, “economy”) in favour of situated narratives anchored in specific contexts. Instead of claiming universal objectivity, maps become devices that show what matters to whom, and how different concerns intersect or conflict in space.​

Current cartographic language presented is agential rather than taxonomic: dams appear as massive, violent interruptions, while eroding banks are drawn as soft, porous edges, visually encoding their different roles in the territory. Colour is no longer tied to abstract categories, but to matters of concern for specific actors, such as algae, port authorities, logistics companies, or nearby communities, so that overlapping colours reveal shared or contested environment-worlds.​

The workshop outcomes

The evening lecture reflected on the maps produced during the prior hands-on workshop at the OMI Rotterdam, where participants collectively explored the Port of Rotterdam as a contaminated ecology. Groups traced how industrial discharges, sediment management, shipping routes, and ecological restoration projects intersect, showing that no single layer can be understood outside its relations to others.​

By spatialising matters of concern, the resulting maps visualised intensities of “mattering” across the territory, making visible places where interests align with or are threatened by infrastructural operations. This exercise underlined how non-human actors can be given graphic and argumentative presence in spatial debates without pretending to speak for a universal “nature”.​

Throughout the lecture and discussion, the speakers and audience addressed how such integrated, agential mapping could help inform decision-making. Rather than serving only as technical background, maps were proposed as diplomatic tools that assemble heterogeneous actors and concerns, enabling more careful negotiations over interventions like dredging, new terminals, or adaptation measures.​

The lecture highlighted that we cannot solve issues in contaminated ecologies by either breaking them down into separate, isolated factors or by treating them as completely unknowable. Instead, the suggested approach moves back and forth between making things simpler and acknowledging their complexity. This method creates localized and practical narratives that can inform action, giving a voice not only to humans but also to other beings and elements in the environment. The goal is to encourage more conscious and post-anthropocentric ways to manage space in Rotterdam and similar port areas.