From its main port in Rotterdam, to its productive hinterlands of greenhouses and farms, the logic and relations that define the physical and social landscape of work and labor in the Netherlands are being redefined by machines, data and interfaces.

Driven by efficiency, competitiveness and policies, the architectures of logistics, agriculture and horticulture, and the spatial organization of human and non-human labor are being reconceived. As robots and smart systems take over the toil, working environments, the workers that populate them, and what they do, transform. Traditional port crane operators are now replaced by office workers seated in ergonomic control rooms and flexwork environments overseeing 24/7 the automated loading and unloading of containers. In the countryside, dairy and horticultural farmers manage ever-growing concerns through dashboards on desktop computers or smartphone apps. Sharing space with the robots, cows and temporary workers become data, and their bodies are managed as abstract components of a larger system, which can be accessed from anywhere by logging on the cloud.

In this event, Víctor Muñoz Sanz (TU Delft), Marina Otero Verzier and Marten Kuijpers (Het Nieuwe Instituut) together with special guests will engage in a public conversation on the spatial implications of automation for the built environment, and on the position of the spatial disciplines in the transition towards automated labor. Taking recent developments in the Dutch productive hinterlands as departing point, they will reflect on how spatial disciplines could engage with these emerging conditions, and speculate on how to develop new forms of research and agency towards more desirable spatial outcomes.

* Image by Jan van Berkel.