Please join us for "The Global Land Squeeze: An Interdisciplinary Symposium" will take place October 28–31, 2025, at Aarhus University. The Symposium is part of the AUFF-funded project “Infrastructural Cascades: A New Approach to Anthropocene Landscape Change", co-organized by project postdoc Zachary Caple and CEH Director Heather Swanson.

Over the past century, demand for land-based resources has intensified dramatically, driving widespread landscape conversion and placing new pressures on long-established ecosystems. Land system scientists and sustainable land-use advocates have described this process as the global land squeeze (GLS). This symposium explores the GLS as a defining force of the Anthropocene, one that transforms landscapes, livelihoods, and multispecies futures. We aim to interrogate two interlinked processes:

1. The social, historical, and metabolic drivers of land conversion;

2. The squeeze dynamics acting on legacy ecosystems and the species they support.

While GLS research relies on global analyses of biomass flows, land-use change, and economic growth, this symposium explores landscape transformation through concrete case studies and conceptual engagement with other key frameworks, such as planetary urbanism, Plantationocene, and social metabolism. It brings together scholars in anthropology, land system science, ecology, environmental history, agrarian studies, STS, and urban studies to examine changing patterns of life and land in this time of accelerating squeeze.

The events of the Symposium are free and open to AU staff and students as well as the general public. Please sign up here.

Programme:

Tuesday, Oct 28

14:30-16:00. Nikos Katsikis, Assistant Professor of Urbanism, TU Delft. "From Hinterland to Hinterglobe: Planetary Urbanization and the Emergence of Operational Landscapes.” Note: this event will take place in at the Aarhus School of Architecture in the Didaktek.

Wednesday, Oct 29

10:00-12:00. Event opening with Professor Simone Gingrich (BOKU University) and discussion: What is the Global Land Squeeze? (Building 1461, room 516)

13:30-16:00. Squeezing the Cerrado: Agrarian change in a South American Biome. (Building 1483, room 344). Presentations from: 

Associate Professor Georg Fischer (Aarhus University)

Professor Sandro Dutra e Silva (Universidade Estadual de Goiás), "Biomes Are Not for Sale: How Soybean Farming Is Changing the Brazilian Cerrado”

Professor Mercedes Bustamante (Universidade de Brasília),“Brazilian Cerrado: At the Convergence of Global and Local Challenges"

Assistant Professor Gustavo Oliveira (Clark University), "What Drives Brazilian Soy Exports to China? A Political Ecology Framework for Analysis of the “Global Land Squeeze""

Thursday, Oct 30

10:00-12:00. Keynote lecture from Wendy Wolford, Polson Professor of Global Development at Cornell University "Plantation Ideal: Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique and Beyond" (Building 1324, room 025)

13:30-15:30. Keynote lecture from Neil Brenner, Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology at the University of Chicago "Urbanization in the planetary metabolism of capital" (Building 1324, room 011)

Friday, Oct 31

9:30-12:00. The Squeeze on Multispecies Landscapes. (Building 1461, room 516). Presentations from: 

Pierre du Plessis (AIAS-AUFF fellow at Aarhus University) "Centering the Kalahari: Botswana Beef-Cattle and their Squeeze on Wildlife Ecologies” 

Rachel Cypher (Independent scholar) “Hydrological Squeeze and Unsqueeze:  Agricultural Groundwater Depletion and the Santa Cruz River’s Unlikely Restoration with Treated Wastewater” 

Shuhei Tashiro (PhD candidate at Aarhus University) "Squeezing the Land is Removing the Water: From Multispecies Paddies to Dry Monospecies Cane Fields.”

13:30-16:00. Closing Session/Field Trip (Weather Permitting). Speakers and Invited Guests.