Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space

Résumé En

During the Spanish Inner Colonisation – a large-scale agricultural reform and land settlement program of the central decades of the 20th century – new towns were built in the middle of the arid areas that were going to be transformed into irrigated lands. Their names and locations were announced in the Official State Gazette together with their proposed locations. The system employed to address their positions in the wastelands was based on the road network: it involved the distances to the nearest roads, and the specification of the kilometric milestones concerned. This paper proposes to analyse the positioning system in relation to one of the most salient features of this Spanish program: the use of the so-called cart-module to distribute the settlement towns. These were arranged in constellations so that each piece of land could be addressed through a walking distance from the closest town. Taking into account also the role of the authoritarian State, present in the technical management of the irrigation systems, the agriculture put into work will be analysed as a vertical practice. This paper will consider these operations from what social anthropologist Penelope Harvey has pointed out as the topological quality of infrastructural spaces, where space is apprehended in relation to the effects of a calculating framework. The material transformation of this topological zoning through irrigation, finally, will be examined in relation to Lisa Parks’ critical infrastructure notion of satellite footprints and signal territories.