The Cyborg Salt-scape: Designing the Sweet Salt-Plain

This paper presents the Saline di Cervia as a case through which to decode the relationship between terraforming and environmental design. While the term terraforming is conventionally associated with an artificial rearticulation of nature, as a techno-scientific attempt to make “alien worlds” habitable, here it is reinterpreted as a process of attunement and co-production. Following the story of the formation of this sweet-saltscape, terraforming emerges as a dialogue between human and nonhuman agencies, natural and artificial techniques. The work particularly draws on Haraway's cyborg metaphor to depict Saline di Cervia as a hybrid socio-spatial ecological space, where processes like crystallization, evaporation, and labor create a complex choreography of environmental reciprocity. In doing so, the paper advocates for a decolonization of anthropocentric design practices, suggesting a shift in understanding geoengineering not as a means of control, but rather as a natural, localized, and collaborative process of world-making.