Global commodity systems connect Global South hinterlands to metropolitan markets in North America and Europe through peripheral infrastructures that remain almost entirely unmapped. The roads, clearings, and settlement patterns that sustain these flows fall outside both state monitoring systems and open spatial records, and no publicly documented methodology exists for inferring them from satellite imagery at the cadence and coverage that systematic observation requires.

This thesis adopts what Eyal Weizman terms architecture in reverse: rather than designing the built environment, it reads the built environment forensically, inferring structures from their spatial effects on the surrounding landscape. At 4-meter satellite resolution, individual facilities sit below Weizman's threshold of detectability, but the roads that supply them, the clearings that accommodate them, and the settlement patterns they reorganize do not. Drawing on William Cronon's theorization of how commodity flows produce interdependent landscapes that obscure the connection between extraction hinterlands and metropolitan markets, the thesis operationalizes informal transportation networks as the measurable proxy for value-chain logistics. Applied to a peripheral region of Colombia, the pipeline integrates road extraction from satellite imagery, spatial-graph construction, network-analytic inference, geospatial-embedding change detection, and a human–AI validation interface.

By rendering the geography of peripheral value-chain infrastructure spatially explicit, the thesis provides a replicable basis for tracing the entanglement of hinterland and metropolitan economies. More broadly, it argues that architecture practiced in reverse—as spatial investigation rather than spatial production—can reveal the territorial organization that global commodity systems are structured to conceal.

This thesis investigates the use of culture as a tool of urban development in the rapidly urbanizing cities of the Middle East, focusing on two countries: Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). As Gulf cities have undergone dramatic transformation in the post-oil era, questions of cultural identity, heritage, and modernity have become central to how these cities are planned and represented. In Oman, cities like Muscat and Nizwa, demonstrate an urbanization approach that focuses on the preservation and marketing of traditional culture. This projects a coherent national identity rooted in heritage. In Abu Dhabi, the relationship with culture is more complex. Traditional culture is intertwined with Westen modernity to produce a new strategy of cultural development, one defined by the deliberate curation of culture. Through an analysis of architecture and urban planning, this thesis argues that culture has emerged as a primary instrument of Gulf urbanization, one through which competing claims of national identity, sovereignty, and global modernity are actively negotiated.