Architecture in Reverse: Geospatial Detection of Informal Infrastructure in Colombia

Abstract

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.