Seeing Like an Ecology: Project Ecologies as Prism, Practice, and Provocation

This article traces the genealogy, architecture, and afterlife of the concept of project ecologies. Originating from an extended immersion into London's Soho advertising industry, the concept proposed a six-layer architecture—team, firm, epistemic collective, personal network, locality, and institution—to capture how temporary projects are embedded in, and recursively reshape, more durable relational configurations. The article reconstructs the intellectual tributaries that fed the concept (heterarchy, temporary organizing, the knowledge economy, the new spirit of capitalism); maps its subsequent diffusion across creative industries, megaprojects, urban development, and infrastructure delivery; and tracks how recent scholarship has advanced—and complicated—its constitutive dimensions along what are here termed the 4 + 2 Ts: time, task, team, transition plus territory and things. In a concluding act of retrospective candor, six limitations—typological drift, empirical reach, boundary delineation, power asymmetries, normative undertone, and conceptual overlaps—are diagnosed and paired with concrete research directions that aspire to convert a capacious but underdetermined trading zone into a proper research program.