[Another infrastructural landscape: Sosa Texcoco’s salt collector in Mexico City, via google maps]

I’m still catching up on my reading after the winter break; another bit of that reading that I’d particularly recommend is Alexis Madrigal’s post on visiting the SEGS, or Solar Electric Generating Stations, located in Kramer Junction, California. Alexis reflects on the scale of this infrastructural landscape, and its relationship to urban landscapes solar fields may power someday soon:

[This] country is big, mechanical, and fast. It cannot be located in a dense place: Land needs to be cheap and land regulations loose. But density requires these other desolate places to exist. If you live in a major city, you are excluded from this world. In fact, it’s been designed so that you don’t see it, won’t see it, except perhaps fleetingly from the highway or as you fly past and snap a photo. And there’s nothing wrong with all that, necessarily.

Read the whole post.