In the latest Foreign Policy, Parag Khanna argues that the city is increasingly becoming a more important geopolitical entity than the nation-state:

The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not — and will not be — one global village, so much as a network of different ones…

Time, technology, and population growth have massively accelerated the advent of this new urbanized era. Already, more than half the world lives in cities, and the percentage is growing rapidly. But just 100 cities account for 30 percent of the world’s economy, and almost all its innovation.

Neither 19th-century balance-of-power politics nor 20th-century power blocs are useful in understanding this new world. Instead, we have to look back nearly a thousand years, to the medieval age in which cities such as Cairo and Hangzhou were the centers of global gravity, expanding their influence confidently outward in a borderless world. When Marco Polo set forth from Venice along the emergent Silk Road, he extolled the virtues not of empires, but of the cities that made them great. He admired the vineyards of Kashgar and the material abundance of Xi’an, and even foretold — correctly — that no one would believe his account of Chengdu’s merchant wealth. It’s worth remembering that only in Europe were the Middle Ages dark — they were the apogee of Arab, Muslim, and Chinese glory.

While the article is too brief and too wide-ranging to treat its thesis (really, theses, as Khanna makes a host of relatively provocative claims through pure assertion) as thoroughly as it deserves, it is an interesting read.  Perhaps his forthcoming book will explore the ideas outlined in the article in more depth?  (I have to admit that I am, predictably, partial to his earlier assertion that “independence without infrastructure is futile”.)

Design Under Sky wrote about this a month or so ago, but given that we’re talking about the Los Angeles River, lo-fi landscape interventions, and that Brett Milligan brought it up again, it’s probably worth taking a moment to mention the Greenaid seedbomb dispensers.  Designers Kim Karlsrud and Daniel Phillips (Common Studio) partnered with David Fletcher (author of the chapter of The Infrastructural City that we’ve been discussing this week) to retrofit old gumball machines with a stock of indigenous seed mixes prepared by Fletcher for various urban Los Angeles habitats, letting inclined Angelenos engage in anthropogenic seed dispersal — perhaps, even, as Fletcher’s photomontages suggest, within the concrete confines of the River.

Perhaps somewhat predicatably, though, I wonder if seedbombs prepared for the harsh conditions of the River’s upper reaches should be limited to “indigenous” species?  What, after all, does “indigenous” mean in such a thoroughly transformed condition?  As Fletcher says in “Flood Control Freakology”:

“…the native versus exotic debate is oversimplified: the landscape assemblages should not be mistake as the cause of environmental degradation, when they are actually an ecologically appropriate result… Many of these infrastructural freakologies serve as green infrastructures, cleansing and processing excess nutrients, controlling erosion, and providing habitat which survives independent of human agency… Moreover, because soil and hydrologic conditions have so radically changed, native vegetation would require careful maintenance to survive.”

What if the seedbombs contained the seeds of the future forests of an infrastructural seaboard?

As volcanism is, for obvious reasons, in the news at the moment, perhaps this is the right time to think back to an article posted a few months ago at English Russia which suggests that Moscow is a city built not on ordinary, stable hills, but on volcanoes:

“Moscow city stands on the top of the giant ancient volcano”, says scientist, “we call often Moscow – the city on the seven hills (as well Rome and some other cities) but just a few know that those seven hill actually are the ancient volcano structure. It doesn’t matter that it is not active for thousands of years already, still there are so called ‘fluid streams’ gases from the center of the Earth comes to surface through ancient volcanoes, they cause the tremors of the surface and ruining the roads and buildings in Moscow.”

Regardless of whether English Russia’s article reflects the actual geological conditions of Moscow (and I don’t think that it does, though I’d like to¹), I do think that its fair to say that this is an extraordinarily rich symbolic image: a Dantean metropolis, constructed on the metaphorical gates of hell, its streets continually poised and ready to collapse into subterranean caverns like an igneous Miami.

Meanwhile, at Polis, Peter Sigrist has been writing a series which traces the history and evolution of that same city’s public parks, using — and I think this is a fantastic idea — the parks as a lens for registering the effects of shifting political and cultural ideologies on the city, from the importation of Western European landscape architects by Peter the Great in the late seventeenth century to park-heavy, green-belted regional master plans adopted in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras.  According to the figures that Sigrist has found, Moscow is extremely densely populated by parks, having between three and four times the ratio of public parks space to citizen that comparable cities — New York, London, Paris — do.

While that series deserves a more careful and serious reading than this flippant post allows, the obvious result of the mental collision of these two reports about Moscow — one fantastic and unbelievable, the other substantiated and historical — is to imagine a Moscow whose many public parks are more Yellowstone or Hawaii Volcanoes National Park than Central Park. That image, in turn, leads me to a third recent post elsewhere, Pruned’s entry on flood hunting.  Flood hunting is apparently the practice of “traveling to sites of inundation”, an activity situated somewhere between (natural) disaster tourism and, as Pruned suggests, the occasionally-thrilling itineraries of flood-control-apparatus inspectors, who typically must inspect their bulwarks and levees and dams without the visual aid of surging floodwaters, but might, on occasion, have the opportunity to “gauge how the built environment reacts in the face of total systemic failure”.

Flood hunting is, of course, quite fascinating as practice; but it is also interesting as a program: a landscape architect might quite plausibly design a coastal levee strung with scaffolds, walkways, and viewing platforms² for watching floods from just above the 500-year flood line, or — as the recently-opened Rising Currents program at MoMA suggests — a systemically-engineered marshy barrier against rising sea levels, which also doubles as recreational space and parkland.  In the same way, its not quite impossible to imagine a city who, being built atop dormant volcanoes, has reserved the most unstable districts of the city as municipal parks.  Whose landscape architects have been called upon to design access systems for these geological freakologies, these unstable geysers, mud pots, fumaroles, and hot springs which sit between broad avenues, kvartals, dense clusters of towering buildings, and whose citizens frequent its public parks not for bucolic relaxation but for sublime thrills.

Just outside Amarillo, Texas, the Cliffside field stores much of the nation’s helium reserves in a naturally-occurring geologic dome. It is part of a complex of partially-privatized fields, mines, domes, and pipelines which extends nearly two hundred miles north-south, from the Texas Panhandle to Oklahoma. A recent article in Seed Magazine describes the complex, whose helium stockpile is by far the world’s largest, and its role in the increasing global scarcity of helium, which is a critical element in a number of industrial and scientific processes, yet relatively easily escapes the earth’s atmosphere for outer space.

This industrial landscape is only possible due to the particular geologic conditions of the region: beds composed primarily of “Brown dolomite” are sufficiently receptive to helium (having been discovered because they contained natural — though less concentrated — helium reserves), while the “Panhandle lime formation”, which is layered immediately on top of those beds, provides a natural “caprock”, penetrated only by the airtight injection wells (PDF). With those wells, production plants, maintenance roads, and pipelines running across the surface of these formations to prosthetically adapt bedrock to use in industrial process, the ground itself has assumed a hybridized and mechanical nature, comprising a very literal landscape machine.

I’ve noted before Pierre Belanger’s predictions about the bio-physical landscape as infrastructure, which he describes as having been “historically suppressed”, but ripe for resurgence as “a collective system of essential services, resources, and agents that generates and supports urban economies”. While the helium industry may not have a very long future, perhaps the geo-physical landscape has also been overlooked, and may also be useful to the development of such a system.

From a recent article in the Guardian:

Biological warfare is to be declared on an alien invader, Japanese knotweed, that swamps gardens and rivers, with the release of an insect to eat the virulent weed.

The decision by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is the first allowing one non-native species, a flying insect resembling a miniature moth, to control the seemingly unstoppable spread of an alien plant…

The wildlife minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, said the fast-growing Japanese knotweed was estimated to cost £150m a year to control, and was able to grow through buildings and roads.

[Knotweed] has also been blamed for flooding, by causing erosion to river banks and clogging up streams with dead plants.

The decision is not without controversy, though, as some environmentalists worry that introducing an exotic predator — the chosen Aphalara itadori, a “plant jumping lice” — is potentially as disastrous as the original introduction of knotweed.  Given the history of predator introduction (in which the introduced predator has occasionally proven more harmful than the prey it was introduced to control), that worry is not wholly absurd, despite assurances from the British government that the introduced insects will be studied in tightly controlled environments before wide release.  But it’s probably worth noting that humanity has already spent the past couple centuries engaging in an unprecedented experiment in cross-species conflict at a global scale…

[The aftermath of a knotweed clearning operation; Invasive plant images via Invasive.org]

[A Japanese knotweed infestation in Ohio]

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a horticulturist recently.  She noted that, due to the extreme pest pressures North American native species now face, some horticulturists now think that the appropriately far-sighted practice is to only plant invasive species¹.  This, of course, flies in the face of the prevailing dogmas of landscape and botanical disciplines, where the categories “native” and “invasive” are treated not as functional ecological descriptors, but as moral markers: to cultivate invasive plants is considered ecological violence, while planting and preserving natives is an indication of moral righteousness.

It is, of course, true that there are a number of good reasons to prefer native plants to exotics, and a corresponding number of good reasons to combat the spread of invasive plants, neither of which I have any intention of minimizing.

[A future forest of Norway Maple?]

[A future grove of Ailanthus altissima?]

But I’m still haunted (and not at all pleased, despite my fascination) by the thought that the decline of native species might be inevitable.  Native species may be adapted to climate and local ecology, but perhaps only invasives are adapted to free trade, and free trade’s attendant equalization of global pest regimes?² Are the Native Plant Societies destined to be horticultural equivalents of the Institute of Classical Architecture, propagating an aesthetic preference which has certain pleasant associations for many people, but which is no longer derived from any functional process?

Moreover: are these the future forests of the Eastern seaboard?  Not Oak-hickory-pine nor Maple-beech-birch, but Mulberry-Ailanthus-Norway Maple?  If so, these future forests would have been constructed by the aggregate effect of human economies spread across several centuries, so that we might have even been said to have unintentionally cultivated them with shipments of insect-bearing fruits, the massive growth of the globalized horticultural trade in the nineteenth century, ballast-loads of exotic aquatics, and ornamental gardens which lurked on the edges of our cities like botanical time-bombs (or, perhaps, the unknowing seeds of the preservation of some forest — if not quite our forest — as strange and unnatural as it might be).  Free trade as a form of monumental gardening, with the entire biosphere its terra fluxus.  Profit-seeking corporations and capitalist nation-states as unwitting gardeners, container ships their trowels.

[A small future stand of Paper mulberry?]

And this is to say nothing of more radical but entirely possible futures, such as that bioengineering our crops might, through cross-pollination, produce fields of genetically-enhanced “superweeds”; yet would forests of incredibly adaptable invasive hardwoods and savannahs of superweeds not be preferable to genetically-pure but frail, choking, and dying landscape-museums of natives?  At some point, presumably, we would admit the evolutionary superiority of kudzu, a plant which is adapted not just to soils, rainfall, and temperatures, but to us and the disturbances we produce.