“Secret Servers”, an article by James Bridle originally published in issue 099 of Icon magazine, looks at the relationship between architecture and the physical infrastructure of the internet. I found Bridle’s last few paragraphs particularly provocative:

“What is at stake is the way in which architects help to define and shape the image of the network to the general public. Datacenters are the outward embodiment of a huge range of public and private services, from banking to electronic voting, government bureaucracy to social networks. As such, they stand as a new form of civic architecture, at odds with their historical desire for anonymity.

Facebook’s largest facility is its new datacenter in Prineville, Oregon, tapping into the same cheap electricity which powers Google’s project in The Dalles. The social network of more than 600 million users is instantiated as a 307,000 square foot site currently employing over 1,000 construction workers—which will dwindle to just 35 jobs when operational. But in addition to the $110,000 a year Facebook has promised to local civic funds, and a franchise fee for power sold by the city, comes a new definition for datacenters and their workers, articulated by site manager Ken Patchett: “We’re the blue collar guys of the tech industry, and we’re really proud of that. This is a factory. It’s just a different kind of factory then you might be used to. It’s not a sawmill or a plywood mill, but it’s a factory nonetheless.”

This sentiment is echoed in McDonald’s description of “a new age industrial architecture”, of cities re-industrialised rather than trying to become “cultural cities”, a modern Milan emphasising the value of engineering and the craft and “making” inherent in information technology and digital real estate.

The role of the architect in the new digital real estate is to work at different levels, in Macdonald’s words “from planning and building design right down to cultural integration with other activities.” The cloud, the network, the “new heavy industry”, is reshaping the physical landscape, from the reconfiguration of Lower Manhattan to provide low-latency access to the New York Stock Exchange, to the tangles of transatlantic fiber cables coming ashore at Widemouth Bay, an old smuggler’s haunt on the Cornish coast. A formerly stealth sector is coming out into the open, revealing a tension between historical discretion and corporate projection, and bringing with it the opportunity to define a new architectural vocabulary for the digitised world.”

Though Bridle does not make this link explicit in the article, the idea of a potential “new architectural vocabulary” is clearly related to the “New Aesthetic” that Bridle began talking about this past May.  (I’ve always liked Matt Berg’s description of it as a “sensor vernacular”, and Robin Sloan’s “digital backwash aesthetic”.  I’m not sure either of those capture exactly what Bridle’s been talking about — more like pieces of it — but they all dance around the same set of things, or at least similar sets.)  Here’s Bridle’s original description, pinched together:

For so long we’ve stared up at space in wonder, but with cheap satellite imagery and cameras on kites and RC helicopters, we’re looking at the ground with new eyes, to see structures and infrastructures.

The map fragments, visible at different resolutions, accepting of differing hierarchies of objects.

Views of the landscape are superimposed on one another. Time itself dilates.

Representations of people and of technology begin to break down, to come apart not at the seams, but at the pixels.

The rough, pixelated, low-resolution edges of the screen are becoming in the world.

And when that — a new aesthetic vocabulary — gets linked to a “re-industrialization”, pulling together aesthetics, culture, economics, and politics, you’ve got a pretty significant project.  I’d like to talk about this at more length later, but for now I will just quote from Dan Hill’s fantastic 14 Cities project.  (Independent of the concerns in this post, the whole project is worth a read.)  This is the fourth of the fourteen fictional future cities Hill describes, “Re-industrial City”:

“The advances in various light manufacturing technologies throughout the early part of the 21st century — rapid prototyping, 3D printing and various local clean energy sources — enabled a return of industry to the city. Noise, pollution and other externalities were so low as to be insignificant, and allied to the nascent interest in digitally-enabled craft at the turn of the century, by the early 2020s suburbs had become light industrial zones once again.

Waterloo, Alexandria and the Inner West of Sydney through to Pyrmont once again became a thriving manufacturing centre, albeit on a domestic scale, as people were able to ‘micro-manufacture’ products from their backyard, or send designs to mass-manufacture hubs supported by logistics networks of electric delivery vans and trains. Melbourne had led the way through its nurturing of production in the creative industries and its existing built fabric.

In an ironic twist, former warehouses and factories are being partially converted from apartments back into warehouses and factories. Yet the domestic scale of the technologies means they can coexist with living spaces, actually suggesting a return to the craftsman’s studio model of the Middle Ages. The ‘faber’ movement — faber, to make — spread through most Australian cities, with the ‘re-industrial city’ as the result, a genuinely mixed-use productive place — with an identity.”

[For more on the New Aesthetic, read Rob Walker's recent interview with James Bridle at Design Observer.  It's also well-worth checking out the essay in Domus by Alexis Madrigal that the image at top is taken from.]

“The sites described by the cable—Israeli ordnance manufacturers, Australian pharmaceutical corporations, Canadian hydroelectric dams, German rabies vaccine suppliers—form a geometry whose operators and employees are perhaps unaware that they define the outer limits of US national security. Put another way, the flipside of a recognisable US border is this unwitting constellation: a defensive perimeter or outsourced inside, whereby the contiguous nation-state becomes fragmented into a discontiguous networkstate, its points never in direct physical contact. It is thus not a constitutional entity in any recognised sense, but a coordinated infrastructural ensemble that spans whole continents at a time.”

In other words, not only is Wyoming in Los Angeles; but America is in Canada, or Canada is in America, or both at the same time.

[Murmansk in polar night, photographed by flickr user euno.]

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a fascinating excerpt from geoscientist Laurence Smith’s new book, The World in 2050, which looks at how four global “megatrends” — “human population growth and migration; growing demand for control over such natural resource ‘services’ as photosynthesis and bee pollination; globalization; and climate change” — are fueling both international involvement and urban growth in the Arctic:

Much of the planet’s northern quarter of latitude, including the Arctic, is poised to undergo tremendous transformation over the next century. As a booming population increases the demand for the Earth’s natural resources, and as lands closer to the equator face the prospect of rising water demand, droughts and other likely changes, the prominence of northern countries will rise along with their projected milder winters…

[In 2050, this] New North… might be something like America in 1803, just after the Louisiana Purchase from France. It, too, possessed major cities fueled by foreign immigration, with a vast, inhospitable frontier distant from the major urban cores. Its deserts, like Arctic tundra, were harsh, dangerous and ecologically fragile. It, too, had rich resource endowments of metals and hydrocarbons. It, too, was not really an empty frontier but already occupied by indigenous peoples who had been living there for millennia.

Flying over the American West today, one still sees landscapes that are barren and sparsely populated. Its towns and cities are relatively few, scattered across miles of empty desert. Yet its population is growing, its cities like Phoenix and Salt Lake and Las Vegas humming economic forces with cultural and political significance. This is how I imagine the coming human expansion in the New North. We’re not all about to move there, but it will integrate with the rest of the world in some very important ways.

I imagine the high Arctic, in particular, will be rather like Nevada—a landscape nearly empty but with fast-growing towns. Its prime socioeconomic role in the 21st century will not be homestead haven but economic engine, shoveling gas, oil, minerals and fish into the gaping global maw.

Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal.

If you suppose that there is a spectrum of ways that we adapt ourselves to our environment, then “architecture” might be at one end, and “cyborg” (whether psychotropic or technological) could be at the other.  In between, there would be “clothing”.  And if you really want to confuse the three and scramble your simplistic understanding of that spectrum, you talk about wearable architecture.

So I couldn’t let Cyborg Month pass without mentioning Mary Mattingly’s absolutely fantastic “Wearable Homes”.  I got in touch with Tim Maly and we ended up co-writing a post for Quiet Babylon, “Wearable Ethics”:

…“Wearable Homes” is a project – part architecture, part photography, part design fiction, part clothing (fashion is not quite the right word here) – which sits at that confused junction between cyborgs and architecture.

Anyways, the post is (thanks to Tim) about a good bit more than just Wearable Homes, so read it.  And if you want more Wearable Homes, you might enjoy this old Pruned post, and Mattingly’s website.

1. This post is for 50 Posts About Cyborgs.

2. This is a cyborg arboretum.  That is, a collection of various plants not naturally found in geographic proximity, brought together for educational purposes, whose constituent plants happen to be cyborgs.  Not augmented humans, but flora augmented by “non-hereditary adaptations”.

Now, in some real and valid sense, just as we’ve been augmenting our own biological capabilities with technological adaptations for millenia, we’ve also been engaged in a massive and only semi-conscious re-shaping of the forms and functions of plants.  However, that re-shaping (co-evolution, really), as fascinating as it is, has been primarily through hereditary tools — biology as technology, rather than something which exists in tension with biology, and thus is an object of interest when, in odd cases, it is married to biology.

This being a post about cyborgs, we’re here to talk about those odd cases.  So, with the exception of one case that I find appropriate because a plant’s biology is being manipulated technologically to mimic a technological construct, this arboretum is filled only with plants which incorporate technology into their physical structure.

3. Arboretums are places for organization and display, so I’ve arranged the cyborg plants into four genera.

The simplest kind of cyborg plant is well represented by a project executed at two schools in Zurich entitled, appropriately, Cyborg Plant.  Cyborg Plant consists of a simple avocado plant (Persea americana) which is nurtured by an attached robotic prosthesis¹.  The prosthesis measures the avocado’s drought stress — indicated by “the position of the leaves and the electrical potential within the trunk” — and irrigates the plant as required.  This attachment, which is essentially a spacesuit for plants, enables the avocado to live indoors without human attention for much longer periods of time than would otherwise be possible (the interior of a built space being nearly as hostile for plants as land is for fish).

Our next plant is exponentially more complex than our first, but conceptually quite similar. Plantas nomadas are the creation of artist Gilberto Esparza; a minature eco-system composed of plants and micro-organisms is housed within a robotic shell, which provides the eco-system with the ability (and digital intelligence) to seek out new sources of nutrition when it is required.  Each of the elements is symbiotically dependent on the others: the plants provide habitat for the microbes, the microbes (in a microbial fuel cell) transform nutrients in water into energy to power the robotic components, and the robotic components provide mobility and direction for the compound organism.

Both Plantas nomadas and Cyborg Plant, then, are examples of what we might consider the first category of cyborg plants: those whose abilities are extended and transformed in a manner quite similar to the original vision of the human cyborg, as their ability to internally regulate inputs and conditions to cope with their immediate environment is enhanced².  (It’s interesting to note, at this point, that on a less experimental and more horticultural scale, native plants, which we tend to think of as the most ‘natural’ plants, are in fact those plants which are closest to becoming cyborgs as species.  Though it would be a significant overstatement to describe them as such, modern horticulture, gardening, and landscape architecture employs a dizzying array of prostheses in order to maintain arrangements of native flora that we determine to be valuable, while it is ‘invasive’ and ‘weedy’ plants which flourish in our cities in the absence of intensive cultivation.)

Of course, technology and plants can be married in ways that are less pleasant for the plants involved.  In Tim Simpson’s Natural deselection, a small community of plants is placed in direct competition for survival.  Three potted plants sit in a triangle around an artificial stem, which protrudes a single mechanical shear towards each potted plant while holding a sensor above each pot.  Though they are (apparently) blissfully unaware, the three plants are in a mortal race: the first plant to reach a prescribed height lives; its compatriots are sheared.

As Alex Trevi notes at Pruned, the possibilities for domestic deployment are nearly endless (provided that one is inclined to treat living rooms as appropriate laboratories for accelerated evolutionary experiments):

One wishes this was marketed for the home decorating market, perhaps through a partnership with Martha Stewart Living Omnipedia or Home Depot; a mass produced kinetic sculpture that approximates the violence and savagery of nature, the brutal facts from which indoor plants seem happily divorced, that is, if they’re lucky enough to have attentive owners.

A third genus (and, as far as I can tell, the most populous genus) of cyborg plants might be called the networked plant.  Like the first genus, the networked plant sees its abilities extended through prosthesis.  However, rather than enhancing its ability to survive in a particular environment, the networked plant’s cybernetic components provide it with the ability to communicate to us in our native tongues (by which I mean of course social media, not language)³.

The Talking Tree, for instance, is a century-old beech near Brussels, which EOS magazine has “hooked up to a fine dust meter, ozone meter, light meter, weatherstation, webcam and microphone.”  Measurements derived from those instruments are translated into brief statements about the tree’s immediate environment, and broadcast on Twitter, Facebook, and the tree’s website.  The raw metrics are also available on the website as a live stream of un-anthropomorphized data; I suspect that a creative presentation emphasizing this raw data — and with it, the vast differences between how a plant perceives the world and how humans perceive the world — would be much more compelling than the statements the project produces, but it’s an entertaining experiment even as it is.

And there are plenty of similar experiments.  Botanicalls are cyborg-creation kits which can be used to give a plant the ability to place a reminder call when it is not watered.  They are, I believe, the only commercially-deployed cyborg implants available for your houseplants.   (Pothos, the twittering Toronto houseplant, is a Botanicall.)  Midori-San, the blogging Japanese Sweetheart Hoya (Hoya kerrii), is quite similar, employing sensors on its leaves to detect bioelectrical current, collecting data on ambient environmental conditions, and using an algorithm to “translate this data into Japanese sentences”.  Even the extraordinarily poorly-designed Australian “Facebook plant” Meet Eater, which Tim Maly pointed out to me by way of @Xeus today, falls into this category.  (The problem with Meet Eater is that it allows Facebook followers to provide the plant with water, but provides no feedback mechanism to indicate when it has been over-watered.  Which is why it is not surprising that Meet Eater is the third “Facebook plant” in a row to die of over-irrigation.  The more socially successful it is, the quicker it dies.)

One interesting footnote to the networked plant, which is usually modified for the benefit of transmitting information from the plant to people about the plant, is Ambient Biomedia, where a plant is modified to reflect the emotional status of a person, thus transmitting information (deep breath) from person to plant to person about the plant⁴.

The final genus in our arboretum is the one that I mentioned earlier as a little bit of a cheat: a plant which has been genetically modified to perform a technological function, rather than incorporating the physical presence of technology in its body.  (Since this plant is only made possible by a technological infrastructure of advanced genetic modification and bio-engineering, I’m willing to bend the rules a bit to squeeze it in.)  Struck by the parallel placement of street trees and street lights, designer Audrey Richard-Laurent has been working on a proposal for a bioluminescent tree which would perform the functions of both tree and light.

Which, if you think about it for a moment, is an impossibly beautiful idea.  A city whose night would literally shine with health.

This might sound like a far-fetched idea, but, as Next Nature notes, a Filipino scientist produced a bio-luminescent Christmas tree by covering it in bio-luminescent bacteria harvested from local squid in 2007, and other researchers have proposed applications for (truly) bio-luminescent plants ranging from lighting highways (which, assuming that the bioluminescent trees would at some point begin to naturalize, might produce the most strikingly beautiful displays of exotic plant invasion imaginable) to crops which glow when they need water.  Mushrooms make forests glow; why shouldn’t trees make cities glow?

The obvious question, then, is: what other technological functions might plants be modified to perform?  Might a tree like Welwitschia mirabilis, which harvests water from fog in the Namibian and Angolan deserts, be bio-engineered and grown on an industrial scale in literal fog farms, like a botanical version of the urban fog farms that mammoth has proposed elsewhere?  Or invasive submerged aquatic vegetation genetically programmed to assemble themselves into titantic but permeable storm-surge barriers off the coast of cities endangered by rising tides?  (One of my favorite Quiet Babylon posts, “If Plants Had Culture”, speculates on roughly this idea, spinning off scenarios about “body pollenating”, spices with shifting vintages, and symbiosis between fashion designers and color-changing flowers.)

4. So that’s individuals: augmented for survival, augmented to their detriment, networked, and genetically modified to mimic technology.

The other possibility — given the degree to which flora is often even more specifically communal than fauna (see: plant sociality, clonal colonies) — is that entire associations of plants might be augmented, producing cyborg forests.

Experiments last year at the University of Washington discovered that the biologically-produced electrical energy of trees could be tapped as current suitable for powering electrical devices.  While the amounts of current tapped from an individual tree are quite small, researchers speculated that, by storing the output over a period of time and tapping groupings of trees, bio-electrical current might prove “a low-cost option for powering tree sensors that might be used to detect environmental conditions or forest fires”.

Spinning off parallel research at MIT, Alex Trevi suggests a series of additional scenarios, the second of which is surely a proposal for a cyborg forest:

COUNTERPROPOSAL #2: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power an apparatus which acclimatizes a parcel from its present northern climes to conditions last seen when the area was straddling the equator, thus enabling the survival of formerly native tropical flora and fauna.

“For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconciously, we propose the term ‘Cyborg’.”

If speculation about post-natural organisms interests you, you ought to keep an eye on two blogs in particular: Pruned and Next Nature.

Writing for Current Intelligence, Serial Consign‘s Greg Smith (and guest co-writer Jordan Hale) discuss the history of standardized shipping containers, how that history has shaped the urban form of seaports such as Tianjin (and linked inland industrial regions), and why the incorporation of shipping containers into an “internet of things” may transform future cities — making “the vast rollout of sensor technology that accompanies [the transformation of shipping containers into network objects possibly] one of the most challenging and meaningful deployments of ubiquitous computing”.

The first question that might occur to an architect, I suppose (assuming that this imaginary architect is not a regular reader of Quiet Babylon — though he should be), is what, exactly, architecture and cyborgs have to do with one another.

The answer is quite a lot — but realizing this depends on understanding what a cyborg is.  Though, as Tim explains, the word has come to refer (particularly in pop culture) primarily to extreme biological-technological hybrids like Schwarzenegger’s Terminator or Star Trek’s Borg, it originally (and perhaps more usefully) refers to a much larger class of bodily augmentations, which Tim describes as “non-hereditary adaptation[s]“, or “technological interventions that change the course of biological existence”.

Because, again using Tim’s words, “visions of cyborgs are all about the relationship of technology to the body”, it turns out that, as Geoff Manaugh points out, the cyborg can be read as a negation of architecture:

The cyborg [under Clynes and Kline's original definition and] in this specific sense, then,  is an organism that does away with the need for architecture—it brings its environment along with it, in the form of artificially created internal feedback systems that adapt, on their own, to often radically changing environmental conditions.

I think Geoff is careful to provide that qualification in this specific sense, though, because when we accept Tim’s broad thesis — that the best image of a contemporary cyborg might not be Robocop, but a woman wearing glasses and holding a cellphone — we soon realize that the line between the architectural and the cyborg can be quite blurry¹.

Take, for instance, Keiichi Matsuda’s “Augmented City”.  Matsuda (whose previous video, “Domestic Robocop”, we noted at beginning of the year) produced the short for his Masters Thesis at the Bartlett School of Architecture.  In both “Augmented City” and “Domestic Robocop”, we see one example of what a cyborg architecture might be.  Rather than using the traditional tools of slow architecture to construct and re-construct the built environment around themselves, future cyborg architects might internalize the process of construction and re-construction, altering not the physical substance of the built environment, but their own perception of it.  As Matt Jones notes after Archigram, “people are walking architecture.”

If that possibility — or the history of cybernetics, or the idea that cooking might be understood as a bodily augmentation (a “pre-stomach”), or teasing out the connection between Christopher Alexander and cyborgs — is at all intriguing to you, you’ll want to subscribe to 50 Posts About Cyborgs.  (You can also follow the discussion at the twitter hashtag #50cyborgs.)

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.