February 7, 2012 – 6:00 am
[A pressurized pipe carries dredge along Bethany Beach, Delaware; photography by Chris Mizes.] On his blog space within lines, Chris Mizes writes about one of the more common ways that the landscapes of dredge intrude on everyday life: beach nourishment. As Mizes explains, this commonplace instance of landscape prosthesis is — like many of the [...]
February 1, 2012 – 8:00 pm
Speaking of the geography of financialization, Alex Schafran had a fantastic post at Polis last December on race, foreclosure, and rhetoric surrounding the “death of the fringe suburb”. In forthcoming work done with my colleague Jake Wegmann, analyzing real-estate data in the region since 1988, we can show that the zip codes to which African [...]
January 30, 2012 – 6:00 am
[Warehouse at 1200 E McNichols Road, Highland Park, Michigan. The small red sign at the bottom right corner of the second image says "Metro".] The warehouse above — and a network of others like it, scattered around the industrial abandonia of Detroit — is a crucial bottleneck in the global aluminium trade. Before I explain how this [...]
December 20, 2011 – 6:00 am
Recommended reading: Alan Wiig’s “everyday structures”, a blog “explor[ing] the place of infrastructure in the urban landscape”, with a particular focus on “Hertzian space” and digital communications infrastructure. Wiig is studying geography at Temple University, so his blog most typically deals with landscapes in Philadelphia or its surrounds. Like many of mammoth‘s favorite things at [...]
October 31, 2011 – 9:13 pm
["Squirrel Highways", a drawing by Denis Wood, Carter Crawford and Shaub Dunkley, from Denis Wood's Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, which Wood describes as a "cartographic poem" about the North Carolina neighborhood of Boylan Heights, where he lives. Wood evidences a fantastic ability to animate prosaic terrain through the making of maps which are [...]
October 14, 2011 – 6:00 am
Above and below, snapshots from “Auckland Volcanoes”, a map by Carl Douglas. Carl’s map marks the location of each of the volcanic craters that dot the surface of Auckland. The craters exhibit a fascinating variety: some have been heavily altered by mining operations (which particularly seek volcanic scoria, a type of rock suitable for use [...]
September 13, 2011 – 6:00 am
Over the course of this summer’s discussion of floods, we’ve talked a great deal about channelization and levees and dredging and the other acts of industrial landscaping that have produced the riverine landscapes of the Mississippi watershed. Those acts, though, are multi-purposed: they are executed to control floods, yes, but they are usually also intended [...]
[I'll be updating this atlas as I continue to post on floods; for now, there are two categories -- blue, for Missouri floods, and yellow, for historical Mississippi floods.]
[Fort Peck Lake (top), Spillway (middle) and Dam (above), in northeast Montana; built between 1933 and 1940, Fort Peck is the world's largest "hydraulically-filled" dam, which means that it was constructed by dredging suspended sediment from borrow pits and pumping it to discharge pipes at the dam site, where it settles onto the embankment. (This [...]
In a great little piece for Domus, Geoff Manaugh looks at what the “critical foreign dependencies” cable says about the nature of the contemporary nation-state: “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 strange spray-painted glyphs marking "our subterranean infrastructure"; image source.] Nicola Twilley walks with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, for Good Magazine‘s Los Angeles issue: “Armed only with a manila folder stuffed full of clippings, archive photos, and annotated printouts from Wikimapia, our first stop is the median strip on the 9500 block of [...]
March 31, 2011 – 12:00 pm
["Cushing has fewer than 10,000 residents, but you can drive around for hours and still not see all the huge tanks there."] Tuesday morning, I caught a portion of an NPR piece on the “pipelines and trucking corridors” that bring Canadian oil from the Alberta oil sands into the United States — and then promptly [...]
October 27, 2010 – 8:48 pm
I’ve mentioned before my fondness for the blog Pathological Geomorphology, but this month’s theme is particularly fantastic: the interface of human landscapes and geomorphology. In Green River, Utah (above), for instance, an extinct oxbow determines contemporary land-use patterns; other examples so far include farmed alluvial fans in Asian deserts, Pennsylvania farmland interspersed between anticlines, and [...]
October 27, 2010 – 5:00 am
[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; [...]
October 3, 2010 – 2:43 pm
[Flushing Airport, one of New York City's "places humans let be", via Google Maps] Robert Sullivan’s recent article on the renaissance of urban ecology in New York City, The Concrete Jungle, is so outstanding that I’ve been sitting on it for two weeks, paralyzed by the plethora of great quotes I could pull from it. [...]
August 17, 2010 – 10:11 pm
[Housing in Hong Kong, from photographer Michael Wolf's series "Architecture of Density"] 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 [...]
February 26, 2010 – 1:20 pm
[The future soil of Miami, captured by satellites while drifting off the coast of Africa.] At InfraNet Lab, Mason White posts about “Particulate Swarms”, or three storm typologies: dust, water, and gas. The first image in the post, of a dust storm over Sydney, reminds me (because in my haste, I mistakenly read the form [...]
February 26, 2010 – 11:01 am
The following is another contribution to the constellation of blog posts supporting the Glacier/Island/Storm Studio at Columbia University; read mammoth‘s previous Glacier/Island/Storm posts. LANDSCAPE MACHINES In Magic, Machines, and Architecture, published in Pidgin 6, we find a gloriously simple description of the function and nature of machines by a participant in a course at Princeton [...]
December 17, 2009 – 1:09 pm
I’m entranced by the simplicity (and, in retrospect, obviousness) of the suggestions in the short text accompanying Sergio Lopez-Piñeiro’s series of photographs at Places, entitled “White Space”. Lopez-Piñeiro says: …even everyday plowing practices — practices with no artistic or design ambitions — have the capacity to transform snowed-in parking lots into beautiful winter gardens… We [...]
Eat your heart out Richard Serra. http://www.edwardburtynsky.com > ships > shipbreaking. After reading this post I was referred to here by a friend: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/ It turns out to be doubly relevant to recent posts: not only containing beautiful images of manufactured landscapes, but also absolutely stunning images of shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh. via Nico Sy, who doesn’t [...]
