Keller Easterling, speculating about “a new counterintuitive economic model” of “infrastructural subtraction” in Domus last November:

“What are the points of leverage, trip distances or economies of scale that make air freight or rail profitable? Architects and urbanist are not themselves logisticians or inventors of new transportation technologies, but they can run the development scenarios demonstrating their spatial consequences. The license to develop may be expressed in terms of remote offsets like schools, technologies and improvements to community that recalibrate and shrink the need for roads. Roads might only exist when bundled with underground utilities, forest buffers, wireless telecommunication and other suppressors…

Just as architects are learning to look past single design events or objects, some of the most interesting scientists and economists in the world are learning to look past the rational assumptions of science to test ideas in a more complex context with multiple actors and circumstances. The soupy matrix of spatial protocols is a rich test bed for these new questions and for new extra-state agreements that pivot around seemingly irrational or changeable desires. In the Amazon and elsewhere, architects may be valuable precisely because they are not offering a hard science but rather an art of subtraction.”

This seems an extremely important space to define: if architects and landscape architects are interested, as Easterling suggests they should be, in developing the capacity to efficaciously alter or disturb the trajectory of organizational protocols which produce large-scale territorial effects like the two Easterling describes in the Domus article, Yasuni-ITT (in which the Ecuadorian government sells stakes in not developing oil resources within the Yasuní preserve) and the conflicting IIRSA (Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America, which aims to “integrate highway networks, river ways, hydroelectric dams and telecommunications links throughout the [South American] continent”), then we designers may need to demonstrate a peculiar utility that we offer — some set of intelligences or capacities innate or developable within the spatial design disciplines that make them useful to the design of such organizational protocols (hence, “valuable precisely because they are not offering a hard science but rather an art of subtraction”) — while simultaneously developing modes of practice and design tools that have the capacity to act on such protocols.

Easterling’s article has suggestions for the latter, as well, describing this “art of subtraction” as a new territory for design, “a perverse expertise”  ”tutored by the bad company [architects] keep”:

“Since architects know to how make the development machine lurch forward, might they not also know how to put it into reverse? Might they know how to design and incentivise not only the addition but also the subtraction of development?”

…

The puzzle of subtraction or negative development clearly turns on quotients of space, yet it might outwit the architect who applies only the customary approach to the familiar site, building or master plan. Global development conundrums like those in the Amazon perhaps tutor an approach to form-making that does not produce the single design event or object, but rather form in a register that the political world can more easily use.

While the remote controls of foreign developers or runaway market multipliers are the source of despair for many preservationists, they might also be a source of ingenious design by architects and urbanists who design counter-multipliers or counter-remotes. Exceeding the reach of single object form, a subtraction protocol might establish an interdependency of variables that addresses multiple sites over time — a cos X that acts as a valve or governor to suppress, leverage or offset development. Just as cos X is an expression for a stream of values, these active forms, unlike a master plan, might simply provide a delta for development concentration and contraction.”

Read the full article at Domus.

Beneath the deeply-shaded underbelly of an elevated section of Seattle’s I-5 freeway, Colonnade Bike Park tumbles freely downhill across steep and jumbled terrain, occupying formerly barren and listless ground. Ramps, berms, drops, and various homespun earth-retaining systems slip between the industrial cathedral’s neatly-spaced namesake concrete pilings, aggregating into roughly pixelated surfaces, which in turn form a series of circuits for the local mountain biking community that designed, built, maintains, and rides in the park.

Like the tricks pulled by the bikers careening across its wood, concrete and earth, the park feels improvised. Much of the material to build it was donated or recycled from demolition projects around the city. Sandstone pavers torn out of cobblestone streets that linked the neighborhoods east and west of the park before the freeway viaduct split them were donated by the Seattle Historical Society. Antique Douglas Fir joists and framing were donated from a renovation project a local mountain biker was working on. A logger friend supplies the Park with a steady supply of “mill reject cedar logs”, logs which are too large, too small, or too deformed to meet the standards of commercial cedar processing. Scraps — pressure-treated lumber, fasteners, and other materials discarded on local construction projects — are brought to the Park and recycled into tracks, jumps, drops, and wall rides. Ordinary off-the-shelf items have been retooled, like the permeable concrete waffle pavers that have been converted into ad-hoc cellular confinement systems.

The accumulated effect of this process of ceaseless improvisation — the Park’s two acres took roughly four years to construct and design is ever ongoing– is a distinctively raw aesthetic. Like many contemporary urban parks, including New York’s (over-)celebrated High Line, Colonnade Park draws much of its aesthetic appeal from the character of the industrial infrastructure it shares space with. Yet rather than introducing crisp contemporary minimalism to contrast with that infrastructure, as many of its more famous contemporaries do, the decisively functional arrangement of the Park’s angled planes of waffle pavers and bermed piles of recycled dirt amplifies the raw instrumentality of the viaduct above.

But, as appealing as it is, the lo-fi aesthetic of these pragmatic and hand-made constructions is not the most important lesson of the Park. What Colonnade Park suggests is a re-orientation of the practice of landscape architecture away from faceless capital and towards creative and vested labor; away from design elitism and towards the participation of the users of a landscape in its construction; and away from standardization and mechanization towards difference, variability and the instantiated volition of the individual laborer.

Public urban landscapes — parks, plazas, squares — are often referred to as “capital projects” by those who build them — politicians, developers, architects, construction firms, planners, contractors, and so on. The use of that particular term recognizes the central mobilizing and productive role of capital in their construction. When capital plays this primary role, the quality of a landscape is understood to be determined in large part by the quantity of capital that can be devoted to it: to “upgrade” a plaza is to replace cheap concrete and unit pavers with expensive stone, wood, and metals; to spend more money is to improve. At the same time, to hold down costs for the production and installation of materials, standardization is essential, and where difference is introduced — in the algorithmic variations common to parametric design, for instance — it is introduced most often at the production stage, where capital is most easily applied.

Colonnade Park presents an alternative.  The Park was built with relatively minimal funding, using refurbished materials. But because of the massive quantity of skilled volunteer labor available, those materials have been fitted together in almost endlessly variegated combinations. As the volunteers who built the park are mountain bikers who wanted to ride in it, the Park is deeply customized to the spatial practices situated within it. Thus the shift from a capital-intensive landscape architecture to a labor-intensive landscape architecture is enabled by the presence of an interested and knowledgeable community which is willing and able to labor in a landscape voluntarily and without pay, for the rewards contained within and produced by that act of labor. This is a different kind of labor, and it heralds new possibilities for landscape design.

To understand these possibilities, it may be helpful to think briefly about the intertwined history of labor and landscape. Perhaps more than other forms of design, labor and landscape are co-generators of one another.  Human behaviors and landscape processes feedback on one another, as the literal liveliness of the materials used to construct landscapes — most obviously, plants, but also animals, fungi, bacteria, insects, and even inanimate substances like sediments, soils, and water which nonetheless possess aggregate behaviors — requires that constructed landscapes are continuously maintained and always evolving, in a struggle between growth and entropy, which are not always easily distinguished. This process of continuous maintenance is not necessarily capital intensive, but it is typically labor intensive. Think of the difference between the process of weeding a garden by hand and maintaining a strip mall planting buffer with weed-whackers and leaf blowers; think of the delicacy and intricacy of the former landscape, and the bluntness of the latter.

Viewed from a historical perspective, the contemporary capital project, with its emphasis on the agency of capital over labor, is an aberration. From the construction of pyramids in Egypt and Mesoamerica, to Roman villas and Qing dynasty gardens, to Bramante and Ligono in the Italian Renaissance, or even Humphrey Repton and Capability Brown in Romantic England, the practice of both monumental and ornamental landscape modification was long defined by a reliance on the mobilization of vast quantities of (often subjugated) human labor quarrying stone, pruning trees, excavating earth. At even broader spatial and temporal scales, the aggregate effects of persistent labor have historically produced some of our earliest and largest geo-biological impacts: terrace cultivation on hillsides in China and the Andes, the pre-Columbian transformation of North American biomes through the persistent annual application of fire, the co-evolved hedgerow ecologies of Western European farmland, and even, as recent archaeological evidence suggests, the fertile, anthropogenically-induced “terra preta” soils of the Amazon.

[Piccolomini Gardens, via Wikimedia.]

Perhaps the most extravagant examples of labor-based landscape modification are the incredibly maintenance-intensive geometries of Baroque gardens, most prominently found in France and Italy. Intended to realize a peculiar set of ideas about the relationship between symmetry, geometry, and the proper ordering and control of both the physical and moral universes that were endemic to that time and place, the Baroque gardens employed armies of skilled and semi-skilled landscape laborers in long struggles against the unruly entropic tendencies of boxwoods and poplars that were constantly trying to escape their confinement into crisply rectilinear parterres, bosquets, and allees. But setting aside the specific philosophical motivations of these gardeners, though, it is not difficult to imagine an alternative Baroque — perhaps we will call it the Ecological Baroque, or the Performative Baroque — equally extravagant in its application of labor to the transformation of landscape, yet aimed towards the realization of an entirely different set of ends: the enhancement and growth of ecological productivity.

[How a "sustainable site" is constructed; source]

[Community planting on a dredge island in the Chesapeake Bay; source]

To envision this Performative Baroque, imagine swarms of volunteer gardeners, acting in concert to re-make the floral composition of an urban landscape. Harvesting one set of urban voids for fast-growing grasses and perennials whose biomass can be converted into fuel. Seeding roadbanks and railways with erosion-halting vegetation. Setting up watches over cryptoforests and freakologies to record patterns of interaction between fauna and flora, and then establishing botanical kill lists of species to be removed for their lack of utility, while encouraging others that host a particular insect species which is struggling. Instead of trucking in groves of “native” trees and burying elaborate irrigation prostheses to support them, as a capital-intensive landscape architecture does, these landscapers would curate the slow successional evolution of new forests on abandoned lots, terrain vague, and infrastructural leftovers. The city would be their garden.

This picture reveals a critical difference between the historical pattern of landscapes produced by an extravagance of labor and a future turn back towards labor, a crucial difference between the hands that carved the Baroque gardens of Vaux le Vicomte out of resistant plants and the mountain bikers who hammered together Colonnade Park. That difference is that the historical pattern is of involuntary labor — at best, wage labor, performed at the behest of a benefactor able to afford wages in the pursuit of some vision — but a future turn towards labor will hinge on voluntary volition. If there is to be an Ecological Baroque, it will be built by willing hands.

What would motivate hosts of volunteers? Why would they lend their time and talents to such collective efforts? If we return to Colonnade Park, we find the coming together of key components that were integral to the making the Park a physical reality. First — and perhaps most importantly — someone had to recognize the latent potential of those couple of abandoned acres beneath I-5. In this case, that someone was a local bike shop owner, Simon Lawton, who was already riding his bike under the viaduct. Lawton’s rides convinced him that the site was perfect for a bike park. The freeway above sheltered it from Seattle’s persistent winter rains.  The irregular but steep topography was well-suited to the introduction of circuit tracks without requiring extensive artificial grading, and, in its then-state of abandonment, the shadowed space was considered a safety hazard by the future park’s neighbors. Lawton took this vision to a series of local organizations and constituencies, including Seattle City Parks and Recreation, a local neighborhood council, Urban Sparks (a non-profit group specializing in kickstarting urban community projects), and, crucially, the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance, Seattle’s largest mountain biking advocacy and trail maintenance organization. Once each of those organizations had been convinced that a bike park could and should be built beneath I-5, it was the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance that mobilized networks of resources — like the streams of surplus construction materials that were fashioned into the physical infrastructure of the bike park and communities of volunteers to construct it. Lawton’s creative opportunism provided the spark, and the presence of constituency that bought into that original creative vision generated a pool of labor that was both invested in the maturation of the vision and capable of pursuing the vision with a great deal of individual creativity. That is, the bikers wanted to ride in the future park themselves and as experienced bikers, the volunteers possessed an innate and specific understanding of the physical geometry of the future uses of the park.

Neither of these things are true of the labor employed on the typical capital project. Like most labor in the Post-Fordist economy, the labor employed on capital projects is specialized, corporatized, homogeneous, and standardized; it is fundamentally ill-suited to craft, at once inimical to difference through standardization and resistant to holistic understanding because of the specialization demanded for economic efficiency.

Freed from the constraints imposed by the dominance of capital, the pooled labor of groups of people defined by shared spatial proclivities — not just mountain bikers, but also skateboarders, soccer players, drag racers, parkour traceurs, rock climbers and boulderers, paintballers, and bird watchers — could begin to generate urban public landscapes which are more idiosyncratic and more differentiated than the public parks of the twentieth century. Similarly, the labor of knowledgeable and motivated ecological hobbyists could transform gardening from an individualistic and primarily ornamental practice into a communal effort, cultivating whole and diversified cities. Labor, which like the volunteer labor that built Colonnade Park, is uniquely motivated, local, and capable of imbuing its work with creative intent, falls outside the typical boundaries of landscape architecture as ‘professionally practiced’. And as these vested pools of labor fuse user, designer and builder they are more invested and broadly knowledgeable of its future use and how it will be occupied than the wage laborers of capital projects, opening diverse realms of possibility for the design of urban landscapes.

The photos in this post are, unless otherwise specified, taken by Brett Milligan. The photos which are by Brett and not of Colonnade Park are from the Goats on Belmont project, which took advantage of a bit of non-human labor to cultivate change. This post is cross-posted at Free Association Design. The account of the construction of Colonnade Park that this piece is based on was pieced together from interviews that Brett conducted with Glenn Glover and Mike Westra of the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance.

[photograph by Ricardo Espinosa]

The first is “The City That Never Was”, a symposium “organized by Christopher Marcinkoski and Javier Arpa, in cooperation with the Architectural League of New York; speakers include Iñaki Abalos, Dominique Alba, Enric Batlle, William Braham, Rania Ghosn, Llàtzer Moix, Robin Nagle, Chris Reed, Willie van den Broek, James von Klemperer, Richard Weller and Daniel Zarza”, “us[ing] the current economic and urban crisis in Spain as a lens through which to consider future patterns of urbanization and settlement”:

“In the twenty years following its accession to the European Union in 1986, Spain underwent unprecedented physical development that radically reshaped its major cities and metropolitan areas. From new housing to commercial and cultural facilities to infrastructure, the country experienced a building boom of such remarkable proportions that by 2005, 20% of Spain’s GDP was attributable to construction-related activities. The equivalent figure for the United States at that time was less than 5%. A year later, The New York Times celebrated Spain as “one of the great architectural success stories in modern history” when reviewing the Museum of Modern Art’s 2006 exhibition On Site: New Architecture in Spain.

Yet today Spain copes with an unemployment rate in excess of 26% and a GDP — according to the latest IMF forecast — expected to shrink by 1.5% this year. The country is littered with unfinished, partially completed or abandoned developments including housing complexes left unenclosed; empty museum buildings with no collections; hundreds of miles of unused roads; and airports without a single arrival or departure. This condition is most severe in Madrid, where over 25% of the urbanized land in and around the city consists of partly vacant or incomplete projects.

However extreme its outcome, this overdevelopment is not unique to Spain. Rather, episodes of failed speculative urbanization are a recurrent circumstance throughout history, taking place at a range of scales with varying degrees of long-term effect. Recent examples of this phenomenon can be found in the Sunbelt region of the United States, as well as in Ireland, Iceland, Panama, Angola, Kenya, and the Persian Gulf. China in particular has been under increased scrutiny of late as a growing number of media reports and images emerge of massive, unoccupied new settlement being built in the country’s interior western and southern provinces. This proliferation globally of unoccupied and incomplete settlement over the past 20 years illustrates broader trends in the processes of urbanization, trends in which presumptions of — and desires for — continuous economic growth instigate intense financial investment and real estate speculation, seemingly indifferent to considerations of local and regional capacities, or changing market demands.

This one-day symposium will use the situation in Spain as a point of departure for challenging the increasingly generic strategies upon which contemporary urban planning and design rely in both established and emerging economies. The event will be organized through four primary themes related to the City That Never Was phenomenon— infrastructure, waste, landscape, and instant urbanism — in order to explore new possibilities for how future formats of urbanization can be conceived, financed, planned, deployed and inhabited.”

The symposium is tomorrow (I said I was a little bit late!), at the Scholastic Auditorium in New York. Tickets are available through the Architectural League’s website through 5 pm today, and then tomorrow at the door. The Architectural League has also produced a small set of features on the topic, including interviews and images, which can be found here.

The second — the event series — is “Changing Industrial Landscapes”, a subset of the “2013 Cornell Landscape Project” (within the landscape department at Cornell University, which is sponsoring the series). Thematically organized by the Student ASLA and instructors Thomas Oles and Brian Davis, “Changing Industrial Landscapes” focuses “on landscape projects working at the scale of past and future industrial practices”. Dan and Marie Adams of Landing Studio spoke first — last night — and Brian claims both that it was excellent and that he’ll have a summary up in the near future.

Irene Curulli follows on March 4, I speak on April 1, and Peter Latz on April 25.

I’ll be giving a version of a new talk I’ve been developing (debuted here at LSU this past Monday), on what I am dubbing “operative terrain”:

A Target, a Books-a-Million, a movie theater, a Starbucks, and a sea of parking; a switching yard filled with double-stacked railcars; a right-of-way, a shoulder, four lanes, a median, four lanes, a shoulder, and another right-of-way; a coal-fired power plant, ash ponds, dikes, sluices, diversion channels, and drying cells (fly ash slurry safely confined, it seems). Such landscapes constitute the bulk of contemporary urbanized territory and, given the regimes of resource extraction and flows of material and goods that mark even nominally rural landscapes, linking cities to distant hinterlands, it might be argued that most territory is urbanized. These landscapes are not so much designed as they are formatted by economic and logistical imperatives. Particularly notable among them are territories that are being actively formatted by industrial, infrastructural, and logistical operations: dredge containment facilities, waste reservoirs, exurban warehouse districts. This operative terrain is essential to the economies of urban systems, hosting and channelling the various material and energetic flows that enable urbanization, yet it also often generates a host of undesirable consequences, and may also–more optimistically–harbor unrealized potential. What is the role of landscape architecture within this terrain?

It’s an exciting talk for me, as it synthesizes many of mammoth‘s concerns from the past several years (including the unfortunately under-blogged 2012) and attempts to shovel them into a framework for one set of new directions for landscape architecture that I argue are critical to developing an effective disciplinary response to the scale of contemporary environmental challenges produced by anthropogenic activity. It’s probably even more exciting to see it situated within the context of a broader set of designers who are responding within this terrain (in much more effective ways than I am), so my only disappointment with the series is that I can’t be in Ithaca for the other three lectures. If you can, you should.

I’m a bit late to getting notice of these events up, but at least I’m doing it before they happen¹: there are two book launches scheduled for the latest installment of Bracket, [goes Soft].

Bracket [goes Soft] examines the use and implications of soft today – from the scale of material innovation to territorial networks. While the projects in Bracket 2 are diverse in deployment and issues they engage, they share several key characteristics — proposing systems, networks and technologies that are responsive, adaptable, scalable, non-linear, and multivalent.

The first launch event is tomorrow evening, at Studio-X NYC:

Drop by Studio-X NYC this Friday evening for the New York City book launch of the next installment in the fantastic Bracket series: Bracket [goes Soft]. There will be wine, books for sale, and a series of short presentations on the subject of soft from the book’s editors, editorial advisers, and contributors, including Neeraj Bhatia, Fionn Byrne, Michael Chen, Leigha Dennis, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Geoff Manaugh, and Chris Perry. Hope to see you there!

The second is a little over a week from now, in Houston on February 17 (7 pm) at Architecture Center Houston, and will feature editor Neeraj Bhatia, Scott Colman, Ned Dodington, and Christopher Hight.

[Geotube deployment strategies; photo via NOAA, drawing by the Dredge Research Collaborative.]

I’m disappointed that I’m going to miss both (Houston more narrowly than New York, as I’ll be in Houston with my Houston Ship Channel studio only a few days later), particularly since Bracket [goes Soft] played a key role in bringing together the Dredge Research Collaborative and focusing our work on the anthropogenic sediment handling practices that we’ve become fascinated with. We have a short piece in [goes Soft], entitled (rather plainly) “Dredge”:

A continuous stream of shipping barges pass through the Mississippi River Delta, moving over 350 million tonnes a year through its three largest ports. Of those, the Port of South Louisiana alone stretches 87 kilometers along the Mississippi, and annually sees some 4,000 ocean-going vessels and 50,000 barges. It is the largest tonnage port in the Western Hemisphere, and the fifth-largest in the world. To maintain this logistical flow, channels — their size and depth determined by the needs of the international shipping industry — must be kept clear. No small task, due to the 200 million tons of sediment that are carried down the river every year. Much of this sediment is washed out to sea or deposited inoffensively along the banks, but a significant portion of comes to rest in industrially inconvenient places. In the Army Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) “Mississippi Valley” division, around 10 million tons of such sediment must be shifted each year. The channels are dredged, and refill, and are dredged and refill. It is to the processes that shape this landscape, and others like it, that we turn our attention.

You can check out the full piece — and many other, more interesting articles and projects — by picking up a copy of [goes Soft].

I’m very excited to be joining the faculty and students at LSU’s Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture as the visiting Marie M. Bickham Chair. In addition to taking in the extremely interesting work that they’re doing here, I’ll be teaching a pair of classes — a design studio on the Houston Ship Channel and a theory seminar entitled “Gantry Cranes, Kudzu Fields, and Rolling Blackouts”, both of which I’ll talk about at a bit more length in the near future — and, to get the semester started, organizing the School’s “Design Week”, a three-day design exercise open to the majority of the School’s students.

For that, I’m similarly excited that Mason White (Lateral Office, Toronto, Infranet Lab) has agreed to help me lead Design Week. We’ve got what I think is a pretty exciting exercise planned (furthering mammoth‘s current obsession with containerization as a generator of landscape typologies, and linking into Mason’s extensive research into the architectural potential of new spatial typologies generated by logistics and other infrastructural operations) but I don’t want to give too much about it away before it gets started. I will say that this means that Mason will be giving a talk at the School next Wednesday, the 16th, at 5:00 pm, the advertisement for which is below.

More soon…

We’re excited to note that Making the Geologic Now — a fantastic collection of images and essays ruminating on the role of the geologic in shaping the present, edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse (Smudge Studio/Friends of the Pleistocene) — will be launched next Tuesday, December 4th, with the release of the free, downloadable e-book at Punctum Books’ website, the launch of an interactive web version of the book, and a launch party hosted by Studio-X NYC. Pre-orders of the print version, which should ship in December, will also be available through Punctum’s website.

Making the Geologic Now announces shifts in cultural sensibilities and practices.  It offers early sightings of an increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for creative responses to material conditions of the present moment.  In the spirit of a broadside, this edited collection circulates images and short essays from over 40 artists, designers, architects, scholars, and journalists who are extending our active awareness of inhabitation out to the cosmos and down to the Earth’s iron core. Their works are offered as test sites for what might become thinkable and possible if humans were to take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer—as a partner in designing thoughts, things, systems, and experiences. As a reading and viewing event, Making the Geologic Now is designed to move with its audiences while delivering signals from unfolding edges of the “geologic now.”

Elizabeth and Jamie have assembled a great and extremely diverse list of contributors, which I’ll copy and paste to avoid the difficult work of choosing who to mention:

Matt Baker, Jarrod Beck, Stephen Becker, Brooke Belisle, Jane Bennett, David Benque, Canary Project (Susannah Sayler, Edward Morris), Center for Land Use Interpretation, Brian Davis, Seth Denizen, Anthony Easton, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Valeria Federighi, William L. Fox, David Gersten, Bill Gilbert, Oliver Goodhall, John Gordon, Ilana Halperin, Lisa Hirmer, Rob Holmes, Katie Holten,Jane Hutton, Julia Kagan, Wade Kavanaugh, Oliver Kellhammer, Elizabeth Kolbert, Janike Kampevold Larsen, Jamie Kruse, William Lamson, Tim Maly, Geoff Manaugh, Don McKay, Rachel McRae, Brett Milligan,Christian MilNeil, Laura Moriarity, Stephen Nguyen, Erika Osborne, Trevor Paglen, Anne Reeve, Chris Rose, Victoria Sambunaris, Paul Lloyd Sargent, Antonio Stoppani, Rachel Sussman, Shimpei Takeda, Chris Taylor, Ryan Thompson, Etienne Turpin, Nicola Twilley, Bryan M. Wilson.

[A TenCate Geotube being unrolled and pumped full of sediment at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island.]

Stephen and I also have a short piece in the collection, written with Tim Maly and Brett Milligan in our guise as the Dredge Research Collaborative. “Packaging Sludge and Silt” considers the geotube as a super-sized, Anthropocene-ready successor to the humble sandbag, and something of a small window into a new vernacular for engineered geology:

The geotube literally encapsulates the sublime materiality of the Dredge Cycle, as sediment and water in slurried suspension are stuffed into geotextile casings. The Dredge Cycle is fundamentally composed of wet stuff: basic materials; ordinary sand, silt, clay, and water. While it can and should be understood as a highly abstracted set of networks and feedback loops operating on a global spatial scale, it should also be understood as a material operation. It is the cubic yards of excavated soil downwashing across your backyard from the new construction three houses down in a rainstorm as much as it is globally networked processes the expansion of the Panama Canal to accommodate the importation of goods from East Asia driving port expansions and dredging operations along the East Coast of North America. Similarly, geotubes are always dirty: placed in muck, filled with muck, and, like muck, slumping and slouching into soft shapes, rather than following the precise angles of architectural geometry.

The geometry of the geotube, however, is no more natural than the clean modernist lines of the Hoover Dam. It is something else entirely, both post-natural and post-architectural. This seems entirely appropriate for an era in which we are freezing sediment-spraying rivers in specific configurations, like the Mississippi at Old River Control, or impounding the eroded sediments of entire continents behind vast concrete structures, like Three Gorges Dam. For an era where our largest monuments are not pyramids and skyscrapers, but geologic impacts.

The launch party, which is free and open to the public, will run from 7 to 9 pm on the 4th. Studio-X NYC is at 180 Varick Street in Manhattan.

[

Continuing the theme of Sandy-inspired rumination on the risks and rewards of littoral urbanization, a pair of articles by Justin Gillis and Felicity Barringer at the New York Times utilize the example of Alabama’s Dauphin Island — a hurricane-battered barrier island near the port of Mobile, both illustrating a broader argument about the role of incentive structures set up by the federal government in encouraging littoral urbanization and, in a follow-up on the Green blog, describing in greater detail the erosive forces acting on Dauphin Island.

First, the illustration of the broader argument:

Dauphin Island is a case study in the way the federal subsidies have enabled repetitive risk taking. Orrin H. Pilkey, an emeritus professor at Duke University who is renowned for his research in costal zones, described the situation here as a “scandal.” The island, four miles off the Alabama coast, was for centuries the site of a small fishing and farming village reachable only by boat. But in the 1950s, the Chamber of Commerce in nearby Mobile decided to link it to the mainland by bridge and sell lots for vacation homes.

Then Hurricane Frederic struck in 1979, ravaging the island and destroying the bridge. President Jimmy Carter flew over to inspect the damage. Rex Rainer, the Alabama highway director at the time, recalled several years later that the president “told us to build everything back just like it was and send him the bill.”

The era of taxpayer largess toward Dauphin Island had begun. With $33 million of federal money, local leaders built a fancier, higher bridge that encouraged more development in the 1980s. Much of that construction occurred on the island’s western end, a long, narrow sand bar sitting only a few feet above the Gulf of Mexico.

…

Since 1988, federal figures show, Dauphin Island property owners have paid only $9.3 million in premiums to the national flood insurance program, but they have received $72.2 million in payments for their damaged homes. Figures from a federal contractor show that the average island resident pays less than $700 a year for flood insurance, though a few do pay as much as $3,000.

On Dauphin Island and in many other beachfront communities, the federal subsidies have helped people replace small beach shacks with larger, more valuable homes. That is a main reason the nation’s costs of storm recovery are roughly doubling every decade, even after adjusting for inflation.

As you’ll note if you read the full article, these are the two primary federal subsidies that encourage littoral urbanization: flood insurance that doesn’t accurately price local risk, and post-disaster infrastructure spending that helps damaged communities rebuild, but typically ignores broader questions about the suitability of the stricken terrain for settlement. There is nothing terribly new about these observations, but it is good to see them receive a wider hearing.

[Detail of central Dauphin Island, at the joint between the rapidly-eroding western end of the island and the relatively stable -- though hardly stable in an absolute sense -- eastern end.]

The second article, which I find the more interesting of the two, discusses in much greater depth the specific causes of erosion on Dauphin Island, and the reasons that erosion is unequally distributed — severe on the ocean side, but actually accreting on the landward side; producing extreme instability on the thin western end of the island, and relatively less instability on the bulkier eastern end. The first cause the article discusses is the interruption of longshore transport by dredging operations for the port of Mobile (though, it should be noted, the Corps disputes this account):

As we mentioned, local residents blame the Army Corps of Engineers for their erosion problems. In a role similar to the one it plays in many coastal regions, the Corps conducts frequent dredging operations in the nearby Mobile Ship Channel, to the east of Dauphin Island, so that oceangoing cargo vessels can make use of the Port of Mobile.

Why would that make any difference?

Many people imagine that beaches and barrier islands are just mountains of sand that sit unmoving at the edge of our shores. In reality, they are highly dynamic systems, constantly moving and adjusting to storms, currents and changes in sea level. Sand actually flows up and down our shorelines, by the billions of tons, and often there’s a net direction to this flow, known as “littoral drift” or “longshore transport.” That is to say, averaged over time, more sand flows one way than the other. The beaches we see above water are but a small part of this system. Far more sand lies offshore, and these unseen hills of sediment play a crucial role in the overall sand supply to beaches down the line. Along the Alabama and Mississippi stretch of the Gulf Coast, the net drift of sand is from east to west. When sand from further east falls into the Mobile Ship Channel, the Corps dredges it out to keep the channel clear – and then, Dauphin Island residents and some scientists contend, dumps it in spots far enough away that the sand is lost to the littoral drift. The Corps does so to save money, under a mandate from Congress to conduct its operations in the most cost-effective way.

In the context of the Dredge Cycle proposed by the Dredge Research Collaborative, what I find fascinating about this is that it is a landed instance of the cyclical feedback we have argued characterizes the Dredge Cycle, of the tendency of the Dredge Cycle to suck ever-increasing volumes of sediment into itself: dredging begets erosion, and further dredging is proposed to provide a source of sediment for beach nourishment to counteract that erosion.

The other cause I mentioned is the natural landward drift of the island itself — all land is, of course, unstable when considered at sufficiently long time-scales, and the “sufficiently long time-scale” for a barrier island is rather brief:

On the south side of the island, fronting the Gulf of Mexico, hundreds of feet of beach have eroded. Numerous lots that were platted and sold in the 1950’s are now inundated by the sea, and the houses that once stood there are gone, many of them knocked down by Hurricane Katrina. The gulf is now lapping at the pilings of surviving houses that used to be three rows back.

“That island is virtually migrating out from under those buildings,” Dr. Pilkey told me. “It’s just so amazing. There is no worse example of unsafe development on barrier islands than Dauphin Island — nothing else like it in North America.”

As the front erodes, the back of the island keeps growing, as storms carry sand over the top and deposit it at the rear. I saw boat houses and docks that had been marooned on dry land. One island resident whom I interviewed by phone, Jack L. Gaines II, has lived on the north side of the island since 1999. “I’ve watched the south beach erode and come toward us,” he said. “I’ve accreted 600 feet of property.”

This may sound familiar to the victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey, some of whom are still shoveling sand out of their living rooms. Scientists say it is no coincidence that the pattern is similar from Dauphin Island to Long Island.

The simple reality is that the nation’s barrier islands are attempting to move inland, a natural response to an unnatural situation. Scientists say that global warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases is causing the sea to rise. If left to their own devices, barrier islands would respond to that rise by migrating landward, and so would the marshes behind them. As storms wash the sand from front to back, the islands would essentially roll uphill, a classic process that scientists have dubbed island rollover.

The problem, of course, is that people have planted buildings on these shifting sands and declared that they can no longer be allowed to move. On the Jersey Shore as on Dauphin Island, Mother Nature seems to be telling us what she thinks of that proposition.

[

After Sandy, ports along the east coast path of the hurricane were closed, including the Port of Virginia in Hampton Roads and, of course, the Port of New York and New Jersey, in large part because the underwater approach terrain surrounding those ports — usually so meticulously groomed by dredgers to match the lines delineated on NOAA’s navigational charts — had suddenly been rendered uncertain, potentially containing hazardous underwater debris or blocked by storm-induced shoaling. In order to re-open the ports, NOAA deployed its “navigation response teams” to urgently re-chart harbor bathymetry, in a vital act of emergency landscape measurement. And after the surveys are complete, the emergency dredging begins…

[At Free Association Design, Brett Milligan recently discussed the Army Corps of Engineers' "national unwatering SWAT team" efforts, also post-Sandy, to remove "copious amounts of... unwanted water" from New York's buildings and streets.]

[Audience discussion during DredgeFest; photo by Nicola Twilley.]

One of the primary reasons that mammoth has been relatively quiet this year is the effort that Stephen and I, as two of the four current members of the Dredge Research Collaborative, have put into organizing DredgeFest NYC.  We did this with no small amount of assistance from our generous hosts, Studio-X NYC, and, thanks to the latest component of that assistance, a full video archive of the symposium is now available. (The other component of the event, the boat tour, was recently covered by The Atlantic Cities here.)

Below, you’ll find the video archive of the symposium that I mentioned.

Before getting to that, though, I suppose this is also an appropriate point to talk briefly about why we organized DredgeFest NYC.

When we began our work as the Dredge Research Collaborative, we began with the intention of producing and publishing speculative design projects that would demonstrate the value that landscape architects and other designers might bring to the aqueous landscapes of dredge. As our initial projects developed and we began to enter into conversations with the engineers, corporations, and agencies that currently are responsible for shaping those landscapes, we realized that there were two major barriers to design participation in these landscapes. First, dredge is an invisible infrastructure. It is essential to economic and environmental processes in nearly every contemporary estuarine city, but it is rarely a topic of public conversation. Second, though there is a growing interest in such landscapes within landscape architecture, that interest has remained primarily speculative, in large part because working relationships between designers and those actors with actual agency in the landscapes of dredge simply do not exist.

DredgeFest is our effort to grapple with these problems. By organizing public events, we are seeking to open up a public conversation about the dredge cycle, at once documentary and speculative, while using the events as an opportunity to build connections between disparate communities. Thus while we were thrilled by the diverse group of panelists who agreed to join us and the even more diverse audience who attended DredgeFest NYC, we were probably even more excited to see specific connections occurring between the design community and the dredging community, like the Army Corps engineer who approached one of our collaborators, Gena Wirth, after the event, excited about the mapping work she had done with us and hoping that she would be interested in expanding on that mapping work in collaboration with the Corps.

We think that this kind of cross-pollination is not only exciting, but essential. This week’s events have emphasized and underlined — in tragic fashion — the importance of designing urban littoral environments, of recognizing and meeting the challenges that rising and warming seas will pose to coastal cities in coming decades.

DredgeFest NYC: Video Archive
The first video, which contains an introduction to the event delivered by Brett and I, is embedded immediately below this paragraph. Below the first video, you’ll find the schedule as a list of talks and panels, with links to the video for each presentation or panel. (A full list of the videos can be found here, in Studio-X NYC’s own video archive.)

Dredge and the Anthropocene
We introduced the idea of dredge as a process that is interconnected with a much larger regime of human sediment handling practices, and examined ways that humans act as geologic agents.

Lisa Baron (USACE): Dredging and Dredged Material Management in NY/NJ Harbor
Andrew Genn (NYCEDC): The Beneficial Reuse of Dredge
Roger Hooke (University of Maine): How Humans Have Shaped the Landscape

Panel: Baron, Geen, Hooke, and Michael Ezban (Vandergoot Ezban Studio)

Circularity and Feedback
We examined the current evolution of the handling of sedimentary resources from 20th-century linear industrial models towards 21st-century methods that create cycles, positive feedback loops, and resilience in the face of contemporary environmental challenges. This section featured leading practitioners who explained how their work participates in and even accelerates this paradigm shift.

Bill Murphy (e4sciences): Geophysical Imaging for Sustainable Engineering – NY Harbor Deepening
Douglas Pabst (EPA): Sediment Management in NY/NJ Harbor
Edgar Westerhof: Green Solutions With Geotextile Tubes – a Dutch Perspective
Vicki Ginter (TenCate): TenCate Geotube Technology
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson (Catherine Seavitt Studio, CCNY): Adaptive Sediments – Dredge and Drift

Regeneration and Public Participation
We examined the emergence of dredge as a resource for environmental regeneration, like the current restoration of island wetlands within Jamaica Bay using dredged material from channel deepening projects. This section also highlighted the grass roots of dredge, with a panel of practitioners who enable public participation through their work.

Kate Orff (SCAPE, Columbia GSAPP): Future Landscape – Remaking New York’s Harbor
Phillip Orton (Stevens Institute of Technology): Guiding Coastal Adaptation with Hydrodynamic Modeling

Panel: Orff, Orton, Dave Avrin (NPS), Hans Hesselein (Gowanus Canal Conservancy), and Debbie Mans (NY/NJ Baykeeper).

The list of people that to whom we owe thanks for making DredgeFest possible is rather long. As mentioned before, we were hosted by Columbia University GSAPP’s Studio-X NYC — Nicola Twilley, Geoff Manaugh, and Carlos Solis. We were supported by the generous sponsorship of Arcadis, TenCate, and TWFM Ferry/American Princess (the last of which was the boat that took us out into the harbor — we can’t recommend Tom Palladino and the crew highly enough), making the event financially plausible for us as organizers. Alex Chohlas-Wood and Ben Mendelsohn put together the event trailer that we posted in early September, and are working on a longer follow-up that is sure to be fantastic. Seth Denizen and Gena Wirth contributed original maps and drawings to the exhibition that greeted attendees at the door, which I intend to post about in more detail soon. It was also extremely rewarding to see everyone who turned out, on both days, to share our enthusiasm for and belief in the importance of understanding and designing landscapes of dredge. Finally and perhaps most importantly, we were thrilled by the enthusiasm and efforts of the speakers and panelists, without whom there quite literally would have been no event.

[Massive warehouse districts both east and west of I-35 in Laredo, Texas, filled with goods shipped across the Mexican border.]

Tom Vanderbilt, with a short history of the pallet, one of those logistical objects whose dimensions and properties format much of the space we live in, from store shelves to exurban warehouse districts:

For an invisible object, [pallets] are everywhere: there are said to be billions circulating through global supply chain (2 billion in the United States alone). Some 80 percent of all U.S. commerce is carried on pallets. So widespread is their use that they account for, according to one estimate, more than 46 percent of total U.S. hardwood lumber production.

I recently contributed a short piece to the excellent Fulcrum. The piece begins with a very short version of the bizarre history of Dead Horse Bay and Barren Island — about which I had to leave out eccentric anecdote after eccentric anecdote, such as the night that an entire horse-rendering facility and the horse-meat therein spontaneously combusted, which is perhaps the one that most succinctly encapsulates the alien quality of that ragged fringe of turn-of-the-century New York City — and then it segues into a series of questions about the future of our artificial geologies that may be familiar to any readers who endured my halting and half-formed delivery of these same thoughts on the DredgeFest boat tour. So beginning with the history:

Approximately sixteen kilometers southeast of Manhattan, the southern coast of Brooklyn wraps north along Floyd Bennett Field — a former airfield turned derelict-littered national park — skips across Plumb Beach Channel, and turns west. The small body of water inside this curve is Dead Horse Bay, named for the daily shipments of dead horses it once received from Manhattan. There, on Barren Island, a tight-knit community of immigrants operated an industrial age predecessor to Agbogbloshie, Guiyu, and Chittagong, recycling growing Manhattan’s waste in squalorous conditions. In a city possessed of an entirely different metabolism than modern cities, that waste amounted to an incredible quantity of dead and dying matter, processed in factories, smelters, bone-boilers, guano plants, and open piles. This fetid surplus was converted into an array of chemical products — glycerin, glues, fertilizers, oils — and exported to Europe.

If you want to get to the questions, you’ll want to click through to Fulcrum…

Like most issues of Fulcrum, the issue my piece appears in (#53) has a theme (the Anthropocene) and pairs two authors on that topic (for #53, the other author is Seth Denizen, who contributes a short tale of holes, absence, and soil taxonomies).

Dan Hill recently wrote a short post on Fulcrum, giving it “top marks” for “pushing an agenda and pushing a format in unison, and [doing] both rather adeptly”. Agreed.

What is the “aftermath” of the touring, the mapping, the listening and smelling, the playing of games? The promises to “make visible the invisible” and thereby “raise awareness” are far too often regarded as ends in themselves. The point of such exercises isn’t merely to make user-citizens “aware” of the complexity of the infrastructures that they’re so reliant upon. So now you know where your Internet comes from: now what? We should perhaps also aspire to raise bigger, “deeper” questions regarding the unique ontological nature of these systems and our place within them: where do they reside on the spectrum between the material and immaterial, the empirical and theoretical, the place-bound and the placeless, the local and the global, the past and present and future, the immediate now and the long now?

And perhaps, ultimately, we should aim to direct that “awareness” into something with “material consequences,” to borrow Nato Thompson’s phrase – something that “produce[s] effects…on the ground,” to echo Scott. There has of course been much debate over the effectiveness of “consciousness-“ or “awareness-raising” art, design, and pedagogical projects, including “critical spatial practice.[13]

This, I think, is an important question (though it is perhaps unfair of me to refer to that bundle of directions as a singular “question”). It also suggests one of the reasons that I think it extremely useful for mapping and revelatory practices to take place within the context of design disciplines, like architecture and landscape architecture — however weak the vocabulary and paths for translating awareness into “material consequences” may seem and indeed, at least at times, be within the design disciplines, at least they exist, and don’t need to be built from scratch.

[From the top: diagram by SCAPE of off-shore oil facilities in the Gulf; Richard Misrach's "Roadside Vegetation and Orion Refining Corporation, Good Hope, Louisiana, 1998" ; diagram by SCAPE of the various chemical products manufactured and refined in "Cancer Alley". All from Petrochemical America, and visible at a higher resolution in this gallery at the New Yorker.]

If you’re in New York in the next week or so, you might want to catch one of the several events related to the launch of photographer Richard Misrach and landscape architect Kate Orff’s new book, Petrochemical America, which “depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as “Cancer Alley” when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region”.

The several events include a lecture and book signing at MoMA this Thursday (6:30 pm — RSVPs are apparently required and available through Aperture), an opening reception at Aperture Gallery this Friday evening (from 6 to 8), and a panel next Tuesday (25th), also at Aperture Gallery. The work from Petrochemical America will be exhibited at Aperture until October 6, so even if you miss these events, you can still catch the exhibition.

And of course — Kate will also be a member of the very exciting line-up we have scheduled for DredgeFest NYC next Friday (the 28th), though the topics of conversation will be a bit closer to New York itself.

Videographers Alex Chohlas-Wood and Ben Mendelsohn are among the many talented people who are helping us put together DredgeFest NYC, and they’ve just released this short trailer for the event.

If you’re hoping to join us for the harbor tour — and hopefully the peak at a few landscapes of dredge that Ben and Alex have provided will whet appetites for exactly that — note that tickets are on sale but are limited.