[Via Pete Brook at Wired, Mary Lydecker's collages splice together scenes from vintage postcards to create images of Pruned-worthy vacation locales (like the infrastructural beach above) and bundles of skyscrapers improbably close to dams, mountains, and rivers, as if the cities they belonged to were crashing suddenly into some unorthodox planner's feverishly strict urban growth boundary.]
[More of Lydecker's work can be found at her website.]
[A landscape in the process of becoming a different landscape:
In late 2010, the waste reservoir of a Hungarian aluminum oxide plant burst, releasing millions and millions of gallons of caustic red sludge. The meter-high toxic mudslide quickly moved downhill through two nearby villages, burying buildings, poisoning fields and killing 10 people.
The image above is from NASA Earth Observatory, while the descriptive quote is from a recent NPR story on the striking photographs of Spanish photographer Palindromo Meszaros, which capture the otherworldly post-mudslide landscape, and are well-worth a look.]
Brian Davis interviews Graham Harman on “landscape ontology” (Harman is speaking in the following quote):
There is a suburb of Iowa City called Coralville. While there is no coral reef anywhere near this suburb today, you will easily guess that there was coral here in the distant past: during the Devonian Era. During the 1993 Iowa floods (a precursor to the far more disastrous floods of 2008), water washed over the Coralville Dam and ripped all the soil from the nearby campsite, exposing a neo-Devonian fossil bed filled with creatures of almost Lovecraftian monstrosity.
What is the connection between Iowa in 1993 and the swarming neo-Devonian monsters of 360 million years ago? You can’t really say that “Iowa” forms the connection, and not just for the reason that Iowa as a political unit did not exist at that time. You can’t even say that the two things happened on the same physical landscape, since Iowa was apparently covered by sea at the time. Indeed, when I look at the position of the continents in late Devonian times I cannot easily determine where Iowa would have been on the map.
In a sense, then, the fossils themselves are the landscape. It is the fossils that link the Coralville of 1993 with the living creatures of the Devonian Era. I would say that a landscape is any object that links a wide variety of other objects that all use it as a mediator. A landscape is like a “wormhole” linking different times and different places or different classes of living organisms and inanimate objects. Through landscapes we are linked to the Native Americans who left a spearhead buried in what is now my parents’ front yard, as well as to the deer, moths, beetles, and viruses that inhabit the woods surrounding their yard, and with which I have only incidental contact.
The italics here are mine, because I find this definition of landscape quite fascinating — in part because of the great breadth of things that it permits us to understand as landscapes. If a fossil can be a landscape, what can’t? Landscape becomes a way of understanding objects rather than a specific class of objects, which is not unlike the argument I’ve made elsewhere that “infrastructural” (in which “infrastructure” becomes a specific kind of behavior that nearly any object can assume in relation to at least some other objects) is a more significant category than “infrastructure” (the collection of things immediately recognizable as infrastructures — roads, bridges, fiber-optic cables, wastewater treatment plants, and so on). As another example of the width of Harman’s definition: a building could easily be understood as a landscape, if, for instance, it serves as the linkage between a family of mice, a night watchman several decades ago who lost the key to the basement closet where those mice now nest, and the Gilded Age family whose wealth paid for the construction of the building.
I also rather like what this suggests about the landscape architect: that a key characteristic of landscape architecture as a pattern of thought is its propensity for understanding linkages between diverse and seemingly-unrelated phenomena at differing scales of time and space — how Devonian geologic movements affect contemporary vegetation patterns, how a measurement standardized in 1675 could determine the urban form of Dutch coastal cities in the twenty-first century, or how the arrangement of paths within a bounded site affects circulation within the surrounding city.
[A second landscape becoming yet another landscape: the coal ash slurry spill at the TVA Kingston plant in Tennessee, December 23, 2008 -- one day after the spill. The spill released over five million cubic yards of slurry, covering the adjacent area in a coat of viscous sludge up to six feet thick. It was the largest such spill in American history. Image via wikipedia.]
I also enjoyed Harman’s thoughts on when a landscape becomes a different landscape:
“People have their graduations, weddings, and major awards; landscapes have their floods and explosions. When looking for the moments when a landscape became a substantially different thing, I would look for the moments when it entered into long-term symbiosis with some other thing— whether it be a human historic event, the intrusion of an invasive species, a cataclysmic physical change, or some other incident that marked the intertwining of the landscape with something else.”
It’s hard to read this and not be reminded of Manuel DeLanda’s co-option of terms from physics and mathematics like “phase transition”, “bifurcation”, and “far from equilibrium” in the introduction to a A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History:
If one allows an intense flow of energy in and out of a system (that is, if one pushes it far from equilibrium), the number and type of possible historical outcomes greatly increases. Instead of a unique and simple form of stability, we now have multiple coexisting forms of varying complexity (stable, periodic, and chaotic attractors). Moreover, when a system switches from one stable state to another (at a critical point called a bifurcation), minor fluctuations may play a crucial role in deciding the outcome. Thus, when we study a given physical system, we need to know the specific nature of the fluctuations that have been present at each of its bifurcations; in other words, we need to know its history to understand its current dynamical state.
…attractors and bifurcations are features of any system in which the dynamics are not only far from equilibrium but also nonlinear, that is, in which there are strong mutual interactions (or feedback) between components. Whether the system in question is composed of molecules or living creatures, it will exhibit endogenously generated stable states, as well as sharp transitions between states, as long as there is feedback and an intense flow of energy coursing throughout the system.
…much as a given chemical compound (water, for example) may exist in several distinct states (solid, liquid, or gas) and may switch from stable state to stable state at critical points in the intensity of temperature (called phase transitions), so a human society [or landscape!] may be seen as a “material” capable of undergoing these changes of state as it reaches critical mass in terms of density of settlement, amount of energy consumed, or even intensity of interaction.
There’s an interesting difference between the two metaphors being used to understand change in objects here: Harman uses a biological metaphor — symbiosis (a landscape becomes a different landscape when it adds a new symbiotic relationship) — and DeLanda uses a metaphor from physics — phase transition (where we might say a landscape becomes a new landscape when the aggregate input of changes reaches a certain threshold and tips the landscape into a radically different state). With the latter metaphor, change is detected by measuring the state of the landscape itself; with the former, change is detected by observing the kinds of relationships that the landscape has with other objects. (I shouldn’t push this too far, because DeLanda is also quite concerned elsewhere with relations — my point concerns the difference between these two metaphors, not a difference between DeLanda generally and Harman generally.)
My first reaction is that this suggests the importance of tracking relations to understanding (and thus to operating in and on) landscapes, which — given the centrality of mapping and drawing to understanding within both architecture and landscape architecture — in turn suggests that we’ll need to keep evolving more intricate and complex tools for mapping (and re-designing!) those relations. I suspect that doing so will require, at least in part, cross-breeding the kinds of maps and drawings we’re already comfortable making with examples from well-outside the fields, particularly examples that permit kinds of quantification and measurement that our current toolkit does not: topological maps re-inserted into measured space, material flow analyses, Odum diagrams, flow diagrams from industrial ecology, and so on.
[Read Davis's full interview with Harman at FASLANYC. If you enjoy that interview, you might also enjoy this series of posts on Davis's thesis blog: A Theory of Instruments, Radical Difference, and The Conceptual Triad.]
[Wildfires in the southern Rockies from space, June 23; via NASA Earth Observatory.]
A recent post on the current wildfires in the southern Rockies at the New York Times‘ Green blog reminded me that I had intended to excerpt an earlier editorial, also at the New York Times, which defended the notion of the Anthropocene as “the stage on which a new, more positive and forward-looking environmentalism can be built”:
Yes, we live in the Anthropocene — but that does not mean we inhabit an ecological hell. Our management and care of natural places and the millions of other species with which we share the planet could and should be improved. But we must do far more than just hold back the tide of change and build higher and stronger fences around the Arctic, the Himalayas and the other “relatively intact ecosystems,” as the scientists put it in their article.
We can accept the reality of humanity’s reshaping of the environment without giving up in despair. We can, and we should, consider actively moving species at risk of extinction from climate change. We can design ecosystems to maintain wildlife, filter water and sequester carbon. We can restore once magnificent ecosystems like Yellowstone and the Gulf of Mexico to new glories — but glories that still contain a heavy hand of man. We can fight sprawl and mindless development even as we cherish the exuberant nature that can increasingly be found in our own cities, from native gardens to green roofs. And we can do this even as we continue to fight for international agreements on limiting the greenhouses gases that are warming the planet.
The emphasis here (in the italics, which are mine) — on the possibility of designing novel ecosystems that perform better than the emergent novel ecosystems that will inevitably replace obsolete ecoystems unless we intervene — suggests a vast and unexploited territory for landscape architecture.
The post I mentioned earlier, on wildfire, brought this excerpt to mind for me because it describes the historical pattern of exactly one such obsolesence:
Using data from tree ring studies, scientists have reconstructed a history of fires in the Southwest. The wildfires of the past were frequent and massive, but they stayed close to the ground and mainly helped prevent overcrowding. Take 1748. “Every mountain range we studied in the region was burning that year,” Dr. Allen said. “But those were surface fires, not destroying the forest but just keeping an open setting.” Cyclical wildfires were the norm.
But beginning in 1900, when railroads enabled the spread of livestock, cattle devoured the grassy surface fuels and the fire cycle stopped. A decade later, a national policy of forest fire suppression formalized this new normal. Over the next century, forest density went from 80 trees per acre to more than 1,000.
Then in 1996, the climate emerged from a wet cycle into a dry one — part of a natural cycle for this region. Winters became drier. And “we immediately began seeing major fires,” Dr. Allen said.
With so many trees crammed into the forest, fires climbed straight to the canopy instead of remaining on the ground.
“These forests did not evolve with this type of fire,” said Dr. Allen. “Fire was a big deal in New Mexico, but it was a different kind of fire.” The result, he said, is that the species that now live there — ponderosa pines, piñon, juniper — cannot regenerate, and new species are moving in to take their place.
It seems quite noteworthy that the ecosystem which is becoming obsolescent — the dense conifer forest — is also a novel ecosystem of anthropogenic origin. The forest we are losing is as artificial as its replacement could ever be.
Dr. Allen’s final quote is also noteworthy, and would serve as a decent mantra for the environmentalist (or ecosystem-designing landscape architect) of the Anthropocene:
“Seeking to preserve existing systems is futile.”
[The authors of the editorial quoted above are Emma Marris, Peter Kareiva, Joseph Mascaro, and Erle C. Ellis.]
[Edward Burtynsky's "Drylands Farming #7" -- farms in Monegros County, Aragon, Spain.]
Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley recently posted an interview with infrastructural landscape photographer extraordinaire Edward Burtynsky, as a component of their latest project, the continentally-roaming Venue (self-described as a “portable media rig, interview studio, multi-format event platform, and forward-operating landscape research base”). In it, Burtynsky aptly describes his work as “looking for the disconnected landscapes that provide us with the materials we need to live, build, and do everything we do”, which suggests that his photography could be understood as an attempt to achieve the re-wiring of our understanding of the physical phenomenon of urbanization from a well-bounded object characterized primarily by some threshold of density towards an operative (lively, pulsating) material network whose dendritic tentacles reach deep into remote forests, sink into and carve out mountains, and even stretch across oceans. Which (beyond the immediate aesthetic impact of Burtynsky’s photographs, which can be awe-inspiring in large format) would explain why I am so fond of it.
[You can learn more about Venue here.]
[A zone: Ebene Cybercity in Mauritius. As a bonus, Ebene is also an excellent example of the capacity of the Tubes to direct urban futures, as one of its prime selling points is that it sits at a landing point for the "the SAT3/WASC/SAFE sub-marine cable which links Southern Europe, Western and Southern Africa and South-East Asia".]
Places has just published a fascinating piece from Keller Easterling, “Zone: The Spatial Software of Extrastatecraft”, which (appropriately) exports and reformats material from Easterling’s forthcoming Extrastatecraft. (Here at mammoth headquarters, Extrastatecraft is more or less guaranteed to be the most hotly anticipated book of whatever year it ends up coming out in, unless Keith Haddock finally gets around to updating Colossal Earthmovers.)
“Zone” is a brief history of the various kinds of “free zones” — “including free trade zones, foreign trade zones, industrial free zones, free zones, maquiladoras, export free zones, duty free export processing zones, special economic zones, tax free zones, tax free trade zones, investment promotion zones, free economic zones, free export zones, free export processing zones, privileged export zones and industrial export processing zones” — that have proliferated globally in both the 20th and 21st centuries, from the United States’ first free trade zone on Staten Island, to mid-twentieth century “export processing zones” like Manaus in Brazil and India’s Kandla Free Trade Zone, to Malaysia’s “Multimedia Super Corridor” or Ebene Cybercity on Mauritius. Expanding upon her earlier work’s contention that “diverse spatial types demonstrate the ways in which architecture has become repeatable and infrastructural” (read: Organization Space‘s “generic protocols for building offices, airports, houses, and highways”), Easterling argues that, with the zone, urbanism has also “become infrastructural”, repeatable, and is even metastasizing wildly:
“Today urban space has become a mobile, monetized technology, and some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the spatial information of infrastructure, architecture and urbanism. Massive global systems — meta-infrastructures administered by public and private cohorts, and driven by profound irrationalities — are generating de facto, undeclared forms of polity faster than any even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate them — a wilder mongrel than any storied Leviathan for which there is studied political response.
One of these meta-infrastructures is the phenomenon of the free zone — a highly contagious and globalized urban form and a vivid vessel of what I have termed extrastatecraft. A portmanteau meaning both outside of and in addition to statecraft, extrastatecraft acknowledges that multiple forces — state, non-state, military, market, non-market — have now attained the considerable power and administrative authority necessary to undertake the building of infrastructure.”
This seems correct — and the “highly contagious” spatial formats produced by these extra-state forces are perhaps all the more important as objects of architectural study when the public sector in the United States refuses to spend on infrastructure even as “the interest rates on 10-year treasury bonds just hit a 220-year low“, as the relative agency of extrastatecraft necessarily expands with every contraction of the state.
Read the full article at Places.
Business Insider‘s Robert Johnson has been touring various projects, sites, and landscapes in and around Canada’s Athabascan Oil Sands; the photographs he’s bringing back and articles he’s curating are a stunning mixture of the industrial sublime, raw instrumentality (such as: the world’s largest dump truck, and its forty-thousand dollar tires), and a visual testament to the scale of contemporary humanity’s geological agency. The photograph above is from Johnson’s aerial tour of the oil sands, which he undertook after being refused access to the mines on the ground. A full set of photographs — well over two hundred – can be seen on flickr.
["Montreal: Percentage of residents who drive to work, live in single-detached housing, and own their homes", from Moos and Kramer's Atlas of Suburbanisms.]
The University of Waterloo’s Atlas of Suburbanisms — a research project by the School of Planning’s Markus Moos and Anna Kramer — looks like a fantastic effort to understand Canadian suburbs on their own terms and as components of larger urban systems:
“…what if we mapped characteristics commonly believed to be telling of suburbs just to see where they actually occur? What if we went to the suburbs, figuratively and literately, and conducted research as if looking from one suburb to the other, or as if looking from a suburb toward the central city? The likely result is an understanding of suburbanism, and our cities more generally, that is richer and more diverse; an understanding that does not take for granted the political or historic development of cities as drawing concrete lines between what we believe is the suburban and the urban.”
To do this, the research relies on a shift from understanding suburbia primarily as a spatial format — defined by distance from the center of a city, by a certain level of density, or by particular ways of arranging streets and buildings — towards understanding suburbanisms as a kind of urbanity constituted by certain patterns of living: driving to work, gravitating towards demographic monocultures, retreating from public space towards semi-public and private space, owning rather than renting.
["Toronto: Percentage of residents who drive to work, live in single-detached housing, and own their homes", from Moos and Kramer's Atlas of Suburbanisms.]
This is not a new idea, of course, as the authors of the Atlas acknowledge in referencing Henri Lefebvre. (And the tradition of understanding urbanism “as particular ways of living” goes back to Louis Wirth’s Urbanism as a Way of Life, and Park and Simmel before him.)
What is novel — to me at least — is the mapping work included in the Atlas, which extracts a set of variables from Canadian census data — on driving to work, home ownership, and detached housing — to create a series of maps of that treat the overlap between these variables as a kind of spatially-distributed Venn diagram (the key is literally a Venn diagram), producing a first draft of mapping suburbanism as a continuum from less suburban to more suburban.
Though two of these variables might really be considered behaviors and one of which is a spatial format, it seems to me that also overlapping different ways of understanding urbanization — sitting on both sides of that shift from suburbia as a spatial format to suburbanisms as ways of life — makes the mapping work stronger because, while it may detract from the purity of the thesis, urbanism is genuinely defined by both spatial and behavioral patterns.
["Vancouver: Percentage of residents who drive to work, live in single-detached housing, and own their homes", from Moos and Kramer's Atlas of Suburbanisms.]
If anything, it’d be fascinating to see the maps become more and more fragmented. The current simple Venn diagram of a key might start to exhibit fractal behavior as it splinters into endless combinatory possibilities. The variables could expand to include more spatial variations — cul de sacs, highway configurations, architectural styles, maximum building heights, building life-spans, chain-store ecologies and big box indicator species — and near-infinite lists of behavioral patterns: the propensity to start families, the kinds of schools attended, whether demographic homogeneity is increasing or decreasing, the kinds of crimes that are most prevalent, modes of transport taken on basic errands, which cultural institutions and social spaces play the most central role in daily life (from bars to places of worship to ballparks to public squares). And then the kinds of variables under consideration could expand: understanding cities as economic entities, as material networks, as infrastructural assemblages…
[Seen via Nate Berg.]
Wilfried Hou Je Bek, author of the Cryptoforestry blog, has a nice article in the first issue of new journal The State on his particular topic of expertise, defining cryptoforestry, describing the place of cryptoforests within cities, and discussing the pleasure to be found in seeking out and treking through cryptoforests — a pleasure which is peculiarly both global and local:
It is often said that the most lasting effect of globalization won’t be economic, but biological. As Alfred W. Crosby stated in his 1986 book ‘Ecological Imperialism,’ the European expansion has closed the seams of Pangea; ecosystems that had been isolated for millions of years have been connected again, and the result is a massive ecological disturbance as species leave their original habitats. What does it then mean to see a milk thistle, an evening primrose and a hollyhock growing side by side on a sandy field somewhere behind a fence in a small town in the Netherlands?
The thistle was a Roman potherb kept for its nutritional and medicinal qualities. The evening primrose is a plant that originates from central America, which spread and retreated across the continent with the coming and waning of several ice ages. Its roots were once the staple crops of tribal people across the Northern American hemisphere. The hollyhock originates from Turkey, and travelled to Europe and China along the silk route. Plants have stories, and the story never ends. The hollyhock can be purchased at the local plant market (three saplings will set you back ten euro), but it is also a persistent and prolific weed that grows through cracks between the walls of houses and the street. Two types of evening primrose have hybridized into a new species that is unique to the Netherlands and Belgium. Together, these plants evoke the consequences of centuries of travel, trade, colonization, opportunity, plunder, subsistence and also of the joy of natural beauty.
Read the full piece at The State, and check out Wilfried’s blog here.
SHIFT, North Carolina State University’s student-produced, professionally-reviewed journal on landscape architecture, is seeking submissions for its second issue, “SHIFT: Process”, which will “focus on new ways of thinking about the design process” that better engage “the designer, the community, and ecology”. More details can be found at the SHIFT website.
[Detail from a map of groundwater wells in Jackson County, Texas, drawn by the U.S.G.S. in cooperation with the Texas Water Development Board and Jackson County; satellite studies of groundwater levels -- which use small changes in the Earth's gravitational field to detect fluctuations in groundwater reserves -- have indicated extreme depletion in Texas as a result of that state's current drought.]
The Guardian reports on new research that quantifies the contribution of aquifer depletion (primarily through the artificial conveyance of water to the surface via deep wells) to sea level rise — “five times bigger in scale than the melting of the planet’s two great ice caps, in Greenland and Antarctica”:
“Trillions of tonnes of water have been pumped up from deep underground reservoirs in every part of the world and then channelled into fields and pipes to keep communities fed and watered. The water then flows into the oceans, but far more quickly than the ancient aquifers are replenished by rains. The global tide would be rising even more quickly but for the fact that man-made reservoirs have, until now, held back the flow by storing huge amounts of water on land.
…
The new research was led by Yadu Pokhrel, at the University of Tokyo, and published in Nature Geoscience. “Our study is based on a state-of-the-art model which we have extensively validated in our previous works,” he said. “It suggests groundwater is a major contributor to the observed sea level rise.” The team’s results also neatly fill a gap scientists had identified between the rise in sea level observed by tide gauges and the contribution calculated to come from melting ice.
The drawing of water from deep wells has caused the sea to rise by an average of a millimetre every year since 1961, the researchers concluded. The storing of freshwater in reservoirs has offset about 40% of that, but the scientists warn that this effect is diminishing.”
It is worth noting, as one of the scientists consulted by the Guardian does, that where many of the defining trends of the Anthropocene are accelerating (so commonly that one might be tempted to say that acceleration is the defining characteristic of the Anthropocene itself), the contribution of groundwater withdrawal to sea level rise appears to have held steady over the past fifty years or so, suggesting that the relative contribution of groundwater withdrawal will decline as other contributors accelerate. Despite that, the picture the study and article paint remains utterly fascinating to me: a world where the aggregate suction of a global economy’s worth of groundwater wells is contributing meaningfully to a massive phenomenon like sea level rise.
[Link via Anson Mackay and Erle Ellis on twitter; risings seas and gravitational flux on mammoth, previously: "the ambiguity of seamelt and landrise".]
[Ship tracks -- "narrow clouds... form[ed] when water vapor condenses around tiny particles of pollution that ships either emit directly as exhaust or that form as a result of gases within the exhaust” — in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, captured photographically by a NASA satellite; the atmospheric trace of the seaborne transfer of goods and materials between East and West.]
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[mammoth is among the blogs included in the "Voices Going Viral" exhibition accompanying "Going Viral", an event tonight at the New York Center for Architecture:
Going Viral explores the impact that social media, technology and device culture are having on ourdesign process, and ultimately the way we practice. How do we shape a global conversation? How are we changing the relationships between academia and the profession? What is the impact of hyper-information sharing and critique? Throughout the evening, the topics of communication, research, collaboration, and data distribution will be addressed and debated. Bjarke Ingels of BIG, Toru Hasegawa of Morpholio and Columbia University, Carlo Aiello of eVolo, and David Basulto with David Assael of ArchDaily will come together for a lecture and panel discussion moderated by Ned Cramer, editor-in-chief of Architect.
Further details can be found at the AIANY Global Dialogues website.]
If I were in New York City tomorrow night, I’d be at Studio-X for what sounds like a really great evening: first, a live interview with Michael Gerrard on “drowning nations” and climate change law, and, second, a roundtable on “sovereignty, governance, and the nation-state itself in a range of geographic and spatial scenarios, from the Arctic to the Internet”. Quoting the event announcement on that roundtable:
Joining us will be architect Ed Keller; Benjamin Bratton, from the aforementioned Center for Design and Geopolitics; Tom Cohen, co-editor with Claire Colebrook of the Critical Climate Change series from Open Humanities Press; novelist Peter Watts; architect and urbanist Adrian Lahoud, author of Post-Traumatic Urbanism; and Dylan Trigg, author of, among other things, The Aesthetics of Decay.
This moderated round-table discussion will also explore a joint research project underway this spring for which Ed Keller, Benjamin Bratton, and Geoff Manaugh have been looking at what they call Google/Arctic/Mars, analyzing the emergence of a new geography—from the virtual to the off-world—and speculating as to its future political organization.
It sounds like things get started around 6 pm; full details at the Studio-X facebook page (or at BLDGBLOG). (Word is that there may even be a live stream; if there is, I would imagine you could find a link at that page.)
[The Placer County Courthouse, in Auburn, California -- imagine it swarmed by a glitch jam.]
NPR reported this morning on a traffic jam in California caused by an algorithmic glitch “accidentally summon[ing] 1,200 people to jury duty on the same morning”. An excellent reminder of the tendency of algorithmic dysfunction to manifest as physical dysfunction, and (at a relatively small scale) of the potentially disproportionate impact of glitches when they are translated from dataspace into an infrastructural system. The glitch may be as simple as having accidentally swapped the 0 indicating “do not come in” for the 1 indicating “come in”, but the resulting jam is rendered in aluminum autobodies and on asphalt corridors where it is much more difficult to clear than it was to create.
[The negative image of the Empire State Building, carved out of oolithic Indiana limestone, and aged into an enormous swimming pool; via Atlas Obscura, which writes:
[Indiana limestone] was in such demand that a massive industry cropped up around it, and hundreds of thousands of tons of mammoth stone slabs were carved out of the ground and shipped around the country. A shocking number of iconic American structures are made out of Indiana limestone, including the Empire State Building, the Washington National Cathedral, the Pentagon, and 35 of the 50 current state capitol buildings.
Unfortunately, in the second half of the 20th century, stone masonry fell out of favor as preferences shifted to glass-and-metal skyscrapers that were cheaper to build and maintain. This dissolution of the limestone industry left many southern Indiana towns impoverished, as they are to this day. Their plight was fictionalized in the 1979 Dennis Quaid film “Breaking Away.” Now all that remains of many of the limestone quarries are massive, eery rectangles etched out of the earth and speckling the otherwise pastoral countryside.
The most famous of these quarries is the Empire Quarry, which provided the 18,630 tons of stone needed to construct the Empire State Building. The quarry is so long and so deep, one can imagine the entire Empire State Building lying within it, refilling the 207,000 cubic feet of empty space now left vacant.
Read the full entry at Atlas Obscura.]
[Miami's Lake Belt, the zone in which the city of Miami becomes a mirror image of itself -- reflected in blue polygons induced by the mining of the limestone rock literally used to construct the city -- before it disintegrates into the Everglades.]
I’ve gotten part way through listening to the portions of last weekend’s Landscape Infrastructures symposium that have been posted online, and was particularly struck by comments that Charles Waldheim made in the closing roundtable:
“I was struck by Neil Brenner moderating the second panel [as he] brought it to a close by saying something to the effect of “the idea, the model, that somehow our action around urbanism should concentrate in the cities, is an outdated notion”.
That struck me as correct, and, at the same moment, if that’s true, it has enormous implications for those of us in [the GSD] and in these disciplines. If in fact we should focus on urbanism and urbanization and its infrastructure, not necessarily focused on the city and an opposition between the city and the externality of biological process, it strikes me that there’s an equally profound paradigm shift potentially for us in landscape architecture. I think, you know, for the better part of the last half-century, in our field, we’ve been operating under a paradigm in which nature exists outside of human agency, the kind of classical if not modernist defintion of ecology, in which urbanization was the problem. And having said that, what I’ve heard over the course of the last twenty-four hours, is that we need to fundamentally re-think that paradigm. [In terms of] the practices that we engage in, the models and habits of thought, the tools, the representational tools that we have available, to be able to think through our commitments, both to social and cultural production, but equally to environment and ecology, absent the idea of our extraction from those natural systems.”
This seems a profoundly important point for landscape architecture, in particular: that urban and natural systems are inextricable, not opposed. Indeed, that they have always been, though the scale of that intertwinment is rapidly accelerating. (If that inextricability seems obvious, it is also important to recognize that an understanding in which natural and urban systems are not just in conflict but fundamentally exclusive has been, as Waldheim notes, the primary paradigm within environmental land planning for at least a half-century.)
One consequence of this is that density and urbanism should not be conflated as if they were always one and the same thing. Density, rather than being the primary characteristic that determines whether a place counts as urban or not (a definition which produces endless pointless arguments about exactly how dense a place must be to be urban), is merely one of the important effects of processes of urbanization. It is a peculiarly important effect in any number of ways — economically, ecologically, phenomenologically – but it should not be mistaken for an essential characteristic of urban terrain.
This is supported (as we’ve noted before, after Christopher Grey) by the definition that Ildefons Cerdà provided for urbanism when he coined the term: “the science of human settlements at various scales and times, including countryside networks”. It’s not terribly far from “countryside networks” to “landscape infrastructures”, is it?
Another really interesting thing, related to both Waldheim’s point and the de-conflation of density and urbanism, is what this indicates about where opportunity lies for landscape architecture as a discipline. While much progress has been made by firms like MVVA and Field Operations in finding roles (leading roles, even) for landscape architects on projects within the envelope of density, it seems to me that the more stretched the scale of an urban network becomes, the more it becomes uniquely suited to design by landscape architects. Put concretely, there are vastly more square miles of land in, say, the artificial watershed of Los Angeles than there is spare open land in Boston’s city limits; and what other design discipline is used to working with so much land? An expanded definition of urbanism quite literally has more room for landscape architecture.
0. Everyone’s favorite Donald Rumsfeld quotation: “[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.” (As evidence that this is everyone’s favorite Donald Rumsfeld quotation, I submit that (a) it has its own Wikipedia page, the wonderfully-titled “There are known knowns”, where debate over its profundity or lack of profundity is documented, and (b) that Rumsfeld himself titled his autobiography Known and Unknown.)
Tetrapods deployed off the Japanese coast near Toyama (top) and Niigata (bottom). An old article in the New York Times reports:
“‘The [Japanese] construction state is in some respects akin to the military-industrial complex in cold-war America (or the Soviet Union), sucking in the country’s wealth, consuming it inefficiently, growing like a cancer and bequeathing both fiscal crisis and environmental devastation,” Gavan McCormack, a professor of Japanese history at Australia National University, wrote…
In the [1990s], public works spending has been stepped up even more to stimulate a languid economy…
…Japan uses as much cement each year as the United States, despite having only half the population and only 4 percent of the land area.”
The tetrapod — a concrete coastal armament used to solidify coastlines and arrest erosion — is symbolic of this metastasized public works state, as there is little constituency opposing their placement and thus tetrapodding typically proceeds more quickly than other projects, so that roughly half of the Japanese coastline has been so armored.
1. GAMES
Last December, I had the pleasure of sitting on the jury for the final reviews of Jorg Sieweke’s landscape studio at UVa, which was exploring various design scenarios for a hypothetical shift of the Mississippi River from its current course to the course it “naturally” desires to take through the Atchafalaya Basin. (This was particularly enjoyable given that I’d accidentally spent the summer blogging about flooding in general and flooding on the Mississippi River in particular.)
One of the student projects proposed a kind of abstracted board game which attempted to codify the interactions between the insurance industry, various economic activities in the Atachafalaya Basin (such as gambling), floods, disaster management systems, public space, and citizens of the flood-prone Basin. This project intrigued me greatly — but it did so less because of its resonance with the recent vogue for “gamification” (where I am inclined to agree, for the most part, with Ian Bogost), and more because it helped me articulate a set of problems related to aggregation, complexity, perversity, and misalignment in the design of landscapes0.
The soils of the Southeastern Piedmont — from Alabama to Virginia — suffered terrible erosion as a result of short-sighted agricultural practices in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. The prevailing agricultural economic systems of that region during those times — slavery and share-cropping — both encouraged short-sighted practices, as the men and women working farms and fields did not own the land, and so had little incentive to care for its long-term health, even as farming techniques that would have arrested or prevented erosion were well-known.
David Montgomery’s fascinating Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations recounts the travels of the British geologist Charles Lyell through the antebellum South:
“[Lyell] stopped to investigate deep gullies gouged into the recently cleared fields of Alabama and Georgia. Primarily interested in gullies as a way to peer down into the deeply weathered rocks beneath the soil, Lyell noted the rapidity with which the overlying soil eroded after forest clearing. Across the region, the consistent lack of evidence for prior episodes of gully formation implied a fundamental change in the landscape. “I infer, from the rapidity of the denudation caused here by running water after the clearing or removal of wood, that this country has always been covered with a dense forest, from the remote time when it first emerged from the sea.” Lyell saw that clearing the rolling hills for agriculture had altered an age-old balance. The land was literally falling apart.
One gully in particular attracted Lyell’s attention. Three and a half miles west of Milledgeville on the road to Macon, it began forming in the 1820s, when forest clearing exposed the ground to direct assault by the elements. Monstrous three-foot-deep cracks opened up in the clay-rich soil during the summer. The cracks gathered rainwater and concentrated erosive runoff, incising a deep canyon. By Lyell’s visit in 1846, the gully had grown into a chasm more than fifty feet deep, almost two hundred feet wide, and three hundred yards long. Similar gullies up to eighty feet deep had consumed recently cleared fields in Alabama. Lyell considered the rash of gullies a serious threat to southern agriculture. The soil was washing away much faster than it could possibly be produced.”
The top image is soil erosion in Mississippi (not, of course, in the Atlantic Piedmont — but sharing the same economic systems), photographed by Evans Walker in 1936 and via the Library of Congress; the bottom image is soil erosion on a farm in Caswell County, North Carolina, photographed by Marion Post Walcott in 1940 and also via the Library of Congress. The image at the top of this post is, of course, Charles Lyell’s illustration of the gully described above, reproduced in Dirt.
2. CRASHES
A series of talks that I’ve listened to in the past year also helped frame these problems for me. The first is an interview on Terragrams with Case Brown, currently of P-REX; the second, Kazys Varnelis’s “A Manifesto for Looseness”; and the third, Kevin Slavin’s “Those algorithms that govern our lives” (or, the somewhat shorter TED version, “How algorithms shape our world”). To explain how they’re relevant to the set of problems within landscape design I’m after, I think it’s best to take them in reverse order.
The central thesis of Slavin’s talk is roughly that programmed algorithms — embedded in and running financial systems faster than humans can react, controlling Roombas, determining price points on Amazon — are participating in the construction of a world that is increasingly designed to suit them and encoded with their logic. This has a pair of weird effects: first, algorithms begin to manifest physically (James Gaddy, describing Slavin’s talk, writes “he describes a fiber optic canal that was dug between New York and Chicago to deliver stock market information microseconds faster, and the way buildings are being carved out from the inside to house trading servers”) and second — and of more interest to me here – algorithmic systems have the tendency to exhibit suddenly bizarre behaviour, like an algorithm on Amazon.com pricing an unremarkable used book at $23 million1. Algorithmic systems are thus prone to the kind of sudden and unpredictable bifurcations that Manuel DeLanda describes in the introduction to A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, switching with little apparent warning from a seemingly stable state to something considerably more extreme or erratic:
“Ilya Prigogine revolutionized thermodynamics in the 19060s by showing that the classical results were valid only for closed systems, where the overall quantities of energy are always conserved. If one allows an intense flow of energy in and out of a system (that is, if one pushes it far from equilibrium), the number and type of possible historical outcomes greatly increases. Instead of a unique and simple form of stability, we now have multiple coexisting forms of varying complexity (stable, periodic, and chaotic attractors). Moreover, when a system switches from one stable state to another (at a critical point called a bifurcation), minor fluctuations may play a crucial role in deciding the outcome.”
We might say that algorithmic systems, because of they follow programmed rules strictly, are prone to rapidly becoming far from equilibrium.
Kazys Varnelis’s “A Manifesto for Looseness”, meanwhile, addresses the way that complex systems are, despite — or maybe really because of — their sophistication, vulnerable to crashes. Talking about the research of sociologist Charles Perrow, Varnelis says:
“…creating tightly coupled systems, very complex, finely tuned, highly efficient systems, in which one part’s operation is closely dependent on another’s, and when we add all these together, we can achieve remarkable levels of efficiency. The result is that these systems, because they are so integrated, can fail in unpredicatable ways. One part fails — a sensor — this has a cascading effect on another part, which exceeds its tolerances. This makes another part fail; and so on, and so on. This leads to anomalous readings on a number of sensors. Operators can’t figure out what’s going on; personnel become overwhelmed. They don’t understand what’s happened; they make the wrong decisions. Things get worse. Nobody knows what to do… Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, the Challenger disaster, the Columbia disaster… Don’t blame the operator — blame the complexity designed into the system itself.”
The algorithmic systems that Slavin describes are, obviously, a subset of complex systems generally and, insofar as they occasionally have something like an operator (though an important part of Slavin’s thesis is the argument that algorithms are increasingly defined by our general inability to comprehend or ‘read’ the ones that shape our world), the operator clearly cannot be faulted for failing to react with algorithmic speed to the actions of the algorithmic system. The kind of cascading failure that Varnelis describes by way of Perrow is, it seems to me, a perfect example of what a rapid bifurcation where “minor fluctuations… play a crucial role in deciding the outcome” looks like, played out in real time. And that minorness — the smallness of the critical fluctuations within the overall scale of the system — is precisely what makes them difficult for the operator to predict, anticipate, or even observe. (Replace “operator” with “designer” in that last sentence, and you’ll have a hint of where I am going with this.)
Third, I mentioned Case Brown’s interview on Terragrams: Brown is principal researcher for P-REX and, most relevantly here, recent recipient of the Rome Prize in landscape architecture, where he studied the Roman villa system, “the ancient… agricultural complex that spread the empire, fed the armies and grew the surpluses to make senators rich” as an early example of a real estate bubble:
“The rise and crash of the Roman villa system reads eerily like the modern story of American foreclosures — profit schemes of land speculation, securitized and excessively mortgaged properties, rapid expansion and even more rapid decline. … As a system, they provide a marvelous example of combining a food economy infrastructure and an elite leisure system, all the while staking claim to an enormous empire. How did this economy operate and did the Romans overextend their land ventures as many have in the modern United States?” Brown asks.
He said it is the nature of these markets to bloat beyond their own means, and the tendency continues today with such examples as oversized American vacation homes, elaborate golf course communities in China or ambitious skyscrapers in Dubai.
“We tend to overextend markets with gluttonous consistency. All these forms of extra-urban development, ancient and modern, draw on a common set of market-exploitation tendencies. Fertile land, urban respite and profit have provided the skeleton for centuries of speculation. To be able to document the birth of this trifecta could reformat our current landscape speculative practices,” Brown said.
Here, in a speculative system, the collapse is perhaps a bit more predictable than within the algorithmic or complex system — with every bubble, there are those who recognize the bubble before it collapses — but the result is the same: a disastrous and typically sudden crash. In all three kinds of systems, I think, crashes can be said to originate with the actions of individually rational parts acting, in aggregate, in accordance with perversely misaligned incentives. The algorithm, for instance, is based on a model of the “real” world (“real” being in quotation marks because the algorithm is, of course, as real as anything else), and when that model is even just slightly misaligned with the world it models, the aggregate nature of algorithms — algorithms always flock — produces outcomes that are rapidly perverse: $23 million used books, “flash crashes”.
3. DISTRIBUTION, AGGREGATION, AND DISAGGREGATION
Returning to the studio I reviewed at UVa: there were several other projects, in addition to the one explicitly referencing game design, that struck me as broadly representative of a trend in architectural design (and particularly landscape architecture) towards proposals that rely on aggregation and distributed components to drive beneficial change. For instance, one proposed distributing the functions of rainwater control and freshwater supply to individual units located on each city block and shared by the inhabitants of that block; another set up a system for collecting fecal matter and turning it into productive soil, again on a small scale, and with collection incentivized by small scale economic rewards (“bring your morning shit, get a morning cup of coffee”). Typically, I think, what such proposals have in common is that they design distributed systems that rely on incentive structures to guide individual actors towards making individually rational decisions with collectively beneficial consequences. (In that, these proposals might be understood as something like neoliberal architectural design, with neoliberal intended here to be simply descriptive, neither derogatory nor laudatory.)
These kinds of proposals are increasingly common: witness the proliferation of projects hoping to find some alternate use for vacant lots at a city-wide scale or the vogue (particularly in student work, which I take as an indicator of future disciplinary trends) for “tactics” (the (genuinely excellent) GSD student publication “Tactical Operations in the Informal City” is typical of this vogue: “the students were asked not to develop a master plan for the whole city, but rather to propose one or two interventions that could initiate a chain reaction of improvement”). A reliance on distributed components and aggregated effects is even making in-roads into surprising places, as in the case of the New Urbanism’s enthusiastic embrace of “Tactical Urbanism” (though, if there is anything consistent about the New Urbanism, it is that it has remained enduringly flexible as an ideology, seeking to co-opt and absorb counter-movements, as Duany wrote in a fascinating article for Metropolis last April that I’ve always intended to write at more length about), an embrace which has been well-received in and amplified by the broader urbanist community on the internet (see, for instance, the chord that the Atlantic Cities‘ coverage of a so-called “guerilla wayfinding” project in Raleigh struck).
And mammoth has both often praised projects in this vein — such as Visual Logic’s excellent Backyard Farm Service or, in our “Best Architecture of the Decade”, where we claimed Kiva as an architectural actor — and proposed them ourselves. (For that matter, the projects I’ve referred to from the studio at UVa were — in no small part due to their participation in the project of distributed design — among the stronger projects in that studio.) Rhetoric surrounding the incorporation of resilience as a primary goal into design — rhetoric which we have encouraged — also typically promotes the dissolution of centralized structures into networks of smaller components which will function in aggregate towards some goal. (I also think this interest extends beyond human actors, towards harnessing the aggregate behaviors of variegated non-human actors like tides, clasts, markets, microbes, brick-laying drone helicopters, and alligators.)
So I intend to phrase my concern here within the context of a deep appreciation for the merits of the general project of distributed design which, at its best, offers a more democratic, more organic, and more resilient alternative to heavily centralized, fracture-prone strategies. But I am wondering: when designers set up complex systems reliant upon the alignment of incentives to channel the swarming and flocking behavior of aggregate wholes towards beneficial ends, is there any thought going into the potential of that very same kind of behavior to magnify small mis-alignments into major crises – mis-alignments that may have been so small as to be invisible to the original designer or which (worse) the original designer may have had her own incentives to ignore? What would be the landscape effect equivalent to the weird behavior that happens at the margins of a video game — or a financial crisis? Where does aggregated behavior cascade through glitches into perverse results2? Where do individually rational behaviours become collectively irrational? What are the dangers in assuming that everything goes according to plan?
4. SAFEGUARDS
If the misalignment of incentives is an obvious potential problem with design that relies on directing aggregate behavior through incentives, then there is an obvious need for safeguards — for structures within a design proposal that will contain the risk of cascading failures.
Thus I suggest that these projects should anticipate failure, which (ironically? I guess?) indicates that they should be particularly concerned with systemic resilience. That is, they should be designed not to finely-tuned limits of tolerance, but with enough give that they can withstand the accidents, perversions, and even crashes that will inevitably result from the misalignment of incentives in unpredicatable ways. Furthermore, they should explicitly acknowledge the presence of “unknown unknowns”. While it is logically impossible to anticipate specific unknown unknowns, it is quite possible to anticipate misalignment and perversity generally. The tendency, I think, in making these kinds of proposals — and this is very much what Stephen and I did in our proposal for Luanda, for instance — is to construct proposals on the basis of best-case scenarios, considering only first-order failures, where first-order failure is defined as the problems that the project responds to and second-order failure is defined as the problems that are potentially generated by the proposed response. In a way, this suggests that designers need to become better futurists, though that may often mean being a futurist at relatively small temporal and spatial scales.
If architects and landscape architects accept that it is probably impossible to set up perfectly aligned incentive structures, but still want to take advantage of their potential, then we’ll need to have mechanisms in place to protect against misalignments that we know are both unpredictable and inevitable. There’s a lot of talk about what those mechanisms look like in the financial world, for example; what would they look like as a component of the design proposal or design initiative?
[Parts of this post emerged out of conversations with Stephen, Brian Davis, and Brett Milligan; in particular, Brett suggested the example of Iowa as an unnatural ecology produced by misaligned incentives. As noted in one of the footnotes, this is all closely related to my interest in the landscapes of global financialization -- which are typically spectacular case-studies in the landscapes thrown off by the misalignment of incentives -- and so, if you enjoyed this piece, you might want to also check out Metro International Trade Services.]
