In recent years, as they seek to rethink the flood control infrastructures and climate defense systems of the Mississippi Delta, American politicians, engineers, planners, and designers have, with good reason, looked to the Netherlands for inspiration and expertise.

This is entirely natural, as the Netherlands has long been the world’s most sophisticated laboratory for deltaic infrastructural experimentation.  In this vein, a recent studio at Harvard GSD, run by Nina-Marie Lister and Pierre Belanger, looked at potential futures for the region around the city of Dordrecht in the Rhine-Meuse Delta.

One of the projects that emerged from this studio, Kimberly Garza and Sarah Thomas’s “de-Damming the Dutch Delta”, makes a proposal that has a great deal of relevance for discussion of the future of the Mississippi Delta: open the massive (3-mile-long) Haringvliet Dam, permit salt and fresh water to mix freely again in the Haringvliet estuary, and make the resultant emerging aquatic ecology the central organizing infrastructure of an alternate urbanism.

There are a couple of things that make this project particularly compelling.

The first is the central role that Garza and Thomas give to re-thinking a key datum.  Landscape architects have paid increasing attention in recent years to the ways that both standardized measurements and standardized measuring tools serve to not only measure landscapes, but also to shape them.  (Gunter’s Chain and the Jeffersonian Federal Land Ordinance of 1785 being two connected examples that have received a fair bit of attention.)  Garza and Thomas identify one such generative measurement, the Normaal Amsterdam Peil, or NAP.  The NAP dates to 1675, when it was established Mayor Johannes Hudde to denote the average summer high flood elevation of the sea adjacent to Amsterdam.  The use of the NAP spread widely through Europe, and is used to establish littoral policies, laws, and regulations.  (The coastline drawn for the Netherlands on a normal map, for instance, is the coastline as set by the boundary between water and land at NAP.) The functional effect of the NAP, then, is to reify a “binary relationship”, as Garza and Thomas say, “between land and water”: on this side of the line drawn using the NAP, you have water; on the other side, you have land. This at once expresses and reinforces an attitude about the way that humans use and occupy littoral terrain, which privileges certain programs — such as the construction of dams that neatly separate salt and fresh waters — while excluding the possibility of other programs — such as an economy based on the biological productivity of the fluctuating gradient that typically occurs when salt and fresh waters mix.

[Registering fluctuating deltaic conditions]

To re-open the possibilities that a more complex understanding of the relationship between land and water would permit, Garza and Thomas propose the replacement of the NAP with a dynamic Normaal Amsterdam Peil, or d(NAP), which would measure water level not as a single datum, but a gradient of possibilities, ranging from a summer low to a winter high and beyond to the highs produced by flood conditions. The incorporation of true flood conditions into the conception of normal is exceptionally important, as it produces an understanding under which flood conditions are not unexpected disasters, but anticipated and recurring conditions of the landscape — normal.

Having developed the conceptual grounds for their project, Garza and Thomas make two deceptively simple moves, which they suggest could have the effect of generating new economies, new patterns of land use, and ultimately new urbanization within the Dordrecht region¹.  The first, as mentioned above, is to open the Haringvliet Dam, permitting fresh water and salt water to mix again within the Haringvliet estuary, as well as restoring silt-depositing tidal dynamics.

The second move is the provision of “bivalve infrastructures”, constructed armatures (above) which accelerate the development of bivalve reefs on new subaqueous ground produced by restored silt deposition.  Garza and Thomas explain why they are so keen on the restoration of that process of silt deposition and the development of bivalve ecologies:

I love this:

[T]he Pontine Marshes project constitutes an engineering problem with two key challenges. First, the water flowing through the wetlands must move slowly enough so that the plants can absorb the pollutants; second, the pattern of the water flow must give all water molecules equal opportunity to encounter the vegetation.

Berger’s solution is to have the water move through an S-shaped course that slows it down to a speed well under one mile per hour. The Italian engineers of the 1930s built perfectly straight canals, since they were simply concerned with transporting water efficiently. But forcing water to meander through winding channels in a wetlands gives more water molecules the best chance of being purified. ”Inefficiency is how environmental systems work,” says Berger.

[The team] built multiple models from Berger’s plans, featuring variations of S-shapes and alterations in the density and placement of the wetlands vegetation.

To scrutinize the designs, the researchers sent water injected with an fluorescent dye called Rhodamine WT through the models and used a fluorometer to measure the intensity of the light as the water exited, which indicated how broadly the water had spread. Test results indicated that the optimum design was one featuring relatively wide S-shaped channels with lots of vegetation underneath and small “islands” of earth to help the water disperse evenly.

“Heidi’s and Jeff’s work gave us a scientific understanding of how these plans functioned, and allowed us to push the design envelope,” says Berger.

This is an experimental landscape architecture.  Not experimental in the usual sense within architectural disciplines — where it is more or less a synonym for radically avant-garde (though this is by no means a condemnation of such architecture) — but experimental in the scientific sense, rigorously testing the performance of various forms, to design a landscape which incrementally advances away from its predecessors.  If we’re going to move beyond talking about designing post-natural ecologies towards actively constructing them, then developing modes of practice that incorporate experimentation will be essential.  (Next: peer-reviewed landscape architecture.)

[seen via @bldgblog; the Pontine Systemic Design previously on mammoth here and here.  Read the full article at MITnews, which also contains a gallery of images.

Update: You may also ask: if this is an experimental landscape architecture, what does an experimental architecture look like?  Rather like Sam McElhinney's fascinating "switching labyrinth", which BLDGBLOG has coincidentally posted this same afternoon.]

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

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

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

I was reminded of the Conveyor Belt for the Dead Sea Works (pictured above) by FASLANYC‘s post last week, which rightly notes that Israeli landscape architect Shlomo Aronson completed a small series of projects in the mid-eighties which prefigured the contemporary interest in landscape infrastructures. While the conveyor belt is an obviously sculptural (and beautiful) presence in the Rift Valley landscape, a more important concern for the invisible patterns of the Judean desert ecology drives the architecture of this infrastructure and makes the project significant as a case studio in the ability of an architect to enhance the ecological function of a large-scale infrastructure.

The conveyor belt, at 18 kilometers the third longest in the world (at least at the time of its design), was planned by the Dead Sea Works to convey over a million tons of potash each year from the extraction site (400 meters above sea level) to the Dead Sea Works’ main factory on the banks of the Dead Sea (400 meters below sea level).  The belt replaced a “tortuous 39-kilometer truck route where 200 semi-trailers a day loaded with potash once clogged traffic, created a safety hazard, damaged the road, and spewed diesel fumes”.  Israel’s Nature Reserves Authority at first opposed the project (which would span the entire South Judean Desert Nature Reserve, “known for the flora, wildlife, and archaeological sites of its unspoiled canyons and cliffs”), citing the fragility of the desert environment, but later approved it on the condition that the Dead Sea Works employed a landscape architect to design the conveyor belt.

Aronson redrew the planned belt route to avoid building unnecessary earthworks, while lengthening bridges to allow “free passage for hikers and desert animals”.  Bridges, which also replaced earthworks wherever possible, were constructed by cranes perched either on the route of the belt or on previously built sections of the bridge, so as to minimize the impact of construction on the delicate desert ecology.  Aronson required all work to be done within a narrow 10-meter construction corridor; this restriction was followed strictly, despite the need to move over a million tons of earth and to construct 12 bridges.  The delicate steel bridges and the yellow ochre sheath of the conveyor were selected to simultaneously emphasize the lengthy infrastructure as a significant engineering feat while permitting the belt to complement, rather than overwhelm, the existing landscape.

The conveyor belt, then, at both the local scale (bridges, earthworks, pylons) and the regional scale (the route) was constructed specifically to account for both visible aims (the preservation of the scenic value of the Syrian-African Rift Valley) and invisible aims (the free flow of wildlife, the avoidance of damage to local ecologies).  It serves at once as a statement of the scale of human intervention in the Israeli landscape and as a statement of the possibility of designing that intervention so as not to detract from that environmentt, but to augment and emphasize the intrinsic beauty of the pre-existing landscape.

As fascinating and long as the belt is, though, it is a relatively minor infrastructure in comparison to the vast — eighteen miles long — Salt Ponds it feeds its cargo onto the shores of.  And those Ponds perhaps present an opportunity for a much more substantial landscape intervention, one which would not merely seek to ameliorate the conditions produced by accepted industrial processes (as Aronson’s conveyor belt does so skillfully), but would look to fundamentally reorganize those processes.  This difference of opportunity may serve to effectively highlight the difference between two possible answers to the question FASLANYC poses, “what value do landscape/architects add to the design of infrastructures?”, a question which mammoth has previously been concerned with.

The Dead Sea Works are a major global chemical producer, supplying in particular potassium — one of the three primary ingredients in chemical fertilizers — to over sixty countries on five continents.  An article (part of a larger series entitled “Life from the Dead Sea”, which is worth reading if you’re intrigued by the Dead Sea) at WysInfo describes the production process:

The potassium in the Dead Sea is… produced at the Dead Sea Works by a process based on selective sedimentation of the non-required minerals in a system of evaporation ponds until the solutions of the desired composition are finally obtained.

For the construction of the ponds a system of dams was built which today encompasses the Israeli sector of the shallow southern basin of the sea, which is now in fact a vast evaporation pond.

At present, the water of the Dead Sea is pumped from the deep northern basin a distance of 400 meters and carried in a canal to the southern basin, into the ponds, where – through natural evaporation – the water loses 50% of its initial volume and kitchen salt and calcium chloride crystallize out into a second system of ponds. Here the carnallite, which is the raw material for producing potash, crystallizes and sediments. Potash is an impure form of potassium carbonate (K₂CO₃) mixed with other potassium salts. Potash has been used since ancient times as a fertilizer and in the manufacture of glass and soap.

This material is mechanically “harvested” from the bottom of the pools and pumped through pipes to the potash plant. Here the carnallite crystals are separated from the stock solution and washed in water to dissolve the magnesium chloride in the solution…

In order to add value to the relatively cheap raw materials (also including bromine, magnesium, and salt) harvested from the Dead Sea waters in the evaporation ponds, the Dead Sea Works refines the harvested potash into compound fertilizers, a process which multiplies the value of the chemicals ten-fold, but requires combining the Dead Sea potassium with “phosphate-rich sediments [found] to the west of the Dead Sea”, which are brought to the shores of the Salt Ponds on Aronson’s conveyor belt.

This chemical harvest produces a great deal of economic benefit for Israel, providing employment to thousands and being the primary way in which Israel benefits from the mineral wealth of the Dead Sea (which is the largest concentration of accessible mineral within the country’s borders — estimated at 1.9 billion tons of potassium chloride and as much as 44 billion tons of salt), but the continuous diversion of mineral-laden water from the northern basin of the Dead Sea south into the evaporation ponds is exacerbating the already perilous shrinkage of the Sea.

An article in Smithsonian magazine from 2005 explains the history of the Dead Sea and how it came to enter its current state of rapid decline:

Created by the same shift of tectonic plates that formed the Syrian-African Rift Valley several million years ago, the Dead Sea owes its precarious state to both human and geological factors. Originally part of an ancient, much larger lake that extended to the Sea of Galilee, its outlet to the sea evaporated some 18,000 years ago, leaving a salty residue in a desert basin at the lowest point on earth—1,300 feet below sea level. Since then, this body of water, known as the Dead Sea since Greco-Roman times, has maintained its equilibrium through a fragile natural cycle: it gets fresh water from rivers and streams from the mountains that surround it and loses it by evaporation. The evaporation process, combined with its rich salt deposits, account for its extraordinary—up to 33 percent—salinity (compared with the up to 27 percent salinity of Utah’s Great Salt Lake). Until the 1950s, the flow of fresh water equaled the rate of evaporation, and Dead Sea water levels held steady. Then in the 1960s, Israel built an enormous pumping station on the banks of the Sea of Galilee, diverting water from the upper Jordan, the Dead Sea’s prime source, into a pipeline system that supplies water throughout the country. To make matters worse, in the 1970s Jordan and Syria began diverting the Yarmouk, the lower Jordan River’s main tributary.

Since then, the Dead Sea has declined dramatically. It needs an infusion of 160 billion gallons of water annually to maintain its current size; it gets barely 10 percent of that. Some 50 miles long in 1950, the sea is about 30 miles long today. Water levels are falling at an average rate of three feet per year. According to a recent Israeli government study, the rate of evaporation will slow and the Dead Sea will reach equilibrium again in a few decades—but not before losing another third of its present volume.

Ironically, though the northern basin is imperiled by retreating water levels, posh hotels along the industrialized southern basin of the Dead Sea are besieged by rising water levels produced by the deposition of waste salts, which lifts the bed of the southern basin approximately seven inches a year, causing the hotels to surround themselves with sand dikes and plan for a leisure lagoon, cordoned off from the industrial ponds.  At the northern end, hotels obviously have the opposite problem: the beach is racing away from their doors, so hotels employ tractors and wagons to ferry tourists from their rooms to the banks of the Sea.  The declining overall volume of the Sea is also emptying the surrounding freshwater aquifers, producing over a thousand gaping sinkholes in the past fifteen years, as retreating freshwater dissolves underground salt deposits.  Together with increased erosion, the sinkholes have destroyed roads, date palm orchards, and buildings, producing a landscape sufficiently unstable to lead the Israeli government to proclaim a development freeze in the vicinity of the Sea.  Complex oasis ecosystems which belie the Sea’s moniker by supporting vibrant communities of flora and fauna, including five hundred million migratory birds who stop at the Dead Sea between Africa and Europe, are similarly threatened.

This environmental and economic catastrophe is by no means solely the result of the industrial processes employed at the Dead Sea Works, but the evaporation ponds do contribute significantly to the draining of the northern basin (by one estimate, approximately a quarter of the yearly shrinkage is attributable to the Dead Sea Works).

In a watershed as water-poor as that of the Jordan River, increased conservation alone will not be able to reduce freshwater demands to levels which could reverse the shrinking of the Dead Sea, though there is no doubt that increased conversation is necessary.

Given that reality, a number of serious large-scale engineering proposals to reverse the drainage of the Dead Sea exist, including two plans for massive canals linking the Dead Sea to larger waterbodies which could replenish it — the Red Sea to the south and the Mediterranean to the west, as well as the development of mass-scale desalination plants which could supply fresh water to replace that taken from the Jordan and its tributaries, potentially affording the opportunity to let the Jordan run freely into the Dead Sea again.

But perhaps what is needed is not merely a new set of mega-infrastructures, diverting water across deserts from other watersheds (and doing so in a manner which is potentially quite dangerous), but a re-configuration of the industrial processes at work in the Dead Sea, a re-shaping of the industrial landscape to create positive feedbacks into biological systems?  One might easily believe that the Dead Sea is exactly the sort of industrialized and urbanized “bio-physical system” which Pierre Belanger has argued (PDF) can only be understood and dealt with at a watershed-scale:

Endogenous and exogenous processes, such as eutrophication, combined-sewer overflow, sediment contamination, invasive flora, exotic fauna, depleted water reserves, and seasonal floods can no longer be perceived as isolated incidents but rather as a part of a large, constructed hydrological ecology that is entirely and irreversibly connected to the process of urbanization…

What form a landscape infrastructure for the revitalization of the Dead Sea might take is difficult to say; perhaps the Dead Sea Works might be inspired by their success at producing salt from salt water, and try their hand at separating out the other component in that raw ingredient, augmenting the salt ponds and fertilizer-production facilities on the southern basin with networks of desalinization plants, capitalizing (as the ponds do, through evaporation) on the plentiful solar energy of the Negev to power those plants.  Or perhaps, like Orange County, a far-sighted municipality could construct a string of wastewater recycling plants and recharge the freshwater aquifers surrounding the Sea, halting the spread of erosion and sinkholes.  Whatever the form, agriculture, industry, wastewater systems, and natural ecologies could be viewed not as competing interests vying over a singular and shrinking water supply, but as necessary components of a single regional urban ecology, with waste flows from one component providing the raw material for the processes of others.

Quotations in this post related to the conveyor belt are derived from both an article, “Desert Conveyance”, which ran in Landscape Architecture in April 1991 and Aronson’s monograph, Making Peace with the Land.  I’m afraid that I didn’t record which quotations came from which source when I originally took them down several years ago; related to the larger question of the Dead Sea Works, doubts linger about the long-term sustainability of any regional economy based on phosphorous production or application: read Infranet Lab on “peak phosphorous” and further background on “peak phosphorous” in this article by Melinda Burns (via @bldgblog), which includes the suggestion by a scientist that “there’s a whole industry that needs to be invented to capture phosphorus” — perhaps a further clue to what a re-invented Dead Sea Works might look like, as the phosphate waste products of farming, as well as the urban sewage choking the Jordan, could become the raw material for industry and the water wasted by industry the lifeblood of agriculture and a reinvigorated Dead Sea.

I’m particularly interested by two things in the interview. First, Berger’s Pontine Marshes project indicates the potential of design disciplines to contribute something — in this case, a designed ecology — to the organization of landscape infrastructures which those who have typically organized them (politicians, scientists, engineers) do not.  This seems to me to be a question which is often left unanswered when landscape/architects make proposals for infrastructures: it’s clear what we get out of our involvement in the work (we get to do exciting projects and have the kind of influence the profession craves), but it is often much less clear what about our contribution to the project ought to convince a government (at these scales, one is almost always working with government) to hire a designer rather than an engineer as the project coordinator (shorter version of this question: why would you hire a landscape architect to design a sewer?).  That Berger has been able to convince the provincial government to pursue the implementation of the project indicates that they’ve found real value in his approach to the remediation of the Marshes.

Second, I’m quite intrigued by the historical trajectory of Berger’s work, by how the cultivation of relationships with scientists (the EPA, in the case of the Breckenridge mine project) and politicians (the provinicial government, in the case of the Pontine Marshes) has allowed Berger to make a direct and linear transition between unfunded research projects and the funded implementation of landscape infrastructures.  While it’s quite possible that this trajectory is only possible within an academic environment which provides the flexibility needed to pursue years of unfunded research and thus that this is not a plausible trajectory for more traditionally organized architectural firms, it nonetheless illustrates a clear path for developing the agency of designers in new fields.

update: We’re done for the night, but, if Pierre Belanger’s opening presentation is an accurate indicator, the conference is fascinating enough to be well worth the effort of tracking down the DVD and watching it — in about half an hour, he’s challenged the (singular) authority of engineering as a discipline, offered a quick but clearly well-researched look at the relationship between infrastructure and zoning in Rust Belt “economies of disassembly”, and posed a very interesting question that suggests something of how infrastructure might be understood differently in the coming century than it was in the previous.

[note: no distinction is made here between Rob and Stephen, unless noted]

6:24 PM We skip the “About the Symposium”. Text scrolls too quickly for Becker. I’m bored. We move on to George Baird’s opening address, “Operative Practices”.

6:32 PM Stephen: “People are watching?”

6:34 PM We pause to watch a climbing video on YouTube.  And then a Scottish recruitment site advertisement.

6:42 PM Videos are good, but dinner’s ready.  Liveblog on pause.

7:41 PM We’re back, and so’s Baird.

7:59 PM Baird talking about Jane Jacobs and William Blake.  Not sure whether they are opposed or in agreement or neither.

[Pierre Belanger, "Redefining Infrastructure"]

8:04 PM Conference organizer Pierre Belanger is up, sooner than the DVD would have intended; “Redefining Infrastructure.”

8:07 PM Black t-shirt.

8:10 PM Many people are being thanked, but thankfully, not as many as at last spring’s Ecological Urbanism Conference.

8:11 PM Pierre reads the American Heritage Dictionary’s definition of infrastructure.

8:13 PM Tracing the history of ‘infrastructure’ to 1927 Mississippi Flood and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

8:16 PM Engineers are shown (by survey) to be one of the most trusted professions in North America.  What are the implications of this, particularly as civil engineering accidents increase in incidence?

8:18 PM Pierre (paraphrased): “Is it possible that engineering (as a discipline) is no longer capable of dealing with the complexity of the infrastructural systems it has produced?” and “What are the implications of the largest engineering firm in the world (AECOM) buying the largest landscape architecture firm (EDAW)?”

8:21 PM With these questions, he’s implying that not only are engineers incapable of dealing with the complexity of the systems they are trusted by society to oversee, but they know it, and so are trying to compensate by adding design talent — landscape architects.

8:26 PM Pierre (paraphrased): “Zoning is the most important structural element in the shape and configuration of the North American urban landscape.” (at the expense of design)

8:30 PM Argument ensues over whether Pierre is correct to refer to “the” 410 freeway.  Rob says no; Stephen says yes.

8:32 PM Tracing the origin of the modern industrial landscape in North America to landmark federal court case from 1926, “Village of Euclid, Ohio vs. Ambler Realty Co.”; hence the term Euclidean planning (Euclid seen below).

8:35 PM Pierre talking about “repatriating” zoning in design discourse; perhaps he means “rehabilitating”?

8:35 PM Notes that original zoning classifications had no classification for biophysical systems.

8:40 PM Discussion of Euclid continues to present day; “economies of disassembly” in the Rust Belt, which Pierre suggests are breaking down distinctions in zoning, or causing the rethinking of zoning without confronting the legal system itself.  Scrap metal, recycling, composting industries thrive on this economy of disassembly and associated processes of “dis-urbanization”.  Discussion moves to nearby Youngstown.

8:46 PM Stephen distracted by high school friend’s beard blog.  Catching up on conversation through own live-blog.

8:48 PM On to Buffalo and Olmsted’s plan for Buffalo, which Belanger argues is a historic example of the tight overlay of infrastructure and urban development (“reciprocity between landscape and infrastructure”).

9:03 PM Parks designed by OMA (Villette) as examples of this same reciprocity.  Discussing the food terminal infrastructure displaced by the park, and its expanded footprint in the Parisian suburbs — a fascinating angle on the history of de la Villette.

9:06 PM Pierre projects the conference’s central question: “Can we redefine the conventional meaning of modern infrastructure by foregrounding and amplifying the biophysical landscape that was historically supressed, to reformulate it as a collective system of essential services, resources, and agents that generates and supports urban economies?”

9:08 PM Stephen notes the emphasis on “economies”, rather than social structures; implication is that urban economy precedes urban social system?  Or perhaps this descends from the emphases and biases of Pierre’s work (on economies, waste, manufacturing, etc.)?

9:10 PM No applause?

[Stan Allen: Urbanizing Infrastructures]

9:18 PM Stan Allen’s talk begins promisingly, but live blog is interrupted indefinitely by kung-fu on YouTube .  Good night; if nothing else, we’ve amused ourselves.