{"id":2355,"date":"2010-04-21T22:40:50","date_gmt":"2010-04-22T03:40:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/?p=2355"},"modified":"2010-04-28T22:11:12","modified_gmt":"2010-04-29T03:11:12","slug":"recreational-volcanism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/2010\/04\/recreational-volcanism\/","title":{"rendered":"recreational volcanism"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n[The Moscow Pool, built on the site of Stalin’s abandoned Palace of the Soviets, via Polis<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n

As volcanism is, for obvious reasons<\/a>, in the news at the moment, perhaps this is the right time to think back to an\u00a0article posted a few months ago at English Russia<\/a> which suggests that Moscow is a city built not on ordinary, stable hills, but on volcanoes:<\/p>\n

\u201cMoscow city stands on the top of the giant ancient volcano\u201d, says scientist, \u201cwe call often Moscow – the city on the seven hills (as well Rome and some other cities) but just a few know that those seven hill actually are the ancient volcano structure. It doesn\u2019t matter that it is not active for thousands of years already, still there are so called \u2018fluid streams\u2019 gases from the center of the Earth comes to surface through ancient volcanoes, they cause the tremors of the surface and ruining the roads and buildings in Moscow.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

1<\/sup> A quick scan around the internet — including this document<\/a> which discusses the “geodynamic stability” of the Kremlin — suggests to me that Moscow’s collapsing streets result from karst<\/a>, not volcanism.<\/div>\n

Regardless of whether English Russia’s article reflects the actual geological conditions of Moscow (and I don’t think that it does, though I’d like to1<\/sup>), I do think that its fair to say that this is an extraordinarily rich symbolic image: a Dantean metropolis, constructed on the metaphorical gates of hell, its streets continually poised and ready to collapse into subterranean caverns like an igneous Miami<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Moscow Botanical Garden at Ostankino, in 1948, via Polis<\/a><\/div>\n

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Meanwhile, at Polis<\/em>, Peter Sigrist has been writing a series<\/a> which traces the history and evolution of that same city’s public parks, using — and I think this is a fantastic idea — the parks as a lens for registering the effects of shifting political and cultural ideologies on the city, from the importation of Western European landscape architects<\/a> by Peter the Great in the late seventeenth century to park-heavy, green-belted regional master plans<\/a> adopted in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. \u00a0According to the figures that Sigrist has found, Moscow is extremely densely populated by parks, having between three and four times the ratio of public parks space to citizen that comparable cities — New York, London, Paris — do.<\/p>\n

The edge of the Grand Prismatic, at Yellowstone; photographed by flickr user Alaskan Dude<\/a>.<\/div>\n

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Lava flows in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, via wikipedia<\/a>.<\/div>\n

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While that series deserves a more careful and serious reading than this flippant post allows, the obvious result of the mental collision of these two reports about Moscow — one fantastic and unbelievable, the other substantiated and historical — is to imagine a Moscow whose many public parks are more Yellowstone<\/a> or Hawaii Volcanoes National Park<\/a> than Central Park. That image, in turn, leads me to a third recent post elsewhere, Pruned<\/em>‘s entry on flood hunting<\/a>.\u00a0 Flood hunting is apparently the practice of “traveling to sites of inundation”, an activity situated somewhere between (natural) disaster tourism and, as Pruned <\/em>suggests, the occasionally-thrilling itineraries of flood-control-apparatus inspectors, who typically must inspect their bulwarks and levees and dams without the visual aid of surging floodwaters, but might, on occasion, have the opportunity to “gauge how the built environment reacts in the face of total systemic failure”.<\/p>\n

Sublimely decaying systems of access: El Caminito del Rey, near Malaga, Spain; image via wikipedia<\/a>.<\/div>\n

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Dendritic systems of access: the Roman Quarry in St. Margathen, Austria, designed by AllesWirdGut Architektur ZT GmbH, and seen at Landezine<\/a>.<\/div>\n

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2<\/sup> I had a very clear image in my mind of what this looks like, but I couldn’t find the video I’m thinking of. \u00a0I think that it’s a commercial (for running shoes?), shot in first person, on scaffolded walkways which are precariously perched on the sides of cliffs in (or to access) an abandoned mine, which I have the impression is in either Iberia or southern France. \u00a0If anyone knows this video, I’ll be grateful if you can remind me of its location.\u00a0 (Update<\/strong>: in the comments, Lockwood points us to El Caminito del Rey<\/a>, a walkway associated with a hydroelectric powerplant — not a mining project — which is the walkway I was trying to remember.\u00a0 The video I recalled is not a commercial, but can be found here<\/a>.)<\/div>\n

Flood hunting is, of course, quite fascinating as practice; but it is also interesting as a program<\/em>: a landscape architect might quite plausibly design a coastal levee strung\u00a0with scaffolds, walkways, and viewing platforms2<\/sup> for watching floods from just above the 500-year flood line, or — as the recently-opened Rising Currents<\/em> program<\/a> at MoMA suggests — a systemically-engineered marshy barrier against rising sea levels, which also doubles as recreational space and parkland.\u00a0 In the same way, its not quite impossible to imagine a city who, being built atop dormant volcanoes, has reserved the most unstable districts of the city as municipal parks.\u00a0 Whose landscape architects have been called upon to design access systems for these geological freakologies, these unstable geysers, mud pots, fumaroles<\/a>, and hot springs which sit between broad avenues, kvartals<\/a>,<\/em> dense clusters of towering buildings, and whose citizens frequent its public parks not for bucolic relaxation but for sublime thrills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[The Moscow Pool, built on the site of Stalin’s abandoned Palace of the Soviets, via Polis.] As volcanism is, for obvious reasons, in the news at the moment, perhaps this is the right time to think back to an\u00a0article posted a few months ago at English Russia which suggests that Moscow is a city built […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[353,43],"tags":[376,188,377],"class_list":["post-2355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futures","category-landscape-architecture","tag-moscow","tag-urban-parks","tag-volcanism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2355"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2383,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355\/revisions\/2383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}