Tencate, a leading transnational provider of geosynthetics and industrial fabrics, recently announced that it will be deploying its largest North American installation of geotubes® for the dredging of the superfund site of Onondaga Lake, in the State of New York:

“As a result of over a century of industrial activity on the shores of Onondaga Lake, lake sediments have been contaminated with chemicals such as heavy metals, PAH’s and volatile organic compounds (e.g., chlorobenzene)…The design by Parsons Engineering is to hydraulically dredge an estimated 2.1 million cubic yards of waste and pump it to a 50 acre dewatering cell through 4 miles of double-walled pipeline. Their design specifies containing and dewatering the waste in geotextile tubes stacked 30 feet in height. TenCate Geotube® containers, of various large circumferences, will be supplied to dewater the sediments. This project is scheduled to begin in the spring of 2012 and is planned to continue for 4 years. Upon completion of dredging and dewatering, TenCate Geotube® containers will be permanently stored in the capped cell.“

[Image via Tencate]

What is a Geotube®?  Imagine the humble sandbag merged with the geo-filtering properties of a silt fence.  Then supersize it, so as to envelop or relocate entire landscapes (with the help of pipes, pumps and polymers).  Render them a patented product, and you have the contemporary sludge sucking sand bag; capable of anything from manufacturing islands, stabilizing shorelines, arresting erosion, creating underwater structures, sieving water from toxic soils and animal waste and other yet-to-be known anthropogenic sediment handling practices.  Their flexi, inflatable qualities allow them to be deployed almost anywhere.

[Source]

The advertisement provides an illustration of a particular utopia, a corporate dream of the urban as a bundle of transportation networks that optimize the efficient exchange of objects and things.

…..

Fast forward a year later.  Last month FedEx – UPS’ biggest competitor – announced that it will provide grant funds of $ 1.4 million (in addition to previous grants) over the next two years to EMBARQ (the World Resources Institute’s Center for Sustainable Transport) to provide “technical expertise on sustainable transportation projects that improve quality of life in cities…Through workshops, field visits and direct consultation, EMBARQ transport planners and FedEx global experts will team up to provide support to [multiple] developing cities in fuel and vehicle technologies, vehicle asset management, and real-time user information systems.”

As part of the grant program, FedEx has created a fellowship for promising staff in EMBARQ’s Mexico, Brazil and India offices,whereby fellows attend 10-day workshops at FedEx’s corporate headquarters in Memphis, Tenn., receiving leadership and technical training from senior FedEx staff. The seemingly seamless and mutually enhancing effects of such coalitions is expressed by one of its India office fellows: “FedEx is interested in moving packages as efficiently as possible, while urban transport providers seek to move people as efficiently as possible. Many of the operational concerns facing FedEx and the organizations that EMBARQ India works with – route design, crew scheduling, fleet management – are essentially the same.“

…..

Meanwhile, it seems that Google might benefit from similar quasi-philanthropic research mergers as its seeks to irrigate [ever broader] territories with [logistical] potential (*).  The company has run into problems installing its new “super-speed” internet project in Kansas City.  The design problem concerns how its fiber optic cables are to be physically hung from existing utility poles within the city.

…..

Moving to the southern hemisphere, we encounter the IIRSA – the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America, or what Greg Lindsay refers to as “the largest infrastructure project you’ve never heard of: An $83 billion, decades-long effort by a dozen South American nations to tilt the continent’s economic axis from North-South to East-West (and from the United States toward China).“

[IIRSA Project Image via Co.Exist]

Chasing the IIRSA project is the The South America Project, a coalition of South American designers researching the potential effects of the IIRSA proposals and testing alternative design scenarios for the continent’s emergent infrastructure.

…..

In the most recent Terragram interview, we encounter another type of logistical design coalition.  Here designer Casey Brown talks about his research interest in the “meta” or “macroscopic” landscape, by which he means the larger physical patterns and forces acting upon a region, nation or collection of affiliated landscapes.  In the course of the interview, Brown is asked if there is a risk of his macro data mining and statistical distillations (what he generates as senior researcher for P-Rex) to be manipulated or “data wrangled” to suit proprietary and institutional desires.

Interviewer Craig Verzone asked this question based on Brown’s description of his current work for Toyota, a client who came to P-Rex for logistics consultation, a selection based on reading their urban diagnostic research published in Drosscape.  Rather than the designers chasing a received or pre-formatted agenda, clients and corporations are coming to them based on the agendas revealed through proactive research questions.   Quite arguably, P-Rex has succeeded in generating disruptive hypotheses and subsequent business singularities.  Yet at the same time, Brown acknowledges that although it is better to be in on these conversations rather than outside them, he admits that “we cannot control data or what they do with it”.

Thanks to R. Holmes and S. Becker for conversations leading to links within this post.

“For the first LI@SX of 2012, Studio-X NYC is delighted to welcome Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker of Mammoth and Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon, three-quarters of the Dredge Research Collaborative (with Brett Milligan of Free Association Design), for a short visual tour of hulking geotubes, silt fences, sensate geotextiles, and other monuments of the dredge cycle, followed by a lively Q&A and informal discussion on the unrecognized architectural possibilities of dredge.  

……….

 Every year, billions of tons of earth are moved by erosion caused by humans and by humans in response to erosion. The Dredge Cycle is landscape architecture at a monumental scale, carving the coastlines and waterways of continents according to a mixture of industrial need and unintended consequences. Thus far, it has remained the domain of logistics, industry, and engineering, a soft successor to the elevated freeway interchanges and massive dams that captured the cultural imagination of the previous century: a new infrastructural vernacular for the self-aware Anthropocene. 

The Dredge Research Collaborative have been exploring the choreography of these interconnected sedimentary landscapes, visiting dredged material confinement areas from Poplar Island in the Chesapeake Bay to Hayden Island in the Columbia River, talking with dredge-experts such as the transnational materials conglomerate TenCate, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Land Management, and publishing and lecturing widely on dredge.”

The event is Tuesday, January 24, 6:30-8:30pm @ Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, New York, NY 10014.  Free and open to the public. No RSVP required.  Technology willing, I may be able to wire into the q + a conversation.

Of note, the evening’s conversation will serve as a prelude to a limited-ticket Festival of Dredge tour this summer, for which LI@SX attendees will be given reservation priority — look for more details on the Festival in the future.

[Images above: Dredging of the Port of Fremantle’s Shipping Channels, 2010, Perth, Australia (By Nearmap), and harbor dredging in Oceanside California by flickr user smacss.]

“Today we find ourselves in a jealous mood, yet at the same time disillusioned, looking back to the times when revolutionary urban ideologies were not only conceived but actually, unlike today, also truly believed in. Just think about the passionate ideas of the Situationist International, who tried to overthrow the advanced capitalist society in the late 1950s and 1960s. Guy Debord, one of its founding members, argued in 1967 that spectacular features such as mass media and advertising play a central role in an advanced capitalist society, presenting us with a fake reality in order to mask the actual capitalist degradation of human life. This issue of MONU is not supposed to celebrate Marxism, our society should not make that mistake again, but at present we find ourselves once again surrounded and confronted by innumerable fake realities and hypocritical urban ideologies such as Green Urbanism or Neo-Urban Socialism, to name but a few. Conceived with the best of intentions, they are nonetheless widely used merely as promotional strategies of companies and institutions to maintain a positive and politically correct public image…

…is there a need for new or true ideologies when it comes to cities, city planning, and urban design? And if there is, what should those new and true urban ideologies look like? And if there is no need – or no hope – and we agree with Francis Fukuyama, who stated almost twenty years ago that we are living in a post-ideological age, in which redemptive, all-encompassing ideologies have failed, what does that mean for our cities and their future? What might be the advantages and disadvantages of a Post-Ideological Urbanism in general?”  -Excerpt from Bernd Upmeyer’s call for submissions for MONU’s Post-Ideological Urbanism Issue.

#whOWNSpace maps are featured in Storefront For Art and Architecture’s current symposium, Strategies for Public Occupation.  As spatial proposition, these maps continue to investigate and reaffirm the public right to the city that the occupy movement has set in motion.   Like the occupy movement, they remove habituated urban blinders, the general assumedness of what is.

The maps delineate the bureaucratic coding of space (and its management: see map #2) brought about through conglomerates of political and corporate processes.  As diagnostic urban field manuals, their agency lies in exposing the taken-for-granted ecology of these spaces, rendering them as more contingent and contestable.  Here we can see them as just one of many possible urban configurations.

As the Occupy movement continues to bifurcate – both within its social organization and the not-so-public spaces it is experimenting with occupying (banks, foreclosed homes, port infrastructure…) propositional maps such as these seem particularly useful for arriving at new ways of envisioning space and contesting the status quo.

As part of the Panama Canal Expansion Project, somewhere around 100 million cubic meters of terrestrial and aquatic earth is being dislodged and relocated.  The guesstimate of that total quantity – a sum of the Pacific and Atlantic works and the freshwater areas in between – is a bit tenuous, as the figures we came across vary (we would love to know if anyone has more definitive numbers).  Further compounding the accuracy of that amount are the contingencies in the modeled volumes.  Of note, the first construction of the Panama canal required four times the original earth moving estimates to complete.

The expansion project site has a collection of before and after images of some of these geo-accelerated landscapes.  Specific instances, such as the removal of Paraiso Hill (images below), requiring the removal of 7.3 million cubic meters, make the massive scale of the entire earthworks more tangible.

[Leveling of Paraiso Hill from 136 meters to 46 meters above sea level.]

[view of (the former) Paraiso Hill from Louisa Hill]

["Construction of the 58-cell cofferdam. This cofferdam will separate the waters from the existing channel in Miraflores and the new channel to allow the dry construction of Borinquen 1E dam, under Phase 4 of the Pacific Access Channel Project."]

["Dry excavation of around 8 million cubic meters of material under the Pacific Access Channel Project, Phase 3. This channel will connect the new Post-Panamax locks on the Pacific Side with the Culebra Cut."]

As reported by Linda McIntyre in this month’s issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine (Friday Morning Lights), U.S. sports stadiums are emulating their European peers by deploying massive lighting rigs to ‘sun’ their turf fields.  Due to local climate conditions, the shade-inducing architecture surrounding the pitch, or a combination thereof, turf fields often have areas that do not get adequate sunlight, or just cannot regenerate as quickly as desired after heavy use.

European companies such as Mobile Lighting Rig and SGL Concept custom manufacture the collapsible structures which can be spread out across large swathes of a field.  Or, smaller components can be installed in high use areas – such as the foreground to the goals – to ‘repair’ isolated patches of fatigued turf through supplemental photosynthetic exposure.

Looking through the product literature we find that the lighting rigs are only one component of the full suite of systems that can be acquired for ‘total’ control of growing conditions, such as temperature modulation, carbon dioxide levels, water, air and added fertilizers. Behind every perfect field seen on game day there is a complex choreography of maintenance regimes and techno deployments that go (intentionally) unseen.  As spectators, we just see the perfected green canvas as a given upon which competing embodied spatial tactics are played out.  But imagine the arean devoid of players and fans, occupied instead with maintenance crews and techno-mechanical systems – the way the field is most of the time, such as this:

[Emirates stadium as seen by flickr user steve260589]

At such times we could see the perpetual making of the field, such as the showers of the irrigation system, the ripping out and re-installation of strips of turf, the application of fertilizers and ground striping, the glacially slow wanderings of the grow lights, and so on; the stadium as temporary greenhouse.

If one were to meticulously diagram all this behind-the-scenes activity, like artist Alan Ball has wonderfully done for game events, we might see something similar, yet different.  The overlaid traced lines would be far more rectilinear, distributed and most-likely a bit monotonous, like the back and forth movements of mowing the grass.  Yet temporally there would be signs of competing and cooperative tactics of spatial activity – such as irrigation flow working in tandem with grow lights, as one can’t irrigate the field when the lighting rigs are on it, for obvious reasons.  There’s an extensive and strategic choreography to it all, which most of us never see.

Like the urban field itself, the design and repair of the urban arena is fundamental to what can be staged upon it.  It’s the bracketed background of the event.  Sitting in the bleachers under the seemingly banal, yet far more common conditions of non-game time, watching the grass grow should one actually be allowed, would offer an apt meditation on our extensively ‘black boxed’ infrastructure.

Above the glow, we might reflect on the amazing peculiarities of the networked recycling of light happening in front of us – the harvesting of distant, geologically stored solar energy embodied in coal or natural gas, transported to and processed in power plants, distributed back across the landscape and subsequently reapplied through a mobile grid of finely tuned lighting fixtures.   All of which calls to mind Stephen Graham’s notion of ubiquitously cyborged infrastructure, or “the ways in which the technological circulations sustained by infrastructural assemblages inseparably blend together the social relations of urban life and the relations between cities with the natural and biospheric processes on which they rely”  (quote from Disrupted Cities) Without the hybridized grasses growing in manufactured and extensively managed soil and systems, no arena for staged and athletically perfect urban drama would be played out.

[Frankfurt soccer stadium.  Source]

“It turns out that firing rockets into the sky in the hopes of making rain doesn’t feel foolish at all….Its hard to track down firm numbers, but scientists within the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) estimate that China employs more than thirty thousand people in its weather modification program.  Most of these are peasants or farmers trained to deploy weapons at the command of regional meteorologists.”

All but two of China’s provinces regularly practice cloud seeding, and during the drought this past summer, China shot so much silver iodide into its atmosphere that it nearly ran out of the specially-designed artillery shells used to transport the chemical into the clouds.  China far exceeds any other nation in terms of its quantitative efforts in weather making.  But as Flagg points out, the efficacy of designed storms are vague at best:

“Seventy years into an international experiment in weather modification, scientists still haven’t arrived at any consensus on whether or not the process works.  We know that silver iodide mimics the crystalline structure of ice, and that when it’s injected into clouds – either by aircraft flying overhead, or on the ground generators that send up plumes of vapor, or, in the case of China, by decades old artillery – the chemical forms small ice nuclei in the clouds, and additional moisture gloms onto the crystals.  Once the crystals are large enough or heavy enough, they fall from the cloud.  Yet weather patterns are so variable that’s it hard for scientists to know when to attribute precipitation to cloud seeding.”

Similar to Japan’s entropic attachment to the manufacturing of tetrapods, one wonders to what extent the weather economy engendered by cloud seeding actually becomes its own ulterior motivation for its Sisyphean efforts.  As the guardian reported earlier this year, just the artillery shells alone cost about 1,000 yuan each.

Some Chinese reports claim that cloud seeding can locally increase precipitation by 10-20%.   The U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (whom China calls upon for technical support and weather mapping technology) may question that claim.   But even though the percentage of effect is likely lower, the sheer economy of scale with which China is experimenting with rainmaking removes the practice from the micro to the mesoscale of geoengineering, like a contemporary replay of “the rain follows the plow”.  Is there a cumulative as production continues to increase?   Is China lessening, ever so slightly, the amount of rainfall that might otherwise arrive on the other side of the Pacific?

Speculating on the flipside, if the practice of cloud seeding becomes more effective in the future through all the research and practice going into it,  it could potentially create vexing questions related to water claims.  Water rights are largely based on terrestrial delineation and the order in which they were appropriated.  If appropriation for “beneficial uses” includes the sky, meteorological mapping might then become implicated with water adjudication at an international level.  The U.N. would have a new set of challenges to sort through and lawyers might end up delineating water claims as tentative inscriptions in elaborate water cycle diagrams, thereby catching an inadvertent view into how interconnected it all is.

Seeded cloud image from here and here.

Like other islands within the urban archipelago of the Occupied movement, Occupy Portland arrived at a critical juncture and was subsequently dismantled this past weekend.  The occupy movement has consistently demonstrated how quickly it learns and adapts.  Mistakes and improvisation seem integral to its shifting and malleable design.  And thus rather than an end, the erasure of the 2-acre camp is likely just another stage in an evolution of unique urban experiments.

What so much of the media coverage seems to miss, or to be uninterested in examining, is that although each Occupy camp shares and replicates a great deal of structural and organizational information with other occupations, each island within the movement is quite urban specific in what it is and the barrage of forces it engages.  So slipping beneath the rhetoric and the politics, here is an incomplete visual record of the physicality of Occupy Portland – both its ragged splendor and problematics – as seen just prior to it being cleared away to become something else.   Panos can be clicked on for full screen views.

[Above: aerial of the three downtown park blocks Occupy Portland occupied.  The radial pattern of Lownsdale and Chapman squares provided the organization upon which tents and provisional architectures were arranged.]

[The central squares became hubs of services and collective systems, including a library, children's center, a cafe (no Portland intervention could survive without one), medical tent, psychological health clinic, information center and communal kitchen.  The volunteer kitchen served up to 1,500 meals a day using food donations.]

Conglomerates of provisional, plastic architecture:

[The park's trees and light poles were used to create a nearly continuous canopy over the park as Portland's wet fall weather commenced.  When fire marshals required that all tarps be raised 12' above ground level, the entire thing had to be redone.]

Improvised infrastructure and waste management (created from within the occupation, and without):

And lastly, communication and the competing ensemble of messages:

[KBOO radio station broadcasting live from its tent in the park]

On landscape analytics vs. activism:

“I’m inclined to suggest that landscape thought can be divided into two domains:  landscape analytics and landscape activism.  Landscape analytics might be thought as the cartography of the space-time of these relations between entities or objects, investigating both how they interact to produce various local manifestations, but also to compose a “virtual map” of the potentialities or tendencies that reside within these regimes of attraction; the paths along which change in these landscapes is unfolding and possible.

Landscape activism, by contrast, is not merely a cartography of space-time assemblages of objects, but rather is the attempt to intervene in landscapes or regimes of attraction so as to form them in ways to produce particular desired local manifestations.  This work of design can range from the trivial to the profound.  It might consist of something as simple as interior design that strives to produce particular types of effects in people that occupy a room, to revolutionary transformations of social relations that through the artful arrangement of objects open vectors where humans and nonhumans become able to relate in entirely new ways, escaping claustrophobic and oppressive regimes of attraction that both quelled the possibility of these relations and generated misery for those occupying these regimes of attraction.”

And following on the heels of a discussion we had in response to Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (see the comments), Levi Bryant elaborates on the paradoxically generative capacity of words, fiction and design speculation as real or affective things within a flat, inclusive ontology of objects:

“Within the framework of onticology fictions are themselves real entities.  In my own work I am always trying to emphasize the materiality of texts and identities, the fact that they are entities in their own right that circulate throughout the world and that affect other entities and objects.  Now clearly Josoph K. in Kafka’s work is not a real person that breaths, eats, is murdered, and so on, but nonetheless The Trial and The Castle are real entities that circulate throughout the world and that affect people in a variety of ways…I lean in the direction that fabricators of fictions invent affects rather than finding them ready made, and that in doing so they invent the possibility of new collectives and forms of living and feeling.  This is why the domain of fiction is a site of both micro- and macro-politics, for it is both a site where both the imagining of alternative forms of collectivity are rendered available and the site where oppressive collectivities are maintained through the construction of dark affects.”

Read the full interview here.