With winter weather wreaking havoc in the airspace above Pruned HQ, Chicago, I thought I'd post a small portion of a VFR map that someone digitized and then overlaid on Google Maps. The map covers the continental United States plus Alaska and Hawaii, parts of Canada and Mexico, and a good chunk of the Caribbean.
Quoting the ever reliable Wikipedia, VFR is short for visual flight rules, which are a “set of regulations under which a pilot operates an aircraft in weather conditions generally clear enough to allow the pilot to see where the aircraft is going.”
As a brief aside, the super-density of the map reminds me of the “equations” inscribed at Waterfall Rocks in the Fox series, Terra Nova. A running mystery among the new arrivals to the Late Cretaceous, those sprawling rock glyphs, we fortunately learn just before the show's cancellation, were instructions on how to design two-way portals between the deep past and the far future. Given the near total indecipherability of the VFR map to my untrained eyes, its constellations of discs and polygons embedded in a fibrous mesh of vectors and cuneiforms could easily be mistaken by closet fans of the much maligned television show as instructions for trans-temporal travel.
Here's another portion of the VFR map showing the cluttered air territoriality around Los Angeles:
Surely the entire map could be marketed, perhaps in partnership with MyTopo, not as supersized wall maps but as wall paper. Specifically, use them to redecorate nursery rooms, daycare playpens and kindergarten classrooms into simulant Cubes and CAVEs to kickstart the visual acuity and muscle memory of the very young for an urban future hermetically sealed not in office cubicles but in immersive control rooms of the coming Data Totality.
In these Neo-Baroque rooms of blurred physical and virtual spaces, running crayons on the walls will be preparatory training for transiting information packets through omni-surveilled terrains.
Or these same rooms could be the training grounds for an acting career in a future Hollywood of nonstop Prometheus perversions, learning long before theater schools the fine art of gestural swording.
For your cartographic titillation, here are some teeny-tiny geological maps of volcanoes in Japan. All those magmatic parameciums fossilized in mid-slither must be quite exhilarating to see at higher resolutions (maybe not unlike these astrogeological surveys?), but unfortunately, to get the full-blown graphic thrill, you'll have to purchase them from the Geological Survey of Japan.
Specifically, Greek swimming pools. We are always reminded of them now whenever we hear news of the financial crisis plaguing Eurozone member countries. Every time, without exception, news of property market bubbles, sovereign debt, IMF bailouts, governments collapsing and violent street protests, including pipe bombs set off by domestic anarchists, not only from Greece but also from Ireland, Portugal and Spain — they inevitably conjure up Suprematist images of shimmering Aegean exclaves.
This is because, as reported by Spiegel last year, Greece has been using creative ways to boost tax revenues and lessen the country's crippling government deficit. These include using Google Earth to find the swimming pools of tax cheats.
Using police helicopters, Greece's financial crimes squad “fly over Athens' affluent suburbs and make films of homes owned by doctors, lawyers and businesspeople. They use satellite pictures by Google Earth to locate country villas, swimming pools and properties. And these tactics have revealed that the suburbs didn't have 324 swimming pools, as was reported, but rather 16,974.”
...which can abruptly make a detour to George Clooney...
If you haven't already heard, the Hollywood superstar contracted malaria while on a trip to Sudan earlier this month. He was there to observe the voting for independence in Southern Sudan and to draw attention to any humanitarian abuses that might arise during and after the referendum. He has since been cured.
No doubt a far less physically taxing way to draw attention to any conflict is through another George Clooney initiative: the Satellite Sentinel project.
A collaboration between Google, the UNITAROperational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT), Harvard University and celebrity-backed NGOs, the project hires private satellites to monitor signs on the ground that could indicate impending violence, such as troop buildup and movements. The images gathered by the satellites are being made public to let would-be aggressors know that the world is watching them.
“We are the anti-genocide paparazzi,” says Clooney.
...and further deviate halfway around the world to the Amazon rainforests...
Last year we read about the efforts of the Surui Indians in Brazil to protect their land reservation. “Almost three times the size of New York City,” their patch of the Amazon rainforest is constantly threatened by farmers, loggers, ranchers and gold miners from all sides. They've lost some of their forest to deforestation, but managed to save the rest.
In order to protect what's left, they've teamed up with Google to capture high resolution satellite images to better spot illegal activities on their land. Every inch of their forest will be mapped and displayed on Google Earth.
...before getting to the topic at hand: food.
Tax collectors, tech-savvy indigenous tribes and George Clooney aren't the only ones using remote sensing and GIS applications to monitor and catch acts of criminality. There are also the crop cops at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Aerial Photography Field Office.
Farmers may seem like trustworthy people, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking no chances. It's spending tens of millions of dollars to create an enormous computerized map of every farmer's field in America. The program is intended to make sure farmers are doing what's required to earn their government subsidies.
It's an enormous task, keeping track of those subsidies. They add up to billions of dollars each year and they go to more than half a million farmers, scattered from Maine to California. Some farmers receive payments for protecting streams and wetlands; others, for growing specific crops. In each case, the payments depend on accurate information on the amount of land involved. So the USDA has resorted to a program of overhead reconnaissance — something akin of spy flights.
We mentioned this program, called the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), a couple of years ago when food prices were at record levels. Because farmers could earn more money by growing cash crops, they started converting the protective greenbelts back into croplands. In the fall of 2007, according to The New York Times, farmers “took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.”
Then came the global financial crisis of 2008, and food prices declined. But that decline, reportsGuernica, “seems to have been an anomaly.”
The December 2010 index of global food prices compiled by the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) hit a record 215, one point higher than in the spring of 2008. In fact, some food products, including sugar, cooking oils, and fats, are now trading substantially above their 2008 levels; others, including dairy products, grains, and meat, are inching perilously close to record levels.
So we'll we see more conversion of greenbelts into croplands? And will there be that one farmer who's going to keep their plump subsidies, courtesy of foreclosed and unemployed taxpayers, while plowing yet even more riches from destroyed wildlife habitats?
But what's a post without a (regurgitated) proposal: The Distributed Bureau of Agricultural Crime Investigation.
The problem with the National Agriculture Imagery Program is that there's just too many farms and too few analysts. Actually, we don't know if there are in fact too few analysts to pore through all those maps. It may be that just one cartographer is that's needed to comb through all the maps of Kansas and can do it in a couple of days.
But why not crowdsource it? Why not release the maps (that is, wikileak them, as they aren't in the public domain due to privacy matters) to the internet wilderness of distributed grid computing, data pornographers, meme-hungry social networking sites, open source virtuality and web-savvy eco-guerrillas?
It'd be like Einstein@home, a citizen science project which last year discovered a “disrupted binary pulsar” that may be the fastest-spinning of its kind. But instead of surveying the universe for distant remnants of supernovas, the teeming Web 3.0 masses use their collective clicking power to survey much nearer terrains. Imagine thousands of Google Earth addicts as citizen crop cops panning through digital screens in search of horticultural counterfeits, hours on end trying to spot cornfields where there should be reconstructed prairie or wetlands. This may even be the only time they get to interface with that other wilderness beyond the urban periphery — with Nature — for an extended amount of time.
Protecting your tax dollars while saving the environment — and enjoying the outdoors.
Animal Architecture. With an interesting niche claimed, all it needs are more projects to post. Help them out with tips.
Delta National Park. John Bass blogs about the contested terrain of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, through which approximately 40% of water in California flows before entering San Francisco Bay and out into the Pacific. Liberally covered are aquapolitics, agriculture, hydro-infrastructure and other spatial systems, from small to large scales. Also be sure to check out the non-blog part of the site.
Subterranea Australis. One of those copy-paste blogs but we're glad it's returned after a summer hiatus, with a changed name, to copy-paste some more.
Tommy Manuel Blog. This interview with the photographer Harald Finster should help you dig in into the archives. The discussion centers on the aesthetics, documentation, preservation and rehabilitation of industrial installations.
GlobalSoilMap.net is a project started by a consortium of soil scientists to create a digital soil survey map of the entire world. It's a wildly fantastic undertaking, one which aims to provide an easily accessible tool to address nothing less than the most challenging global issues of our time: food security, climate change, environmental degradation, water scarcity and threatened biodiversity.
As avowed addicts of soil maps, we couldn't resist posting some of the gorgeous maps from the site. The maps we have selected, however, are the fading, dusty, conventional kinds — probably those saved from disintegration in some corner filing cabinets of some windowless office of some civil servant and then scanned and archived to help produce the next generation maps.
Specifically, we chose the ones of Africa, because these beautiful abstractions of geology often mask less beguiling ground conditions. In the case of Zimbabwe, its soil maps provide an illustrative history lesson on its colonial past (white farmers settled on the most productive polygons while black farmers were gerrymandered to less productive tendrils and globules) and also on its post-colonial hangover (those same polygons, tendrils and globules are the sites of violent land redistributions under Mugabe). In the case of Ethiopia and Sudan: famine, drought-induced genocide and harrowing stories of displacement.
Once finished, the digital soil maps will be freely available and web-accessible.
Depending on how much you already know about your city, this task will involve a fair amount of research and perhaps some site visits. There are three parts.
1) Confect together a fantasy itinerary for a CLUI tour of your city.
Where are the wastewater treatment plants? Where does your trash end up and where are the places they used to go? Where are the abandoned landfills, those now capped with park or forest preserves and possibly leaching toxic chemicals into underground aquifers?
Where are the water purification plants? Does your city get its water from hundreds of miles away? From another country? Where are the pipes, canals and aqueducts? Any reservoirs? Are there dams nearby? Desalination plants? Where are the control rooms surveilling the whole system?
Where is the electricity coming from? Nuclear, solar, hydro or oil? Are there oil refineries anywhere?
Where are the communication antennas showering the whole landscape with electromagnetism? Do you live in a city that's at one end of a submarine communications cable? If so, where does it enter into the continent? (Taryn Simon photographed once such entry point.)
How is your city managing to stay solidly in place? Where are the levees and flood control? Where are the avalanche tumuli, debris fields, anti-tsunami warning and protection system and wildfire surveillance network?
Any military bases nearby? How about abandoned ones? Or how about abandoned ones that's been adaptively reused or been sown with a replicant pre-settlement ecosystem? Among concrete bunkers and silos, wildlife now flourish.
Are there stone quarries, coal mines, steel mills, lumber yards, shipyards, Supermax prisons, land art?
The headquarters of supranational megacorporation? National science laboratories and testing grounds?
Look through CLUI's Land Use Database to see what could be considered CLUI-esque.
2) Map out these places.
It's simple. Just go to Google Maps, and below the logo on the left is “My Maps”. Click that link and then “Create new map”. The rest should be easy. It'll simply be a matter of searching the site and then tagging it with a placemark. The learning curve is low.
3) Let everyone know about it.
You can do so by leaving the link in the comments. If we get a good amount, we'll collect it all into a new post.
This is optional, but we do want to know about these places and so will others. It'll be interesting perusing through these fantasy itineraries, going on late-night scopic drives through CLUIrome and CLUIlondon and CLUIlosangeles. CLUIhongkong! CLUImexicocity!
This image comes from the official website of U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV). It shows the proposed rail route radioactive waste will take if and when the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository becomes operational.
As graphically depicted, it begs easy comparison to the Mississippi-Missouri river system. Rivulets and tributaries and one big fat branch sweeping across the landscape, meandering as they transport their cargo inexorably to their destination, dutifully following the laws of gravity but a lot of the times not, and with and against the will of the people.
Both are considered very important to national security and therefore must be controlled. The river, of course, has its dams and levees and navigational locks, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, but it also has a proto-nervous and proto-immune systems constantly monitoring any abnormal levels of natural activities, which, if detected, will be taken care of by a cadre of engineers. The rails will no doubt have its own security barriers, a surveillance system and a disaster management protocol.
And therein lies our main reason for posting the map: we want to propose a landscape architecture studio in which students are tasked to design the landscape of this radioactive corridor, which must be occupiable public open space, and thus will have to balance (or not) the demands of security and access.
Will they be inspired by Israel's West Bank barrier or North Korea's DMZ or both?
Will they create the country's longest and thinnest national park with an outer layer of well-infrastructured recreational area and an inner layer of restricted wilderness? Or will the whole thing be just a constructed wetland filled with Bird flu-West Nile hybrid superviruses that even terrorists are scared of?
Perhaps in imitation of Gertrude Jekyll, one designs a thick, fury border of native vegetation transcoded with phytoremediating genes. And interspersed along these rows of explosive biodiversity, in equal distance from each others like grain elevators, are sentinel towers housing landscape architects charged with maintaining the greenbelt.
In any case, if and when shipment begins, it would be interesting to travel to all those farming towns and those vast, horizon-filled counties lining the rails just to ask what the people now think of those very evocative sounds of bullhorns rolling across the landscape. Will they still be rendered nostalgic for the heroic past, half-remembering childhood stories of their great-grandmothers tending to their prairie homesteads, marking the passing of the day and the seasons by the passing of trains, sometimes waiting the delivery of their daughters' new Sunday best clothes ordered from Sears Catalog, always lulled to sleep by the distant sounds of metal wheels on metal tracks?
Will the sound still call to mind the glamorous era of American intercontinental railway journey when the dashing Cary Grant and the lovely Eva Marie Saint drank champagne in plush, oak-paneled boxcars while evading cops, spies and double agents against the backdrop of the national landscape?
Or do they now evoke nuclear holocausts, a country heading towards a post-oil crisis and Rob Lowe?
The Romantic and the Pastoral landscape replaced by an anxious terrain in constant threat of a sonic blast.
A state famously regarded as desolate but made seemingly dense and outrageously interesting in this cartoon by Roz Chast, scanned from the April 22, 1996 issue of The New Yorker. Still awesome 11 years later. But has the mosaic changed much since its publication?
National Geographic Newsreported earlier this year that “isolated tribes in the Amazon are now using satellites, computers, and even Google Earth to guard against threats from logging, agriculture, drug wars, and oil operations.”
In another National Geographic Newsarticle, we also read that activist groups in Southeast Asia have been helping indigenous communities “mix computers and handheld navigation devices with paints, yarn, and cardboard to make simple but accurate three-dimensional terrain models.” These models were then used in the courts to fight developers and in gaining political support. Already the Higaunon people in the Philippines have won an ancestral land title, and the Rumah Nor in Malaysia have stopped a major paper company from encroaching on its territory.
With Google spotlighting the continuing genocide in the Sudan on Google Earth, there is much to be enthusiastic about this synergy between high-tech geospatial technologies and human rights activism.
Unfortunately, as with any quasi-democratic government easily prone to corruption and bribery, lawmakers in the Philippines and Malaysia have re-written existing laws to require the use of GIS technologies and “anything related to measuring space” to officially recognized professionals.
While these legislative revisions do not outright forbid indigenous groups from making maps and terrain models, they effectively bar indigenous communities from making high-tech maps. As Mark Bujang, of the Iban people from Malaysia's Sarawak state on the island of Borneo, explains: “Imagine that indigenous communities who are trying to show the location and size of their native customary land in court are not able to do so unless they get someone who is licensed and registered. This is not possible, because most of the licensed and registered surveyors are working with the government or private consultant firms, [and] the latter costs too much for the communities.”
Terrorists attacking British bases in Basra are using aerial footage displayed by the Google Earth internet tool to pinpoint their attacks, say Army intelligence sources.
Documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google.
The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked.
Written on the back of one set of photographs taken of the Shatt al Arab Hotel, headquarters for the 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group, officers found the camp's precise longitude and latitude.
“This is evidence as far as we are concerned for planning terrorist attacks,” said an intelligence officer with the Royal Green Jackets battle group. “Who would otherwise have Google Earth imagery of one of our bases?... We believe they use Google Earth to identify the most vulnerable areas such as tents.”
Gorgeous renderings of the geology of the Martian and lunar polar regions, just the right patterns to replace the rose windows of Notre-Dame. Because surely there's something more transcendent when one is lit with the creative primordial forces of alien landscapes, your entire body aglow with abstracted asteroid impact craters, volcanic ejecta and ancient river channels, rather than with dubious hagiography and occultish propaganda. Right?
Far from merely inducing or aggravating a pathology for RSSpectating in global disaster events, the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System “combines existing web-based disaster information management systems with the aim to alert the international community in case of major sudden-onset disasters and to facilitate the coordination of international response during the relief phase of the disaster.” Although unless you have access to their alert-notification and interactive components (e.g. Virtual OSOCC), you will probably just end up fetishising humanitarian crisis into another Edward Tufte poster.
And there's also UNOSAT, a United Nations programme whose goal is “to make satellite imagery and geographic information easily accessible to the humanitarian community and to experts worldwide working to reduce disasters and plan sustainable development.”
For instance this map assessing the wholesale destruction of housing and businesses in Harare, Zimbabwe during Mugabe's urbicidal Operation Murambatsvina.
With ike™, you can gather incredibly rich, georeferenced spatial data sets with point-and-click precision and ease. Packed inside its relatively tiny but rugged casing reside a mobile GIS with a GPS, a digital camera, a compass, an inclinometer which eliminates the need for a tripod, and a laser distance meter. The laser, in fact, also eliminates the need to be on site, allowing for data collection to be conducted from as far away as 1km. The perfect accessory for The Bleex.
In a disaster scenario, for instance, you can photograph and map out the location of breached levees, downed electricity pylons, impassable points on roads and bridges, pockets of survivors, etc., all at a safe distance, then quickly disseminated at headquarters or analyzed on the field by yourself. And the photos, hopefully, should prevent, or at least reduce, the lies and obfuscations at future congressional hearings.
All it needs then is a blog editor and a wireless internet connection. Bloggers embedded as citizen soldier-engineers in post-apocalyptic disaster zones. Reading the terrain, directing aid relief traffic.
Once, for a school project, I was tasked to delineate the border of a large waterbody in a wetland using an ancient GPS device, getting as close as possible to the water's “edge,” whether accessible or not, and shouting at frequent intervals the coordinates to my partner. This had to be done a second time, in fact, after originally misreading the “edge” entirely — only to end up with mildly accurate, incomplete data sets, which someone then painstakingly entered into ArcGIS. Suffice it to say, with ike™, the entire process would have quickly produced far more extensive and far more accurate information. And also been a lot less wet.
From the Geologic Map of the Uruk Sulcus Quadrangle of Ganymede in which “[a]lbedo, surface morphology and texture, and crater densities were the principal characteristics used to distinguish one unit from another, following planetary photogeologic mapping conventions. Crosscutting relations were used to determine the three-dimensional relations between units. However, unlike the terrestrial planets, for which the techniques for planetary geologic mapping were developed, Ganymede has landforms that, apart from impact craters, are largely structural features. Although every effort was made to identify individual material units, the map has as much in common with tectonic maps as with geologic maps on which units are distinguished in terms of lithology and age. Thus, on this map some units of the same apparent lithology and age are distinguished from one another by different surface features.”
One cannot help but imagine that a thousand years from now, after Ganymede has long been terraformed and colonized, our ancestors may be in the midst of a civil war borne out of border disputes and conflicting claims of territorial legitimacy, the legacies of an imprecise quadrangle map.
Future Jovian israeli-palestinian warfare as a function of geomorphological abstraction. Terrorism as an offspring of ancient mapping iconography.
Fisk and his endlessly fascinating geological investigations will surely return in varying permutations, recognizably or otherwise, throughout the new year. So please visit often and stay awhile.
Simply because they're truly awesome, here are two more maps from Harold N. Fisk's 1944 Report. I'm a huge fan.
One wonders if the Army Corps of Engineers will ever learn that treating rigidity and permanence as design orthodoxy in a landscape where instability and suppleness are supreme can only lead to catastrophic consequences, no matter how much federal money are pumped into their projects. Perhaps they have, but I see little evidence of this. And to think that India and Bangladesh, in their attempts to control the Ganges and Brahmaputra, are looking to the corps for ideas and models.
“The 1748 Nolli map of Rome, regarded by scholars and cartographers as one of the most important historical documents of the city, serves to geo-reference a vast body of information to better understand the Eternal City and its key role in shaping Western Civilization. The Nolli Map Web Site introduces students to Rome and the structure of its urban form; it illustrates the evolution of the city over time; and it reveals diverse factors that determined its development. Above all the Nolli Web Site is intended to provide a vehicle for students and teachers around the world to explore and facilitate creative thought.”
Besides illustrating the relationship between Roman buildings and public space, the Nolli map is intriguing in the way it reveals the city's highly choreographed built environment beneath a seemingly irrational city planning. Fascinating, too, is the depiction of villas and their formal gardens inside and outside the walls. There is much to play around with and many interesting read.
Harold N. Fisk's 1944 monumental tome on nature at its most mundane and sublime is, amazingly, available online and free. Landscape architects in every specialty have much to glean from it, not the least of which are water engineering techniques, ecological and geological processes, graphic representation, and the ideological and philosophical implications of reconstructing the Mississippi River.
The maps, scanned at high resolution and full scale, are some of the most beautiful I've seen.
The following files are hosted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
