Here now is the fantasy table of contents for the fantasy second issue of Buttology, a fantazine for the spatial study of waste.
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Examining The Waste Stream “Garbage is the effluent of our consumption, and it flows backwards through the landscape of Los Angeles. Unlike liquid wastes, which drain downslope to the sea, the tiny tributaries of trash, from millions of homesteads, collected by a fleet of thousands of trucks circulating in constant motion, hauling to nodes of sorting, distribution, reuse, and, finally disposal, flow up the canyons and crevices to the edge of the basin.”
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No Island is an Island Mining and exporting its rich deposits of phosphates, formed from bird shit deposited over thousands of years, the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru had for a time the highest GDP per capita. But with the depletion of its major natural resource and the mismanagement of the trust fund set up to provide for its post-phosphate future, the country now has one of the lowest. It wasted away its island in return for not much.
To keep its economy afloat, it allowed the creation of secret offshore banks. Some of these banks' headquarters are no more than shacks, but through one of these shacks in 1998, “Russian criminals laundered about $70 billion, draining off precious hard currency and crippling the former superpower.”
In 2001 until 2007, Nauru agreed to settle Afghan and Iraqi refugees fleeing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and seeking asylum from Australia. With the millions of dollars in aid the government received in return, one would have expected decent accommodations for them, but living conditions were not much better than those at Guantanamo.
And then there was that deal it made with the United States to set up safe houses in China for North Korean defectors.
Frog's Dream “[T]he Frog’s Dream project attempts to re-establish a sustainable relationship between city and suburbia. It proposes to transform the vacant McMansions, at the periphery of cities, into eco-water treatment machines, commercially known as Living Machines, in which a micro-ecosystem of plants, algae, bacteria, fish and clams are present to purify the water. A micro-wetland ecosystem will be formed around these mansions to sustain larger wetland animals and plants. The project also involves transforming the highway system into a multi-functional infrastructure that transports cars, trains and bikes, as well as forming a network to facilitate water transport between a city and its surrounding suburban wetlands.”
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puRE “The peri-urban Revitalization Element [puRE] is a catalyst for fostering sustainable development within existing suburban areas, by re-envisioning a classic suburban icon—the swimming pool—and transforming it into a productive, water-treating element within a community.”
Q: Are there any ways to use the large amount of human waste generated by New York City for the common good, like turning it into drinking water or compost, for example, that would not require a huge financial commitment or a significant change in infrastructure?
A: Human waste is such a misnomer. It is an extremely useful product. As you point out, it can make biogas, for a start. In China, 18 million or so households get their cooking fuel by linking their latrine to a biogas digester (an airtight underground tank), tapping off the methane and cooking with it. It cuts down on deforestation and is cheap and infinite. There is really interesting stuff going on in Europe, too, where Lille in France, Stockholm in Sweden and a few other cities are running buses and taxis on biogas produced from sewage and household garbage.
In fact, the only waste about human waste is that it goes to waste; even in the 19th century, Karl Marx calculated that London was losing a fortune by throwing all that potential fertilizer away into its water system.
But back to biodiesel: Yes, there are companies working on that, including one in Canada which you can find if you search online for “biodiesel” and “human waste.” The trouble with sewage as an energy source is that the technology for now — even though it’s ancient (Marco Polo reported seeing biogas tanks in China in the 13th century) — it’s not yet cost-effective. Some wastewater treatment plants get gas or electricity from the process, but by no means all. It is often seen as prohibitively expensive, especially when the plants are struggling to run and meet all sorts of regulations.
Money is going into the wastewater infrastructure from the federal stimulus bill, which is great, but I would like to see more of it dedicated to exploiting this chronically and acutely undertapped source of energy. It will cost money, but so did putting in the infrastructure in the first place, and it will probably pay its own way eventually. It’s definitely a chronically and acutely underexploited source of energy.
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Dying in the Dying-field “Dying-places are ordinarily in homes or in hospitals, but this poor fellow has neither a home nor a hospital in which to die. We are here in a vacant space near the river—a sort of common littered with refuse and scavenged by starving dogs. It has been named the Dying-place, because poor, starving, miserable outcasts and homeless sick, homeless poor, homeless misery of every form come here to die. The world scarcely can present a more sad and depressing spectacle than this field of suicides; I say suicides, because many that come here come to voluntarily give up the struggle for existence and to die by sheer will force through a slow starvation. They may be enfeebled by lingering disease; they may be unable to find employment; they may be professional vagrants; they come from different parts of the city and sometimes from the country round about. They are friendless; they are passed unnoticed by a poor and inadequate hospital service; they become utterly discouraged and hopeless and choose to die. Their fellow natives pass and repass without noticing them or thought of bestowing aid or alms, and here it is not expected; they have passed beyond the pale of charity; it is the last ditch; they are here to die, not to receive alms.”
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Tips for the next issue will be much appreciated. We're especially looking for built works, thesis projects, entries submitted to (ideas) competitions and proposals of a highly speculative nature.
Aresa, a Denmark-based biotech company, had genetically modified thale-cresses and later tobacco to change color when their roots come in contact with a chemical released into the soil by decaying explosives. This new technology promised to become a cheap and safe method to detect landmines, which still injure and kill thousands of civilians each year.
But the company felt the market potential of its land mine plants was declining. It would take a few more years to develop the technology, and mine-clearance machines, according to them, has already gained “official status as the preferred mine-clearance method. Mine-clearance machines are able to clear larger areas more efficiently, which has led to falling prices in mine clearance.” Consequently, they decided to focus on “investment in mine contaminated land in Croatia” — real estate, in other words.
Aresa will still work towards de-mining its properties, no doubt using those mine-clearance machines. So probably unrealizable now are some of the more beguiling methods they would have used (or not) to broadcast their botanical sensors, such as misting mine fields with a GMO gas cloud. And using cargo airplanes: instead of carpet bombing them with high explosive TNTs, they'll drop cluster seed bombs, which disintegrate a few feet above the ground before showering these killing zones with transgenic seeds. Re-bombing landscapes to save thousands of lives.
One item that we ended up not including in our survey of reclaimedunderspaces is a proposal by West 8 “for transforming the 10.8 km disused railway line surrounding the city-heart of Gwangju [South Korea] into a usable green corridor.” One element in their proposal is a botanic bridge containing massive concrete tree-pots planted with representative samplings of indigenous Korean flora.
Which would creep along the entire length of the redesigned railway line in staggered but graceful steps. A forest on move and on the prowl for new vistas, rustling their branches and leaves melodically with their own velocity.
Or not.
On rooftops across the city and with binoculars on hand, people will wait for these walking shrubs to pass by and try to identify one or all of the specimens, which would be changed periodically. Treewatching. It's the new urban hobby.
This is a quick survey of sorts in three parts. The firsttwo parts covered built projects. This last part contains two unrealized projects, one a student thesis project and the other a masterplan for a major urban revitalization program.
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Published in 306090 07: Landscape within Architecture (2004) is Hans Herrmann's Public Domain and the Dispersed City, his thesis project at Clemson University. Sited at the intersection of Interstate 85 and Interstate 285, also known as the topologically knotty Moreland Interchange, in Atlanta, Georgia, this project aimed “to provide new forms of access to the space of the interchange through the introduction and incorporation of an urban park. As a device, the park is designed to bring focus and articulation to the roadway’s existing status as a public monument.”
Because this issue of 306090 is out of print and used ones are rather expensive, we'll quote a good chunk of the article, specifically the part about “organizational tactics”:
The park is arranged according to three structuring systems. One system is made up of a network of paths and event pads or surfaces that define activity zones both on and above the ground plane. The paths link event pads located throughout the park, while also carrying services that may be used to delineate individual event spaces. Power, water, and other utilities are supplemented by secondary sets of inlays (e.g., information-conveying conduits such as telephone lines, DSL, satellite feeds) that are accessed through the paths and pads. The pads and surfaces are paved, inlaid, or sometimes planted. To promote varying forms of occupation, the pads feature points of connection to the utilities supplied through the adjoining paths.
Throughout the course of a year, the paths and pads are opened and closed by a second structuring system: a carefully maintained program of plantings. The continual redefinition of space by shifting vegetation ensures a constant revitalization of the park as new venues and points of interest become available and familiar ones are closed off. In doing so, the park becomes a barometer of sorts through which the seasonal events and traditions of the city may be observed.
Given that the space of the interchange is largely conditioned by the daily cycle of traffic, time becomes the third structuring system. As conceived, the park has two temporal modes. The first is a twenty-four-hour park, comprised of the indeterminate spaces and events supported by the paths and pads, as well as the everyday points of operation such as service stations and welcome centers. The second mode is a carefully defined and choreographed set of events and venues that operate on a pre-determined timetable. That schedule is governed by a calendar of events decided upon by the city and its parks and recreation council. Those systems will function simultaneously to allow for overlaps of use and occurrence to take place while within the space of the interchange and the city at large.
As a civic construct, the proposed park supplements the interchange by supplying it with new opportunities for access. Functioning in many different ways to serve the public, the park and interchange attempt to bring dialogue to, and between, the occupants of both spaces, while fostering a dynamic layering of activities and interactions.
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The East River Waterfront Esplanade and Piers is a planned series of public spaces below and in the vicinity of F.D.R. Drive, an elevated highway on the eastern edge of Lower Manhattan.
The masterplan was developed by multidisciplinary teams that included Ken Smith Landscape Architect, SHoP Architects, several engineering firms and the planning and transportation departments of New York City. You can download it from here.
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Now it's your turn to let us know in the comments (or on twitter — @pruned) what similar “reclaimed” spaces below still functioning highways, bridges and rail lines that we have missed.
We're paying a return visit to the Center for PostNatural History, this time for Permitted Habitats, their infographic on genetically modified organisms allowed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for field tests since 1987. This map shows where these neo-florae have been released into the environment, which institutions have applied for the permits to conduct the experiments, and what enhancements these organisms have been engineered with, for instance, drought tolerance and fungal resistance.
Having taken many joyrides over the years throughout Illinois, which according to the map has hosted many of these real world trials, we may have driven past by one or two of these plots. But we wouldn't know. Some protocols may have been set up so that no rogue environmentalists will come and uproot the plants, say, electrified fences or surveillance sensors, but perhaps the best form of quarantine is anonymity and apparent ordinariness. One passes by them oblivious, because they are as unremarkable as the next hundreds of thousands of rows of corns. But of course they're not. To once again borrow from Trevor Paglen, these are genomic dark spots in the landscape, fully alight with the Midwestern sun.
One of the things we like about this map is how the icons pop in and out, sometimes massing together and swelling to shroud an entire state before desiccating gradually. Quiet passages of solitary icons here and there, then a massive pileup; transgenic thunderstorms developing over some skies somewhere, possibly flooding an uncontaminated gene pool with a deluge of foreign DNAs. It's like watching the time-lapsed maps of The Weather Channel.
Or the as yet uncommissioned The Transgenic Weather Channel. Instead of actual meteorological events, it will track these genetic fringes, these dark topographies shrouded in secrecy by Big Agro, Big Pharma and their patent lawyers, for any signs of quarantine breaches. When something jumps over the fence, periodic bulletins will be issued.
High 70s. Clear in the a.m. Thick fog of insulin pollen in the p.m.
This is a quick survey of sorts in three parts. This is the second part.
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Covering about 7.5 acres under Interstate 5 in Seattle, Washington, is the I-5 Colonnade Park. Weaving through this concrete forest are trails, pedestrian crossings connecting two neighborhoods, an off-leash dog park and a couple of picnic areas. A major portion of the park is a series of mountain bike skills trails constructed by the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance and its volunteers.
This park, together with Burnside Skatepark, pictured above, is an instructive contrast to the super-designery landscapes in the first part of this quickie survey. It suggests a way to rehabilitate these forgotten, dark urban spaces without eradicating heterogeneity and fostering exclusion, which often accompany so many regeneration projects. This park is “dirty,” not Dutch, but thrives nonetheless.
A short documentary about the mountain bike park can be viewed here.
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Raumlabor's Spacesbuter is a mobile pavilion made of “an inflatable bubble-like dome that emerges from its self-contained compressor housing. The dome expands and organically adjusts to its surroundings, be it in a field, a wooded park, or below a highway overpass. The material is a sturdy, specially-designed translucent plastic, allowing the varying events taking place inside of the shelter — dance parties, lecture series, or dinner buffets — to be entirely visible from the outside and likewise the exterior environments become the events’ backdrops.
“When inflated, the dome has proportions of 65.5 feet deep, 33 feet wide and 21 feet high. The space is highly adaptable and will morph depending on the surrounding environment. It merges with its surroundings: enveloping lampposts and trees while yielding to building facades or nearby vehicles.”
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Looking like a den for muggers awaiting lost pedestrians retracing one desire line after another in the hopes of finding an escape route is West 8's Carrascoplein. Located underneath railway tracks on the outskirts of Amsterdam, the park (perhaps landscaped boulevard is a more apt term), as described by Ian Bourdain, is “made up what initially appears to be little more than an artificial wooded landscape: grass and asphalt surfaces littered with cast-iron tree stumps lit up from within. At night, the latter glow and cast shadows over the concrete columns and undersides of the overhead bridges. The effect is at once calm and unsettling, at times empty and eminently ignorable (especially during the day), and at others (particularly after nightfall), ambient, moody and almost unsettling in the way that light, shadows and colour flicker across the site.”
The park may look inhospitable and barren in photographs, but Bourdain assures us that the park “has been welcomed by local pedestrians, many of whom now feel much more willing to traverse the space, as well as by those seeking an alternative urban experience – in this case, a dance of light and shadows. The risk of doing something quite strange in an out-of-the-way location has been repaid by improvements in the quality of the place and its attractiveness to people living elsewhere in Amsterdam.”
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Battle i Roig's Parc Nus de la Trinitat (1993) is located in one of the most important road networks in Barcelona. With public open spaces at a premium, the designers planned out a very dense program arranged within two semicircular bands around a central circular green space. Squeezed inside include a water channel, two tennis courts, urban farm gardens, a volleyball court, a basketball court, a mini-football pitch and picnic areas. The layout no doubt echos the presence of the ring roads; nevertheless, through grade changes, landform construction and strategic plantings, the roundabout and its traffic are visually and aurally screened out. In some areas, you would hardly think that you were in the middle of “the largest system of ring roads in the city.”
(Or actually, according to this post [in Catalan; thanks, Louis Carrogis, for the translation] and the photos contained within, the park is hardly a peaceful respite. In fact, it's in a very dilapidated state. The entrance to the park, says the author, looks like an industrial zone or a big parking lot that's far from inviting. The pool is without water, and the bathrooms and courts badly need maintenance. The landscape is unsightly. Must be the recession, drought — i.e., climate change — and opportunistic squatters marginalized from other public spaces.)
A former pick, and a favorite, is the BioSteel™ Goat, a breed of Angora goat whose genes have been augmented by the Nexia Corporation to produce spider silk in its milk — that is, its milk contains spider silk protein. This “silk milk” is purified, dried and then transformed into microfibers for use in making bullet-proof vests.
Silk spiders are too anti-social to farm successfully, but these genetically modified goats provide a way to manufacture the biomaterial on a commercial scale. There were 40 BioSteel™ Goats produced, according to Pell. Some were sold to the U.S. Defense Department, and these ones “are currently housed in former ammunition bunkers on the now decommissioned Plattsburgh Air Force Base in Plattsburgh, NY. The Nexia Corporation has since been liquidated and purchased by an oil and gas venture. The status of the remaining goats is unknown.”
Could they now be happily grazing on some pastoral meadow (sun-dappled but under a total genomic eclipse), mating with nearby flocks and still more further afield unbeknownst to their owners? Perhaps one should try to track them down, even procure the help of Trevor Paglen to map these biogeographical black spots.
