In what will certainly enrage feline lovers everywhere, Andy Beckerman and his colleagues from the University of Sheffield, UK, are blaming cats for “the ongoing fall in urban bird numbers.”
From New Scientist: “Many accusatory fingers point to the cat, and in areas of high cat density, predation may indeed be the sole reason for the decline. It might not be cats' only effect, however. Becker's team built a model that took both kills and the fear factor into account, and found that apprehension could explain the decrease even where predation is low. A reduction of just one chick per breeding pair per year per cat can lead to a fall in bird numbers of up to 95 per cent.”
Does this mean that urban ecology will simply be variegated, for the most part, by what members of the Westminster Kennel Club and the International Cat Association decide to include in their indoor menageries, and that any further decline in biodiversity will be offset by what is quarantined and confiscated at airports? Does this also mean that cats might be part of the solution to the looming Avian flu crisis?
The article, unfortunately, is too meager to provide an answer, and the source material published in the journal Animal Conservation isn't freely available online.
Nevertheless, there are two projects worth mentioning in this context. One is the Bat House Project.
A collaboration between Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller and partners, the project aims to highlight “the potential for architects, builders, home-owners and conservationists to work together to produce wildlife-friendly building design” and connect “the worlds of art and ecology to encourage public engagement with ecology issues.”
And one way of achieving their goal is to sponsor a competition. Entrants are tasked to design “a purpose-built structure that will provide the maximum diversity of specialised features to attract roosting, breeding and hibernating bats, and the possibility for visitors to engage with the bats and learn more about them.” The deadline is Monday, September 10, 2007, and the winning entry will actually be built.
Similarly exploring ways to increase urban biodiversity and augment the interface between the wild and the city is Natalie Jeremijenko's pigeon paradise, or the Model Urban Development for the Birds. We'll let her give you the tour, courtesy of Seed Magazine.
But we'll let Jonathan Glancey have the final words, though.
“Architecture and wildlife,” he wrote in The Guardian last year, “have [...] been intimately connected in most cultures around the world since the very first baked brick was placed on top of another some 10,000 years ago. Equally, animals were found within buildings, whether in stables, or, in much of the world, in the home itself.”
However:
Today's architecture is determinedly anti-animal. For all the insistent talk about “sustainability” and “green” buildings, and the huge popularity of wildlife programmes on television, animals have been increasingly pushed away from the built environment. So much so, that vast tracts of modern architectural development and urban landscaping are actually reducing the population of some of those animals we appear to be so very fond of at Christmas - if at no other time of the year. This distancing of animals, while imagining ourselves to be safe and clean inside our spick-and-span, chemically cleaned homes is, on one level, darkly comic. In many towns and cities, these same homes sit on heaving piles of maggots, rumpuses of rats, squealing mice and all sorts of other creeping things. Even the most superficially perfect minimalist Manhattan apartment, designed by the most fastidious architect, will be scuttling with cockroaches before the residents move in and take their first power-shower.
And despite our best attempts to exterminate it, the animal world creeps, bounds and flaps around us. And, unless genuinely dangerous, we should learn to welcome it into our built environment. Our homes are not just for us, or our cats and dogs, but part of a much wider, wilder world.
Before news reports of the unveiling yesterday of a digital reconstruction of Rome circa A.D. 320 swept through the wires, we have always imagined the city to have contained people. And also trees, villa gardens, roving animals and kids, garbage, loose bricks and faded paint, pornographic graffiti, inclement weather, migraine-inducing smells and noises, sewage and stormwater underfoot, and prostitutes and their pimps — all swirling together in the urban vortex.
Enlightened as we are now by Rome Reborn 1.0, we realize how fundamentally wrong we were. Walking through the streets of the city back then wasn't really like walking now through the jumbled street maze of Varanasi, that frenetic, sometimes stultifying, temple-field Hindu holy city on the banks of the Ganges in India. In actuality, “the state of our knowledge about the urban topography of ancient Rome” tells us that it was verifiably spacious, its architecture pristine, the center of the world inhabited by no one.
And “about how the city looked,” “students or the general public” will be taught that navigating through “the alignment of built features in the city” was a breath of fresh air with cool winds tickling your hairy arms, the sun safely lighting your back to fend off murderers, thieves and whores, and the soothing operatic sounds of modern Europe drowning out the howls and the din of ancient city life.
Of course, we could be wrong and might not yet have heard that the reconstruction team, realizing that no new insights can be gained from their expensive simulation without the everyday physical marks of urban habitation, or urban violence, will be bringing in game designers from EA for v2.0.
SimRome 2007®. See how Romans bath; their shit flowing through the sewers; molest their slave boys while taking pointers from those Third Style porno-frescoes decorating the atrium; move from one temple to another temple to yet another temple offering gifts, etc.
Anyway, they will be hoping that the all-powerful Soprintendente will not send letters to all parties angrily demanding an apology for the use of archaeological sites as a backdrop for their violent simulations.
If you misspell Utah on Google Maps as Utak like we did recently, you will be taken to Krasnovodsk, Turkmenistan. Apparently, UTAK is the city's airport code. Some cursory searching tells us that somewhere nearby is a weather station that has been gathering data since 1883. And not much else.
But look to the right of the green arrow, and you'll see a series of horseshoe-shaped tumuli, each one measuring at least 100 feet wide, bisected at the middle, and paired with a linear mound in the front/back. The configuration reminds one of an amphitheater.
Lest someone tell us that they are simply defensive fortifications or ordnance storage bunkers or outdated meteorological instruments or the beta test site of Bush-Putin's Transcaucasian missile shield or Michael Heizer's Complex Four or ancient auroral observatories — don't!
Better to speculate than to be told the truth, right?
In any case, sensing that other places might also have their own lexical doppelgängers, which you can only navigate to via a careless mistype on Google Maps, we typed in Chiago, Ney York, New Yoirk, Califronia, Oaris, etc.
But rather than being sent to some antipodean other place, dotted with strange manmade formations that defy explanations by even the most seasoned CIA satellite intelligence analysts, Google asked us if we meant to type something else. Very irritating, to say the least.
One can't help but wonder, then, if Google is intentionally preventing us from finding these counter-sites and terrestrial obverses, and only through the most random slip of the fingers can we possibly break its algorithmic barrier and discover other Utaks. After all, online cartographers have stumbled into weirder places by accident before.
According to an Associated Pressarticle that's been making the rounds through the wires since last month, Lo'ihi Development Co. is to start selling lots in Hawaii with spectacular 360º ocean views for the introductory price of $36.05.
The catch: these prime real estates are still submerged more than 3,000 feet below sea level and won't surface for another 10,000 years. That is, if the submerged volcanic island will actually break the surface.
Nevertheless, the real estate entrepreneurs want to create “online chat rooms and newsletters to discuss everything from street names to what kind of government to install” and “hold a 'homeowners association' meeting — a boat ride over the volcano — every April Fool's Day.”
A couple of suggestions:
1) Hire volcanologists and supranational mining conglomerates to engineer island-sized earth-moving machines, which will orchestrate lava flows, earthquakes, undersea rock falls and sedimentation to (de)form fantastical landscapes of your own designs — orogenic espalier, this can be called.
2) Hire Dr. Moreau, or a similarly inspired landscape architect, to sketch out an ecological succession scheme to be carried out the moment the island emerges, and all the while recombining plants and animals into myriads of chimeric hybrids, which will further evolve as they wait for their new habitats — new landscapes, other ecologies.
We absolutely love the music video you did for Röyksopp's single Remind Me. It's brilliant, to say the least. And to say that we've seen it on YouTube dozens of times and then many times more afterwards would not be an exaggeration.
We also love the commercial you guys made for the French energy conglomerate Areva. We're not huge fans of nuclear power plants, but watching how uranium mined in Canada ends up lighting a dance floor somewhere in China via maps, graphs, isometric projections, sectional cut-outs, flowcharts and systems diagrams — all to the groovy disco beats of Funkytown — really made us want to buy shares in the company.
Have you seen the parody that someone made of the ad, by the way? If not, you guys should really check it out. It's hilarious.
Funnily enough all three videos remind us of our childhood — those groggy Saturday mornings waiting to see if ABC might again broadcast Conjunction Junction or any of the number of Schoolhouse Rock! cartoons showing us how the various parts of our bodies work; and those halcyon after-school afternoons watching Mister Rogers tour a factory and learn how familiar items like crayons, stuffed animals, spoons, and zippers get mass produced in a sort of mesmerizing Fordist ballet.
But we're not writing this open letter to tell you guys all about our television staple when we were 28 8 years old, rather to find out — if and when Torbjørn and Svein commission another music video — if maybe you wouldn't mind animating the mindbogglingly complex, insanely fascinating, intellectually stimulating, utterly hypnotic process of municipal wastewater treatment.
About 20 seconds in Remind Me were devoted to it, but we think it deserves a longer treatment, if not a full cinematic homage to the diagram. Don't you agree?
No doubt you are quite familiar with what goes on, but for the unenlightened, here are the search results from Google Images for “wastewater treatment” and “sewage treatment”. Additionally, this Wikipedia entry gives a nice introduction, although some parts might be confusingly too detailed.
Most people don't know much about what goes on at the treatment plant. For one thing, they are generally zoned out to the urban periphery. The more segregated they are from the populace, the better. The more they get unnoticed visually, aurally and olfactorily — again, the better. And yet sewers practically underpin modern civilization. Without them, it would be hard to imagine how megalopolises like New York City could have come into existence and then thrived. Their importance is such that people should sacrifice a virgin every year among the filtration towers, aeration tanks and Daphnias. Or to absolutely ensure that no empires and nations will crumble: two virgins.
Oh, sure, our readers will remind us that Chicago has a recycling facility located right next to the city's most popular tourist destination and in the shadow of Oprah Winfrey's palatial condo, but it's so unassuming, so pedestrian that it hardly draws much attention to itself. New Haven, Connecticut had the right idea when they asked Stephen Holl to design their facility. So many people wrote about it, most recently in Wired. Herbert Mushcamp wrote about it in the New York Times way back in 2001, calling it “poetically expressive”, but on Michael Van Valkenburgh, Holl's co-designer, he judged him to be “a splashy form maker but not a sophisticated thinker.” Ouch! Muschamp was probably right, but we've always wondered whether Nicolai Ouroussoff inherited his philistine indifference towards landscape architecture from his predecessor.
We're sure you don't give a fuck about Nicolai or his myopic architectural reportage, but we can't remember the last time people's shit (as a spatial concern) got this level of coverage. Ideally, the process alone should generate mass enthusiasm, but it seems celebrities need to be involved to stir interest. And even then that kind of attention is always fleeting.
And another thing, a lot of people have yet to fully grasp the often monumental task of channeling our shit from anywhere in the city all the way to these treatment plants, something that always boggles our mind. Sewers are understandably hidden. There's the issue of public health, for one, and there's also the matter of property values — Not In My Backyard, that sort of thing.
But apart from manhole covers and storm drains and maybe a bump in the road where a pipe got too close to the asphalt, there isn't a lot of surface evidence. They're everywhere, rhizomatically entrenched, and yet only when a main sewer line gets clogged and stinks up the neighborhood or when there's an outbreak of cholera or when some photogenic kid falls in and an entire nation becomes hysterical, engrossed by the endless media coverage of the heroic rescue, does this all-pervasive subterranean landscape momentarily reveal itself to us, and we wonder then where our shit actually ends up. But such contemplation should be performed on a daily basis.
So this is where you guys come in. An H5 music video (avant-doc?) will certainly get copious amount of airplay on MTV2, even if it's about sewage. Your style is eye-popping, though definitely not intellectually vacuous; it is so hyper-slick that it will inject some glamour to an otherwise unglamorous subject. Predictably, someone will upload it to YouTube, where millions will watch it. Many more will embed it on their blogs or use it to further disfigure their MySpace pages. Bored interns will e-mail it to everyone. It'll be the new viral video, ingeniously parodied endlessly by yet more bored interns. One such parody on the near nonexistent wastewater treatment of Mumbai will appear on VH1's Best Week Ever, E!'s The Soup, Bravo's Outrageous and Contagious Viral Videos, and several other pop cultural affairs programs.
And then joy upon joy, the appalling state of ignorance and popular apathy towards wastewater treatment is reversed.
We're purging our bookmarks, deleting from our browsers everything not on queue to be posted on Pruned, and storing them online here for your voyeuristic self-frottage. A cathartic vomitry of XXX-Link-Pr0n. A critique of the del.icio.us life. A commentary on blogs, bloggers, and blogging. A manifesto. A self-portrait.
A lyric poem or the lyrics to a hip hop song.
Call it what you will, we're just glad to have a bit more breathing room.
And here they all are, all linked together under the all-enveloping theme of landscape.
In between reports from CNN of Paris Hilton's impending subtopian incarceration (in a section of Los Angeles' Century Regional Detention Center reserved for celebrities, public officials, police officers and other high-profile inmates, in a cell shared with a “reckless driver”)‚ and Lindsay Lohan's upcoming 21st birthday bacchanalia (in Las Vegas, right after spending 30 days at the celebrity architecture du jour — the rehab center), we heard reports of the jet-setting TB-infected Atlanta lawyer quarantined in Denver (an accidental celebrity in a rehab center of a different kind, as it were), flown there yesterday with an escort of federal marshals.
His flight manifest immediately piqued our interest. It's a doozy.
News reports tell us that after it was discovered that he had been infected with tuberculosis and advised not to travel, Andrew Speaker took a flight anyway for his wedding and honeymoon, first to Paris and then to Greece, presumably taking sidetrips here and there. After Greece, Speaker took another flight to Rome. There, he received a phone call telling him that further tests have revealed that his TB was of an extremely dangerous form. Now placed on the US no-fly list, he decided to cirumvent this restriction on his movement by flying to Montreal via Prague — in a confined space(!) for over 8 hours(!) with other people(!) within close transmission range! From Canada, he then crossed the border back to the U.S. by car. The CDC was frantically trying to get in touch with Speaker during this time. Upon learning that he was back in the country and en route to New York, they instructed him to check himself into a hospital there.
(We want to mention that he was phoned by one Dr. Martin S. Cetron, who as the director of the CDC's Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, should definitely be interviewed.)
His travels were not yet over. After being quarantined for three days in New York, he was put on a flight — this time on a CDC-operated plane with masked passengers and crew — to Atlanta where he was detained under a federal health order, making him the first patient to be placed in forced isolation in more than 40 years. And yesterday, as previously mentioned, he was flown yet again to Denver. Whether this is the last leg of his Infection Tour of 2007, we don't know.
As dizzying as this sounds, one only needs to imagine health officers tracking down the passengers and crew, their connecting flights (if any) and their connecting flights afterwards (if any), and to their drive home with family and friends, to hotels and restaurants, and their countless passings through crowded public spaces, to realize that there's a lot to trace and retrace still.
For a cartographer, it must sound absolutely spine tingling. It's like mapping out the initial migration of the 1918 flu pandemic from Kansas to the trenches of World War I and then to the rest of the world; or plotting the route taken by the HIV virus from its incubation chamber in the rain forests of Congo and its journey up and down the Kinshasa Highway (a.k.a. AIDS Highway) before bursting out of Africa.
In what must have been some amazing synchronicity, Critical Spatial Practice reminded us yesterday about Terminal Air by Trevor Paglen and the Institute for Applied Autonomy.
Spatialized as a CIA office-cum-travel agency in Langley, Virginia, from where the Extraordinary Rendition Program is presumably coordinated, the project explores the “complex interconnections between government agencies and private contractors involved with the United States Central Intelligence Agency's extraordinary rendition program. Since the mid-90’s, the CIA has operated the extraordinary rendition program, in which suspected terrorists captured in Western nations are transported to secret locations for torture and interrogation. A thoroughly modern enterprise, the extraordinary rendition program is largely carried out using leased equipment and private contractors. These private charter planes often use civilian airports for refueling, making their movements subject to public record and visible to anyone who knows which tail numbers to look for.”
In the future Ebola-SARS-smallpox-Avian flu scourge, rendition flights for the terminally ill will be coordinated in a CDC/WHO office-cum-travel agency and carried out using remotely operated private charter planes departing from little known and abandoned airports, stopping for refueling at major international airports, where they sit on the tarmac like ticking biological time bombs.
“High over the beautiful countryside, passenger jets crisscrossed the sky, leaving white contrails behind them,” writes Richard Preston in The Hot Zone, this after recounting, in gory details, the progression of the Ebola-like Marburg virus on a man in central Africa (in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital, we read, his internal organs failed, and he “bleeds out” from every orifice).
The image of contrails crisscossing overhead, stitching distant places together, is an apt premonition of what comes later in the book — that of an outbreak of Ebola among a population of monkeys halfway around the world in Reston, Virginia, outside of Washington, DC, imported there on those white contrailed airplanes, and about to break out into the general population.
Our pustuled and hemorrhaging cargo will similarly pass over enchanting landscapes, leaving vaporous tracings for Ebola enthusiasts to track, eventually finding its way to highly specialized medical treatment centers, which from the outside look like typical suburban houses with picket fences and generic landscaping but are actually top secret Biosafety Level 4 labs.
In any case, there are other things of particular spatial interest to us.
There's his quarantine room, for instance, an isolation chamber with its own independent ventilation system, irradiated with ultraviolet lights, and where any normal conversation probably gets droned out by the beeps and whirrings of machinery, the technical mutterings of nurses and doctors, and benedictions from the worried. Or so we imagined. Who designs these rooms, one wonders. Are there any elements engineered purely out of aesthetics, surpassing any functional concerns, or is the former inherent in the latter? Is there a simulation epidemic chamber where they get tested, where one could inspect for leaks as one would assess a home inside an earthquake simulation hangar?
And there's that liminal space separating the patient from the outside world, that semi-impervious partition for preparation and decontamination. It's a zone of waiting, where one is possibly compelled to pray — Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me — while wondering what the cafeteria is offering for lunch today.
Etc.
Since we've obviously gone off in the fetid deep end, we'll mention one last thing: Wikipedia describes Reston, Virginia as “an internationally known planned community that revolutionized post-World War II concepts of land use and residential/corporate development in American suburbia.” And although the city was “planned before the term New Urbanism entered into mainstream use, in many ways it follows new urbanism guidelines.”
One can only therefore wonder here whether the Ebola outbreak represents a form of critique of New Urbanism and corporate landscapes, the same way AIDS, as Preston remarks, was an immuno-response by the earth to the human species creeping deeper and deeper into the jungle, clear cutting everything in sight for agriculture, diamonds and gold.
To put it in another way, urban planning can only be considered successful if it can spatially repel Nature's WMDs.
