BusinessWeek on T. Boone Pickens, the “modern-day John D. Rockefeller” who “owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property.”
The New Yorker on the American lawn. “What began as a symbol of privilege and evolved into an expression of shared values has now come to represent expedience. We no longer choose to keep lawns; we just keep on keeping them.”
Off-Grid on soil power. “Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) that make use of the energy given off by soil microbes are amongst the technologies that hold promise for bringing power to developing states.”
While we are still on the subject of coastalinterventions, let us finally enter into the archives Vicente Guallart's wonderful microcoasts.
Installed on a rough stretch of the Spanish coast, these terrestrial islands enable comfortable colonization of landscapes in a state of “permanent revision,” where solid ground gives way to more ambiguous landforms.
If we can be permitted to continue our self-indulgent streak, we would like to imagine these microcoasts having been fitted with an internal fantamagical machinery that allows them to expand and contract, either following some sort of obscure, unknowable tectonic logic or in direct response to external stimuli, for instance, beach erosion and the fluctuating numbers of English pensioners.
Each one is like an orthogonal paramecium genetically modified with an Autobot's DNA, unfurling its geometry laterally or outwards into the sea, perhaps joining others of its own species to form a superorganism and in the process Spain gains a small province, before mitotically subdividing into beach furniture. For power, they graze on a diet of sun, wind and waves.
When there is no more edge, when the sea finally abuts the city, they will just migrate to new ecotonal pastures.
And while all of this is happening, you can picnic or sunbathe or set up permanent camp.
Mapping the Ecotone, Ashley Kelly and Rikako Wakabayashi's winning entry in the design competition Envisioning Gateway, is one of those things that we have been meaning to post for months.
Having earlier attempted to communicate our fascination with coastal interventions and our belief that by merely being sited on such tenuous terrain, they are by default the most interesting type of project there is, we think that the duo's project will be a good postcript to our previous post.
Their proposal is certainly among the best that we have encountered last year, and it definitely deserved its First Prize.
Kelly and Wakabayashi had a two-fold task. First, they had to develop a master plan that unifies the separate units of the Gateway National Recreation Area scattered all over the New York-New Jersey harbor. Second, within this larger scale, they had to design a new park at Floyd Bennet Field in Jamaica Bay, the result of which are seen in the images accompanying this post.
A major element of their proposal is a series of jetties and piers, rigid infrastructure in an otherwise shifting landscape. It's the urban edge intersecting with the natural landscape. From above, they look like the runways of the now defunct airport, here realigned not to direct people off to distant locales but to the site itself.
It's a simple design but a fantastically genius one. It allows park visitors to come “into direct contact with marshlands, tides and fluctuating sea levels” but, in keeping with the natural condition of the park, a place in “necessary flux,” this infrastructure vacillates between accessibility and inaccessibility.
In other words, during low water levels, you can throw around a frisbee, have a picnic or take a hike on dry ground; you can do most anything what you can at a national park or an urban park. however, when the waters come and inundate the site, there will certainly be some things that you won't be able to do. But you would then be able to fish from the jetties, do some kayaking and more — until, of course, the site reverts back to drier conditions.
The great deluge may have come but there's no reason to panic. The design being as resilient as it is, the infrastructure hasn't collapsed. The symbiotic relation between the varying ecological and cultural systems hasn't deteriorated.
This is disaster, designed.
There is an important lesson here for coastal cities threatened by sea level rise, especially cities like New Orleans. The prevailing paradigm is to separate urban settlements from the waters, to fortify against attacks from the elements. But it's a catastrophic mistake to think that one can contain something as eternally mutable as the landscape. You cannot freeze the outline of the shores or the riverbanks forever in time and place.
What Kelly and Wakabayashi are saying is open up the city to the waters. Give it a zone of transition — an ecotone — where both land and water can be occupied simultaneously.
In the abstract, replace classical notions of formal clarity and structural stability with an orthodoxy of flexibility and adaptibility.
Meanwhile, it must be mentioned that in addition to being points of access, the jetties and piers are pedagogical tools as well. As the landscape changes around them, they provide a backdrop with which one may be able to discern the various habitats, the disappearance and reemergence of landforms, and fluctuating sea levels.
One may even possibly detect the creeping effects of global warming.
In a familiar story that may yet become all too familiar to everybody in a climate-changed future, the Italian cities of “industrial Brindisi” and “elegant, baroque Lecce” are battling each other over sand.
Faced with losing the pristine San Cataldo beach to creeping Adriatic sea currents, the town of Lecce in Puglia arranged to dig up 200,000 cubic metres of sand out at sea in front of neighbour - and rival - Brindisi. But with EU-funded work set to start proud locals in the port city of Brindisi rose up in protest, with 10,000 signing a petition to stop the digging, hundreds forming a human chain along their own, eroding, beach, and fans at a local football match unfurling a banner stating: “Don't touch the sand.”
As interesting as this tale of mineral piracy is, it would be moreso if we were to hear that a landscape architecture firm has been commissioned to do some sort of project to be sited on this stretch of contested coastline.
Not only will they have to maneuver through a potentially explosive political landscape but the designers must simultaneously attend to the physical forces at work in this coastal landscape — such as beach erosion and surfzone currents — that, while much is now known about them relative to just a few decades ago, are still largely mysterious.
Maybe there is a competition for a new beachfront promenade or another Trump golf course or one of those so-called eco-towns or just a sprawling mansion for a chief executive and his family as a summer retreat from the city. The project site is no longer in Puglia but in a barrier island, such as North Carolina's Nags Head, pictured above. It's a mobile landscape, a fragile terrain always in danger of collapse, where everything is beyond the control of engineering. Entrants will have to navigate between programs of containment and resilience, between settlement and retreat, between conflicting ideas of permanence and impermanence.
And all entries will be the best projects ever. Obviously.
In any case, to return back to Italy, the deputy mayor of Lecce was asked from where the city will now get their sand after the courts ordered them to stop digging in front of Brindisi. She replied that they will import it from economically desperate Albania — which, of course, means that it will be another case of the rich exploiting the poor to maintain their quality of life, and the exploited is left with a degraded landscape.
In one of our recent climate change fantasies, we proposed that the richest and most intensive carbon producing countries should set aside “reservations” in their own territories — and not just in some arid, treeless corner of New Mexico, for instance, but in prime real estate, say, Malibu — for refugees whose Pacific island nations have been swept under the ocean by sea level rise.
Now someone has pointed us to a Wikipedia article on the Nauru Phosphate Corporation, the government entity in charge of phosphate mining in Nauru. Specifically, we were directed to the unfortunately small section about the country's long-term investments intended to support its citizens once the phosphate reserves have been exhausted.
There, we read that “the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Development group has constructed two of five hi-rise luxury condos in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. The five towers (two completed as of 10/05) are located on prime Honolulu real estate with ocean views, and represent a benchmark in Honolulu luxury high-rises. Other investments included Nauru House [N.B. divested in 2004 to pay off debts] in Melbourne and Hawaiki Tower in Honolulu.”
Should Nauru's co-investors feel charitable and transfer their shares of these luxury condos to the struggling island, we can imagine these towers, then, being granted extraterritorial status. In spacious floorplans and lushly decorated rooms, Nauru's citizens can ride out the flood in foreign land while still preserving their sovereignty, if not their island culture.
Put in some wind turbines on top, drill a few geothermal pipes into the molten underbelly of Oahu, harness the power of the waves and maybe New Nauru can become a sustainable settlement, something which its most recent incarnation was definitely not. Of course, they may have to battle their neighbors who must protect the market value of their multi-million dollar condos.
Alternatively, they could be employed as migrant service workers by the tennant associations, their wages being sent back home as remittances.
First there was Barcelona, and now Cyprus is also importing water.
Like Spain, Cyprus is suffering from a severe drought that has left its reservoirs at 7.5% full. In fact, according to Reuters, the first shipment of 40,000 cubic meters of drinking water from Greece is “more than double the quantity in all of the Mediterranean island's 17 main reservoirs.”
In this project, described as “unprecedented in its scale,” there will be a total of 5 tankers delivering water over the next 6 months, though we can't help imagine a continuous line of smaller ships of the line plying through the waves of this ancient sea for many years to come, until global warming is reversed or the Cypriots decide to leave en masse, a river encased in metal, with tributaries from other hydrologically well-endowed regions, and meandering just like any other by means of propellers.
One wonders what the geopolitical implications of this new international trade could be? Will these maritime sea lanes be considered as strategically important as the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca, in which any disruption always poses a threat to national security and are thus constantly patrolled by naval forces and monitored from above by a constellation of spy satellites? Will calls for UN trade embargo be sought against countries threatening these vital routes?
You can live without oil. You can live without high-priced rice while the current food crisis rages on. But you can't live without water.
In any case, we wonder as well what the contours of the geopolitical landscape would be like if Israel were to import water not just from the European side of the Mediterranean but, out of the gravest of gravest necessity, from its Arab neighbors also, for instance, tapping the Tigris or the already overtapped Nile? As inconceivable as this scenario may be, the reality of it is that climate change will reconfigure new artificial river valleys in the most unlikely combination of countries.
Meanwhile, instead of tankers, how about dirigibles retrofitted with solar panels? During the rainy season, they graze along the canopies of the Amazon, soaking up fresh tropical water. Enterprising landscape architects on an eco-tour of the rainforest will record their mesmerizing whirs of rotating blades — the eco-soundtrack of New Nature — and then sell the DVDs on eBay or at a farmer's market.
Come the dry season, they migrate to Cyprus and Barcelona.
