Lord Smith of Finsbury, the new head of the UK's Environment Agency, talked to The Independent about a wide range of issues, but this is what he said about coastal erosion, the government's defense plans, and why those plans may involve abandoning parts of the British coastline to the sea.
“We know the sea is eating away at the coast in quite a number of places, primarily – but not totally exclusively – on the east and south coasts. It's a particularly huge issue in East Anglia, but in quite a number of other areas as well.”
Lord Smith, a former culture secretary, promised to do his “level best to try to defend communities where there are significant numbers of properties under threat and where it's possible to find engineering solutions”.
But he said the agency, working with ministers, would have to identify “priority areas” and warned: “We are almost certainly not going to be able to defend absolutely every bit of coast – it would simply be an impossible task both in financial terms and engineering terms.” Suggesting that parts of north-east Norfolk and Suffolk faced the most immediate danger, Lord Smith promised to work closely with the communities involved to achieve as much “consensus” as possible over which coastal stretches to protect.
He said: “We will publish next year details of the work that's been done, where we think the particular threats are, where we think there is current defence in place. We will begin to talk with communities where we think defence is not a viable option.”
He also said ministers could no longer rely on insurance companies to cover families who lost their homes, suggesting they would have to be rehoused at taxpayers' expense. He said: “We need to start having a serious discussion with government about what options can be put in place.”
It would seem that though the British coast managed to keep the Spanish Armada, Napoleon and Hitler away from its sands, it will not be able to stop the rising sea.
In any case, it's not really earth-shattering news and, as it is another instance of politicians giving sound bites rather than actual specifics, nothing new as well, but given the opportunity afforded by a related and current bit of news to post photos of the armored beaches of Happisburgh under assault by the North Sea, we'll take it.
Meanwhile, we are reminded of an article published in the The Guardian nearly two years ago. It's about two coastal villages — Kilnsea in Yorkshire and Happisburgh in Norfolk — whose coastal defenses were crumbling, becoming infrastructural ruins in a Picturesque water garden, as it were. Both villages were told by the government that their groynes and revetments were not going to be maintained, essentially putting their community at risk and turning their homes into worthless real estates.
However, Kilnsea managed to secure funds for flood protection, because it has businesses to protect and “a fair share of forceful and articulate inhabitants” who, supposedly, know “how to play the system.” No money is to go to Happisburgh, because it has “poor houses” and the “cost-benefit ratio is too high”.
One must wonder here whether Lord Smith's “priority areas” will similarly be a function of political influence. Will the baron's plans be another case of money going where money is?
And only because the Olympics are in the news everywhere, one also has to wonder if those plans will be affected by the dramatic increase in construction cost of the London Olympics. It's interesting to imagine quaint hamlets by the sea turned to flooded ghost towns, because the money that could have saved them had been redirected to pay for Zaha Hadid's natatorium.
As East London gets “regenerated,” a village somewhere on the British coastline undergoes its version of cultural cleansing. While one locale gleams with “civilizing” architecture, its antipode becomes a wasteland, whose history gets obliterated and whose inhabitants gets displaced and stuffed into imported FEMA trailers, refugees not of wars but of misallocations of infrastructural funds. The eyes of the world will be directed on the jewel, and because they are weak, because they are too easily mesmerized, their gaze will not be straying too far to notice the new climate change ghettos.
Here are some more photos of “multiple lines of defence” turned into “multiple lines of disarray.”
There are other sorts of defensive armaments decaying on the beach, such as this wartime pillbox.
After having tumbled from above some time ago, it now quietly lies on the sand below, sinking, totally in submission to the slow erosional forces of the waves. Fortress England under attack not by aerial bombardment but by geology and oceanography.
More photos!
This may be the fate of all of Happisburgh: a city reduced to Suprematist abstraction. All concrete slabs, mere foundations that can't even support itself against erasure.
To repeat: all photographs are by Andrew Stacey and were downloaded from his website. For his Happisburgh photos, start here.
InfraNet Lab, the digital playground of Mason White, Lola Sheppard and Lateral Architecture, investigates “the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics,” such as enviro-veillance, Icelandic data islands, artificial wave-breaking reefs, etc. They must be after our hearts.
Several memes running through this blog come wonderfully together in Gazex®, an anti-avalanche system manufactured by Technologie Alpine de Sécurité (TAS): terrestrial augments, wilderness access, urban/wild interface, disaster urbanism, climate change and (admittedly a stretch) fountains.
From a distance, they look like disembodied talons jutting out from the rockface, ready to prick at imminent disasters. With their array of remote sensors, they are constantly reading the landscape; the mountains are kept under constant surveillance, lest they want to endanger quaint Alpine hamlets and new luxury ski resort developments above Denver or lose skiers to the wintry wilds.
When an avalanche is deemed likely, it detonates a mixture of oxygen and propane gas in its explosion chamber. The resulting hot gas is then directed downwards to the zone at risk.
TAS describes their product as the best avalanche prevention mechanism, as there are “no explosives to handle and no personnel interventions in or near danger zones.” But will there be any market for it in the near future? At least in the Alps, demand may soon vanish due to “a change in the large-scale weather pattern.”
In the late 1980s, there was a dramatic step-like drop in the amount of snow falling in the Swiss Alps. Since then, snowfall has never recovered. In some years, the amount that fell on the plateau between Zurich, Bern and Basel was 60 per cent lower than was typical in the early 1980s, says Christoph Marty at the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos. He has analysed snowfall trends spanning 60 years and adds that the average number of snow days over the last 20 winters is lower than at any time since records began more than 100 years ago.
The future of winter tourism in the region is looking grim.
Maybe TAS should start manufacturing artificial snow machines? Preferably not.
Should you want to see it in action, you can download this video. There is another, but that file may be corrupt, as it won't unzip for us.
Thankfully, N.E.E.D., whose entry was awarded First Place, provided us with images of their winning proposal: “an aquaculture-driven floating park, inlaid with combinational modules of public indoor programs.”
“South Street Seaport,” writes N.E.E.D., “has always been closely connected with infrastructural industry of the city. Being a port and a market for fish, it actively switched its urban structure according to development of transportation modes and storing methods of goods. To continue this historical trajectory of being a highly responsive urban district, the project proposes a fish farm(works), where the future of aquaculture actuates the next transformation phase of the area.”
But fish grown in the waters of New York City? Somehow locavores might still prefer frozen fish trucked in from afar over fresh ones from the East River. There is a “sustainable water purification system,” though the way the project statement reads, one is made to think that this is for cleaning water that has been contaminated by this near-shore aquaculture and not to sanitize river water for use in the farm.
Nevertheless, as with any ideas, this shortcoming can easily be resolved with further development.
One wishes here, though, that the spongy, osseous kelp forest underneath was extended above the water line: a spongy, osseous rain forest within which fishes swarm. New York's new skyscraper-aquariums.
Still, we do like the idea of extending the territory of Manhattan, a phenomenon not without historical precedence. You could even push the entire edge all the way out with these “half-submered pontoons,” thus stitching the island and the other boroughs together.
While everyone above enjoys the floating park and its many programmed cabinets de verdure, and amidst hilarious territorial disputes over, say, where Manhattan begins and Brooklyn begins (or vice versa), an aquatic eco-machine purifies the water below to a level that 1) eating its locally grown fish will not physically and psychologically repulse people; 2) urban agriculture moves away from the grotesquely expensive real estate of Manhattan into the less(?) expensive real estate of the tidal estuary; and 3) when there's an architecture biennale/festival in the city, someone will stage The Continuous (Sushi) Picnic.
Research into Lou Gehrig's disease has demonstrated that, at least in mice carrying the associated genetic mutation, this neurodegenerative disorder can spatially manifest itself as “very subtle” but detectable behavioral patterns before the onset of symptoms.
Quoting at length a press release from the American Psychological Association:
Researchers led by Neri Kafkafi, PhD, of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, part of the University of Maryland's School of Medicine, mathematically analyzed about 50,000 predetermined movement patterns that resulted when rats roamed freely, one by one, in a small arena. The software created an abstract space defined by combinations of behavior such as speed, acceleration and direction of movement. Mining the resulting behavioral data enabled researchers to test many more facets of behavior than they could analyze manually.
After videotaping the movement of two groups of rats – one type with the mutation that results in an ALS-type syndrome, the other type normal controls — the scientists used the computer to "pan" for differences between groups and identified a unique motor pattern in mutant rats two months before disease onset (which would equate to roughly five to 10 years in humans).
Of the multitude of behavior patterns analyzed, the predefined "heavily braking while slightly turning away from the wall" showed a group difference. In two independent data sets, rats with the ALS-type mutation were significantly less likely than controls to brake and turn from the arena wall as they approached.
The benefit of this study is that “by being able to predict more accurately which carriers may express the disease before they experience symptoms (the 'premorbid' state), researchers could test medicines that might prevent symptoms from emerging.”
One wonders whether this sort of research, somewhere down the line, will result in public places getting littered with CCTV cameras data mining for the tell-tale signs of genetic diseases affecting motor functions. Similarly when traffic cameras take a photo of your license plate when you go over the speed limit and then get your ticket in the mail a couple of days later, these outdoor medical scanners take a photo of your face, match it up to a database at the CDC and a couple of days later, you get a diagnosis in the mail.
There will be a specially outfitted plaza where those without health insurance can get their free check-ups. Those with no more sick days can simply walk pass through on their way to work or linger about during their lunch breaks. Hypochondriacs will come in droves and stay there, like skateboarders to a Brutalist plaza.
If there is a predictive behavioral pattern to a pedophile's movements within the spatial confines of playgrounds and parks (that is, if children still go outdoors anymore) as well as the streets bordering schools, you get a court order to receive some psychiatric counseling.
Do terrorists have a genetic mutation that not only affect their cognitive reasoning but also their motor functions, the pattern array of which is so perceptibly different with that of non-terrorists that you can “spot” them?
We're always suckers for interesting lines drawn on a map, so we cannot help but complement our earlier post on the radioactive waste transport routes to Yucca Mountain with this map of the “NASCO Corridor focus area.” It primarily shows existing transportation infrastructures linking the three NAFTA trade bloc countries. Collectively, they are sometimes nicknamed as the NAFTA Superhighway.
The term may also refer to a mythological highway that, according to The Nation, is imagined to “be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else.” Gap jeans stitched together by little Indian kids? Nonunionized illegal immigrants? Lead-painted toys from China? Cocaine? CLUI tourists?
In any case, this other NAFTA Superhighway, as a matter of cultural geography, sounds incredibly interesting.
Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation's Wal-Marts.
In reading BLDGBLOG's post on urban infrastructure as a source of nightmares, one wonders if this is an actual nightmare, a real one collectively dreamt up by the Midwest. Each night, up and down I-35, people violently wake up from the same dream: a road “slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat.” They all wish they were dreaming about Freddy Krueger instead of a pack of migrant labors moving in the cover of darkness en route to harvest fields in Iowa.
Or more interestingly, it's the projection of East Coast progressives; it's what they think these people are having or should be having nightmares about.
Better yet, it's the wet dreams of NASCO, Wal-Mart and other multi-national business coalitions.
