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!
Inspired by a Dwellarticle published last summer — in which Geoff Manaugh, in his temporary guise as the magazine's Senior Editor, asked Matthew Coolidge, of The Center for Landscape Use Interpretation (CLUI), what makes his favorite city work — we have concocted a fantasy itinerary for an infrastructural tour of our HQ, Chicago. We, too, are interested in learning what makes the city function. From where does it get its water and electricity? What happens to our shit? What about our trash? Where is the nerve center overseeing all that traffic?
Coolidge started at a wastewater treatment plant, so we'll also begin in one, the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant. It's the largest in the world, and if you live in Chicago, this is where your shit, condoms and dead pet gerbils end up eventually after swirling for miles and miles in a vortex network of underground pipes and tunnels.
It should be noted that Stickney doesn't yet have its own Wikipedia entry. If being zoned out of the city and exiled into the fringes isn't a sign of its off-center status, then its digital absence from the seemingly omniscient encyclopedia must surely point to a collective amnesia about this critical urban infrastructure. But then again, the general public is largely ignorant about such things, seeing how we've designed infrastructure to be invisible. Out of sight, out of mind.
If Stickney somehow represents one end point of something, then one starting point may be the Jardine Water Purification Plant, the largest capacity water filtration plant in the world.
“It draws raw water from two of the city's water cribs far offshore in Lake Michigan and sends nearly one billion gallons of water per day to consumers in the north and central portions of the city,” says Wikipedia.
Though Jardine is located on a prime lakefront location, unlike Stickney, it couldn't be more peripheral. Nearby is Navy Pier, that collection of kitsch suburban mall attractions. While one is rarely visited, the other is one of the most visited tourist destinations in the city, if not the most popular. Chicago would survive if Navy Pier is leveled to the ground, but it would struggle without Jardine.
Also nearby is Lake Point Tower. Until very recently, i.e., last night, we thought that Oprah Winfrey was domiciled atop this trefoil skyscraper, the only residential structure east of Lake Shore Drive, but apparently not. Still, it was always incredibly exciting to think that when one of the world's most popular, most powerful and wealthiest women gazed out of her palatial windows, the Picturesquely framed views of sublime Lake Michigan included that unrepentant slab of pure post-industrial functionality.
Also very nearby is the future site of Calatrava's Chicago Spire, if it survives the economic crisis.
And then there's the Deep Tunnel Project, “a large civil engineering project that aims to reduce flooding in the metropolitan Chicago area, and to reduce the harmful effects of flushing raw sewage into Lake Michigan by diverting storm water and sewage into temporary holding reservoirs. The megaproject is one of the largest civil engineering projects ever undertaken in terms of scope, cost and timeframe.”
Digging started in the 1970s, and it's still unfinished. The entire project is expected to be completed in 2019.
You can watch a YouTube video about the construction here.
Another hydrological megaproject is the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, completed in 1900, when according to landscape historian extraordinaire Jo Guldi, “we used to believe that civil engineering was going to transform civilization.”
The canal reversed the flow of the Chicago River, making it the only tributary besides the St. Lawrence River through which precious Great Lakes freshwater flows out. As an artificial conduit, it's a continuing source of controversy. Calls to re-reverse the river are growing louder, as some fear (perhaps overblown) that this diversion can be used by parched Western states as a wedge argument in their a bid to tap into the Great Lakes.
One good place to see the canal in active mode is at the Lockport Powerhouse. Alternatively, you can simply walk along the canal and then segue into Lockport to explore the urban landscape of a post-industrial, Midwestern suburban town.
For some reason, we didn't think there would be a quarry anywhere near the city, but there is one, Thorton Quarry, located just a few miles south. An even greater surprise is the fact that it's one of the largest in the world.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, what is now Illinois was south of the equator, and a warm, shallow sea covered the region. Reefs were formed, and these mineralized remains of corals, algae and sponges are what's being mined. We don't know how much of the construction materials in the city comes out of Thorton, but we like to think of the highways and skyscrapers here are made of this long lost equatorial landscape.
To our complete surprise, there are actually several functioning nuclear power stations in Illinois, making it ranked first among the states in nuclear generating capacity. Not all are located near Chicago, but there is a good clustering of them around the city, including decommissioned ones. Beyond the border is a Kuiper belt of sublimely radioactive landscapes, perambulant as though caught in the gravity well of inner city Hyde Park, the site of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor.
As with any tour, there needs to be some side trips, even for one that's already off the beaten track. For instance, one could go to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Before the construction of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, its particle accelerator was the largest in the world. This is where physicists have elucidated (and still continue to do so) nothing less than the fundamental construct of Nature and the landscape architecture of reality.
We certainly missed a few places, but you'll let us know which ones in the comments, right?
Disease is in the air, so we thought we'd offer up all our disorganized musings on spatializing health by way of tags. You can scan through tidbits about the politics of pollen, disease tours, subterranean pharmlands, reconfiguring the sky to combat suicides and the hilarious 2007 World Infection Tour of Andrew Speaker.
Tagging our posts is something we have always wanted to implement here but have only recently done so when we redesigned the blog's layout. In other words, there may be some stray epidemiological posts that we haven't yet labeled — in fact, there are still so many posts that need tagging — but what has already been stamped with the health tag should be enough to encapsulate our M.O. in this subject.
Meanwhile, as we are wont to do, we decorated this post with a couple of images taken from an old New York Timesarticle about a cancer therapy using proton accelerators.
The machines accelerate protons to nearly the speed of light and shoot them into tumors. Scientists say proton beams are more precise than the X-rays now typically used for radiation therapy, meaning fewer side effects from stray radiation and, possibly, a higher cure rate.
If a particle accelerator calls to mind the Large Hadron Collider, then you can imagine the sheer gargantuan size of these anti-cancer machines. One of these machines can weigh 222 tons, costs $100 million and requires “a building the size of a football field with walls up to 18-feet thick in which to house it.” In other words, it's “the world’s most expensive and complex medical device.”
One wonders how much energy it needs, and whether hospitals had simply connected it to the electrical grid or had to build a dedicated power generator. If it's the latter, did they also put up another building to house it in?
We may be overimagining the logistics here as usual, but our minds are reeling into hyperdrive as they imagine clusters of buildings connected together by arrays of electromagnets and miles of wirings, swarming with technicians and operators, buzzing with the grinding gears of three-story tall gantries, all overseen from a cavernous control room of wall-to-wall LED monitors. And the central focus in the entire sprawling complex is just a narrow beam of invisible protons.
Given the extent some people in the U.S. are willing to go through to cure their illnesses despite the costs, and how the medical industry is an all-too willing pill pusher — and of course, these proton accelerators just prove that — we can't help but wonder when we might see a new cancer treatment regimen so incredibly complex, an entire city has to be built for it. When a patient starts treatment, it draws energy from all around, even from deep inside the earth. The whole landscape shudders and contracts.
Have you seen the planet destroyer in the trailers for the new Star Trek movie? Will it be like that, though with a finer but still mindbogglingly powerful beam? Somehow we think the indescribably absurd American health care system will make it happen and beat the equally preposterous American military industry to the punch.
Stunning news via The Associated Press. Undeterred by the stories of Dubai, the global financial apocalypse, a shaky national political system, the occasional war and sectarian violence, the Beirut-based developer Mohammed Saleh wants to develop “a 3.3-square-kilometre, artificial island shaped like a cedar tree as a major attraction off Lebanon's coast.”
This US$8 billion “paradise” would be aimed primarily at “Lebanese expatriates who have nostalgia for their country and would like to invest in it.” For reasons we can't yet process without experiencing cognitive failure, this marketing strategy will somehow insulate the project from the economic crisis.
In any case, if ever some reclusive billionaire who fantasizes about being the Rockefeller of archi-bloggers and then actually doles out patronage to these outsider spatialists, including us, we would like to use our grotesquely plump fellowship to create a sort of travel guide to the world's artificially terraformed coastlines. In the same illustrative vein as John Briscella's The Urban Gridded Notebook and Work AC's 49 Cities, we'll document with near encyclopedic breadth the fluctuating peripheries of Manhattan, Chicago, Singapore, Dubai, Tokyo and whatever cities that have undergone coastal expansion. San Francisco was once imagined with twin peninsular augments. What other cities were planned to be implanted with geological prosthesis? And what urban (hi)stories can one gleaned from these littoral recontouring?
It will be an antipode history to the future extractive history of sea level rise.
They're all out there, surveying the built and natural environments for you with whatever tools they've got, and probably having fun doing it. Go read their reports.
For our public blogroll, see our list of RSS feeds [good links] on Bloglines. Which of these you are going to subscribe to (or whether or not you are going to follow even one of them) will be up to you.
1) Choose from any of these hyper-surveilled storage reservoirs in the Pacific Northwest.
2) Excavate “teacup” basins in a plaza. Downscale their dimensions in proportion to the reservoirs selected in (1) so they will all fit within the installation site.
3) Ring the basin interior with concentric steps-cum-seats.
4) Hack into the servers of the U.S. Department of the Interior where the data on water levels at the reservoirs is collected and parsed. (Or does the bureau have an API?)
5) Re-network the flow of data from these real-world reservoirs, so that not only will the numbers get rendered into info-porn, they will also determine the water levels of your simulant reservoirs.
Corpus Extremus (LIFE+) ends today and will be capped off later tonight with some interesting lectures, one of which will be given by Richard Pell, a professor of art at Carnegie Mellon. He will talk about his Center for PostNatural History, whose mission is “to acquire, interpret and provide access to a collection of living, preserved and documented organisms of postnatural origin.”
Pell has a couple of pieces in the show. Transgenic Organisms of New York State is “a survey of genetically modified organisms that are created, bred, or exist in the state of New York,” and Strategies in Genetic Copy Prevention catalogs and displays “examples of techniques and technologies used during the past century to prevent living organisms from reproducing.”
With his creative output, Pell is trying to reimagine the natural history museum, and by extension, questions our concept of Nature. At least to our knowledge, you don't see natural history museums organizing family-friendly exhibits of bioengineered life, let alone collecting and cataloging them. (We'll be absolutely thrilled if someone tells us otherwise.) But modified living things have been part of our physical and cultural landscape for thousands of years, more so in recent decades with our ever expanding ability to manipulate organisms. On a farm out there somewhere, wheat genetically modified to resist pests better than unadulterated strains is now growing. On a pasture out there somewhere, a clone waits until its ready for its own Dolly moment in front of the world media. On a lab out there somewhere, a biotech entrepreneur is copyrighting recombined lines of DNAs before they are released into the wilds. No natural history museums are documenting this other “natural history” with encyclopedic intensity, but as repositories of knowledge, they should.
We regret not posting this sooner, as it sounds very interesting, but if you happen to be in New York in the next couple of days, we suggest you stop by Exit Art for Corpus Extremus (LIFE+), an exhibition presenting work by artists who are “uniting science and art to challenge conventional understanding of both fields.”
This exhibition and its programming covers diverse topics, among which are the “extended” and the “obsolete” body; prolongation of life; life outside of the body; patenting life; genetically programmed life; hardwired spirituality; cyborgian and hybrid life and intelligence; male pregnancy and gender roles and stereotypes that are changing with developments in reproductive technologies; scientific and artistic ethics in relation to “the Other” that challenge anthropocentric hierarchies; and last but not the least – the ethics of the biotech aesthetics, employing techniques for mere visual effect.
One of these “recombinant mix[es] of the poetic, political, fantastic, clinical, ironic and utopian” is InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies (2008) by Jennifer Willet.
Inside a portable tent, we are told, as we haven't seen the show in person, the artist “presents biotechnological materials and techniques that normally exist only within the laboratory environment. By taking actual laboratory specimens outside of their confined and secured environment, InsideOut challenges the closed relationship the laboratory has with external or 'natural' ecologies.”
This sculptural installation has an immediate resonance for us, because our most basic medium — the enclosed garden — is itself a laboratory, a space of experimentation that is physically and conceptually detached from the larger landscape. Its quasi-hermetic condition may not necessarily contribute to a highly charged atmosphere of innovation; nevertheless, gardens are fecund breeding grounds for new forms and new theories of landscapes: horticultural chimeras, fake hills, constructed views, nature as spectacle, paradise as a garden, playgrounds as antidote to urban living, landscapes as propaganda, etc. These inevitably spill over the walls, changing not merely the “outside” tectonically but also how we then interact with what is transformed. With new landscapes come new social and political systems. Just look at the experiments in mannered irregularity at Stowe and the “imagineered” hyper-reality of Disneyland and how they have influenced the practice of landscape architecture, architecture and urban design.
One has to wonder, then, what are the landscape implications of these investigations into post-nature, this blurring of the natural and the artificial, this ever increasing confusion between biology and machine, over what is life and what is non-life? What are the spatial consequences of Dr. Frankestein's monsters busting out of the confines of these science labs? What will the world look like when even our understanding of what is the body and by extension our concept of the self gets fundamentally reconfigured?
Our future selves and our future landscapes are in those petri dishes.
Meanwhile, another piece in the show is Suzanne Anker's Shelf Life (2009) by Suzanne Anker.
“This sculptural installation,” as described by our tipster David Hays, “features LED lighting panels of differing wavelengths, such as 'red' or 'blue,' above a series of aluminum 'seed houses,'” and it “functions as a food-bearing micro-system. From glow-in-the-dark plants to grow-in-the-dark herbage, new botanical technologies are rapidly developing. Proliferating due to photosynthesis, these living food production machines — plants — turn light energy into food.”
“NoArk II is intended to raise questions about the taxonomic challenge posed by the creation of new bio-technological life forms. A cabinet of curiosity, NoArk II is constructed of an experimental vessel designed to sustain living cells and tissues, alongside museum specimens of preserved animals. In a sense, this is a unified collection of unclassifiable sub-organisms, or as the artists refer to them — extended bodies.”
A couple of things related or otherwise to this piece:
1)Seed Magazine published this week an article about our symbiotic relationship with bacteria. We read the astonishing fact that there are “100 trillion bacterial cells in our bodies, outnumbering our human cells 10 to one,” and that rather than eating us alive from the inside out and outside in, some of their biological functions complement our own.
Even more astonishing, they may even be us. They are extra-corporeal organs we have been continually implanted with since birth — or to use Catts and Zurr's term, they are our extended bodies. As the article explains, “[o]ur bodies are, after all, composites of human and bacterial cells, with microbes together contributing at least 1,000 times more genes to the whole. As we discover more and more roles that microbes play, it has become impossible to ignore the contribution of bacteria to the pool of genes we define as ourselves. Indeed, several scientists have begun to refer to the human body as a 'superorganism' whose complexity extends far beyond what is encoded in a single genome.”
2) To recycle some questions asked in previous posts: if and when geoengineering as a solution to many impending environmental crises proves to be financially unfeasible, can we go “ultra-local” and hack our own bodies, for instance, to augment our own skins with photosynthetic cells to “grow” our own food — local and organic to the extreme? What will happen to farms and to other sites of production? And what new epicurean culture will this bring about?
How about modifying our intestinal ecologies in such a way that our biological waste is greatly reduced or is somehow “transformed” that our billion-dollar sewer infrastructure becomes obsolete or at least cheaper?
How about piezoelectric skins to harness enough energy from anatomical deformations to power iPhones for a day's worth of tweeting?
Basically, what we want to know is: where is biotechnology taking us and do we want to go along for the ride?
