Popular Science paid a visit to Disaster City in College Station, Texas. It isn't a city, of course, but “a vast disaster-simulation center designed to look and feel as close to catastrophe as you ever want to be. Each hairline crack, each mangled car, all the mountains of rubble are modeled on wreckage from real disasters, like the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles that killed 72 people and injured nearly 12,000. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing inspired the collapsed parking garage, with cars dangling off the sides like spiders from a ceiling, while the 12-foot-deep rubble catacombs resemble those from Ground Zero.”
This “Jerry Bruckheimer set” is where search-and-rescue teams go to train.
Saemangeum is an estuarine tidal flat on the western coast of South Korea, just south of the port city of Gunsan. With the completion in 2006 of a 33-kilometer seawall, perhaps the world's longest, it is now essentially a 400-square-kilometer artificial lake.
It won't be a lake for long, however, because this is the site of what's been dubbed as “the world's largest reclamation project.”
To put its gargantuan scale into perspective, the project site is roughly two-thirds the size of Seoul, the South Korean capital.
The last major land reclamation project in Asia was the construction of Hong Kong International Airport, an artificial island formed out of Chek Lap Kok island. At the time, 80 percent of the world's dredging equipment was involved. But at just a little over 12 square kilometers, the airport is a mere sandbar compared to Saemangeum.
The current record holder for land reclamation is the Palm Deira, currently under construction in Dubai. Saemangeum will be 8 times larger.
So what will all that reclaimed land be used for?
The original plan was to turn 70% of the estuary into farmland with the rest set aside for industries. Because of political and economic realities, however, the ratio of agricultural use to non-agricultural use has flipped. Instead of mainly agricultural, the new plan calls for most of the reclaimed land to be developed for industrial, financial, residential and tourist facilities.
Sure to excite many and appall the rest, Saemangeum is now envisioned as the Dubai of Northeast Asia.
Last year, several teams were invited to participate in an ideas competition and submit conceptual masterplans for this Korean Dubai. Last November, three teams were chosen as co-winners.
One team comprised of designers from MIT, ORG and Office dA. In their masterplan, Saemangeum is divided into an industrial North and a more leisure-oriented South.
The North is organized into a regimented system of 330 ‘landscape chambers’ – rooms of varying sizes, bounded by trees and canals and able to host multiple kinds of development. These chambers might contain factories, a science park, a university, or even a space port. By contrast, the South has the spatial configuration of a ‘constellation.’ Similar to stars in the sky or jewels on a crown, small cities are dispersed along the landscape on a series of small hills surrounded by areas of agriculture or nature, connected by roads and pointing to each other.
One of the advantages of this scheme is that “by spreading many cities over the land, transportation is reduced as industry grows alongside residential communities, rather than commuting-distance away from it.”
Another team was led by Jeffrey Inaba. Whereas the MIT team's scheme is both orthogonal and geomorphic, the Inaba team's scheme is wholly orthogonal, organized based on symbiotic pairings.
For instance, quoting one of the presentation boards, “wetlands are coupled with industry, agriculture and buildings to filter effluents, run-off and household grey water” and “alternative energy zones are paired with agriculture and water to harness energy through biomass processing and hydro-electric production.”
A third team was led by Florian Beigel and Philip Christou from Architecture Research Unit based at the London Metropolitan University.
As described by Kieran Long in a recent article of The Architectural Review, their scheme “envisages a city of islands that combines a self-consciously artificial landscape with a logic born of land reclamation and the depth of the lagoon. Beigel's work has always pursued his concept of ‘landscape infrastructure’, where the landscape is built first and helps to define a non-programmatic urbanism born of geography and typology.”
Kieran Long, as well as Ellis Woodman in Building Design, noted the introduction of existing, Western urban typologies. Implanted into the islands are Barcelona's Cerda grid, Cambridge University's quadrangles and the “kilometre style” perimeter developments of Kay Fisker’s Copenhagen, among others. This is Collage City, and this is how one might “create a sense of place out of nothing.”
These three teams will submit their finalized proposals by the end of this month. The government will then select which of the schemes to work with. It may also elect to choose more than one team or even combine aspects from two or all three masterplans in its phased development project. Or none at all.
In any case, just a couple of decades after it's finished, Saemangeum's checkered islands and constellation cities will burst out of their seawalled compound, stimulated into runaway mitotic subdivision by population growth. Like a Suprematist painting in the works, New Saemangeum will meet up with China's own territorial expansion, sustained by immigrant soil from abraded post-glacial, post-Tibetan Himalayan mountains.
Then no sooner than the two meet, climate change will come in and undertake its own reclamation project.
Israel is in the midst of a water crisis. Climate change, a rapidly growing population, extensive agriculture and a very developed industry are all putting pressure on the few and extremely contested sources of freshwater.
Desalination creates more problems than it solves, because the process is energy intensive, expensive, and besides freshwater, ironically produces highly toxic byproducts as well. Though not as egregiously unsustainable, wastewater treatment plants function under a similar ecological imbalance. More efficient and creative ways to offset water demand are therefore needed.
Ayala is an Israeli company which specializes in designing and building artificial wetlands to treat contaminated water from agriculture, industries and urban areas. The treated water will definitely not be potable, but at least it could still be re-entered into the system and be used in some way again, thus reducing the need to extract more from already dwindling supplies. And if it isn't reused and instead gets dumped immediately, at least the effluent will not pollute these precious supplies much.
We have described the principle of these eco-machines before in numerous posts, but to repeat, they take advantage of the ability of certain water plants not only to extract pollutants from the soil and water but also to render them inert. With the help of microorganisms, such as microbes, bacteria and fungi, they can take in toxins, heavy metals, greasy substances and pathogen agents. They can even phytoaccumulate and phytoremediate, to use the technical terms, substances that more technologically advanced systems cannot.
Of course, no single species can neutralize all contaminants. There isn't even a master matrix of plants and microorganism that works in every scenario. The trick is in finding the right combination that, in a sustainable manner, most efficiently removes the target pollutant and yields the purity level one is aiming for.
Ayala has been doing just that for nearly two decades and has deployed their wetlands machines all over Israel and in other places further afield. You can find them in domestic settings treating household sewage so that the reclaimed water can be used for irrigating the garden. Higher up on the urban scale, they can be found treating municipal wastewater and also the stronger stuff, the poisonous waste, from industrial sites. The company has also been involved in projects to treat landfill leachates and to rehabilitate degraded rivers.
Of course, Ayala isn't the only company applying ecological solutions to wastewater treatment. There's John Todd Ecological Design, possibly the most popular of them all, or at least the one with the most media coverage; Natural Systems International, who co-designed Sidwell's educational wetland; and Worrell Water Technologies, who holds, to our surprise when we first learned of it, the registered trademark for Living Machine®. It's a crowded field, thankfully.
But who besides Ayala is also working on contested terrain? Who could also say that their artificial wetlands have a geopolitical dimension to them? We're not saying that Ayala's eco-machines are co-conspirators, but who else could possibly say that theirs might be helping to entrench settlement of lands with varying narratives of provenance, with conflicting claims of true ownership? Who else is potentially employing Nature, albeit a Frankenstein version of it, as an instrument of occupation and hegemony, of erasure and amnesia? Who else could be, just maybe, quite possibly, after the deepest parts of our spatialist hearts?
Setting the stage for the Central Asian Hydrological War — a side conflict of the future Great Sino-Indian Hydrological War — Turkmenistan has started flooding a natural depression with runoff water funneled from the country's heavily irrigated cotton fields via a network of canals. The goal is to create anartificiallake in the middle of the desert.
Because it's called the Golden Age Lake, one wonders if the country's former nutso overlord, Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Niyazov, who dreamt up this “Soviet-style engineering feat,” and his (perhaps equally nutso) successor who's continuing apace with the project, got the idea for the name from the ancient nutso Nero and the artificial lake he landscaped for his Golden House.
In any case, the lake will be huge, almost 2,000 square kilometers (770 square miles) with a depth of around 70 meters (230 feet). Another estimate puts the lake at 3,500 square kilometers, or nearly the area of Utah's Great Salt Lake.
Project boosters say it will make the desert bloom; open up degraded areas for agriculture, thus increasing food production and security; attract migrating wildlife; and ensure the nation's water security in a region of severe water scarcity.
Critics counter by saying that the lake may never fill up, as the water will evaporate and leech faster that it could collect, leaving behind unevaporated salt and chemicals spread out all over the desert for winds to pick up and coalesce into toxic dustclouds that will cross borders into other countries.
Moreover, these skeptics predict that Turkmenistan will compensate by siphoning off water from Amu Darya river, which Uzbekistan relies on for irrigation, thus further angering its neighbors.
Unadulterated optimists and eternal give-damners will imagine the creation of a techno-utopia in which petroleum-guzzling treatment plants are replaced with constructed wetlands lush with genetically modified phytoremediators to purify agricultural runoff laden with pesticides and fertilizers; water-guzzling fields with post-botanical farms yielding record bushels from just a tiny amount of water; miles of canals that are no more than elongated salt ponds with an innovative water distribution and collection network; and an artificial Dead Sea with an actually thriving wildlife preserve, unironically dubbed the Hydrological Peace Park of Central Asia.
More screen captures, this time from a trailer of Roland Emmerich's film 2012, which looks as if it's aspiring to be classified in the bukakke subgenre of disaster porn. Retinal outbursts of apocalyptic carnage will be numerous and their delivery relentless and furious, nonstop until of course the FX shops have exhausted themselves and not because of some narrative obligations.
It would be great if some of the shots in the trailer each provided the basis for a landscape/architecture studio, an ideas competition or the instigation for a series of micro blog posts. For instance, Michelangelo's dome rolling over on top of Bernini's piazza could be the starting point for a studio in which students are tasked to formulate a master plan for a post-apocalypse Rome. They will be following in the footsteps of some of the greatest (or at least most interesting) builders and urban planners in history: the emperors, the popes and the fascists.
With such illustrious precedents, the pressure on students to outdo them will cause sleepless, sweaty and scream-filled nights. However, one will be soundly dreaming about Michelangelo's still decapitated dome, lying on its sides, fully restored and repurposed as public housing, then elevated on a rainforest of recycled columns above Bernini.
Another maybe could explore what urban lessons can be gleaned from the floating, nuclear city of USS John F. Kennedy and speculate on their applicability to landborne cities.
If you can incorporate the aircraft carrier omelette-flipping onto the White House into your proposal without getting pelted by assorted vegetables and laughed out of your final critique, you will win a very plump traveling fellowship.
And lastly, how about landscape architecture via tectonic attenuation?
InfraNet Lab continues its unbroken string of phenomenally wonderful posts with a report on stepwells, those “inverted ziggurats excavated from the earth” that were the Subcontinent's answer to the extreme seasonality of its water supply. During the too few monsoon months of hydro-excess, the stepwells would fill up and the collected water would be used for the upcoming drier months.
The stepwells also were occupiable public spaces. According to Nerraj Bhatia, “As a subterranean landscape, the base of the inverted pyramids provided a cool microclimate to escape the hot conditions at grade. As such, these became central public spaces of gathering and architectural significance. The collection of water also attracted large ecosystems of bees, fish, lizards, parrots, pigeons, and turtles amongst other species. Each monsoon would reinvigorate these stepwells and promote new life. As a functional, religious and social infrastructure, these became the central spaces for many communities to gather, bathe and converse.”
Short of purchasing the standard text on stepwells, Morna Livingston's Steps to Water: The Ancient Stepwells of India, you can read more about them in this article also written by Livingston, who says of their demise:
It was only with the British rise to power in India in the early nineteenth century, that opposition to stepwells as key elements of the Indian water system emerged. To the British, stepwells were a sanitary disaster. The installation of rural taps became a top priority of the Raj. Not without reason, the British colonialists feared disease from the mixing of bathing and drinking water; moreover, the stepwells hosted a waterborne parasite, the guinea worm.
Meanwhile, one stepwell, the Chand Baori, made a brief appearance here in a post which has been postscripted through the years.
