If the U.S. Department of Homeland Security leaves its labs on Plum Island — “America's first line of defense against foreign animal diseases” — for swankier digs on the mainland where researchers would be able to handle the most dangerous animal pathogens, what would you do with the abandoned island?
An editor for Nature offered up some suggestions, including using the site for a “future museum on Craig Venter and his synthetic life form” and an “organic plum farm,” of course. But maybe instead of giving it to Craig Venter, the government deeds the buildings and the entire island to Richard Pell for his PostNatural History Museum.
Geoff, Mette and Mark's intensive design studio on Cockatoo Island ended a couple of weeks ago, with the next one in 2011 (or so we hear), so perhaps in the interim they'll island hop to Plum Island next summer (or post-abandonment). How would students respond to this particular island, once described as a “ticking biological time bomb” located so close to so many major population centers? What projects would they confect after rambling about the place where outbreaks of three infectious diseases (for instance, the West Nile virus in 1999) were alleged to have started; where wild animals are killed on sight but a habitat for several bird species is nevertheless supported; and where the serial killer Hannibal Lecter would have enjoyed a brief respite from his incarceration but one which he sneeringly rejected?
Detached physically and conceptually from the everyday and the larger landscapes in so many ways — away from the “mainland” way of doing things and into the avant-garde realms of Dr. Moreau and Dr. No and even into the off-grid DIYs of Giligan's castaway mates and still yet into the seemingly supradimensional fantascapes of Ricardo Montalban and Tattoo: what wildly experimental terrains will they terraform?
A fantasy table of contents for the fantasy first issue of BUTT, now renamed Buttology, a fantazine for the spatial study of waste.
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The Rise of Public Composting Toilet “Installation of composting toilets in public facilities is catching on. In New York City, The Bronx Zoo and Queens Botanical Garden have been operating restrooms with composting toilets, with no need for sewer lines, for the last few years. The technology in both facilities is made by Clivus Multrum and resembles a conventional toilet, except that it uses only 3-6 ounces of water, in combination with a bio-compostable foam, for flushing.”
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Montreal’s Wastewater Treatment: A History of Problems “While it’s an impressive system in terms of its scope and capacity, the treatment process itself leaves much to be desired. In fact, it’s actually one of the worst in Canada. A national ‘report card’ issued by the Sierra Club in 2004 gave the city’s treatment process a grade of F-. The only other city to receive a grade worse than Montreal was Victoria, a place which doesn’t even have a treatment process in place yet.”
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Nomadic Spaces: The Afghan Sewer Kids of Rome “Italian police have found more than 100 immigrants, including 24 Afghan children, living in the sewer system beneath railway stations in Rome.”
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Trash Track “Trash Track relies on the development of smart tags, which will be attached to different types of garbage in order to track in real time each piece of waste as it traverses the city's sanitation system. The goal of the project is to reveal the disposal process of our everyday objects and waste, as well as to highlight potential inefficiencies in today's recycling and sanitation systems. The project will be exhibited at the Architectural League in New York City and in Seattle starting September 2009.”
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LooWatt “Today, 40% of the global population lives without toilets. In most places, scarcity of water renders sewer systems impossible, while ad hoc human waste disposal spreads waterborne illnesses that prey upon millions, and cripple developing economies. It is crucial to address the global sanitation crisis with creative solutions. While many NGOs are hard at work installing composting eco-toilets for those in need, a continual challenge is to motivate communities to look after their new toilets. By turning human waste into a high-value commodity, energy, the Gardiner CH4 offers plenty of incentive to sustain itself.”
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The Geopolitics of Space Toilets “[Veteran cosmonaut Gennady Padalka] told Novaya Gazeta newspaper that officials had rejected his request to work out on the American exercise bike during their pre-training mission. Worse than that, they had also ruled that American and Russian crew members should use their own ‘national toilets’, with Russian crew banned from using the luxurious American astro-loo.” The situation may have improved since reading this.
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Religious Freedom vs. Sanitation Rules “For the last two and a half years, Mr. Crislip, a planning supervisor for the state’s Environmental Protection Department, and local sewage authorities have had more than 30 meetings in a futile effort to persuade members of the sect here in Cambria County, about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh, to upgrade outhouses next to a schoolhouse so they comply with state sanitation codes.”
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Fez River Project “The City of Fez Department of Water and Power (RADEEF) is currently implementing a new system which will channel the city’s water sewage towards two treatment plants. Thereby, the Fez river will soon stop receiving backwater and regain its potential as a public amenity. If rehabilitated, its impact will be inordinately salient to the unique urban context of Fez. Indeed, the medina’s intra-mural population not only lacks public open spaces, but is also experiencing a rapid deterioration of its environment due to over-densification and aging public infrastructure.”
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Soft Disaster “The national obsession with soft paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra — which in 2008 alone increased its sales by 40 percent in some markets, according to Information Resources, Inc., a marketing research firm. But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.”
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Poo Power to the People “Lünen, north of Dortmund, will use cow and horse manure as well as other organic material from local farms to provide cheap and sustainable electricity for its 90,000 residents.”
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Mapping Urban Drug Use “A team of researchers has mapped patterns of illicit drug use across the state of Oregon using a method of sampling municipal wastewater before it is treated. Their findings provide a one-day snapshot of drug excretion that can be used to better understand patterns of drug use in multiple municipalities over time. Municipal water treatment facilities across Oregon volunteered for the study to help further the development of this methodology as a proactive tool for health officials.”
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Tips for the next issue will be much appreciated. We're especially looking for built works, thesis projects, entries submitted to (ideas) competitions and proposals of a highly speculative nature.
A passing scene or two in a British police drama of the garden variety gritty kind — no need to name the show, but the scenes involved its Northern Irish anti-hero of an undercover cop discovering immigrants from Eastern Europe arriving by boats on the blue-toned, cinematically tempestuous North Sea and then being sent off, if not to the brothels, to work unsurprisingly at slave wages in the commercial greenhouses of a light-deprived Norfolk, where the glass-walled foliage provides as much cover from the Home Office as the urban jungle of council estates — those scenes reminded us of Thanet Earth.
Thanet Earth, as described by The Guardian last year, is “Britain's biggest greenhouse development.” Located in Kent, “80 football pitches' worth of greenhouse” will accommodate “1.3 million plants, growing in seven greenhouses, each up to 140m in length and fed by its own reservoir.” The entire complex will be heated by seven power generating stations located on site, and any excess supply of electricity will be sent to nearby towns. It is estimated that when all the greenhouses are completed, the UK's crop of salad vegetables will increase by 15%.
It's huge, massive, perhaps so gargantuan that migrant workers might go undetected among the wild thickets of cucumbers and peppers, lost in the din of pneumatic harvesters, sonorous simulant thunderstorms and the reverberated rustlings of tomato leaves. It's just huge, massive, gargantuan.
Or maybe Thanet Earth is so technolicious, so heavily under surveillance that no stray variable can ever escape its sensors. Speaking to Will Wiles of Icon Magazine, Steve McVickers, Thanet Earth's managing director, says, “We're measuring all the time. Temperature, humidity, the amount of water in the Rockwool; we're looking at the growth of the plants, we're looking at the ventilation, we're looking at where the sun is, we're looking whether it's raining, we're looking at the wind direction. The greenhouse is constantly adjusting itself.”
Phantom EU neo-gypsies displaced by the econopocalypse, non-functioning CCTV cameras, a food crisis, humorless Dutch efficiency experts, a rogue transgeneticist, guerrilla gardeners and allotment nutters, the insufferable Jamie Oliver and the sublime Heston Blumenthal — all converging in that one giant patch of the earth excised from geography, from the cycles of time and even from itself, one day infiltrated by a Northern Irish anti-hero of an undercover (food) cop after reports that tomatoes coming out of these Crystal Palaces have suddenly and improbably started tasting better, sweeter, juicier than Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's organic heirlooms, right after the children have also started going missing. This is a story pitch to the BBC.
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.
