When Bad Things Happen

A short [funny] guide to nine big things to worry about—and what you can do about them.

Read more: When Bad Things Happen - What to Do in Case of Disaster http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/features/14985/

Smallpox Attack
Chlorine Release
Blackout
Dirty Bomb

Earthquake:

What the city would do: Dig survivors out of crumbled tenements and town houses and race to extinguish blazes fueled by broken gas lines. A minimum 5 on the Richter scale would level homes all over the five boroughs, and more deaths would result later as destabilized buildings are toppled by aftershocks and pedestrians are pummeled by falling air conditioners and other debris. Though two major fault patterns run under Manhattan, experts say a big quake is unlikely.
Worst-case scenario: A high-magnitude earthquake with an epicenter within the five boroughs. Aboveground subway lines and bridges crack, and airports are disabled.
What you can do: Live in a steel-framed high-rise built after seismic codes were adopted in 1996. At the first tremor, grab a cell phone and take cover in a doorway or under a solid piece of furniture. Protect your head. If you can, turn off natural gas, water, and electricity, but beware of aftershocks. Cover your nose and mouth with clothing to avoid breathing toxic dust.

Indian Point Explosion
Avian-Flu Pandemic

Hurricane:

What the city would do: Issue evacuation orders 48 hours before the storm hits, urging people in vulnerable zones (see map) to flee those areas by public transportation or catch an MTA bus to Madison Square Garden or one of 22 other intake centers.
Worst-case scenario: A storm closes in on the city faster than expected. Evacuees are stuck in cars on closed roads; the subways and Hudson River tunnels flood. Though a death toll would likely be low, damage could be extensive.
What you can do: Keep three days’ worth of food, water, diapers, medication, and other supplies in a safe place. If you’re in a hurricane zone, buy flood insurance and snap photos of your house for future reference. Keep a prescription stash handy and pack a bag with copies of important documents, extra keys, rain gear and shoes, nonperishable foods, and at least $100.
As the storm approaches, nail plywood over windows and bring balcony furniture and garbage cans inside. If you’re evacuating, unplug appliances, turn off pilot lights and water, and put valuables you can’t take along in watertight containers. Fill your tank, grab a map, and get out of town—with your pets.

Nuclear Bomb:

What the city would do: Pray for help from the Feds because city hospitals, police precincts, and firehouses could be destroyed. If the prospect of a fema-managed catastrophe isn’t scary enough, a nuclear bomb would kill millions, and the lucky ones would get vaporized instantly. Others would be burned, blinded, or poisoned by radiation sickness in subsequent weeks and months. Bodies would litter the streets, and the water supply would be contaminated. The city would be too radioactive for outside emergency workers to enter, so those left alive would have to improvise.
Worst-case scenario: A bomb in the center of midtown. It doesn’t get worse than this.
What you can do: You could try to get your hands on some potassium iodide tablets in case you survive. Or, you might consider investing $200,000 in a “safe room”—a sealed, gamma-radiation-proof space with positive pressure, oxygen, food, necessary medicine, and other supplies—preferably underground. If you’re in a tall building, there’s no harm in heading for the center of the middle floors, which will put more mass between you and the radiation outside. But really: Kiss your ass good-bye.

Protocell Manifesto

http://grayanat.posterous.com/manifesto-for-the-world-architecture-festival

A manifesto for protocell architecture: against biological formalism

1. We want to change the world with almost nothing.

It is possible to generate complex materials and architectures through harnessing the fundamental energetics of matter. In other words, doing more with less.

2. What we call protocell architecture is, at root, a piece of Dadaist and Surrealist research, in which all the lofty questions have become involved.

The novel self-assembling material systems that arise from protocell architectural practice make no reference to, nor attempt to mimic bio-logic. As such, protocell architecture is an alien to the natural world, yet speaks the same fundamental languages of chemistry and physics. The results of these conversations and interactions constitute a parallel biology and second biogenesis whose aesthetics are described by Surrealist agendas.

3. Architecture is dead, long live architecture.

Protocells constitute a disruptive technology for architectural practice since they are capable of reaching a transition point when evolution emerges within the system, the outcome of which is unpredictable and therefore offer novel and surprising ways of constructing architecture that will succeed and replace conventional technologies.

4. Protocell architecture swallows contrast and all contradictions including the grotesquery and illogicality of life.

Protocell technology is at the beginning of an evolutionary pathway that is connected to and dependent on the environmental conditions around it. The responsiveness of protocells to stimuli, means they can be regarded as computing units. Consequently, protocells do not seek to generate idealized architectural forms but reflect and interpret the full spectrum of the processes they encounter in the real world.

5. What is generally termed life is really a frothy nothing that merely connects.

Protocell technology offers an opportunity for architects to engage with the evolutionary process itself. Unlike natural biological systems that evolve randomly according to Darwinian evolution, protocell technology allows deliberate and specific interventions throughout the entire course
of its coming into being. By moving and metabolizing, protocells may form the basis for a synthetic surface ecology. These interventions are the basis of what we call protocell architecture.

6. We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce nature, we want to produce architecture in the way a plant produces its fruit. We do not want to depict, we want to produce directly, not indirectly, since there is no trace of abstraction. We call it Protocell Architecture.

Protocell Architecture embodies the principles of emergence, bottom-up construction techniques and self-assembly. It is equipped with design handles' that enable the architect to persuade rather than dominate the outcome of the system through physical communication. As such, these systems are unknowable, surprising and anarchic.

7. We want to collage effective organic machinery that composes itself according to the drivers of biological design.

Protocell Architecture is chemically programmable and operates in keeping with the organizing principles of physics and chemistry.

8. We want over and over again, movement and connection; we see peace only in dynamism.

Protocell Architecture gathers its energy from the tension that resides at an interface between two media such as oil and water, which causes movement, disruption and change. Protocell Architecture resists the equilibrium since this constitutes death.

9. The head is round, so thoughts can revolve. The head of architecture is green, robust, synthesized and exists everywhere simultaneously, whether it is large or very, very small.

Protocell Architecture is fashioned from 'low tech biotech' characterised by ubiquitous, durable and affordable materials.

10. We wish to blur the firm boundaries, which self-certain people delineate around all we can achieve.

Protocell Technology becomes a co-author in the production of architecture through the possession of living properties and its ability to self-assemble.

11. We tell you the tricks of today are the truths of tomorrow.

Protocell Architecture is better adapted to the prevailing physical and social conditions since it is founded on a new set of technologies that are not 'alive' but which possess some of the properties of living systems. As such these technologies are qualitatively different to the industrial and digital technologies that have become the mainstream tools of the twentieth century.

12. We will work with things that we do not want to design, things that already have systematic existence.

Protocell Technology has the capacity to transform and modify existing building materials and architecture with the potential for surprise.

13. You know as much as we do that architecture is nothing more than rhythms and connections.

Protocell Architecture embodies the complexity of materials in a literal, rather than metaphorical manner and becomes a physical part of our existence.

14. We will construct exquisite corpses not dead but alive and useful.

Protocell Architecture is central to the understanding of living systems. It allows us to work with and enhance the unavoidable inconsistency which is the essence of life itself.

15. We deal in a second aesthetic, one that initiates beginnings and moulds with natural forces.

Protocell Architecture is connected to the environment through constant conversation and energy exchange with the natural world in a series of chemical interactions called 'metabolism'. This involves the conversion of one group of substances into another, either by absorbing or releasing energy - doing more with less.

Rachel Armstrong + Petrifying Objects

http://www.rachelarmstrong.me/

Rachel is currently collaborating with international scientists and architects to explore cutting-edge, sustainable technologies by developing metabolic materials in an experimental setting. These materials possess some of the properties of living systems and couple artificial structures to natural ones in the anticipation that our buildings will undergo an 'origins of life' style transition from inert to living matter and become part of the biosphere. By generating metabolic materials it is hoped that cities will be able to replace the energy they draw from the environment, respond to the needs of their populations and eventually become regarded as alive in the same way that we think about parks or gardens. Since metabolic materials are made from terrestrial chemistry they are not exclusive to First World countries and have the potential to transform urban environments worldwide.

Aucklantis:

Aucklantis is also a future city in New Zealand that floats on the sea over the site of Old Auckland after it had been flooded and destroyed due to rising sea levels. Aucklantis is the setting for conflict between old and new worlds, technologies and beliefs.The inspiration for the narrative comes from my fascination of the historic and geographic uniqueness of New Zealand and its relative isolation shaping its development since the age of the dinosaurs when the Moas ancestors were able to walk across the land bridges.Fascinating too is the utopian paradise.

By addressing traditional paradigms in the presence of modern invention, science fiction helps us address some of the deeper common issues of today that are at the core of our humanity.

Biolime: Mock Rock

On the effects of an emerging Living Technology, one that possesses some of the properties of living systems but is not actually alive (ISSP, Online), when it is introduced as a way of making the buildings of Mossville more sustainable, a suburb of the imaginary city of Hardwich, by coating their houses with Biolime, a synthetic rock that is capable of producing limestone by fixing carbon dioxide from the air. Although Biolime goes against the conscientious community's notion of what is natural they come to accept that all other methods of generating a more sustainable environment have not sufficient to reverse the carbon trend and new unnatural measures are justified.

The collaborators had produced a simple oil-in-water droplet emulsion that used carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to drive a chemical process that formed a rock-like salt called carbonate, commonly known as limestone. The resultant work was generally regarded as a fringe research activity though some years later the renewed interest in finding ways of dealing with the runaway carbon count. First World countries endorsed Biolime as the most immediate and effective way to combat climate change.

Cell-like agents used in the Biolime process did not have any genes. Biolime itself was not alive and although it shared some of the characteristics of living systems Biolime would die without the continued nurturing of the community. How it could be true that water could turn into rock?

A few weeks later those areas that had been sprayed with the Biolime solution began to transform and produce a moist, heavily patterned, whitish rock. Delicate crustings of this material appeared in gutterways and grew into stalactite fingers where water had accumulated. Small children picked at oddly shaped protrusions that were sometimes used by wildlife and the Biolime could also be found in places where it had not been deliberately applied.

Mossville had realised that if something as small as the chemical fragments of technology that constituted Biolime, could make such a difference to the health of the community, then the efforts of each individual, no matter how trivial, would make an ever greater difference in their collective quest to tackle the weighty issue of climate change.

Living Architecture:

Architects throughout the ages have likened the built environment to biological systems, but modern architecture is not alive since it is made of inert materials that are belligerent to and disconnected from the natural world. Yet, biology is far more important to architectural practice than just providing the inspiration for new forms and aesthetics. Biological processes are critical to architectural practice in terms of developing more dynamic and environmentally integrated materials.

Metabolic materials could be designed to extract carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the air and release oxygen into the environment. Such materials could even perform new functions that are not found in nature and could safely remove toxins or nanoparticles from the environment and process them into safer substances. When the metabolisms were no longer active they could senesce and decay back into their components for recycling.

Speculative drawings by architect Christian Kerrigan shows one potential application of Metabolic Materials in the future by the sustainable reclaimation of Venice through growing an artificial reef underneath the historic city using the protocell technology.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Much of our waste today is comprised of plastic that does not biodegrade. This waste accumulates in swirling seas of debris, where plastic to sea life ratios are 6:1; where birds and mammals are dying of starvation and dehydration with bellies full of plastics; where fish are ingesting toxins at such a rate that soon they will no longer be safe to eat.

The largest of these garbage swills is known as the Pacific Gyre, or The Great Garbage Patch.

It is roughly the size of Texas, containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash. Shoes, toys, bags, pacifiers, wrappers, toothbrushes, and bottles too numerous to count are only part of what can be found in this accidental dump floating midway between Hawaii and San Francisco.

Amazingly, there is no effort underway to clean the mess. Explore this web site to learn more, but most importantly - join the movement to address this problem!

Today I Understood Bush...

If you've been wondering why the Bush administration has been spending money, cutting social programs, and starting wars like there's no tomorrow, now you have your answer: as far as they are concerned, there is no tomorrow.

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Fear

by: Mike Davis


Flood, drought, urban sprawl, fire, tornadoes, snakes, cougars, bears, mountain lions, and marauding mice--and that's just the first part of this book! Davis' tour of woe supports his idea that LA's environment is "Walden Pond on LSD" (p. 16). Rather than exhibiting variations along relatively predicable lines, LA's hydrology, topography, and biota swing in great deviance and complexity made all the worse by human settlement and public policy that perversely baits the dangers, rues the results, ignores the connections, and then recovers with even worse ideas.

Davis illustrates his points with vivid descriptions that show how human actions and the environment interact, with often dire results. For example, he shows how the official policy in Southern California of "total fire suppression" (p. 101) essentially builds huge stockpiles of fuel--chaparral--conveniently placed near homes in landscapes buffeted by hot, dry winds--perfect for huge, debilitating fires that destroy homes and humans. The fire practice for the urban areas is similarly dire: LA's policy of not enforcing fire codes in tenements made for hellish firetraps that consistently killed human beings in fire after fire. And, to complete the cycle, Davis shows how these disasters lead to more of the same: money to rebuild after the fires creates more houses in more precarious positions next to even more supplies of fuel drying in more hot, dry winds. Davis similar coverage of floods shows how politicians harness these natural forces as a way to return recovery money to the disaster victims, thereby buying votes for the next election with a largesse that feeds the cycle of the "Apocalypse Theme Park." All this operates within denial so thick that journalists and LA boosters refuse to admit that tornadoes--yes tornadoes--wreck havoc on LA's inhabitants in destruction every bit as terrible as tornadoes in Kansas.

Davis' sixth chapter, "The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles," explores LA's destruction in novels and film by hordes, nukes, quakes, cults, monsters, bombs, pollution, gangs, terrorism, floods, plagues, riots, aliens, volcanoes, sandstorms, mudslides, freeways, dystopias, and more (pp. 280-281).

Davis' final chapter presents his titular diagram--"The Ecology of Fear", shows the social hierarchy of a city (Chicago) sorted into zones of housing types concentric on the city center and spreading out in rings of residential hotels, ethnic enclaves, worker homes, apartments, single family dwellings, and commuter bungalows. Davis' update is one based on "padding the bunker": his wheel-and-spoke system includes an inner city hub given over to zones of fear--prostitution, drugs, homeless--inside a wheel of blue collar suburbs of neighborhood watches. On the outer rim: edge cities spiking out from gated suburbs walled off from a gulag rim of prisons. Davis analyzes his geometry along the theme of misperception, fear, and public policy that destroys the urbanity of the city in favor of the sprawl of the suburbs in a system he portrays as in the end as "combustible" (p. 422).

I don't think Davis reveals the forces that power his diagram in the same way that he did so deftly in the first part of his book. There, he showed political power actually flowing out of natural disasters and perversely feeding their destructiveness. Isn't public policy often deliberately making urban life worse (See, for example Norquist 1998 or Orum 1995)? Isn't public policy creating a system in which urban crises and danger serve as a kind of fuel for political power? For example, "the war on poverty" provided funding for politicians to destroy cities with dim-witted plans that made urban problems far worse. Is the result of worsening urban conditions even more political power accumulating in a disfunctional spiral that dooms inner city residents onto an electoral plantation where their only purpose is to show up at the polls in order to elect the same machine that entraps them?

Design and the Elastic Mind, MoMA

The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use. This Web site presents over three hundred of these works, including fifty projects that are not featured in the gallery exhibition.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/

Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration. Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations.

Garbage of New York City

http://nycgarbage.com/index.html
OMG, would you buy one of these for $50-100?
It started out as an experiment about the power of package design, now Justin has sold more than 1,200 of these spread over 25 countries. Perhaps this is NYC's cure for garbage--repackaging your waste and then selling it back to you...