M1 On Oil

It has been predicted with American geophysicist M. King Hubbert’s model in 1956 that the global petroleum production rates will peak just after year 2000 and has correctly predicted that production of oil from conventional sources would peak in the continental United States around 1970. Though oil is increasingly plentiful on the upslope of the bell curve, it is increasingly scarce and expensive on the down slope. Once the peak is passed, oil production slows and costs begin to accelerate, as seen currently in oil and gas prices. We are currently seeing the effects of the depletion of oil in our quotidian lives not to mention its effect on global warming. The issue is not of “running out” of oil, so much as not acquiring enough to keep global economy running that will lead to a collapse, that even a shortage of 10-15% of an oil dependant country is enough to collapse its economy and reduce its citizens to poverty(1).

Perhaps the most dramatic consequence of oil depletion is of agriculture. Pesticides and agro-chemicals are made from oil, commercial fertilizers are made from ammonia, which is from natural gas that will be peaking in the near future, and most farming tools are power driven by oil-derived fuels. Food shortage will be an outcome as transportation and distribution become expensive. The average transport of food in the U.S. is transported almost 2400 km before it is made available, and in Canada, the average is 8000 km (2). In the future, food prices will skyrocket and for those less fortunate, starvation and famine will take hold even on a global scale.

As well, the concept of suburbia will also be under speculation, as commuters can no longer afford to drive into the city, there will be an overflow of people in the near future looking to move closer to the centre. The growth of the city can also harvest new problems with water scarcity and also with health and sanitation. Presently in the United States, 4% of people do not drive, whether because of low income, being handicapped, or age—this number will likely rise, making driving exclusively for the elite class and most likely will harness resentment amongst the general population(3).

We will see an increase in oil nationalism when countries with the most oil is withholding its resources from the future market and then auctioned off to favoured customer relations with other countries that they want to maintain good relations with. The United States will probably tend to be less favoured amongst some of the oil producing nations. The monopoly of oil can potentially cause major warfare while nations battle over oil, not to mention civil wars that will arise from the shortcomings. Cities and nations will eventually fall apart as the consequences are unimaginable. Permanent fuel shortages would bring the world into a generations-long economic depression as millions become unemployed when industries implode. There will no longer be big box stores, clothing stores, cafes, and postal services—the financial economic downfall will be evident.

The financial community begins to accept the reality of Peak Oil.

"They accept that banks created capital during this epoch by lending more than they had on deposit, being confident that tomorrow’s expansion, fuelled by cheap oil-based energy, was adequate collateral for today’s debt. The decline of oil, the principal driver of economic growth, undermines the validity of that collateral which in turn erodes the valuation of most entities quoted on Stock Exchanges."(4)

When truth can no longer be concealed, prices for daily maintenance of life will escalate abruptly, and the support and infrastructure of our civilization will fall. There will be emergency summits, diplomatic initiatives, urgent exploration efforts, but the turmoil will not subside. Thousands of companies will go bankrupt, and millions will be unemployed. Democracy will be shut out, as economic hardships will bring out the worst in people. “Fascists will rise, feeding on the anger of the newly poor and whipping up support. These new rulers will find the tools of repression—emergency laws, prison camps, a relaxed attitude towards torture—already in place, courtesy of the war on terror” (5). Simultaneously, climate change will work against us, making its presence felt “with a vengeance”, while engulfed in financial ruin, food and water supplies will seize and prolonged droughts will crop up in numbers as harvesting crops decline(6).

Almost daily, we see our personal environments changing, whether with work, climate, commuting, spending—we must progress and take nothing for granted as a new Dark Era is emerging for ourselves and generations to come as growth may be coming to an end. The social and economic consequences are cataclysmic as our entire financial order from interest rates, pension funds, insurance, to stock market is dependant on growth(7). We must find new [renewable] alternatives and new ways of using the resources we already acquired in order to alleviate stress globally and especially oil dependant nations.

Notes:
1. Matt Savinar, “Peak Oil”. Life After the Oil Crash, 27 Oct. 2009

2. Stephen Hesse, “Matters of Survival in a Shattered World,” The Japan Times, 25 Apr. 2005, 1 Nov. 2009,

3. James H. Kunstler, Interviewed by Glen Hiemstra for Futurists.com, May 2008,

4. Colin Campbell, “The Financial Consequences of Peak Oil,” 24 Feb 2004, 1 Nov 2009


5. Jeremy Leggett. The Empty Tank: Oil, Gas, Hot Air, and the Coming Financial Catastrophe. Random House: New York, 2005

6. Jonathon Gatehouse, “When Oil Runs Out,” Macleans, 9 Feb. 2006, 1 Nov. 2009

7. Bryan Appleyard, “Waiting for the Lights to Go Out,” The Times. 16 Oct. 2005, 3 Nov 2009,

M1 Project Intervention

Imagine Manhattan in the year 2050 when oil production slows to be almost nonexistent, leaving this oil dependant city torn to hardship and ruin for generations thereafter. Nothing comes and nothing leaves Manhattan. The population is dwindling as disease and famine has swept the city, taking the weak, old, and the unborn with it. Those who remain are forced to use existing resources for survival. What was once Wall Street and 5th avenue boutiques are forced to become obsolete, they remain only recognizable as ruins after the citizens ransacked and demolished the buildings for materials—glass, copper wire, tubes, plastics, paper—anything they can use in order to survive.

The rising sea levels change the waterfront to be almost unrecognizable. Citizen led efforts are being made to alleviate stress on an already burdened civilization before it may be too late. The earth has proven itself to be less resilient than predicted, and it is furious, its fury lies in our ability to take advantage of its selflessness while stealing every piece of armour it has created over the course of its existence, but the earth has also proven to be merciless in its vengeance. As news and newspapers do not come frequently as they used to, it has become almost impossible to predict the weather and its patterns, rendering the city vulnerable and open to the violent attacks of climate change.

The sorting of rubble and rubbish almost becomes a natural thing, heaps of waste produced by the city has nowhere to go. The problem cannot be hidden any longer as waste is no longer being moved to disposal sites, it will become a visible crisis that needs resolution. It will create thousands of jobs and a union of positive community relationships at a time of urgency and extremity. Waste will define the city and its built environment with undulating layers forming a ubiquitous landscape.

In my project I will look at Manhattan Island and its conditions for potential flooding, while implementing a permanent flood barrier solution by reutilizing waste as the building material. I would like to concentrate on 4 architectural and topographical conditions the island presents: the Meatpacking District, Battery Park, the South Street Viaduct, and East Harlem—as potential locations to implement a continuous flood barrier.

The plan is to consider the type of waste that will be projected onto the city at a time when there will be little or no movement within cities. Since vehicles will no longer be seen as a primary mode of transport, it will be seen as a resourceful readily available form of “trash” that people can salvage parts from in order to create the structural system of the barrier. Presently in Manhattan, approximately 48% of the population own vehicles, MTA has approximately 5,900 buses that run intercity, 13,087 taxis, and around 40,000 for hire vehicles—this amounts to approximately 3,500,000 tires(12). Tires are among the largest and most problematic sources of waste as approximately one tire is discarded per person per year. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports 290 million scrap tires were generated in 2003(13). With landfills minimizing their acceptance of whole tires and the health and environmental risks of stockpiling tires, we must make new uses for them. These tires can then be filled with concrete or stones to build the perimeter of the landfill and then interconnected by cementing between the tires or by petrifying the materials in place by protocell technology. The cars are then filled with carefully selected plastics and other non-toxic materials with long material life or materials that would not decompose under water, but instead be preserved under those conditions. The vehicle would then be put in a hydraulic crusher that encapsulates all its waste and then spits out a bale that can then be used as a building block for infill.

This would be done in layers, with each layer separated by demolition wastes and debris of crushed concrete, bricks, stones, and sands—as filler between gaps. At the top of the landfill above the water table, is another strata of waste, these are items that require remediation. The waste is then separated into different cells to be compacted and then covered with soil or thick plastics (ie. tarp)—whatever is available. Harvesting methane from the waste will be done in order to create renewable energy for the city, utilizing bioreactors to speed up the breakdown of garbage and produce more methane in the process. The leachates are drained and collected into a pond or constructed wetland for safe remediation of wastewater effluents. This is ideal because it is inexpensive to construct and operate, and also requires a low level of maintenance because of its synergistic relationship with the environment.

The land is then shaped to create the barriers, at the same time programmatic relief for its citizens. Parks, new living spaces, meeting places, trading markets, educational spaces—a forum built by its people from abandoned shipping containers, cars, pop bottles, plastics, carpets, and debris, woven together by whatever’s left of the city. What was seen as a dismissed unwanted inconvenience in our lives, waste, will prove to be a coveted resource in changing our built environment, urban fabric, and also in bringing together communities and support during future turmoil.


Notes:
12. “2005 Annual Report,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 1 May 2006, 10 Nov 2009,

13. “Management of Scrap Tires”, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 3 Jan 2007, 29 Nov 2009,

Kevin Lynch’s Wasting Away

Philosophy on “positive waste,” making the most out of an inevitable process:
Lynch, Kevin. "Wasting Away". Sierra Club Books: San Francisco, 1990

Decline, decay and wasting are a necessary part of life and growth; we must learn to value them and to do them well. This book represents a natural progression in his consideration of all aspects of urban life. He saw that we are headed in a self-destructive direction that has implications for virtually every profession, including environmental design and planning. Though the book is not a warning, but a plea that we should acknowledge most waste and the processes of wasting as valuable and necessary in the life of people, things, and places, and promote his philosophies on “positive wasting”.

He tried to expand readers’ thinking by reducing the notion to its most fundamental meaning and then exploring its many implications. Lynch examines waste from many perspectives and addresses cultural notions of waste and why we are so uncomfortable with waste and wasting. He then looks at waste in the context of other cultures and talks about class and waste, eating, cleaning, and death. As in many other ancient societies, buildings and even settlements were wasted deliberately as a symbol of royal prestige and purity, just as emperors were served more than they could eat and possessed more clothes than they can possibly wear. New cities and palaces were at one time built at every accession and abandoned at each royal death.

Wasting is a pervasive process in human society, just as it is elsewhere in the living system. It is a feature of the underlying flux that carries us along, the everlasting impermanence of things. If we look for continuity and not permanence, then wasting might be turned to account. Rarely, the accumulation of waste caused the abandonment of a settled place, unless it has served to hasten some natural evolution. Only occasionally has the environment been pushed to some truly irreversible dead end. Wasting has not usually caused fundamental social change, but it accelerates changes under way, and shifts the distribution of burdens. Its presence preoccupies us: it is an affair of the mind. Might there be pleasures in it and practical opportunities so we may be at ease with waste.

Designing America's Waste Landscape--Mira Engler

Engler, Mira. “Designing America’s Waste Landscape”. London: John Hopkins University Press, 2004

The history of garbage in the past two centuries has been the history of urbanism: the rise of cities necessitated efficient collection of trash and excreta. Our modern-day equivalents are the aluminum can foragers, who open bags left out on trash night and search for redeemables. Their fortunes rose as those of the field scavengers fell. Prior to the 1970s, when cities and states first put a price on tossing them, cans were just trash among more trash, going to landfills. Forty years earlier, cans hadn’t yet been invented, and a few years before that, in the early 20th century, garbage itself was virtually nonexistent in big American cities.

Mira Engler’s Designing America’s Waste Landscapes covers the whole dirty history of excrement, offal, leavings, and scraps as they eventually evolved into sewage, compost, recyclables, and toxic sludge. Designing America’s Waste Landscapes is not a social history of how households and municipalities came to produce tons and tons of this stuff daily, instead, it brings together in one place many far-flung conversations about trash in disciplines as varied as art history, architecture, engineering, anthropology, and political science, with references to thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin. She focuses on the idea of trash transparency—that we should look our waste straight in the gut, so to speak, and not shy away from the noxious smells, industrial apparatus, or toxic byproducts that are the results of being consumers.

Engler’s overarching concern is the application of this principle to the reclamation of polluted landscapes and the planning of future waste disposal sites and looks to the work of a group of artists and landscape architects who have argued that, instead of recoiling from the waste we produce, we should integrate it into our everyday landscape. Many of the artistic projects Engler discusses have provoked policy makers and local bureaucrats to come up with more interesting solutions for our waste landscapes. Some works, such as Mel Chin’s experiment-as-conceptual-art piece Revival Field, have even advanced scientific understanding of what’s possible in remediating and recovering wasted landscapes. As a landscape architect who has submitted her own projects for re-envisioned dumps and former industrial sites, Engler is heavily invested in the idea that artists can make a measurable difference and to produce work that embraces waste, rather than hides it from public knowledge. Her ideal of trash transparency emphasizes that nature and culture are interdependent and that remediated landscapes should incorporate a record of human effects.


For Brief By Carly Berwick see:
http://americancity.org/magazine/article/review-mira-engler-baltimore/