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,

Edward Burtynsky: on Manufactured Landscapes + Oil

"Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times."

In Manufactured Landscapes, Burtynksy's produced a series of still photography, contextualizing his photographs in the global cycles of energy, production, and waste, by cinematically inhabiting the subjects of his work. While his work serves as a commentary on the impact of large-scale industrialization, Burtynsky claims to neither criticize nor praise these developments, but to bring images to viewers in the hopes of opening their eyes to the realities of the contemporary world.


The series investigates:
1. The production cycle in China (Factories and Recycling),
2. Energy in China (coal industry and Three Gorges Dam),
3. globalization,
4. extraction industries (minding and the oil industries in Canada and U.S.), and also
5. urbanization in China (transformation of old neighbourhoods in Shanghai)

His exhibition on Oil surveys his 10-year journey of expansive documentation into the subjects of oil from:

1. extraction and refinement—how it is drawing from the earth, processed for our use
2. It then proceeds to show how oil is used and its effects—urbanization, roads, cars, etc.
3. And concludes with the destruction and consequences that lie at the end of oil—vast recycling yards, immense installations of defunct oil fields, breaking down of oil tankers

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.

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?

Future Scenarios

http://vincent.callebaut.org/page1-img-grand-place.html

2036, the Internet is 50 years old ! Democracy has spread in real time and knowledge is within everyone’s reach. Lies by the State and condoned genocide are no longer possible. We are moving towards world peace. Information and communication technologies have considerably modified the layout of public spaces, the consumer society of the 20th century and citizen movements. The economy of this cyberdemocracy is no longer based on money, but on the intangible exchange of information.

http://www.kunstler.com/Mags_Forecast2009.html

The big theme for 2009 economically will be contraction. The end of the cheap energy era will announce itself as the end of conventional "growth" and the shrinking back of activity, wealth, and populations. Contraction will come as a great shock to a world of conventionally programmed economists. They will toil and sweat to account for it, and they will probably be wrong. Unfortunately, this contraction will do its work in unpleasant ways, driving down standards of living, shearing away hopes and expectations for a particular life of comfort, and introducing disorder to so many of the systems we have depended on for so long. People will starve, lose their homes, lose incomes and status, and lose the security of living in peaceful societies. It will become clear that the Long Emergency is underway.

Major Driving Forces Affecting Life in 2030
http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/ecology/scenario.htm

1. Increasing threat of the 2008 Financial Collapse
   to the stability of the global economy
   
   
2. Increasing threat of global economic meltdown caused by uncontrolled globalization.
   
   
3. Increasing Globalization
   
   
4. Increasing population growth
   
   
5. Increasing demand for fossil fuels
   
   
6. Increasing divisions between the
   First and Third Worlds
   
   
7. Increasing immigration from the
   Third World to the First World
   
   
8. Increasing collapse of global ecosystems
   
   
9. Increasing global warming and climate change
   
   
10. Increasing growth of Failed States
    
    
11. Increasing threat of Terrorism
    
    
12. Increasing growth of the internet and
    instantaneous global communication
    
    
13. Increasing development of renewable energy
    
    
14. Increasing outsourcing of jobs from the
    First World to the Third World
    
    
15. Increasing threat of global pandemics caused
    by the growth of anti-biotic resistant viruses
    in the Third World
    
    
16. Increasing division between the Globalized World
    and the Islamic World
    
    
17. Increasing threat of bankruptcy by the United States.
    
    
18. Increasing threat that OPEC will switch the global reserve currency from Dollars to Euros.
    
    
19. Increasing concern about the rising number of
    immigrants in the First World.
    
    
20. Increasing scarcity of natural resources.
    
    
21. Increasing costs of scarce natural resources and
    fossil fuels.
    
    
22. Increasing growth of a global consumer culture.
    
    
23. Increasing threat of WMDs threatening global
    society and economic stability
    
24. Increasing threat of war and violence in the declining Third World countries.
    
    
25. Increasing threat to societal stability caused by
    economic insecurity and the growing division between the very wealthy and the vast majority.
    
    
26. Increasing threat of global environmental collapse caused by Global Warming and the destruction of
    Global ecosystem.
    
    
27. Increasing global insecurity caused by the interaction of environmental collapse and
    economic insecurity.
    
    
28. Increasing fear of economic and societal breakdown.
    
    
29. Increasing distrust of political and economic leaders.
    
    
30. Increasing fear that our political and social
    institutions aren't working
    
    
31. Increasing fear that the future will be worse
    than the past.

2bcont'd...