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.

Robert Bean on Obsolescence and the Culture of Human Invention

http://www.robertbean.ca/
http://www.obsolescence.ca/bean.php


The research and creation associated with Obsolescence and the Culture of Human Invention is informed by the fact that material obsolescence in industrial culture is also the product of research methodologies. From as early as 1932, manufacturers from industrial economies have been actively researching and implementing the failure of design and technology into our lived experience. By scientifically quantifying and perfecting obsolescence in products, the continuous and accelerating consumption of manufactured products has been assured. The consequences of this development are considerable. Obsolescence, whether material or spiritual, becomes one of the most relevant developments of our time. The research associated with poetic and artistic creation may not share the methodologies of research formed by instrumental objectives. Culture, myth and metaphor are familiar to the process of creative and poetic research. How will artistic creation and research based in new technologies provide a renewed insight into the predicaments of obsolete things and experiences and how can this shape and influence the insight, future and wellbeing of our culture?

Obsolescence and the Culture of Human Invention will cover a three-year investigation into language, technology and artistic production in the context of digital media. The research documented and produced interdisciplinary artwork influenced by the culture and language of machines and obsolescence. The physical contact with the object was used as a procedure for remembering an obsolete technology that has influenced and predated his experience. The cultural complexity of the apparatus, its design, function, and mechanical precision were conveyed through this process of disassembly. The labour that fabricated and implemented the writing machine was also revealed. This project is an exploration of organic and inorganic memory through the borders and interface that continue to define the human experience with machines.

We are specifically interested in the creative and critical potential that technology and cultural obsolescence necessitates. Rather than presuming that obsolescence is inherently defined by loss and nostalgia, we will actively engage methods of creation that generate and inspire production concurrent with the processes of obsolescence. How can the excess of technological obsolescence inspire creative activities and circumstances?

There is an apparent contradiction in naming obsolescence as the subject of an extensive research project into creativity. Research methodology is traditionally associated with progress, development, and the brand new. Consequently, researching the imaginative and productive potentiality of outmoded culture and technology advances an inverse relationship that may appear obsolete to the conventional language of research. This is a critical paradox of our time as well as a principle question to investigate during the research / creation project. How are we as artists and producers affected by the experiences of obsolescence at this moment in time? How does this situation influence our perception, intuition, sensorial experience and our creative activities? The project profiled the ingenuity and resourcefulness that the artists brought to the contingencies of material and cultural obsolescence in an era of unprecedented technological advancement.

More Useful links + Resources on Waste

Dirt Studio, “toxic beauty” consultants.

www.dirtstudio.com

Fresh Kills design competition

ww.nyc.gov

Garbage studies at the University of Arizona

www.bara.arizona.edu/gs.htm

Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I). Dir. Agnes Varda. Ciné Tamaris, 2000.

Hackensack Riverkeeper

www.hackensackriverkeeper.org

Susan Strasser. Waste and Want:

A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan, 1999.

Simon Schama. Landscape and Memory. Knopf, 1995.

Robert Sullivan. The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City. Anchor, 1999.

Robert Smithson. The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. University of California Press, 1996.

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/

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

Notes on Alvin Toffler: Future Shock + The Third Wave

http://www.alvintoffler.net/?fa=bios

What differentiates the Tofflers from others who today echo this view is their insistence that there can be no economic transformation without a corresponding upheaval in our social, political and cultural institutions and values.

In support of this idea, the Tofflers draw not merely on economics, but on social psychology, military history, politics, pop culture and religion, revealing the hidden or unnoticed relations among them - and their implications for the decisions we make today.

http://www.ameinfo.com/44149.html

“3rd wave” book argues huge historic changes:
1. hunting and gathering to agriculture
2. rise of industrial age and all the things that go with it, mass production, factories
3. rise of a knowledge based economy

The central feature of his futurology is to note patterns in human history.

Toffler's idea of leadership is one of the ability to handle change, and improve existing practices. As he argues: 'In every company new ideas, new products, and new people are waiting to be born. The leader's task is to get them out and breathing.

'In the third wave, good ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. It may mean courage, imagination, entrepreneurialism, warmth, organizational savvy or street smarts. These are the kinds of brains that will thrive in the third wave.'

He thinks the leaders of tomorrow must be 'managers of adaptation equipped with a whole set of new, nonlinear skills.' And this guru of the future suggests: 'The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.'

http://www.yoyow.com/marye/tofflers94.html

"future shock"--when too much change hits too fast for people to absorb, they then began to show signs of either deteriorated decision-making capability or disorientation; indeed, in some cases, stress and illness and so forth. Future shock is the consequence of the premature arrival of the future.

The Third Wave, ten years after Future Shock. That book said that the changes around us are not entirely random, that you can see patterns, and that basically what was happening was a revolutionary upheaval on a par with, or even greater than, the industrial revolution--or indeed the agrarian revolution that came first. We used the terminology First Wave, Second Wave, Third Wave.

Then came the industrial revolution of two or three hundred years ago, which launched what we call the second great transformatory wave in history, and gave rise to an industrial civilization. That industrial civilization had multiple forms. It had capitalists and communists; it had Japanese, Korean, Swedish, or American versions; but all of the industrial countries, by definition, were based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass entertainment. Sociologists referred to it as the mass society.

The old scenarios, the scenarios of Orwell and Huxley and hundreds, if not thousands, of science fiction writers, saw the continual advance of technology as necessarily increasing the industrial character of society--making it more bureaucratic, more centralized, more impersonal, more robotoid, and so on.

There is a contrast between second and third wave, where 2nd is based on mass society produced by industrial civilization, while computer age is more singular and independent.
Military on the contrary to mass production where they are participating in demassification of no assembly line.

http://www.solutioneers.net/solutioneering/thirdwave.html

Second Wave society and Expansionism is based on 3 beliefs:
1. Nature is to be exploited.
2. Humans are pinnacle of long process of evolution.
3. History flows irreversibly towards the progress of a better life for humanity.