Crisis in Crisis

THIS WILL BE THE LONGEST AND HARDEST

FIGHT OF YOUR LIFE. NO ONE IS GOING TO MAKE

IT EASY AND I SURE AS HELL WON’T. IF YOU WANT ALL THE INFO,

IT WILL COST YOU TIME, MONEY & ENERGY.

IT’S ALL THERE FOR YOU TO FIND, SIMPLY FOLD THE

PAGES BACK & FORTH, BUT BE WARNED

THAT THE PAGES WILL EVENTUALLY RIP.

COV—C—Lab: Vol. 20Crisis In Crisis

20112011

>








COV—C—Lab: Vol. 20Crisis In Crisis

2011

4 | 3








TOC—C—Lab: Vol. 20Crisis In Crisis

SIDE A

00. Warning Message— The Who

01. Letter from the Editor— Worse then Better?

02. Crisis in Crisis— Biosphere Ecology

03. Borders— Steven Graham Interview

04. Celbrity Mobilizing— by Martha Rosler

05. Design for the Apocalypse— John McMorrough

06. Warning Message— British Ministry of Info

07. Crisis Devices— curated by SLAB

08. Foreclosed Homes— by Geoff Manaugh

09. Marathon— by David Gissen &Rachel Schreiber

10. Unfriendly Skies— illustrations by C-Lab

11. Warning Message— Chic Freak

SIDE B

12. Encyclopedic Articles— A-I, [page 58-69]

13. Warning Message— Woody Allen

14. Exclusion Zone— Oleg Yavorsk Interview

15. Humanitarian Intervention— Eyal Weizman

16. Rogue States of Mind— collage by C-Lab

17. More Is Less— collected by MTWTF

18. Warning Message— David Byrne

19. Systems Gone Wild— Modern Infrastructure

20. Warning Message— Sonic Youth

21. Maps— Erin Aigner Interview

22. Inauguration— Photography by Jesse Seegers

END

--. RUN!— Visual Essay by Nohawk

**. Warning Message— The Governator

xx. Exit— Grab your shirt and leave

2011

6 | 5

—THE WHO—

Warning Messages00 —

WE LIK

E NIG

HTM

ARES.

THEY

TEST OU

R FITN

ESS

WE LIKE NIGHTMARES. THEY TEST OUR FITNESS

EVERYTHING IS FLUID AT THE MOMENT

& OUR BASIC ASSUMPTIONS OF

HOW TO FIX THINGS HAVE PROVEN

INEFFECTIVE.

Things Will Get Worse Before They Get Better

by Jeffrey Inaba

>

America’s new administration has brought about a palpable sense of optimism. There are high hopes for the agency of govern-ment. There is confidence that people will mobilize for a worthy cause. There is belief that economic recovery could begin sooner rather than later. In architecture there is a newfound feeling that the profession can improve cities. But optimism is a fragile thing. Unfavorable events are likely to oc-cur which could dash any such hopes. One way to prevent ourselves from overreacting, and subsequently falling into despair, is to appreciate the nature of crisis. Understand-ing crisis may help us to judge the unfolding situation and maintain a realistic measure of faith. In this issue you will find wide-ranging examples of crises: how they begin, unfold and, despite attempts at their management, spin out of control. Everything is fluid at the moment and our basic assumptions of how to fix things have proven ineffective. So prepare for things to get worse before they get better. Hopefully, even this helps to cushion the fall.

As the second installment in an ongoing editorial project between Urban China and Volume, we have produced this limited edi-tion publication on the occasion of the exhi-bition Informal Cities at the New Museum. Inspired by the unofficial compilations sold by fans at music concerts, we offer a bootleg

Ed Letter01

10 | 9

EVERYTHING IS FLUID AT THE MOMENT

& OUR BASIC ASSUMPTIONS OF

HOW TO FIX THINGS HAVE PROVEN

INEFFECTIVE.

>

1. Biodome Image—int. spread with weeds and de-cay, nice one. August, 2011

2. One Year Later— wild life and luxury items. progress in progress, August, 1996

issue of Urban China. The bootleg is a DIY format for assembling and disseminat-ing work within a circle of hardcore fans, typically consisting of live work recorded, sequenced and edited by the concertgoer. Unlike a pirated copy or fake which tries to assume the identity of an authorized product and is motivated by a desire for profit, a bootleg announces itself as an improvised, illegitimate work and is largely motivated by a wish to share. Given the urgency of the topic, C-Lab has borrowed the bootleg format to quickly distribute observations, initiated in dialogue with Urban China, on the crisis and its management. X

Essays02Crisis in Crisis: Biosphere 2’S Contested Ecologies

by

Janette Kim &

Erik Carver

Every symptom—thining ozone, missing species,

growing slums, dwindling oil, acid rain, DDT,

mushroom clouds—confirmed the diagnosis of

impending world destruction. For Biosphere 2,

conceived in the swirl of post-Hiroshima envi-

ronmentalism, the crisis was fueled by a breach

of spiritual and technological equilibrium. It pre-

scribed nothing less than a new world wrapped

12 | 11

in a three-acre bubble. Emerging from the

Arizona desert in 1991, Biosphere 2 enclosed

eight humans, 3,800 other species, and seven

biomes for two years. Its crisis-response bal-

ancing act sought to repudiate the arrogance

of the past in favor of a monastic harmony

between biosphere and technosphere.

Today, a generation after Biosphere 2’s

launch, Al Gore continues to check the plan-

etary balance.3 But Biosphere 2 is in a new kind

of crisis mode. The windows have opened.

The monkeys have been sent away. New neigh-

bors are crowding in. Biosphere 2 has finally

succeeded, if only as a model of catastrophe.

It simulates global warming. And, while never

achieving a seamless web of life, it manages to

assemble a fantastic menagerie of displaced

Biosphere 2 initially mouthed conserva-

tionism’s obsession with restraint (consume

less, switch bulbs, recycle…). But in practice, it

3. The creators—at one time happy and proud, now very sad and broke.

4. Plans—relocate, this is the way to live, August 1996.

5. The Master Controls—play Zelda and control the atmosphere at the same time, August 1996.

14 | 13

embodies the Obama administration’s provoca-

tion “we never let a crisis go to waste.”4 Rather

than ameliorate crises, it exploits them.

Equilibrium and Escape

The Institute for Ecotechnics’ (IE) 1982 “Galactic

Conference”5 in Les Marronniers, France brought

Buckminster Fuller together with Phil Hawes,

a Frank Lloyd Wright student who pitched

a scheme for a spherical, space-traveling

greenhouse. Fuller leapt on it: “If you guys don’t

build a biosphere, who will?”6 Two years later, IE

launched Space Biosphere Ventures (SBV).

In 1969, Fuller had famously called for

managing the planet as if it were a spaceship.7

SBV reversed Fuller’s metaphor, and proliferated

its rationales. Not just a spaceship prototype,

Biosphere 2 was alternately a shelter from

nuclear winter (“Refugia”8) and a laboratory to

model planetary homeostasis.

To John Allen, co-founder of IE and presi-

dent of SBV9, these diverse missions worked

towards a singular vision of ecology in tune with

egalitarianism, global spiritual consciousness

and the “delicate web of life” on Earth (AKA

Biosphere 1). “Ecotechnics” was itself an ex-

trapolation of Lewis Mumford’s organic concept

of “Biotechnic” design, in which production

and consumption are trained to nurture the

group and culture the personality.10 Biospheri-

ans synthesized theories of such IE speakers as

ecologists James Lovelock and Eugene Odum

to portray the planet as a cybernetic organism

that self-regulates to achieve a “climax state”

of maturity, health and efficiency.11 The name

itself was inspired by Vladimir Vernadsky’s

1926 book The Biosphere, which posits three

stages of evolution—geosphere, biosphere and

noösphere or sphere of thought—each stage

radically transforming the previous. Vernadsky

and Teilhard de Chardin followed up with the

Omega Point, a transcendent, singular state of

maximum evolution in global complexity and

consciousness. Allen similarly compared Bio-

sphere 2 to a giant mandala of global unity, and

admitted that this syncretic vision would have

been impossible without psychoactives.12 Like

6. It Was Better— we should have remembered to water the plants. August, 1996

a trip, Biosphere 2 escaped, momentarily, from

the atmosphere of earth.

Precarious Stability

Biosphere 2 was built as the world’s most air-

tight building, designed to leak no more than

10% of its air per year (half the rate of the Space

Shuttle). Without 1970s advancements in her-

metic enclosure, it was sealed to tolerances only

dreamed of by machine-age architects. Facade

consultant Peter Pearce patented the “Multi-

hinge” node-less space frame triangulated to

minimize thermal flexing. Structural silicone was

factory bonded to two layers of glass and plastic

laminate.13 Sealant was applied in two colors

(white and gray) to make redundant enclosure

legible. A skin of welded stainless steel plates

lined concrete slabs and foundations beneath

two to six meters of soil. Neoprene spanned 158-

foot diameter steel drums housed in geodesic

domes to create “lungs” that expand and con-

tract as Biosphere 2’s interior air heats

and cools. Hunting for leaks, installers waved

incense under the glass and shot compressed

air through “sniffer tunnels” to verify welds.

Equilibrium was engineered by instru-

mentalizing two distinct ecological theories:

Darwinian competition and cybernetic regulation.

In addition to the “Intensive Agriculture Biome”

and the humans’ “Habitat,” there were five

“Wilderness” biomes, with some species grown

in greenhouses and others trucked in as entire

landscapes. Swaths of tropical rain forest

were sampled from Venezuela, savanna from

French Guyana, desert from Baja, marsh from

the Everglades, and the ocean from the Yucatan.

At the suggestion of William S. Burroughs,

bushbabies were introduced to supply compan-

ion primates.14 Biosphere 2 designers included

“more species than the scientists thought might

finally survive, so that if one species failed,

another would thrive, finally reaching self-orga-

nized stability.”15 Unlike those of the prevailing

reductionist science, this would be a new kind of

lab: operating with a large number of variables

to study systems at the scale of the earth’s

ecosystems, while (in theory) being able to track

“every atom in the Biosphere’s systems.”16

Ultimately, however, the atmosphere seeped

back in. Biosphere 2’s sixty-mile long, termite-

proof, silicone seal was eventually penetrated by

ants, creating an insect network that united its

biomes with the Sonoran Desert outside. Due

to unforeseen oxygen absorption by the raw

concrete, oxygen plummeted from 20.9% of the

atmosphere to 14% (equivalent to respiration

above 10,000 feet) in six months.17 A measured

amount of air had to be added for survival.

If Biosphere 2 was headed towards homeo-

stasis, it was not the Arcadia imagined

at the outset. Biospherians soon went hungry,

lost an average of 14% of their body weight

and reported caffeine

A hot-dog stand [was set up] not far

from the Biosphere... Sometimes we

lined up …and took turns peering

through binoculars at fat people who

were spurting ketchup on sausages

and shoveling them into their mouths.

We were culinary voyeurs.18

Few imagined that their Eden would be overrun

by ants, roaches and morning glories. Five

species of roaches were included to recycle dead

leaves, but a stowaway species from Australia

multiplied into the millions.

The person on night watch had the

chore of creeping into the kitchen to

catch them unawares. Armed with

16 | 15

a vacuum cleaner, he or she flipped

on the light and vacuumed up

as many of the roaches as possible

before they all scuttled away.19

Captured insects were fed to the chickens,

whose eggs in turn were fed to the humans.

Biospherians were constantly exhausted

from work. Starvation and the psychological

pressures of isolation left little energy or desire

for the ambitious roster of philosophy lectures,

meditation and theater initially designed to

promote collectivism. The anticipated new

civilization receded amidst outbursts by “master

manipulator” John Allen. During morning medi-

tation, Allen bellowed, “You have no discipline,

no interest in the Synergia!”20 The self-sustaining

community became a monastery in a high-tech

shell: outfitted with the latest machinery, but

without the economies of scale that would pro-

vide enough caffeine or alcohol to intoxicate.

The Space of Mononaturalism

Biosphere 2 was largely dismissed by reporters

and scientists as “science fiction” performance:

a commune founded upon “New Age masquer-

ading as Science.”21 Only two of the eight had

graduate degrees in science. These claims

were reinforced by images of the Biospherians

wearing suits that looked “like a cross between a

scarlet prison jumpsuit and a Star Trek uniform.”

In true utopian style Biosphere 2 was built

on a mythology of consensus based on natu-

ral principles. Vernadsky, Odum, and Lovelock

described an image of nature so pure and

purposeful that social policy should submit to

its imperatives.22 Odum called for birth control

and fiscal policy to discourage economic growth.

Lovelock writes, “Let us forget human con-

cerns, human rights, and human suffering, and

concentrate instead on our planet, which may be

sick.”23 This version of nature-in-crisis made no

provision for dissent.

A holistic nature was enclosed in a single

interior, forming a continuum of the world’s

major landscapes. But its monolithic shell was

articulated into a neighborhood of iconic archi-

tectural forms from distinct cultures: the Great

[THERE IS] A CRISIS OF MISALIGNMENT BE-

TWEEN THE BIOSPHERE AND THE TECHNO-

SPHERE. THESE SEEM TO BE OUT OF BALANCE;

A CATASTROPHE…BIO-SPHERE 2, INSTEAD, CRE-

ATES A BALANCE BE-TWEEN BIOSPHERE AND

TECHNOSPHERE

7. Wise Guy— its amazing how people will listen to you when wearing a cool hat and have a handle bar moustache to go with it, August, 1996.

Pyramid, Babylonian Vaults, Kennedy Space

Center, Monticello.24 Unlike Le Corbusier’s mod-

ernist dream of neutralizing walls and a “single

building for all nations and climates, with respi-

ration exactly at 18°C,”25 unlike Hawe’s original

spherical spaceship, Biosphere 2 was decidedly

postmodern: superficial, multicultural variations

enclose a substantial, universal Nature.

Yet, the project soon erupted into a

battlefield for nature wars. Midway through the

first mission, the venture split between those

who—like Allen—pushed for the primacy of con-

tainment, and those who doubted the value of

enclosure.26 The debate over whether this was an

engineering feat or a science experiment grew

louder. While Biospherians translated Odum

and Gaia into blueprints, 1970s ecologists had

turned away from steady-state theories. They

instead favored “shifting mosaics” or more aim-

less and anarchic models. Ecologists like Daniel

Botkin saw the landscape as flux: “wherever we

seek constancy…we discover change.”27

In the end, Biosphere 2 succeeds or fails

not in maintaining enclosure or homeostasis,

but rather in its ability to effect new agendas,

debates and decisions on scientific hypotheses.

Viva Las Bio-dome28

Trees inside the enclosure developed soft bark

due to lack of wind: Biosphere 2 was better at

creating new ecosystems than modeling existing

ones. Once homeostasis and holism ran dry,

Biosphere 2 came alive.

Built to last 100 years, it outlived its found-

ing premise in less than three, and its massive

space-framed atmosphere now absorbs any and

all programs (and invites the manufacture of

new content to fill its void). It produces a strange

world with buttons and switches that allow for

the continuous production of new relationships.

Allen named the mechanical realm housed in

CMU walls beneath the biomes’ “artistically

modeled” concrete grottoes the “Technosphere,”

after the manmade world that Biosphere 2

sought to bring into alignment with the plan-

etary ecosystem.29 Here, urine was converted

into irrigation, drinking water was captured

from transpiring plants, and air was cooled and

heated by a dedicated power plant.30 Designed

for stable state regulation, the Technosphere has

become an environment machine that subse-

quent housekeepers31—now inspired, disgusted,

or otherwise provoked by this first model—

can adjust.

Following SBV’s two closed missions, it

has been managed as a controlled ecology lab

by Columbia University (1995-2003), and the

University of Arizona’s B2 Institute (2007-pres-

ent). Academic scientists replace enclosure with

regulation: windows are opened, and a system

of fans and sensors has been installed to control

atmospheric conditions. In B2, air can be fresh

or recirculated as long as its chemical makeup

is controlled. Plastic partitions subdivide the

dome, isolating the biomes and allowing mul-

tiple experiments to go on simultaneously.32

In practice, Biosphere 2 is a blur of many

spheres. In place of Allen’s idealized philos-

opher-scientist, contemporary Biospherians

include tourists, school children, grad students,

retirees, scientists and international research-

ers. They take guided tours, exchange informa-

tion with research teams in the Venezuelan rain

forest or participate in high school outreach

programs33 Even during the first mission, the

enclosure membrane restricted molecules and

NATURE IS INSIDE

18 | 17

bodies, yet allowed heat, photons and electricity

to pass freely. Telephone, email, videophones,

satellite TV and radio all cycled through a con-

trol room at the center of the Habitat.34

Biosphere 2 performs equations of ef-

ficiency and contingency that decide who is

present, who is responsible to whom and who

gets their way. Each of its spheres defines a

broad constituency including humans and non-

humans, enclosed territories and sites of shared

concern. The global environmental crisis is not

just scarcity and global warming. It is the failure

to contest standards of distribution, efficiency

and value necessary to run the house. Biosphere

2’s own crisis engages in debate over research

priorities, ecosystem construction and resource

distribution. Having never proved eco-holism, it

becomes a machine for actively connecting sites,

organisms and systems according to shifting

eco-politics.

Biosphere 2 began with the belief that we

can be most responsive to the pressing charges

of environmental crisis with ascetic sensitivity to

homeostatic equilibrium. It claimed to provide

an architecture of limits based on the authority

of Nature, an updated container for a low-

impact life. But at the same time, it cleared land,

synthesized ecologies, manufactured infrastruc-

ture, patented new building systems, expanded

universities and published volumes of data. In

doing so, it became the scale model of an ambi-

tious new collective.35

Dreamland of a Warm Age

Walt Disney sought to showcase life in a utopian

city with futuristic life support systems and no

private property: a vision ultimately spun off into

edutainment (EPCOT) and New Urbanism (Cel-

ebration). Biosphere 2 is today’s Lilliputia. The

life of the future is tested in a contained environ-

ment, then broadcasted to the public.

“Self-sufficient buildings” and “eco-cities”

such as Masdar (in Abu Dhabi) or Dongtan (near

Shanghai) seek their appropriate place in the

biosphere by acting as biospheres themselves.

Responsibly efficient—with zero-carbon, zero-

waste, zero-greenhouse-emissions, zero-water

[THERE IS] A CRISIS OF MISALIGNMENT BE-

TWEEN THE BIOSPHERE AND THE TECHNO-

SPHERE. THESE SEEM TO BE OUT OF BALANCE;

A CATASTROPHE…BIO-SPHERE 2, INSTEAD, CRE-

ATES A BALANCE BE-TWEEN BIOSPHERE AND

TECHNOSPHEREusage and zero-energy standards—they suffer

from the same domestic problems as Biosphere

2. That is, pursuing conservation as though

it were possible and desirable to withdraw from

nature. What if this were reversed? Biosphere

2’s crisis offers possibilities for aggressive,

informed inclusion of nonhumans in an

expanded city.

As Biosphere 2 reunites with Biosphere

1, Cañada Del Oro Ranching and Development

LP (CDO)—who purchased the Biosphere 2 site

in 2007—draws plans to build a retirement vil-

lage with commercial and resort developments

nearby. Like Biosphere 2, these new buildings

will regulate their perimeters: air conditioning

systems will calibrate and filter the air, windows

will be airtight and shielded with optical coating

films, utilities will monitor consumption. Houses

will be as big as local tastes allow. Shells will be

a series of membranes and moisture stretched

across lightweight steel framing. Office build-

ings built will likely express their triangulated

exoskeleton rather than the individual office. Our

buildings are now domes—machines that opti-

mize and express atmospheric enclosure. They

react to the crisis of manmade world destruction

by building more and better little worlds. Skin

has replaced basement as the site of refuge.

Architects have taken on biology. Plastic sheet-

ing and duct tape is the new bomb shelter.

This involves nothing less than a progres-

sive un-balancing of natures and publics.

Anything else would be wasting a crisis.

1 Allen, John and Anthony Blake, eds., Biosphere 2: The Human Experiment (New York, Penguin Books, 1991), 10.2 Speaking at “Nature Space Society” Tate Modern, 2003 while showing a slide of Biosphere 2.3 Gore, Al, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, (New York, Rodale, Inc., 2006).4 “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things,” Rahm Emanuel. Zeleny, Jeff, “Obama Weights Quick Undoing of Bush Policy,” New York Times, November 9, 2008.5 Papers included The Galaxy: A Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Chal-lenge by R. Buckminster Fuller, Principles of Evolution of Life in the Galaxy by Richard Dawkins, The In-terdependence of Inner and Outer Space, by Dr. Albert Hofmann, and Architecture for Galactic Colonies, by Phil Hawes.6 Poynter, Jane, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2 (New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press,

2006), 20.7 Fuller, Buckminster R., Op-erating Manual for Space-ship Earth (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1969).8 Broad, William J., “As Bio-sphere Is Sealed, Its Patron Reflects on Life.” New York Times, September 24, 1991.9 Allen headed SBV with architect Margret Augustine. He studied sociology and geology at Colorado School of Mines, attained an MBA at Harvard, and was a General Manager of the

“Synergia Ranch” commune in New Mexico. Here Allen befriended Biosphere’s principle investor, Ed Bass,

in the 70’s through the acting troupe, the “Theater of All Possibilities.” Bass, billionaire oil heir, former Yale architecture student, and ‘ecopreneur’ invested $150 billion in the project. See Broad, 1991.10 Odum, a pioneer of ecosystems theory, posited that organisms are linked in a “healthy state of order” in which ecological succession leads to a “climax state” of maturity, health, and efficiency. Worster, Donald, Nature’s Economy: A His-tory of Ecological Ideas, (Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press, 1994), 368.11 Odum, a pioneer of ecosystems theory, posited that organisms are linked in a “healthy state of order” in which ecological succession leads to a “climax state” of maturity, health, and efficiency. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 368.12 “It’s impossible to fully appreciate the Amazon, or anything as complex as a tropical rainforest, without special states of conscious-ness.” Brown, David J. and Novick, Rebecca M., eds., Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations for the New Millennium, (Freedom, CA, Crossing Press, 1993).13 Pearce is a student of Full-er’s and author of Structure in Nature. For more on the Pearce Multi-hinge System see Chilton, John, Space Grid Structures, (Oxford, Architectural Press, 2000).14 One of them dies explor-ing a transformer box.15 Poynter, Human Experi-ment, 75.16 Ibid, 204.17 Sniffers produce a daily

“weather report,” tracking oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. A homemade scrub-ber turns carbon dioxide into limestone using sodium and calcium hydroxide but cannot offset the oxygen depletion.18 Poynter, Human Experi-ment, 191.19 Ibid, 191.20 Ibid, 107. SBV infighting during the second mission in 1994 is so fierce that when an investor takeover led to a communications blackout, two former

Biospherians raced to the building and break its seals, to let their voices and the atmosphere rush back in. See Ayres, Drummond B. Jr.,

“Ecological Experiment Be-comes Battleground,” New York Times, April 11, 1994.21 Zimmerman, Michael,

“Review: Biosphere 2: Long on Hype, Short on Science,” Ecology, Vol. 73, no. 2 (April, 1992), 713.22 “Users of the term

‘ecosystem’ were retaining modernism’s basic defect, its penchant for compos-ing the whole without the explicit will of those humans and nonhumans who find themselves gathered… in a totality constituted outside the political world, in the nature of things. The eco-system integrated everything but too quickly and too cheaply. The Science of ecosystems allowed us to dispense with the require-ments of discussion and the due process in building the common world.” Latour, Bruno, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2004).23 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 386.24 Allen, Biosphere 2, 89.25 Quoted in Banham, Reyner P., Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environ-ment, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984), 156.26 Dissenters included an advisory council of scientists hired by Bass. See Poynter, Human Experiment, 225.27 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 397. Quoting Botkin, Daniel, Discordant Harmonies, 10, 62.28 Bio-Dome. DVD. Directed by Jason Bloom with per-formances by Pauly Shore, Steven Baldwin, and William Atherton, (Los Angeles, MGM Home Entertainment, 2002).29 Poynter, Human Experi-ment, 76.30 The technosphere sits within the seal of Biosphere 2 and includes air handling units, water storage tanks, the carbon scrubber, and a patented waste-recycling system, WastronTM, converts human urine into agricultural irrigation, while

20 | 19

water transpired by plants is captured as condensation for drinking water. External to the seal on Biosphere 2’s campus is a natural gas and diesel plant, using 6 million kW hours per year at a cost of $1.3 million per year, enough for 600 homes.31 Many have noted that ecology, the study of the household (“oikos” in Greek) is a term derived from economy, or household management. See, Worster, Nature’s Economy, 37.32 Columbia researcher Guanghui Lin, for example, tests rainforest’s ability to absorb carbon at different concentrations. See, Marino, B.D.V and Odum, H.T., Biosphere 2: Research Past and Present (Great Britain, Elsevier Science, 1999).33 Travis Huxman, direc-tor of B2, celebrates the opportunity for tourists to interrogate graduate students working alongside elevated viewing platforms, arguing that they provoke and assist students in fram-ing their work.34 Visitors and self-described “inmates” would kiss through the glass, or put their hands up in a

“Biospherian handshake” while talking on a prison-style visitors’ phone next to the airlock.35 A skill Latour identifies with economists.

Interview03Borders Stephen Graham Interview

by

Gavin Browning

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Gavin Browning:

You’ve used ideas of “inside” and “outside” to

discuss the new urban security doctrine. What do

these terms mean for cities?

Stephen Graham:

The current period is marked by the demise of the

separation of the inside of the nation from the

outside and the sense of pervasive mobile threats:

real and imagined terrorism, disease, cyber at-

tacks, non-state adversaries of all sorts that are

organized through networks and permeating the

outside and the inside, being and enemy within as

well as an enemy without. This leads to a radical

militarization of policing, and on the other hand,

a shift within the military towards more a more

policing set of functions—both inside and outside

the state. A lot of these politics of security come

together around cities, because cities are the

spaces deemed both most at-risk and most threat-

ening. For example, illegal immigration where in

particular, neighborhoods where the diaspora and

the cosmopolitan mixes are concentrated are per-

ceived to be the threat of both illegal immigration

and the threat of internal terrorism.

So there’s this radical sense of the security of

the world coming together in and around micro-

geographies of the city and micro-technologies of

the city, and this is also fueled by the sense that

cities are open to the outside world in terms of

constant connections with infrastructure, with

flows of people, with flows of information and so

on. This is what Paul Virilio called the “Over-

exposed City”—the idea that the city can no

longer be demarcated from the outside world in

any simple way. The security politics that we’re

interested in now bring the global and the local

together in a very intense way.

GB

How does this new standard of militarized polic-

ing affect or blur borders during a crisis?

SG

There are many examples of a state drawing bor-

ders inside its own boundaries in new ways, such

as a state of exception (where there is a call of a

state of emergency in which normal laws are actu-

ally revoked by the law itself in Giorgio Agam-

ben’s terms) where you have, for example, spaces

22 | 21

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of incarceration inside the city or within the state

where refugees or suspected terrorists are placed

without rights of citizenship, or without rights

of trial, or without rights of humanitarian law.

Another good example is the SARS crisis of 2003,

where it wasn’t really the edge of the nation that

was concerned, territorially-speaking. Rather, it

was the airport, because the airport is now where

the border is located. So there’s a real sense of the

state trying to organize and filter-in new surveil-

lance and security devices to stop pathogens—and

people deemed to be carrying pathogens—from

coming right into the heart of the city.

Another example is the Container Secu-

rity Initiative in the US. There’s an effort being

made by the Homeland Security Department

to basically change the whole global system of

container port traffic, based on its own idea of

the homeland being secure. So every container

port in the world who wants to trade with the US

now has to have its own information systems, its

own tracking systems, that operate in a way like a

global homeland.

While all these borders come together inside

the nation, the question about security of the

homeland also goes beyond the nation to inflect

global systems of airline traffic, port security,

information technology flow, financial flow: all

of the flows that sustain the city. This is all about

the micro-geographies of the city and the global

geographies of the security coming together.

GB

A crisis carries with it extreme urgency. How do

borders function under such moments of extreme

urgency and duress?

SG

Extreme events tend to heighten state efforts to

tighten borders. With the SARS crisis, for ex-

ample, there was a very heavy investment in emer-

gency measures to track people, to scan people, to

do new sorts of testing whether or not individuals

were carrying infection—this is all about the idea

of re-drawing boundaries.

Remember, in the 90s there was a huge

celebration of the end of geography: a celebration

of a neoliberal utopia of perfect mobility. Sud-

denly, that was all backtracked—bringing in new

24 | 23

Borders—This is what Paul Virilio often called the “Overexposed City”—the idea that the city can no longer be demarcated from the outside world in any

simple way.

borders, new ideas of filtering borders, biometrics

into passports, face recognition, bringing in bor-

ders at the micro-scale. For example, the proposal

by the New York City Council to bring in a

surveillance cordon in around the strategic finan-

cial district of Manhattan, organized by cameras

that can recognize license plates. It’s based on the

example in London.

Generally, crises breed new borders, they

breed new attempts to draw borders, they breed

a language which stresses a sense of exposure and

a sense of anxiety, and a sense of being exposed

to new threats and new mobility which is easily

translated into a semi-racist politics of demon-

izing beyond the border: seeing the civilian as

the enemy. The whole discussion around illegal

immigration in the US and Europe is very much

about demonizing the racialized body that is

challenging our civilization, that is threatening

our labor markets, that is taking our housing, our

jobs, and so on.

This is the language of emergency being

manipulated for political ends. None of this is

new—there’s a whole history of manipulation of

the language of emergency for political ends, of

course. What’s new are the ways in which the

control technologies involved are much more

capable—and much more globally organized—

than in previous eras.

GB

What does this blurring imply for refugee camps,

which are often located on or near borders?

SG

We’re now seeing the militarization of what Teddy

Cruz calls the “political equator,” or, the division

between the Global North and the Global South.

This obviously runs right between the US and

Mexico, between Spain and Morocco, and in and

around Gaza and the West Bank. So you have the

political equator of the world running through

the micro-geographies of urban space, and these

borders being militarized very heavily—new

checkpoints, biometrics, and so on—but there are

also efforts being made to create extra-territorial

refugee camps. For example, Australia is basically

appropriating an island in the Pacific as an extra-

territorial camp, and Spain is using some of its

historic enclaves in Morocco to try to manage the

flows of Africans trying to come north.

At the same time, we see intra-territorial

camps: highly militarized spaces of incarceration

within Northern nations where the rights of citi-

zenship and human rights are often problematic.

GB

You state that there has been a blurring of not

only physical borders, but also the border be-

tween civilian and military security forces. Can

you explain?

SG

The military is being deployed more often within

nations than during the Cold War, especially

through urban warfare exercises: in the US, for

example, the Marines might invade Oakland

for simulation purposes. But before 9/11, North

America was the only portion of the world that

didn’t have a US military command, even though

military commands existed for every other inch

of the planet. Now we have a military command

called NORTHCOM, which is gearing itself

towards internal deployment within the North

American continent—deploying satellite systems,

surveillance drones, all with a view to trying to

catch these enemies within, and working with

the Patriot Act and other spaces of surveillance

such as telephone traffic, internet traffic, financial

transactions and so on.

There is a sense of military deployment

increasing inside states, at the same time as police

are being organized in a much more militarized

way: anti-terrorist squads and SWAT teams

are increasingly deployed for routine and basic

misdemeanors, while police have a much more

militarized look as well as more militarized tactics

and technologies.

And on the other hand, the military is being

deployed to do more than fight wars. For ex-

ample, the military in Iraq were involved initially

in a state-versus-state conflict, but since then, it’s

been involved in a huge range of peacekeeping,

reconstruction and counter-insurgency operations:

a whole set of policing-style activities in which

you’re never clear who the enemy is. X

26 | 2126 | 25

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DON’T WAKE ME FOR

THE END OF THE WORLD

UNLESS IT HAS VERY

GOOD SPECIAL EFFECTS.

— ROGER ZELAZNY

Design for the Apocalypse

by John McMorrough

>

Utopia, that place of high aspirations and lofty ambition, has been the motivating conceit for a society (and an architecture) of achievable perfection for quite a long time, but across the spectrum of culture there has been a recent turn from the utopian to the apocalyptic, in forms both fictional and factual. Invoking the “apoca-lypse” brings forth connotations of the end of the world—historically imagined as everything from the judgment of God to nuclear Armageddon. In its contemporary manifestation it has taken the form of various global crises: environmental, economic or unexpected. Of course, the “end of the world” is not a novelty. It has its own history, and is itself a genre of expression as a category of pessimism. A recurrent theme within cultural thought, it is the shadow of the progressive ideal of the avant-garde. What we see in this latest… manifestation is not merely the conservative po-sition describing a fall from grace, or the entropic decline of systems and the diminishment of qual-ity over time, but a description of a new prevalent condition. With the intermingling of the improb-able and the prosaic (think Katrina and The Day After Tomorrow, or 9/11 and Children of Men), the consideration of the apocalyptic is no longer a matter of fantasy,1 but of policy (one recently referred to as “disaster capitalism”).2

The question is, of course, why apocalypse now?

The genre of the apocalyptic always con-tains within it a means of working through the problematic of its era. The term itself indicates as much: from the Greek “ποκάλυψις”—literally

Essay05

38 | 37

DON’T WAKE ME FOR

THE END OF THE WORLD

UNLESS IT HAS VERY

GOOD SPECIAL EFFECTS.

— ROGER ZELAZNY

>

Apoc—Utopia, that place of high aspirations and lofty ambition, has been the motivating conceit for a society (and an architecture) of achievable perfection for quite a long time, but across the spectrum of culture there has been a recent turn from the utopian to the apocalyp-tic, in forms both fictional and factual.

translated as a “lifting of the veil” and repre-senting, as a concept, the disclosure to certain privileged persons of something hidden from the mass of humankind—its occurrence in narra-tive is symptomatic of larger issues. However, it reveals the limits and fears of the society that wrote it. For us, it is a combination of factors: it is both global warming and sub-prime loans, both nuclear terrorism and social ills. All are real. And all are, to some extent, constructs.

The real issue with the various evoca-tions of the end of the world has never been about “the end,” but rather a beginning. Anthony Burgess, author of the dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange, once commented that the warnings of apocalyptic tales were really wish-fulfillment.3 In a world of overwhelming complexity—of zero-sum economics and peak-oil—the apocalypse comes not as problem, but as answer. The “end of” also implied a “begin-ning of”—a chance to re-start and re-think. At the level of fantasy the apocalypse represents the chance to begin anew; the end of the world in film always represents a new start, a chance to have another, unencumbered go at making the world.4 If utopia is an unattainable goal, a literal no place, then the apocalypse is an everyplace.5 In this sense the specter of the apocalypse is another version of the modernist tabula rasa, a leveling of the past to make way for the future.

So the end of the world is but a re-orienta-tion of sensibility. We can already see evi-dence of this in the new emphasis on the basic conditions of our existence. What unifies these manifestations is their survivalist undertone.6 The operation of the subject in an environment is not only a thing, but also an action, a mechanism that calibrates itself to need. This mechanism is never in stasis; its needs are never in perfect equilibrium to the available means. Thus, it is scarcity (of food, water, safety, resources, ame-nity or potential) that is the engine of transforma-tion and change in a variety of environments (natural and artificial, economic and ecological—namely architecture, landscape and the city).

These impulses, in light of this symbolic (and increasingly real) economy, can be seen

>

as having strange portents for the projects of architecture. How would architecture act in a post-apocalyptic mode? And what is the rela-tion of architecture to capital when there is no capital? One possibility is for architecture’s disciplinary preservation. Here, if we understand architecture as a historically formulated set of rules and guidelines, then the future of architec-ture looks dim. One could imagine its on-going continuation, but in a material enactment of an increasingly archaic form of thought. Eventually architecture’s status may be that it becomes a fixture of the university—as a testament of the plentitude of an earlier humanism—next to the Classics Department, as just another repository of dead languages.

Or, one could imagine the re-description of architecture’s disciplinary legacy in terms of its performance and effectiveness, with an em-phasis on the agency of design as a responsive, problem solving effort. If this sounds like an environmental call to arms, with the earnestness of LEED and green design, of responsibility and stewardship, preservation and prevention, it is not. There are issues of responsibility, of course, but that is not the only manifestation, or even the most useful. The new mode would want to address matters of concern; where environmen-tal matters are no more or less important than the social in terms of either cause or need. The coming apocalypse may or may not be a solv-able problem, or it may not be a problem at all, but its existence as even an idea demonstrates a shift that is not only practical, but conceptual. To shift from the utopian to the apocalyptic is not merely to set the terms in an opposing relation, but to understand their similarity. Both describe a condition of radical change; turning from one to the other as a privileged mode doesn’t speak to a preponderance of nihilism per se…

…but to a fundamental recalibration of the imagination (specifically, architectural imagina-tion) from issues of plentitude to those of scar-city. The recent architectural debates regarding criticality and post-criticality can be understood as having changed in light of a shift in cultural imagination away from the progressivism/positiv-

ism of late global capital as a preparatory effort to a more apocalyptic framework of environmen-talism and peak-zero sum economic models. This would be seen through the survival impera-tive, as acting on a new understanding of how measures are made.

Design for the apocalypse, because ready or not, it’s coming.

1 See Kiel Moe’s “Observations of the Concept of Place in Post-Risk Societies in Recent Fiction,” Places, Volume 20, Number 2, 2008: 42-43.2 See Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropoli-tan Books, 2007).3 Anthony Burgess, “The Art of Frivolity,” Times Literary Supple-ment (12 June 1992): 22.4 See Alan Weisman’s The World without Us (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007).5 This usage is a reference to the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, within whose famous work of a perfect imaginary island there is the irony that the perfection is not only imaginary, but in a sense impossible, as “utopia” means, literally, “not place” (as translated from the Greek εủ, “not”, and τόπος, “place”). The positive associations attributed to Utopia are in fact the domain of the homo-phonic “Eutopia” (as derived from the Greek εữ, “good” or “well”, and τόπος, “place”), to which it is clearly related, yet significantly.

6 One of the more interesting specimens of this genre of recent apocalyptic fiction as both indictment and wish-fulfillment is James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand: A Novel (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), which extends the arguments regarding the depletion of the world’s oil supply made in The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Grove Press, 2006). In the novelization the result of the extended energy crisis is both worldwide economic and political collapse, as well as an increased supply of fresh churned butter, made possible by the newly agrarian existence. For a further discussion of Kunstler’s

“Long Emergency” see my own “The Future of Fuelish Building” in Volume 7 (2006).

40 | 39

—BRITISH MINISTRY OF INFORMATION

Warning Messages06

KEEP CA

LM &

CARRY

ON

.

KEEP CALM & CARRY ON.

UniqueContent

07

Crisis Devices

by SLAB

44 | 43

Foreclosed Homes

by Geoff Manaugh

In the otherwise unwatchable 2005 film Fun With Dick and Jane, actors Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni watch in dismay as their front lawn is repossessed. The turf is literally peeled off the surface of the earth, rolled up like wallpaper, and carted away in the back of a pick-up truck. The natural landscape of their suburban world is revealed as very literally superficial. It is not a landscape at all, you could say, but a commer-cial product whose lifespan has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with afford-ability. The couple has fallen behind on their payments—and their prosthetic terrain is taken away. “Not everybody could afford a landscape like that, eh?” says Hector, the gardener, as he packs an armful of turf into his truck. Not everybody, indeed.

I’m reminded of an article by Charles Montgomery from the October/November 2008 issue of The Walrus. On a visit to Stockton, California, a town particularly hard-hit by foreclosures, Montgomery stumbled upon a bizarre growth industry: painting the dead lawns of foreclosed homes green using athletic turf dyes. “It seemed fitting that realtors in Stockton

Essay08

should consider it normal to paint these lawns green,” he explained to me over email. “It was only the appearance of vitality that mattered. Homes that looked palatial from the street were fragile inside: thin walls, cheap lights, shelves pinned to cardboard-thin drywall. Everything about Stockton’s suburbs felt temporary, as though the place was a movie set—built to be consumed and abandoned.”

Of course, foreclosures in the US continue to accumulate, with no genuine end in sight—whole suburban developments now reduced to ghost towns when they were expected to be booming. Lawns are drying up, if not repos-sessed outright; pools are turning green with algae, or simply evaporating to form illegal skate parks; garages sit empty; upstairs bedrooms have gone silent. In some cases, wild animals have actually begun to colonize the derelict homes, like some avant-garde backdrop de-signed for a particularly exotic zoo. Mountain lions sleep atop uninhabited ranchos, sunning themselves on pinewood decking.

This is the spatial residuum of the financial crisis. Like a modern-day Pompeii, it is a geog-

raphy of collapse—in this case, an immersive archaeological site distributed nationwide.

But we mustn’t forget that these foreclo-sures did not begin today. In the mid-1990s, for instance, photographer Todd Hido had already begun to document repossessed homes in the greater Los Angeles area. These houses, forcibly abandoned and emptied of not quite all their contents, were sealed behind locked doors and left to accumulate dust. However, those locked doors included coded lock-boxes, and those lock-boxes contained keys—and it was these keys that Hido figured out how to access. The codes, he and a realtor friend discovered, were nothing more complex than an abbreviation or anagram of the name of the bank that fore-closed the property. “Home Savings of America was HSA,” Hido pointed out in a telephone interview. Enter that code—and you can enter the building. “You could always tell what bank it was by the signs in front of the houses. I prob-ably made it into forty or fifty of them that way, and then I started taking pictures.”

When I asked him what he hoped to find there, Hido replied: “I was definitely more in-

terested in the ones that weren’t cleaned up. A lot of times somebody would come in and wipe the place clean, but I concentrated more on the simple little marks and the simple little traces left behind. You could tell where pictures were hung, for instance, as if there were still stories on the walls themselves.”

The photos he produced are an odd kind of spatial portraiture: the inner lives of aban-doned buildings. It’s as if we’ve come across some little-known burial practice in which twenty-first century homeowners have been entombed with none of their possessions. They are antechambers to the afterlife of the American dream. In sheer volume alone, our living rooms now far outweigh the pyramids: for every stone tomb in the world, there are a thousand unused dens full of cat hair and dust. For every cemetery, there is a dead lawn in Stockton. Take away the possessions and the electric lights, and perhaps it is not a landscape meant for the living at all: the suburbs become a giant sepulcher.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing here, then, is to realize how mundane it will be

4646 | 45

1. Wood Interior— sweat patterned carpet ready for some family fun, get the pool table & beer and let the good times roll.

2. Soiled Mattress— don’t let it get you down, everyone does it. Prop it up & letter dry.

48

when the world really does fall apart. It won’t be all fires and riots and warfare, but empty dining rooms and leaking sinks. Perhaps the only things we’ll leave behind are some carpet squares, maybe a broken lamp, perhaps some loose thumbtacks on the garage floor. So much for the monumental. Hidos’s photos are all the more bleak for being so ordinary. There are stained rugs and scuff marks. Old mattresses. Weak afternoon sunlight filtered through cheap drapes. Oil stains on concrete. Perhaps it’s much worse to realize that there isn’t some apotheosis of the suburban landscape on the way, a geographic rapture that will complete—and finally justify—our built environment.

There is no moment in the end when it will all make sense: we’ll evacuate a world we hardly knew, a purgatory of broken drywall and reclaimed lawns constructed by ancestors we will pretend not to understand.

WILD ANIMALS HAVE BEGUN TO COLONIZE THE DERELICT HOMES, LIKE

SOME AVANT-GARDE BACKDROP DESIGNED FOR

AN EXOTIC ZOO.48 | 47

3. Wood Interior— sweat patterned carpet ready for some family fun, get the pool table & beer and let the good times roll.

4. Soiled Mattress— I am completely making these captions up, you probably shouldn't waste your time reading them.

50 | 49

Marathon

by

David Gissen &

Rachel Schreiber

Start

Anyone with proper training can run a mara-

thon, and a marathon can be run in any location.

It is a distance (26.2 miles), an event and an

adjective for any feat of endurance. Jean Bau-

drillard argues that the marathon has become a

setting in which to stage an image of collec-

tive suicide: a space in which one presses their

body and mind to the limit and hopefully claims

at the end, “I did it.”1 The marathon is also an

evaluative tool of a city’s interaction with the

human body in this state of physiological crisis,

and a barometer of a city’s physical, environ-

mental and political health. Can the air of a city

support the runners’ lungs under such intense

circumstances? Can the financial and politi-

cal apparatus of the city support the required

infrastructure? Can a particular route transform

often-tumultuous spatial histories into positive

media representations?

These questions should ring true to any-

one familiar with the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Between 2006 and 2008, over 350 articles in

major newspapers speculated on Beijing’s ability

to support an Olympic marathon (even though

one has been held there annually since 1981).

The key issue was pollution, but others consid-

ered how sites such as Tiananmen Square would

be integrated into the route, or whether paving

conditions would be up to par. The environmen-

tal quality of the host city can be discussed

relative to all Olympics events, but with the

marathon—an event that by design exceeds the

rarefied boundaries of the Olympic compound—

Essay09

these issues often reach a fever-pitch. The

debates surrounding the Beijing 2008 Olympic

marathon epitomized larger discussions regard-

ing the interrelation of marathons, runners, the

health of the cities that host them and media

relations both within the city and abroad.

Breathe

One central issue haunts the ability of a city to

host a marathon: air. Because athletes generally,

and marathon runners specifically, metabolize

air at a faster rate while taxing their respiratory

and circulatory systems, the chemical content of

air can have potentially disastrous consequenc-

es, even being “deadly to marathoners, triath-

letes and cyclists.”2 Citing concerns over the air

at Beijing, the world-record holding marathon

runner Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia decided

not to compete in the Beijing Olympic mara-

thon. An asthmatic, he stated to reporters “the

pollution in China is a threat to my health and it

would be difficult for me to run forty-two kilo-

meters in my current condition.”3 Other athletes

and trainers demanded the provision of special

masks to help mitigate the seemingly horrific

pollution of Beijing (registering five times the

recommended limits of the World Health Orga-

nization), and the British Olympic Commission

worked with scientists to develop a mask for

use during training. These efforts to essentially

unhinge athletes from the atmosphere of the

city were described as precautions, but such

precautions unfairly criticized the air of Beijing

compared to other major industrial cities, and

among them, other Olympic host cities.

Evaluating the suitability of urban air for

marathons began much earlier, however, with

the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, where eleva-

tion—not pollution—was the source of outside

concern. Dubbed the “high altitude peril” by the

New York Times, Mexico City’s air was believed

to potentially “kill, maim or ruin an athlete.”4

This form of “atmospheric orientalism” views

non-Western air with fear and suspicion: a

double standard that becomes evident in

comparison to the language used before the

1984 Los Angeles Games. Despite worse air

quality—so fierce that the British Equestrian

team developed special masks for their horses—

the sheer ability of the United States to either

host or manage the Games was not questioned,

and particularly not on the basis of its air. The

city’s smog was so severe, in fact, that it was

blamed for the swollen eyes and wobbly gait of

marathon Olympian Gabrielle Andersen, a famed

Olympian who staggered toward the finish line in

the women’s marathon.

Perhaps the most startling development

in Beijing 2008 was the Chinese authorities’

fundamental reworking of the urban metabolism

to accommodate the lungs of athletes. In order

to address smog levels in Los Angeles—1984

brought the worst the city had seen in a decade—

drivers were asked to voluntarily cut back on

recreational driving, and factories were asked to

consider voluntarily reducing their production

by eight percent. In Beijing and the surround-

ing municipalities, driving was limited to two or

three days per week per vehicle, while numer-

ous factories in and around the city were either

closed or relocated for the summer season

preceding the Olympics. Typically, Olympics

are used to bolster the economic prospects of

cities, but the factory closures actually resulted

JEAN BAUDRILLARD ARGUES THAT THE

MARATHON HAS BECOME A SETTING IN WHICH

TO STAGE AN IMAGE OF COLLECTIVE SUICIDE

52 | 51

in increases in unemployment and a reduction

of China’s blistering export economy. These

closings coincided with signs of weakness in

the larger national economy.5 Imagine staging

the Olympic games in post-war Detroit and the

asking the Big Three to either shut down, or to

relocate. Such an unimaginable demand might

bolster the strength of a runner’s lungs, but

would momentarily cripple the economy of the

region. Run, Run, Run.

Run

Just as athletes’ lungs interact with the com-

plexity of the city’s ecological metabolism, so do

their feet traverse complicated political geog-

raphies. Urban marathon organizers face their

share of politics while determining routes, often

attempting to show their city in the best light

to runners and spectators alike. Such “dressing

up” of cities has often involved forms of urban

control. For example, while the authorities in

Beijing responded to international pressure to

54

transform their city’s air, they simultaneously

built walls around, and controlled media access

to, some of the city’s most sensitive sights. Such

forms of route-control have also entered the

planning of marathons in the United States. In

the 1990s, the Washington DC marathon route

was devised in such a way as to avoid the city’s

poorer, African- American neighborhoods.

In comparison to this more familiar history

of municipal and governmental power, one of

the most surprising marathon routes was that

staged in the New York City Marathon of 1976.

Here the marathon’s urban interaction was rede-

signed precisely in order to enable runners and

spectators into some of the city’s most troubled

spaces. During the city’s most severe post-war

fiscal crisis—a crisis that exacerbated the city’s

intraurban tensions, diminished its international

reputation and devastated its public infrastruc-

ture—the organizers of the marathon decided to

change its route.

Originally, the marathon consisted of

four laps around the relatively idyllic Central

Park but its route was then altered to traverse

all five boroughs, including some of the city’s

toughest neighborhoods. The new route brought

a degree of democracy to the event by opening

the marathon spectacle to the entire city, and

indeed the nation—one history describes it as

“the first-ever Marathon race for the masses.”6

The event was billed as citywide, good-spirited

competition, with New York Mayor Abraham

Beame as the starting racer.

The image of runners moving through

ethnic, working-class and poor neighborhoods of

the outer boroughs was intended to address the

city’s reputation as a fractured and dangerous

place: these problems could be overcome. Fred

Lebow, the marathon’s grassroots organizer,

gathered support for the event based on its

potential to unify the city. As Bob Glover, a New

York City marathon trainer, described, “One of

the ways that Fred sold the concept of a five

borough marathon to the city was that the city

needed something positive.”7

The 1976 marathon was a success, and

in 1977, the new route of the New York City

Marathon was used to reimage New York City as

a vibrant and healthy urban totality. In the pages

of New York Magazine, the editors developed a

map of the marathon route, illustrating strapping

young men running throughout the city. The

runners do not move through a decrepit, crisis-

ridden city, but through a visage of clean air and

robust urban buildings and infrastructure. The

fantasy image of the urban marathon appears in

this image of the route, and of these young men.

1 Jean Baudrillard, America

(London and New York: Verso,

1998) 19-202 http://www.prlog.org (last

accessed, December, 1, 2008)3 Thomas, Katie, “Citing Pol-

lution, Gerbrselassie Opts Out

of Olympic Marathon,” New

York Times, March 11, 2008.4 Litsky, Frank, “Peril of High

Altitude to Athletes Called

Exaggeration,” New York

Times, October 24, 1967.5 Scott Tong, “China Clearing

Air for Olympics” American

Public Media, July 8, 2008

and “China’s Economy looks

to Rebound After Lackluster

Olympics,” 08.25.08,

http://www.moneymorning.

com/2008/08/25/china-olym-

pics/ (last accessed 1.9.09)

6 http://aimsworldrunning.

org/marathon_history.htm, ac-

cessed December 14, 2008.7 From the film Run for Your

Life, Screen Media Films,

2008.

JEAN BAUDRILLARD ARGUES THAT THE

MARATHON HAS BECOME A SETTING IN WHICH

TO STAGE AN IMAGE OF COLLECTIVE SUICIDE

54 | 53

UniqueContent

10

Unfriendly Skies

by

C-Lab

56 | 55

>

56 | 55

image 1 Earthquake, Iron Man,

Encounters at the End of the World, The Happening

image 2Charlie Wilson’s War, Airport

Armageddon, Babel

image 3Jaws, Waterworld, Wall

Street, Wall-E

image 4Red Planet, Thx-1138, There

Will Be Blood, Poseidon

image 5Dante’s Peak, War of the

Worlds, Twister, The Andromeda Strain

image 6The Day After TomorrowSyriana, 28 Days Later,

The Perfect Storm

image 7A.I. Artificial Intelligence,

Two-Minute Warning, The Constant Gardener,Resident Evil: Extinction

FILMMAKERS

HAVE GIVEN US

MEMORABLE

ANTAGONISTS

who single–handedly level large-scale devastation. Less appreciated, however, are cinematographers’ skill at evoking system-atic failure through atmospheric devices: innocent and fluffy clouds part, darken, and hell fire descends. A quick inventory of disaster film-skies reminds us that in the movies —and in real life— crisis may strike anytime.

AAAAAAA…FREAK OUT!

—CHIC—

58 | 57

Warning Messages11

AAAAAAA…FREAK OUT!

60 | 59

A. Credit

by

Ginger Nolan

1975New York City’s Mayor Abraham Beame prepares a state-ment on October 17, announcing that the city is bankrupt.

1977In Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, an endless script of graffiti-smeared trains (the pre-eminent symbol of New York’s decade of “crisis”) streams by, not as a menacing torrent but as a quiet, melancholy river. When all the crises that we think of not as crises but as “city life”—the con-structions and destructions, the displacements and replace-ments, the transactions and retractions—when these sud-denly fall quiet, then the real crisis begins. In Akerman’s film, the city-dweller is haunted by the inability to repay the debt of love infinitely expended by family back home.

“We love you, we miss you, why don’t you write?” The letters broke no reply, save the quiet rush of traffic. In exchange for the “credit” extended by those back home, Akerman offers only the collateral of mute imagery—strangers in a subway, lonely streets with long shadows, an eternal river of graffiti. But perhaps these are collateral enough. Perhaps images of the city are fair trade for all manner of invest-ments, but the currencies are different, and the exchange rate is unknown.

Might credit be infinitely expended in trust of an undefined collateral? Why, after President Ford’s infamous (though apocryphal) 1975 invective to New York City to

“drop dead,” did the Fed rescue New York once again? New York had been on the Federal dole for over a decade, and was widely considered a drain on the national economy. It had been on the brink of bankruptcy countless times, since at least as early as 1908. But apparently there was some col-lateral worth investing in repeatedly, regardless of recurring defaults: that is, the collateral of crisis itself. New York had always promised to investors the latent lucre of upheaval. But in the recession of the 1970’s, mired in stillness, the city would not only be unable to repay its debts; it would be unable to generate more debts, and New York’s debts were immensely profitable to its stakeholders. Robert Moses, in previous decades, had exploited the collusion between usury and urban development. In creating continual crises—the massive human displacements effected by his

projects—he had perpetually adverted crisis. By the late 1970’s, after a decade of refusing its role of purveyor of crisis, New York had to show its investors that it was ready to jump back in the fray, to accept the eternal curse (the eternal blessing) of crisis.

1978Mayor Koch describes his campaign against graffiti in militant terms, gloating over the purchase of ferocious dogs to patrol the train yards. In his dreams, he says, he would hire the Saudi police chief, and suitable draconian punishments—presumably dismemberment—would be meted out to teenagers wielding spray-paint. Concurrently, graffiti was being peddled in major art galleries, suggesting a certain complicity. The war against graffiti was a tactic not to suppress crisis, but rather to shift crisis back into the hands of its rightful perpetrators. The image of crisis was to be produced by art galleries—not by youth from the ghettos—while the operations of crisis would be enacted by bankers, planners, and developers.

1982In light of continuing deficits, the Senate Banking Committee urges local bankers to invest more in the city. They contend that if indeed the city goes bankrupt then the “banks would be among the biggest losers.” The New York Times reports that bankruptcy was the newest growth profession. Another article claimed that the 1978 Bankruptcy Reform Act had effectively softened the stigma of bankruptcy.

By declaring bankruptcy, Beame essentially pledged

Encyclopedic Articles

12

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Go Bag was a therapeutic conglomeration of things that functioned as a remedy to any crisis. It jiggled and clanked at the bottom of my backpack—a hard, heavy elixir for an array of diseases afflicting those that had come to Southern California from around the world.

B. Go Bags

by

Jean J. Choi

Every household should pack a Go Bag — a col-lection of items you may need in the event of an evacuation. A Go Bag should be packed in a sturdy, easy-to-carry container such as a backpack or suitcase on wheels. A Go Bag should be easily accessible if you have to leave your home in a hurry. Make sure it is ready to go at all times of the year.

— New York City, Office of Emergency Management

At five o’clock in the morning, the violent tremble of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake shook me out of my sheets. Instincts took control and rolled me under my bed. I lived on the fourth-floor of an eight-story apartment build-ing in West Los Angeles. If it collapsed, how would my pitiful twin-size steel frame bed protect me? I already knew that most survivors of homes that fail live on the top floors. Those who live on the lower floors are usually doomed. The better thing to do would probably have been to sprint down the fire escape into a clear parking lot, offering a panoramic spectacle of my home crumbling to the ground—with Go Bag in hand.

Growing up, I had to carry around a Go Bag at school. It consolidated the back-then essentials within one quart-size, Zip-Loc plastic bag: one can of Vienna Sau-sages, one juice box, one colorfully-printed bandage, one miniature flashlight, one compact aluminum blanket, one napkin, a dollar’s worth of spending cash and a letter from mom explaining that everything was going to be just fine. This, of course, would sustain me in case of a crisis.

Packed under the guise of looming natural disasters, my Go Bag covered a broader range of problems: it was a survivalist remedy for the cornucopia of crises that distinguished Southern California in the 90s. At that time, its sunny, glowing exterior was warped with failures more rampant and terrifying than the effects of an earthquake. Racism shook violently through the streets during the Los Angeles Riots, and social skepticism became visible through immigrants’ failed utopian dreams. In addition, a highly publicized criminal trial flooded mass media, where a certain celebrity was acquitted for double murder. My

to the city’s lenders that the city was theirs to govern. Crisis took command in the guise of private-public partnerships. It is not surprising that New York would then direct its re-development efforts towards attracting international banks to its soil. Once the investors had moored upon this rocky ground of speculative wealth, the city’s debt was no longer simply the banks’ asset but also, supposedly, their liability.

C. Monkeys

by

Jason Zuzga

Monkeys present a cognitive crisis for humanists, under-mining the distinction of the human from all other, what with those faces and hands. Monkeys thus must be kept clearly secured beyond the legal and physical bounds of the human. Monkeys, secured in laboratories, may be subject to tests that would be beyond consideration for any human subject. Monkeys camp through bare life, grinning at us aggressively (never smile at a monkey), about to snatch a sandwich from our hands with theirs, responsibility-free.

Rhesus macaques are held “responsible” for the death of S S Bajwa, the Deputy Mayor of Delhi. He is said to have been reading the newspaper when harassed by marauding monkeys to the edge of his balcony, then over the side. Rhesus macaques are held “sacred” as incarnations of the God Hanuman by Hindu fundamentalists, including the political party Bharatiya Janata (BJP) of which Bajwa was a member. Throughout India, the urban monkey popu-

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D. Public Relations

by

Ina Howard-Parker

Public relations during a crisis is mass psychiatric care meant to reassure a panicked public that its ontological frameworks are meaningful and safe, and that the event described as a crisis is an anomaly.

Tragedies are common and acceptable—war, crime, injustice, disease, death, failure—as long as they occur within established cognitive frameworks. War, it follows, is necessary and honorable, crime happens in dangerous areas, illegal drugs kill, the bad and the weak fail. It is when the storylines with which we make sense of the world are corrupted—“our brave troops” are exposed as torturers and rapists rather than honorable killers, violent crimes occur in the wealthy suburbs, FDA-approved medicines take the lives of innocents—that tragedies become crises.

One is taught to handle crisis communications thus: divulge information as accurately, quickly, and thoroughly as possible. One major, singular tear in our cognitive fabric can be decisively repaired—reestablishing and in many cases strengthening our sense of order and security. Small, drawn-out disclosures, on the other hand, are a thousand small cuts. They produce endless anxiety that another, and yet another, could come any time. They forever undermine our sense of security.

The most famous, and most often praised, case of crisis communications is the “Tylenol Crisis” of 1982. Seven people were killed when Chicago-area Tylenol bottles were laced with cyanide. While the poisonings were quickly es-tablished to be the result of local tampering, the notion that one of the safest brands of a mundane, over-the-counter medicine could kill stirred nationwide psychological terror that far outweighed the number of deaths or the actual threat to the public.

Tylenol recalled every bottle of its product in the country at great short-term cost to the company, but at great long-term benefit too: Americans once again believed that over-the-counter medicines were safe, just as they’d always understood them to be, and in fact came to see Tylenol as the country’s selfless protector. Had Tylenol withdrawn only those bottles in Chicago, or only those in the effected pharmacies, a persistent fear might have accompanied the swallowing of every pill thereafter, undermining trust in the industry and cutting into sales indefinitely. Buy, buy, buy.

The very same week as the Tylenol crisis (now a canonical case study in business and communications books), thousands of Palestinians were massacred in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps as Israel troops stood by and watched. For Americans accustomed to the idea of

lation explodes as the green inner patches and outer edges of the cities are folded into the sprawl. The monkeys move from the trees to the middle, encouraged by the abundance of food, the ethical prohibition on monkey-killing and the active feeding of urban monkeys on the part of Hanuman-worshippers (especially on Tuesdays and Saturdays). Newly municipally employed monkey catchers earn a killing by sending monkeys to some sanctuary beyond the city, from which these monkeys continue to escape and wreak havoc in the nearest town. Male monkeys can be caught, microchipped, sterilized, and released for the equivalent of US$35. Well worth it.

This monkey line gets crossed on occasion and crisis may ensue beyond the scope of human control, planning or study. See elsewhere Planet of the Apes. See elsewhere Hu-man Evolution as some monkeys start to think more about themselves and plan ahead, assuming the ability to manage any crisis with words and numbers. Crisis-free monkeys with delusions of grandeur risk global catastrophe, one that we critical humans will surely manage.

Rhesus macaques in psychology laboratories in the 1950s chose to starve to death in the comfort of cloth mother rather than suckle on cold metal mother’s milk. Rhesus macaques can have their fingertips guillotined off to see whether or not these fingers will regenerate, may be intentionally infected with HIV, or they may be turned into heroin addicts in order to test addiction-breaking hypotheses. In Spain, the Parliament voted in July 2008 to honor the principles of the Great Ape Project, making it a

62 | 61

the Middle East as a violent place, the event was a distant tragedy, but not a crisis. It attracted far fewer column inches, TV hours, or days in our collective memory than the Tylenol poisonings. For the Muslim world, however, the event fit perfectly into their collective ontological mod-els in which Israel—and by extension America—willfully seeks their destruction. Ignored by Americans, the event strengthened and radicalized a divergent worldview, and has arguably cost far more American lives in the long-term.

Made of burlap, jute or woven plastic, sandbags have long been a key element in disaster relief. A wall of carefully stacked sandbags, while not completely waterproof, is a vital means for channeling floodwaters. Long lines of sand-bags, stacked pyramid-style along the tops of levees and bulkheads, are a first line of defense against floodwaters.

The sandbag is an outgrowth of the gabion, a wicker barrel open at top and bottom, which medieval armies turned into a fortification by setting it on end and filling it with sand, earth or rocks. When artillery started to become part of European warfare in the fifteenth century, rings of gabions would shelter gunnery crews as they went about the slow work of preparing to fire their cannon. The concept of a gabion was simplicity itself: a light barrel of wicker, easily carried in an artillery train, but capable of

Absolute SubmissionCrisis management typically involves the deployment of logistical forces to fight against a gargantuan event of war, weather or disease. Yet some crisis management techniques operate with seemingly counter-intuitive logics, advocating absolute submission and acknowledgement of defeat. Ob-scured by dominant remedies associated with strength and willpower, these inverted techniques are often relegated to vaguely mystical 12-step mottos and popular prayers.1 Still, the organizational disposition of submission in the face of catastrophe is very effective, since it allows necessary information to flow. Tense symmetrical competition with catastrophes creates an escalating and dangerous confi-dence game of lies that obscures need and information. For instance, victims of Katrina and the cyclone in Myanmar experienced exponentially longer aid delays as they lingered

absorbing tremendous violence once filled with dirt. The sandbag improved on the principle. Lighter than wicker barrels, they could be stored much more efficiently. The first sandbags apparently appeared in the 1790s and played a role in the American Civil War, but they really came into their own during the mechanized fury of World War I, when the combatants were able to field huge numbers of soldiers who could create long lines of sandbag-topped trenches at a rapid clip.

Centuries before environmental concerns began to rise, the sandbag was an example of low-impact technology. The material filling the sandbags was available on-site; if the bags were left untended for a few months, the burlap deteriorated and the materials returned to the earth. A few handfuls of sand and a pile of sacks may not seem like much, but once the bags are properly filled, sealed and stacked, the resulting wall can seem as solid as brick and heavy as stone.

E. Sandbags

F. Tacticsby

Steven Hart

by

Steven Hart

64 | 63

in information-poor situations, waiting for officials to shape face-saving stories. In contrast, China’s choice to submit to the influx of media coverage after the Sichuan earthquake instantly placed the faces of grieving parents on screens around the world. The rare display of defeat without cover-up dissolved resistant sentiments around the world while accelerating aid. Similarly, China’s willingness to show Beijing under a cloud of pollution taught the world more about environment than any attempt to mask the problem with trumped up displays about a “green” or “eco-friendly” Olympics.

Overt Covert OperationsIn the run-up to the Olympics, China rehearsed another seemingly inverted logic of crisis management: mass anti-terrorist spectacles. On the playing field of a stadium, armies of specialists created precise formations for synchronized martial arts and fire-fighting drills. Against puffs of smoke and other pyrotechnics, young women Karate-chopped wood and laid on the ground in the shape of the Olympic rings. Squadrons of men took aim with submachine guns while steering a moving Segway with their knees. Men in matching orange jump suits and white hard hats sawed through steel rods in a modified kick-line. SWAT teams demonstrated their skills in theatrical vi-gnettes. What the CIA, Scotland Yard or the KGB might have hidden, China openly displayed with Busby Berkeley choreography and graphic costumes. In the CIA/FBI ver-sion, a thousand men holding their hand to their ear would have to sit on the field in a perfect phalanx of evenly spaced desks. Some might be wearing matching plain-clothes golf shirts and shorts, while others would be costumed with pinstriped banking suits in the most beautiful shade of indigo blue.

While awe-inspiring, the techniques also initially seem comedic and anachronistic. As if lacking previous experience with terrorism, Chinese officials plan to manage the problem with older, perhaps even misdirected, displays of strength. Yet, when the smoke lifts on the field to display the sheer numbers of personnel, the feminized anti-ter-rorist dance drill is vaguely terrifying. One considers what a bad idea it would be to perpetrate any sort of terrorist act in this climate. While nations often use aestheticized aggression to enhance their violent acts, animals (and some people) use it to avert violence.2 Here, the technique, in its preventative mode, brings a potentially effective overt display to techniques that were once hidden.

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G. The Tour

by

Gavin Browning

Flanked by emergency workers, George W. Bush’s Septem-ber 14, 2001 bullhorn ballyhoo atop the ruins of the World Trade Center reassured a panicked public that its leader

“can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people—and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”

Years later, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that she too had heard a panic-stricken public—having witnessed the post-earthquake rubble of Sichuan Province, she stated I was very moved by the people of the affected earthquake area. They clearly are showing great spirit. There’s been a major effort to relocate them, and the government has worked very hard at that. Yet it was really the spirit of the people that comes through, because they are determined to restart their lives.1

Empathetic, concerned, alternately donning hardhat or furrowed brow—the spectacle of politicians being led through sites of trauma appears again and again for a reason. The Tour signals that they do indeed hear affected publics. Yet, it is hardly a Bush-era phenomenon. Abraham Lincoln walked the charred earth of Antietam, Winston Churchill toured the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and in 1977, Jimmy Carter’s limousine took a detour, rolling up to

what might have been Dresden circa-Slaughterhouse-Five: Charlotte Street in New York City’s South Bronx.

President Carter’s visit to this bleak landscape was a break from the past. Covering the event, the New York Times noted: “no one could recall when Mr. Carter, or any other President had visited an area like the South Bronx.”2 The wreckage he toured that day was not specific to one crisis in particular, but rather to the ongoing crisis of being poor in America. Opportunities blockaded by monolithic highways and housing projects, residents had seen once-stately neighborhoods suffer what urban epidemiologists Deborah and Rodrick Wallace call a “contagious fire epidemic” that coincided with municipal cuts to fire depart-ments and federal urban renewal funds under Richard Nixon.

Jimmy Carter’s tour helped steer funds and policies toward the recuperation of Charlotte Street, and toward those who felt ignored by their government. Carter asked the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to “[s]ee which areas can be salvaged,” suggesting that “[m]aybe we can create a recreation area and turn it around.”3 The Tour can be many things: photo op, ill-timed political misstep (the American public never forgave George W. Bush for not taking a tour of New Orleans immediately post-Katrina as he chose to survey the devastation from Air Force One instead), symbolic gesture, or in the case of Carter’s tour of Charlotte Street, the beginning of something new.

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H. Tourism

by

Jorge Otero-Pailos

The monuments of the world are beyond their carry-ing capacity. But the number of visitors increases by the day. In 2007, twenty-five million people visited the Memorial Parks of Washington DC. That is more than forty-two times the resident population of the city. Between 30,000 and 50,000 people walk into Notre Dame de Paris every day, which is only 48,000 square meters. The Great Wall of China is the eleventh-most visited tourist attraction in the world, drawing ten million visitors per year. The numbers are staggering. According to the United Nation World Tourism Organization, international tourist arrivals have increased in volume by more than thirty-two times since 1950, and they are expected to reach 1.6 billion in 2020.

Visitation damages monuments, sometimes irrepa-rably. The most innocent acts, like breathing, can alter the humidity ratio in delicate environments and destroy them when multiplied by thousands. For instance, the amount of exhalations is a serious concern in the prehistoric caves of Altamira, Spain, which must limit visitation to 8,500 people per year. In 2000, the Spanish Ministry of Culture

built a replica of the cave right next to the original, to accommodate excess visitors. Another older replica of the caves also exists in Madrid’s National Archeological Museum. See, see, see.

Historic preservation is undergoing a fundamental transformation in order to manage the crises caused by mass tourism, turning from the public sector to private enterprise. Specifically, by recognizing that thanks to mass tourism, the great monuments of the world now have larger audiences than some television shows and incorporate advertising.

Private companies are vying to use the most-visited sites as media to broadcast their brands within the meaningful, experiential context of memorable vacations. Take for instance the façade of Milan’s Duomo, which is currently partially hidden behind a huge billboard for com-panies like Camper Shoes and Vagary Watches. American Express awards yearly preservation grants to historic places around the United States and abroad. In exchange for their sponsorship, it receives the right to present its logo at sponsored sites.

By encouraging private companies to usurp the preservation of national monuments, the state’s power to endure—and preserve itself—appears symbolically weakened. As an instrument of this weakening effect, historic preservation reveals itself to be part of the greater process of globalization, which is a collective dream of the demise of the nation-state. We are perhaps not far from wish fulfillment.

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I. Walls

by

Haifa Zangana

Iraqis say that concrete walls and the US embassy are the only real construction in occupied Iraq. One is built to wall-in Iraqis in whole towns or city neighborhoods, the other to wall-in the occupiers and their stooges. The gigan-tic one billion dollar new embassy itself has been built next to the old Iraqi presidential palace, which had few if any concrete walls during Saddam Hussein’s rule.

The US embassy is a neocolonial fortress replete with three concentric circles of concrete walls, manned from the outside by Iraqi and foreign mercenaries, then by the US marines, and then again by the US Special Forces—not counting the walls around Baghdad’s Green Zone as a whole. When rockets fall, the security men, the officials and the prostitutes who work there have several concrete shelters handily scattered every hundred yards or so for them to hide. These walls are called “security walls” from inside the Green Zone. Most Iraqis, however, call them the

“occupation walls.”In general, walls, especially in Baghdad, are made of

three-meter-high concrete blocks. During the surge—the 30,000 US soldiers increase in Baghdad—“the coalition forces [had] erected more than 3,000 individual sections of concrete blast walls throughout the city….[T]hese barriers included both Jersey barriers — short concrete dividers commonly seen on roadways in the United States—and larger twenty-foot blast walls that commonly surround bases and living areas.”

The highly publicized “success of the surge” has scarred Baghdad with barriers, checkpoints and walls. Every wall has one entry checkpoint and one exit, boxing closely linked communities into ghettos and gated com-munities. Box, box, box.

Likewise, Iraqi people and their districts have been labelled according to the occupier’s vocabulary. Iraqis are no more. They are: Sunnis. Shias. Radical Shias. Sunni terrorists or Muslim extremists.

Subduing Iraq required the creation of propaganda on sectarian violence, and on how to quell it. Walls, in a US Military statement, were seen as “one of the centrepieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence,” and, as part of “a series of mea-sures long sought by the White House [that were] aimed at advancing reconciliation between the warring Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs”. Yet, walls as a means of control were never mentioned.

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—WOODY ALLEN—

Warning Messages13

IT’S NO

T THA

T I’M A

FRA

ID TO

DIE.

I JUST D

ON

’T WA

NT TO

BE THER

E W

HEN

IT HA

PPENS.

IT’S NOT THAT I’M AFRAID TO DIE. I JUST DON’T WANT TO BE THERE WHEN IT HAPPENS.

Interview14Exclusion Zone Oleg Yavorsk Interview

by

Gavin Browning

Gavin Browning

Tell me a bit about the game. How did it

come about?

Oleg Yavorsky

The idea of a game built around the Chernobyl

Exclusion Zone came to us quite some time ago.

We were witnesses to the accident back in 1986,

so we felt we could deal with this sensitive topic

properly, and that we could deliver a message to

the outside world about the problems that remain.

GB

Do you remember the meltdown?

OY

I was a kid at the time. My parents evacuated

people. Like them, a lot of people were involved

in the destruction of the actual sarcophagus and

the evacuation procedures. [As kids] we were so

close to the site, and I remember a lot of discus-

sion about the meltdown. However, due to the

specifics of the Soviet era, a lot of information

was not disclosed. It’s only really now that we’re

beginning to hear hidden and devastating facts,

like people shoveling radioactive fuel with their

bare hands. A lot of terrible things happened.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. takes place in the exclusion

zone, and we tried to make the game universe as

authentic as possible. We went to the actual zone

on a number of exploration and research trips.

We took thousands of photos. So, the structures

and the houses that you see in the game… they

are actually the authentic ones from

around Chernobyl.

It’s not that we recreated this place perfectly.

It’s more that we recreated the most well-known

and notorious objects and places, such as Prypiat,

the ghost town—a totally barren and empty city

that used to have 50,000 residents—and the

sarcophagus of the Chernobyl Power Plant.

GB

A Ferris wheel appears in the game, too?

OY

Yes, that’s located in the central core of Prypiat. In

fact, it’s an interesting story: the Ferris wheel was

never switched on. It was built for May Day—a

big holiday back in Soviet times—but the accident

happened just beforehand, so it was never used.

When we were in Prypiat—which is the most

interesting place in the zone—we went through

lots of flats, through the library, down the central

streets, and you still see communist propaganda

in the shop windows. To me, it’s like….well, I

remember what it was like back in my childhood,

back in Soviet times. Now, it’s absolutely about

seeing how nature gets the upper hand. There’s a

lot of wildlife in Prypiat. But the wildlife mingles

with newspapers dated back to 1986, old commu-

nist books, and a lot of other traces of that time.

That makes this place very special, and we paid a

lot of attention to recreating that atmosphere in

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

74 | 7374 | 73

*The name of the game is (Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers, Robbers)

THE COMPUTER GAME S.T.A.L.K.E.R.* UNFOLDS IN THE ABANDONED PLAINS,

COMMUNIST BOULEVARDS & APARTMENT BLOCKS

OF POST-CHERNOBYL UKRAINE. GAVIN BROWNING

RECENTLY SPOKE WITHOLEG YAVORSKY**,

ABOUT THE CHALLENGES OF REPRESENTING THE

INFAMOUS ZONE & ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS

TO BE A S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

1. Video Games— I used to play video games back in Middle School, never really got to into it, beat Contra a couple of times by cheating and the same with Mike Tyson's Punch Out, but these guys are taking it to a whole new level.

GB

It’s a way of traveling there without

traveling there.

OY

Yes, there’s no need to go there. You can see it in

the game.

GB

What is the premise of the game?

OY

We wanted to create an alternative story: a “what

if” scenario, a worst-case scenario. We imagined

things at Chernobyl going fully out of control,

and we placed it in a futuristic setting. It takes

place in the year 2012, and at this time, we imag-

ined a second melt down of the Chernobyl Power

Plant [which according to the story takes place in

2006]. In this six-year period, a whole universe

has been established: a zone within the exclusion

zone. And strange things occur there.

We included a lot of the conspiracy theories

around the meltdown. For example, there is a

huge antenna in Chernobyl. One theory goes that

it emitted psychoactive waves after the meltdown

into the West, as part of a governmental experi-

ment on psychotropic weapons. These ideas were

integrated into the storyline, along with ideas of

energy… energy is available in the center of the

zone, and this is very enticing to scientists.

GB

To scientists?

OY

Yes. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s go into the zone to look for

artifacts, which are basically common items that

have absorbed enormous energy, and they are

now very valuable to the scientists and corpora-

tions who want to study it.

GB

So the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s sell these items?

OY

They’re marauders. They earn their living by

2. Chernobyll— is by no means funny or a place that I'd like to visit especially with zombies, who wants to figth Zombies. This article is even more depressing after the current events in Japan.

76 | 7576 | 75

going into the zone, risking their lives, fighting

mutants, fighting each other, looking for artifacts

and bringing them to the outside world.

There’s a whole community of these

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s, and there are different factions

with varying philosophies. Some of them rival

each other—they fight for resources such as

artifacts, but also over territory. Sometimes, they

fight for truth.

They are also trying to find a way into the

mysterious center of the zone, which is believed

hold a bonanza of artifacts. It is commonly be-

lieved to have very valuable and precious things. I

am in the zone right now.

GB

Where is the center? Is it the center of Prypiat?

OY

No, the ultimate level is located in the center of

the power plant—the sarcophagus—where there’s

a monolith. It’s a super-mind-power monolith

that controls the whole zone. A player approach-

es it and makes a wish. Depending on how the

player has played the game, this wish determines

the ending.

GB

How does a player win?

OY

There are seven different endings. Five of them

are false. In one of the two true endings, the

player wins by actually making the zone disap-

pear, and restoring peace and happiness to this

world (spoiler alert).

In the second true ending, the player wins

by joining the super-mind-power monolith, and

becoming one with the zone.

THE COMPUTER GAME S.T.A.L.K.E.R.* UNFOLDS IN THE ABANDONED PLAINS,

COMMUNIST BOULEVARDS & APARTMENT BLOCKS

OF POST-CHERNOBYL UKRAINE. GAVIN BROWNING

RECENTLY SPOKE WITHOLEG YAVORSKY †,

ABOUT THE CHALLENGES OF REPRESENTING THE

INFAMOUS ZONE & ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS

TO BE A S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

† Olec is the Director of PR for GCS Game World

1. Tanks—who needs food when you have tanks, with one tank you could probably feed three villages.

Essay15Humanitarian Intervention

by

Eyal Weizman

Throughout the past two decades, “humanitarian

interventions” have grown to structure Western

states’ response to emergency. At the core of

the idea of “humanitarian intervention” is the

ethico-political principle recently framed as

“responsibility to protect” which lies at the heart

of the humanitarian impulse. The problem is that

in order to get to the victims of armed conflicts,

protect them and provide aid—or at least claim

to do so—states sometimes have to engage in

military actions. Increasingly (and in places such

as Mogadishu, Kosovo and Afghanistan) this in-

tervention has bound humanitarian agencies with

the logic of war-making. Anyone working in the

humanitarian sector should take Colin Powell’s

2001 statement that NGOs and relief workers are

“force multiplier for us… an important part of our

combat team” as a cause for serious concern.

When soldiers in what George W. Bush has called

“the armies of compassion” become proxy experts

in humanitarianism, humanitarian concerns

could easily become a pretext to justify impartial-

ity with respect to unjust and brutal aggressions

(as in Sarajevo) or an alibi for a political decision

to mount a military intervention against sover-

eign states (as in Afghanistan and Iraq). The

paradox is that, bound with military intervention,

human rights and humanitarian action may actu-

ally aggravate the situation for the very people it

purportedly comes to aid. This scenario is at the

heart of the humanitarian paradox. The integra-

tion of humanitarian logic into military interven-

tions has, furthermore, been one of the reasons

78 | 77

for a steady increase in the number of attacks on

aid workers in zones of conflict.

In seeking to avoid their instrumentaliza-

tion in the hands of military, political and other

interested parties, independent aid organiza-

tions have recently defined a certain operational

distance from states and their militaries and

returned to traditional humanitarian concepts of

impartiality and neutrality. The term “humani-

tarian space,” coined by Rony Brauman, former

president (1982-94) of Médecins sans Frontières

France, is a zone carved out of state sovereignty

or the space of war to be kept at a distance

from state politics and battle-spaces. Although

primarily defined in geographical terms as “real

spaces,” these “zones of emergency manage-

ment” are spheres of action that, as Thomas

Keenan remarked, “are understood as concep-

tual as well as physical…[in as much as they are]

free of political and military influence,” and

in which the infrastructure and the technology

of aid organizations could facilitate protecting,

policing, feeding, providing health care, but

also a place where advocacy and discussion

amongst displaced people and between them

and international agents can take place.

Often managed by UN agencies (UN-

HCR, the United Nations High Commission for

Refugees, being the largest), national organiza-

tions (USAid) or by a combination of more than

500 contemporary-crisis NGOs, these zones

designate the formation of a global generic

space for “humanitarian management.” While

they may appear like rather simple physical

environments, humanitarian zones rely on

complex assemblages of spatial arrangements,

infrastructure, means of communication, legal

and organizational procedures. Humanitarian

zones—such as those recently established in the

DRC after the resumption of hostilities there—

quickly give rise to refugee camps, the latter

forming the material link between the concept

of “humanitarian intervention” and a massive

and rapid, although largely unnoticed, process-

es of migration, construction and urbanization.

Humanitarian zones are global spaces—woven

into international networks of information-flow

through the media and to the global network

of commodity-circulation through the products

of aid. At present, the 13,000 international aid

workers in Darfur (citizens of more than thirty

different nations, members of hundreds of dif-

ferent relief organizations) are living in scores of

staff encampments built next to refugee camps.

Rony Brauman described this growing archipel-

ago of aid workers camps in these words: *

Paradoxically, the establishment of these

zones during war might accelerate the move-

ment of people away from their homes, because

people naturally flee into protected zones

seeking refuge and care. Aggressors have also

learnt how to use the presence of aid organiza-

tions and humanitarian zones to induce popula-

tion transfer from areas they wish to ethnically

cleanse. Aid could thus affect the development

of hostilities and whether a conflict worsens or

abets. In many conflicts, aid might have actu-

ally worsened the situation on the ground.

In his pioneering research on refugee

camps in Africa, architect Manuel Herz demon-

strated the amazingly rapid process by which

anonymous rows of prefabricated dwellings

evolve into sites of urban complexity. Within

days of relocation, barter and commerce are

established. Within weeks, markets evolve to

exchange goods and labor with the citizens of

the host country. Within several months, clusters

and districts turn into a “neighborhood,” and

temporary shelters become solid structures of

adobe, brick or corrugated sheets. Camps are

always “less” than cities, but have a sense of

the urban nevertheless.

So while the emergency architecture of

humanitarian relief often seeks to communicate

temporariness, because camp residents often

like to demonstrate their intention to return to

the places from which they were forcefully relo-

cated, these places may linger for decades in a

state similar to what Georges Orwell once called

the “endless present”—permanent temporari-

ness without past or future. Herz also demon-

strated how the internal layout of many camps

TRUCKS, FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE VEHICLES, WALKIE-TALKIES, SATELLITE PHONES AND

COMPUTERS CREATE AN ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENT, WHOSE PERVERSE EFFECT IS TO PUT THE TEAMS IN A QUASI-VIRTUAL

WORLD WHERE TIME AND SPACE ARE MEASURED IN DIFFERENT UNITS FROM

THOSE OF THE COUNTRY WHERE THEY FIND THEMSELVES. SO THEY FIND THEMSELVES,

ALMOST WITHOUT KNOWING IT, IN A BUBBLE, A “NON-PLACE,” A HUMANITARIAN MISSION

WHICH COULD BE EVERYWHERE AND WHICH IS NOWHERE…

80 | 79

2. Gatorade—is full of elec-trolites, perfect for revamp-ing and rehidrating after A long day in the desert.

folds in complex geographies. After crossing a

border, fleeing inhabitants of entire territories

are handled by humanitarians and organized

into a dense (and sometimes segregated) fabric

of districts, blocks and repetitive shelters. The

physical design of the camps intersects mili-

tary and medical principles, and their spatial

regime of multiple separations and the strict

regimentation of time and space are somewhat

reminiscent of the principles of the eighteenth

century “machines à guérir” (healing machines)

of early hospitals.

Camps are where different nationalities

and linguistic groups, refugees of different ori-

gins, aid workers and journalists interact for the

first time. A reorganization of political relations

within the displaced communities often takes

place during the process of relocation. For many

refugees, camps facilitate a transition between

traditional rural and urban life. Emerging

powers begin challenging traditional family or

clan structures. Moreover, by being sometimes

the largest employers in an area, aid agencies

impact on the economics and the politics of

the societies in which they are working. Thus,

although claiming for neutrality, humanitar-

ian agencies, many of them NGOs, engage in

effectively building new cities and engage in

social engineering.

The anthropologist Michel Agier showed

how, for their international sponsors, the hu-

manitarian zones and the refugee camps within

them represent the most politically efficient

form of emergency arrangement of the planet’s

populations who are most unwanted and unde-

sirable. Host states (whenever they can enforce

it), surround and police these zones, and rich

states donate generously into them (partially)

so that refugees remain close to their area of

origins, and as far away from their borders as

possible. Agier describes refugee camps as

vague and heavily guarded “waiting rooms…

on the margins of the world” while also as

“laboratories in which still unconceived forms of

urbanism are germinating.”

The imagery of emergency compels us to

think about political situations as exceptions to

normal life and order, and often forecloses more

nuanced ways to understand crises as accelerat-

ed processes of social and political change. The

loss of homes, villages and towns, the fast mi-

gration into foreign territories, the construction

of and accommodation to newly built environ-

ments and the encounter with a multiplicity of

different cultures, languages and technologies,

place some refugees in the fastest—and pos-

sibly the most traumatic—contemporary track

to modernization, urbanization and globaliza-

tion. In this sense, “emergency,” in the words of

the humanitarian scholar Alex de Waal, “fuels

the locomotive of history...accelerating socio-

economic change.” “Emergency” could thus be

understood as an initiator and accelerator of

irreversible processes of transformation. The

challenges posed to the humanitarian practices

is that: however strong (and just) the political

imperative to return to pre-crisis “normality” is,

modernization and urbanizations cannot simply

be reversed. Once introduced to urban life,

refugees, like all people throughout history who

were driven to cities during times of need and

crisis, are unlikely to renounce the urban when

better times arrive. Do humanitarian agencies

have the legitimacy, and should they develop

the expertise to deal with such emergent urban-

ity and social change?

This entry is based on “Planning Emergency” a conversation between Rony Brauman, director of research at MSF and former president (1982-94) of

Médecins sans Frontières France, and Eyal Weizman Columbia University Feb 4, 2008. Laura Kurgan and Peter Marcuse hosted the discussion. This conversa-tion between a physician and an architect was meant to recall the fact that the ori-gins of modern architecture and town planning emerged together with the discourse of medicine and hygiene. At present refugee camps are the clearest embodiment of this principle, designed according to principles that intersect architectural with medical knowledge.Secretary Colin L. Powell, Remarks to the National For-eign Policy Conference for Leaders of Nongovernmen-tal Organizations, October 26, 2001. http://www.state.

gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2001/5762 Keenan, Thomas, “Tidying UP,” a lecture delivered at the Tate Modern for the conference Sovereignity and Bare Life: Zones of Conflict, November 29, 2008. Brauman, Rony,

“From Philanthropy to Humanitarianism: Remarks and an Interview,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol.,103, No., 2/3, Spring/Sum-mer 2004. The temporary nature of the camp is an issue that is constantly reenacted amongst Palestin-ian refugees, the population with longest refugee status in the world. When in 1951 permanent structures were built by the UN to replace the tent encampments set in 1948, a debate amongst refugees emerged regarding whether or not to accept and enter these homes. Every other set of plans for local- or internationally-sponsored improvements, introduced during the subsequent 60 years, was viewed with great

suspicion. In fact it was the discussion itself, the resistance to improvement (but also, mostly, its final acceptance) that performed the temporary nature of the camp and reinforced the calls for return. Herz, Manuel, “The Archi-tecture of Refugee Camps,” http://roundtable.kein.org/node/460 and “Introduction

- Architecture of Humanitar-ian Relief,” http://roundtable.kein.org/node/459. Agier, Michel, On the Margins of the World: The Refugee Experience Today (London, Polity, 2008), 42, 66. Waal, Alex de, “Whose Emergency Is It Anyway? Dreams, Tragedies and Traumas in the Humanitar-ian Encounter,” http://round-table.kein.org/node/1078.

TRUCKS, FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE VEHICLES, WALKIE-TALKIES, SATELLITE PHONES AND

COMPUTERS CREATE AN ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENT, WHOSE PERVERSE EFFECT IS TO PUT THE TEAMS IN A QUASI-VIRTUAL

WORLD WHERE TIME AND SPACE ARE MEASURED IN DIFFERENT UNITS FROM

THOSE OF THE COUNTRY WHERE THEY FIND THEMSELVES. SO THEY FIND THEMSELVES,

ALMOST WITHOUT KNOWING IT, IN A BUBBLE, A “NON-PLACE,” A HUMANITARIAN MISSION

WHICH COULD BE EVERYWHERE AND WHICH IS NOWHERE…

82 | 81

UniqueContent

16

Rogue States of Mind

by

C-Lab

WHILE IT MAY SEEM

LIKE THE CRISIS IS FULLY

UPON US, IT WILL GET

WORSE. NEW SUBJECTS

WILL EMERGE IN THE

AFTERMATH OF MULTIPLE

CRISES YET TO COME.

84 | 83

86 | 85

88 | 87

01. DownsizingIn the wake of the economic crisis, the federal government decides to sell off its under-performing units. States with the lowest GDPs are auctioned to other nations in an attempt to jettison dead weight and reinvigorate the economy. Vice President Joseph Biden is chosen for his working class credibility to deliver the bad news to the populations of the newly foreign territories, including his former constituents in Delaware. The union is eventually dis-mantled, leaving only a few wealthy states, geographically isolated and increasingly paranoid about their neighbors.

02. Chinese Financial ImplosionAfter a decade of robust growth, China’s industrial export economy is tanking due to its dependence on foreign economies that are now hurt by the financial crisis. Thousands of factories have closed, and millions of workers have already lost their jobs. During the boom years, the central government used the profits from exports to invest in American debt, amassing treasury securi-ties equal to about one quarter of foreign-owned debt. A rogue trader in the Chinese central bank, the child of migrant workers, sees threats to the solvency of the US government. She sparks a sell-off of securities, bankrupting America and further devastating China’s economy.

03. Senior EpidemicThe aging of the boomer generation and rapidly rising medical costs are driving a healthcare crisis. In the coming decades, Social Security and Medicare entitlements will exceed workers’ payroll contributions by trillions of dollars. These “unfunded liabilities” are the most serious long-term threat to the government’s financial future. The boomers’ fixation on spiritual and physical health alongside advances in medical technology will give them relative immortality, but at a great expense—an epidemic of oldness that financially cripples future generations.

04. DroughtDrought is a reliable predictor of civil war in many areas of the world. The economic shock caused by low rainfall and crop failure leads to unemployment, indebtedness and famine, a dangerous mix in countries with already weak governments. Future farmers are both scientists and warriors: chasing biotechnical advance-ments in a futile attempt to keep pace with climate change while arming themselves in a paranoiac defense of their increasingly precious resources.

05. Petro State DeclineRussia’s largest corporation, the state-run natural gas company Gazprom, is $42 billion in debt, and the price of oil continues to fall fast. Political power in Russia is deeply connected to Gazprom—before becoming president, Dmitri Medvedev was its chairman, and Vladimir Putin used its revenue to nationalize op-position media companies. When Gazprom fails it will destabilize the government, but in the meantime, the weakening of the petro state will only bring more brutal and desperate political repression. Former oligarchs invested in Gazprom become alternative energy dissidents. But for now, they are excluded from political and economic power.

IMAGE CAPTIONS

UniqueContent

17

More Is Less

by

MTWTF

image 1100,000,000,000,000 Drachmai, Greece 1944

image 210,000,000 Cordobas, Nicaragua 1990

image 35,000,000 Rublei, Belarus 1999

image 4500,000,000,000 Dinara, Yugoslavia 1993

image 550,000,000,000 Dinara, Serbian Republic 1993

image 650,000,000 Marks, State of Thuringia 1923

image 760,000,000 Yuan, China 1949

image 82,000,000 Zlotych, Poland 1993

image 91,000,000 Zaires, Zaire 1993

image 10

5,000,000,000 dollars, Zimbabwe 2008

When a country experiences hyperinflation its currency rapidly loses value and as a result consumer prices increase. Notes of higher and higher denominations are printed to avoid having to carry around wheelbarrows of cash. In these instances the higher the numerical value of the bill, the lower the currency’s purchasing power.

90 | 89

—DAVID BYRNE—

Warning Messages18

IN TH

E EVEN

T OF A

PRES-

SURE LO

SS, ALL O

UR

LINES A

RE BU

SY N

OW

. I W

ILL BE LAU

GH

ING

OU

T LO

UD

AN

YH

OW

IN THE EVENT OF A PRES-SURE LOSS, ALL OUR LINES ARE BUSY NOW. I WILL BE LAUGHING OUT LOUD ANYHOW

Systems Gone WildInfrastructure After Modernity

by John McMorrough

94 | 33

For a time, it seemed that US President-Elect Barack Obama’s first move was going to be to take a page from the WPA and invest heavily in the nation’s infrastructure. Played up heavily in the media, investment in infrastructure was to inject massive amounts of capital in the economy and create jobs while simultaneously investing in the nation’s future. But when the House Appro-priations Committee introduced its version of the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan of 2009—a document that reflects the Obama administration’s intents—infrastructure was downplayed, receiving only a fraction of the proposed $800+ billion. That figure is less than what was proposed for digitizing health care records.

The document paints a gloomy picture. Included is the equivalent of less than one year’s worth of funding for the Federal Highway Ad-ministration (a drop in the bucket, along with $2 billion of some $50 billion needed to modernize existing transit systems), $1.1 billion to improve intercity rail (the Northeast Corridor alone needs over $10 billion of improvements) and $3 billion out of $41 billion for airport infrastructure (the backlogs listed are all from the House docu-ment). Instead of a vigorously rebuilt infrastruc-tural future, we are just treading water.1

So what happened? To understand our present predicament—and Obama’s strategic retreat from infrastructure—we need to go back, before even the WPA, for a brief history of infra-structure to see how fucked we are.

Essay19

94 | 93

Cities grew tremendously in the hundred years between 1860 and 1960, and infrastruc-ture was the foundation for that growth. Trains, streetcar lines, streets and highways allowed inhabitants to rush around with relative ease. As infrastructure filled past capacity and congestion became bad, the public had faith that the experts would solve the problems by constructing new infrastructure—always more capacious and more technologically advanced.

Infrastructure was idealized by modern-ist architects. Take Vers une Architecture, for example, in which Corbusier extolled the societal transformations that would take place if only the people were to listen to the architect and the engineer. It was, after all, a matter of architecture or revolution. For modernists, a plan and the capacity of a clear idea would bring order to the chaos of the metropolis. In implementing the plan, modern architecture relied on infrastructure above all else.

A city’s modernity became nearly equivalent to its infrastructure, as evident in Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris, the ultra-real technologi-cal landscapes of Tony Garnier’s Cité Indus-trielle, or the wild, electric fantasies of Antonio Sant’Elia’s Città Nuova. Modern architecture would be nothing but pastiche without engineer-ing to support it—merely new clothes for an old body. The engineer, Le Corbusier concluded, “puts us in accord with natural law.” Only after the engineer laid down a foundation could the architect start to create beauty through form.

Infrastructure captured the popular imagina-tion as well, particularly in America. There, it was the means by which Americans tamed the frontier, harnessing untamable nature to trans-form it into paradise for man. Infrastructure was America’s first modernism: Americans accepted modernism in their bridges and dams before they accepted it in buildings. With the massive burst of infrastructure building under Roosevelt’s New Deal, Americans came to believe that functionalism and technology would lead them to economic prosperity. This reconstructive power of infrastructure is what Obama suggested he might replay with his plan when it was first an-

1. Infrastructure—Infra-structure was idealized by modernist architects. Take Vers une Architecture, for example, in which Corbusier extolled the societal trans-formations that would take place if only the people were to listen to the architect and the engineer.

OUR INFRASTRUCTURE EXISTS IN A STATE OF PERPETUAL OVERLOAD. THE NEWS IS FILLED

FAILING INFRASTRUCTURAL SYSTEMS: ELECTRICAL GRIDS OVERLOAD DURING PEAK SEASON,

PETROLEUM REFINERIES BREAK DOWN, FLOODWATER CONTROL SYSTEMS OVERFLOW IN HEAVY

STORMS, WASTE WATER PLANTS SPILL SEWAGE, AQUEDUCTS MYSTERIOUSLY LEAK.

nounced. No doubt many architects warmed to the idea of a reinvigoration of modern ideals, just as the profession seemed to have taken a fatal blow from the economic collapse.

But in the end, Obama didn’t turn to infrastructure. By its own admission, his plan underfunds critical infrastructure greatly. It may yet be that Obama sees this only as a temporary stimulus, and will fund infrastructure in its turn through the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank (this stimulus plan was explicitly dedicated to helping “shovel-ready” projects and these have largely been funded already). But perhaps there are deeper reasons.

Between 2004 and 2008, I led a team of researchers investigating changing conditions of infrastructure in Los Angeles, producing The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los

Angeles as a result. Los Angeles, for us, was a case study. A particularly interesting city, but one that proved the rule regarding infrastructure rather than the exception.2 Our conclusions were, first and foremost, that a WPA-style infra-structural push is impossible today.

Infrastructure has changed radically. Whether the Los Angeles freeways, the New York subway, the London Tube, the motorways outside Dublin, or airports just about anywhere, much of our infrastructure exists in a state of perpetual overload. It is under massive stress from the pressures we place on it: overbur-dened, aged, little loved. This not only true for transportation. The news is filled with failing infrastructural systems: electrical grids overload during peak season, petroleum refineries break down, floodwater control systems overflow in

96 | 95

OUR INFRASTRUCTURE EXISTS IN A STATE OF PERPETUAL OVERLOAD. THE NEWS IS FILLED

FAILING INFRASTRUCTURAL SYSTEMS: ELECTRICAL GRIDS OVERLOAD DURING PEAK SEASON,

PETROLEUM REFINERIES BREAK DOWN, FLOODWATER CONTROL SYSTEMS OVERFLOW IN HEAVY

STORMS, WASTE WATER PLANTS SPILL SEWAGE, AQUEDUCTS MYSTERIOUSLY LEAK.

heavy storms, wastewater plants spill sewage, aqueducts mysteriously leak.

Curiously, infrastructure is a new word. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies its first use in 1927. The word only achieves real currency in the 1980s after the publication of a scathing public policy assessment entitled America in Ruins: The Decaying Infrastructure, which raised many of the issues raised here. To understand the technical systems that support a society—roads, bridges, water supply, wastewater, flood management, telecommunications, gas and elec-tric lines—as one category, it was first necessary to see it fail.

The current dismal state of the country’s infrastructure is in part because of decades of neoliberal policies encouraging tax cuts instead over investment in capital projects. This is also

partially because infrastructure tends to conform to an S-curve during its growth. As money is invested in infrastructure, its efficiency leaps ahead radically, but at a certain point returns begin to diminish. Thus, while investment initially delivers handsome benefits, as the S-curve flat-tens, returns-per-dollar invested lessen greatly. Obama may well have realized this: infrastruc-ture needs to be rebuilt to remain functional, but pouring massive funding into existing infrastruc-ture is unlikely to restart the economy or even fix all of its problems.

Perversely, as the S-curve flattens, many forms of infrastructure enter into a phase in which social engineering becomes as important as physical engineering. Take, for example, Interstate Highway 405 on the west side of Los Angeles. The 405 grinds to a halt every afternoon with regularity as commuters make their way up and down the coastal communities to their homes. Adding another lane to the 405 would cost a staggering billion dollars per mile. Within seven or eight years (no doubt a shorter time than it would take to construct the lane), that lane would fill and the highway would be as congested as before. Traffic planners now understand that congestion itself modifies social behavior. Individuals have a limited tolerance for their commutes, usually forty minutes to an hour each way. If congestion makes their commute grow past their comfort point, they will find ways to modify it, going at odd hours, finding a new job, or finding a new home. Conversely, without congestion, commuters will find no reason to make such plans and will live and work as they wish, rapidly filling the roads.

Problems with infrastructure go beyond the S-curve; they also extend to our idea of individual rights. To be sure, the massive infrastructure projects of the 1960s and 1970s—most notably, highways—devastated communities and brought down property values. Since then, homeowners have become greatly concerned about infrastruc-tural developments. Mainly, they think that while they are necessary, they can be anywhere as long as they are “Not in My Back Yard.”

98 | 97

Already prior to the economic crisis, hom-eowners would defend their homes like medieval barons defending their castles, becoming skilled practitioners in mobilizing together to question, forestall, and generally prevent the construc-tion of new infrastructural systems. To think that individuals will somehow overcome NIMBYism when home values are more under threat than ever is ludicrous.3

NIMBYism also has a subtler, equally dangerous cousin in bureaucratic stalemate. Communities have created legal frameworks of byzantine complexity and these can greatly interfere with new infrastructural projects, both traditional and more recent. Poor mobile phone coverage today is less likely to be the fault of telephone carriers seeking to cut costs than the product of communities finding means to prevent construction of new towers. Similarly, fiber-to-the-home rollouts have been slowed by the diffi-culty of obtaining rights-of-way from a patchwork of governments.

What tactics can we look for then, if the strategies of big infrastructure have failed us?

Master plans are bankrupt. Of course here and there a pet light rail project will be built and maybe even a high-speed train—assuming it doesn’t become another slow high-speed train like the Acela—but as the economic stimulus plan suggests, these are unlikely to be funded. We’ll give Obama credit for figuring out that big infrastructural projects can’t be built today.

So what, then, is an appropriate infrastruc-tural strategy for the new President to adopt?

Just as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown flipped the valence on sprawl and signage in their classic Learning from Las Vegas to lay the groundwork for postmodern architecture, we need to flip the valence on hacking: the serious game of taking advantage of secret exploits in systems or turning to “social engineering,” convincing other people to do what you want by appealing to their own self-interest.

One option would be to provide open APIs (a computer programming term for Applica-tion Programming Interfaces). APIs function as abstractions, allowing programs to ask other pro-grams to do things for them. As Senator, Obama was involved in a law that led to the construction of a government website, USAspending.gov, that tracks what the government spends money on, and that site has open APIs so that the data it delivers can be accessed by anyone.4 Opening up the APIs for existing and new infrastructures would allow developers to build on this data, making current forms of infrastructure more ef-ficient, or at least easier to use.

Here is a concrete example of how this might work: during the past year, I have found myself looking at traffic in the New York City metro area in a much more canny way, simply because of the capacity for Google Maps on my iPhone 3G to deliver relatively up-to-date infor-mation about traffic speeds. Google Maps still has a long way to go to make the system usable: not all routes are covered, the data is too coarse and real-time routing is often tricky.

Still, instead of suggesting that we add lanes to highways, the government might find a lower-cost solution in simply making more sen-sor data publicly available to citizens. Thus far,

unfortunately, agencies seem to think that the act of making such information available is some-where between aiding and abetting terrorism and a distraction from their job. Passing a law to en-sure that every government agency makes data available should be a priority, and funds should be made available to do so. Even forms of data as basic as subway train schedules are hard to get hold of, often requiring either Google’s muscle or a lawyer and a Freedom of Information Act request.

This sort of thinking could be applied to electric power as well. Peak electricity demands are exceedingly costly for power companies and a major factor in grid breakdowns. Large com-mercial customers such as factories and oil refin-eries already know when electric power is more expensive and have the ability to plan around that. Why shouldn’t consumers be encouraged to respond to power fluctuations dynamically?

Coming up with new forms of “human hack-ing” or social engineering is a key to rethinking infrastructure. Simple, relatively inexpensive measures might involve subsidizing fiber to Main Street to encourage the growth of offices in downtowns of suburbs and small towns (often lying half-empty while peripheral areas boom), or adding Wi-Fi to all forms of public transit to en-courage commuters to get out of their cars and into existing buses and trains.

These quick thoughts point toward the necessity of rethinking infrastructure as hacker-ready in an age of systems gone wild.

1 House Appropriations Committee, “Summary: American Recovery and Reinvestment,” http://ap-propriations.house.gov/pdf/PressSummary01-15-09.pdf2 Kazys Varnelis, ed. The In-frastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2008).3 William B. Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in LA (Point Arena, CA: Solano Press Books, 1997).

4 Douglas McGray, “iGov. How Geeks Are Opening Up Government On the Web,” The Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2009, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/technology-government

100 | 99

DO YOU BELIEVE IN RAPTURE BABE? A TERRIBLE HIT STRIKES TODAY. A TERRIBLE HIT FOR THE PARADE. BURNIN’ EYES SEEK JESUS COMIN.’ JESUS COMES TO PAVE THE WAY.

—SONIC YOUTH—

102 | 101

20 Warning Messages

DO YOU BELIEVE IN RAPTURE BABE? A TERRIBLE HIT STRIKES TODAY. A TERRIBLE HIT FOR THE PARADE. BURNIN’ EYES SEEK JESUS COMIN.’ JESUS COMES TO PAVE THE WAY.

Interview21Maps Erin AignerInterview

by

Gavin Browning

When a crisis occurs, New York Times Graphics

Editor Erin Aigner makes maps. As she describes,

data mining is equally important as graphic

design when conveying information to the news-

reading public.

Gavin Browning

How do maps function during a crisis?

Erin Aigner

One thing that maps can do is give information

in a more succinct way, or in a way that shows

multiple types of information all in one spot. So

you might be able to show reference or back-

ground information, whether that be the existing

population in a place, or the infrastructures that

are being affected there. It’s great to be able to see

something—to have a visual. Especially because, I

think, crisis [response] people want information

as quickly as possible, and a visual is a good way

of doing this, as opposed to reading or hearing.

GB

How do you see your role as someone involved

with maps in the event of a crisis?

EA

Being in the news, and I think this is the case

with anyone dealing with crises, you’re trying to

give good and effective information, but give it

quickly. So in some ways what I do is an iterative

process, where I’m trying to get the basics out

there as quickly as possible, and being a person

who creates maps, I continue creating maps that

potentially give more in-depth information as I’m

able to research it and produce it. So in the begin-

ning it might be something as simple as “this is

where this happened,” and then I go back and

continue to work more in-depth, and that even

continues over a number of days. With both the

earthquake in Sichuan and the cyclone that hit

Myanmar, we continued to apprise people of the

situation—what was happening in terms of aid, in

terms of relief, in terms of people evacuated, in

terms of people found.

GB

How long do you continue to make maps after a

crisis occurs?

EA

In the cases of Myanmar and Sichuan, I made

maps everyday for several days, probably three,

four, five days after the event, showing more

information.

GB

So as long as it’s in the news, you’re making

maps? Question, with pause and all.

EA

Yes, as long as we can get new information, and

as long as there’s something new to display. That’s

one of the things that we would be working on

during those days—working with a government

agency or a relief agency or the UN to get new

information. Sometimes called new news.

THIS IS WHERE THIS HAPPENED

104 | 103

GB

Oftentimes the way an event is reported can af-

fect its outcome, especially with a public relations

crisis where people are monitoring their media

presence and act with that in mind. Have maps

ever affected the outcome of an event?

EA

I’m sure they have, although I’m not necessar-

ily certain of anything that we’ve done here at

the Times. I think sometimes they can provide

information about how things can be either done

in the… future. Once a crisis has happened, how

do you rebuild? For instance, remapping a flood

plain. If you saw, okay, here’s where Hurricane

Katrina flooded, maybe there could be either

some new regulations or policies developed. But

being in the media, our aim is to report the situa-

tion as quickly as possible. And if those maps in

turn later affect policy, that’s great.

UniqueContent

22

Inauguration

Photography by

Jesse Seegers

106 | 105

!108 | 107

--RUN!

Visual Essay by

Nohawk R

—

N

110 | 109

HA

STA LA

VISTA

, BABY

HASTA LA VISTA, BABY

—GOVERNATOR—

Warning Messages**

114 | 113

XX[Vol. 20] is the result of the appropriation of the original publication, Crisis, by the students of AG410 Publication Design at the California Institute of the Arts.

mental think tank devoted to the process of real-time spatial and cultural reflexivity. archis.org

C-Lab, The Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting, is an experimental research unit devoted to the development of new forms of communication in architecture, set up as a semi-autonomous think and action tank at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia Uni-versity. arch.columbia.edu

Urban China is a multidimen-sional text combining profound issues and simple narration, for-mal official discourse and vivid folk interpretation. It currently has studios in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzho. urbanchina.com.cn/

Printed by EAP, Seoul, Korea.

Administrative Coordination:Jessica Braun

Editorial Office:Studio-X180 Varick Street, Suite 1610New York, New York 10014c-lab.columbia.edu/

Volume has been made possible with the support of Mondrian Foundation Amsterdam

Contributors:Lucia Allais is a Behrman-Cotsen Fellow at the Princeton Univer-sity Society of Fellows.

Erin Aigner is a Graphics Editor at the New York Times.

Shigeru Ban is an architect in Tokyo.

Cory Booker is the Mayor of Newark, New Jersey.

Gavin Browning is the Program-ming Coordinator of Studio-X at Columbia University GSAPP.

Erik Carver is an architect in New York.

Jean Choi is pursuing an M.Arch at Princeton University.

Aaron Davis is an M.Arch. can-didate at Columbia University GSAPP.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro is an architecture firm in NYC.

Keller Easterling is an architect and writer from New York City. Omar Freilla is the founder of Green Workers Cooperative in the South Bronx.

David Gissen is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Visual Studies at California Col-lege of the Arts.

Steven Hart is the author of The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway.

Laura Hanna is a filmmaker and co-founder of Hidden Driver.

Manuel Herz is an architect based in Cologne and Basel.

Ina Howard-Parker is the founder of Represent Agency.

Jeffrey Inaba is the Director of C-Lab at Columbia University GSAPP.

Janette Kim is the Director of the Urban Landscape Lab at Columbia University GSAPP.

Stephen Graham is Professor of Human Geography at Durham University.

Joseph Grima is the Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

Mark Hansen is an Associate Professor of Statistics at UCLA.

Christopher Hawthorne is the Architecture Critic at the LA Times.

Todd Hido is a photographer of landscapes and people.

Hsieh Ying-chun is an architect in Taiwan.

Huang Weiwen is the Director of the Shenzhen Planning Bureau.

Sam Jacobs is a founding direc-tor of FAT.

Jiang Jun is the editor of Urban China.

Jeffrey Johnson is the Director of China Lab at Columbia University GSAPP.

Laura Kurgan is the Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University GSAPP.

Liu Jiakun is the chief architect of Jiakun Architects Studio.

Geoff Manaugh is the writer of BLDGBLOG.

James McConnell is the Director of Geographic Info Systems at the New York City Office of Emergency Management.

John McMorrough is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Ohio State University.

Leah Meisterlin is an M.Arch. candidate at Columbia Univer-sity GSAPP.

Ginger Nolan is pursuing a Ph.D. in Architecture History at Columbia University.

Jorge Otero-Pailos is an Assistant Prof. of Historic Preservation at Columbia University GSAPP.

Martha Rosler is a visual artist and the author of numerous books.

Ben Rubin is a media artist based in New York City.

Rachel Schreiber is the Director of Humanities and Sciences at California College of the Arts.

SLAB is a Brooklyn-based architecture firm run by Jeffrey Johnson and Jill Leckner

Su Yunsheng is the redactor-in-chief of Urban China.

Kazys Varnelis is the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University GSAPP.

Eyal Weizman is the Director of the Centre for Research Archi-tecture at Goldsmiths College.

Mark Wigley is the Dean of Columbia University GSAPP.

Oleg Yavorsky is the Director of PR for GCS Game World.

Haifa Zangana is the author of City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War & Resistance.

Jason Zuzga is a poet and the Non Fiction Editor of Fence.

Crisis DevicesResearch and design by Egbert Chu, Jessica Dobkin,Aimee Duquette, Allan Horton, Jeffrey Johnson, Taka Sarui, Magda Wala

Tripping the Light Fantastic Research and graphics by Greg Bugel, Benedict Clouette, Zach Heineman, April Lee, Troy Therrien and LabRAD (Wayne Congar and Arielle Assouline-Lichten).

Unfriendly SkiesResearch and graphics by Kate Meagher

Professor: Dylan Fracareta

Graphic Design: Scott Massey

© California Institute of the Arts, 2011. All rights reserved.

The original colophon has been left intact.

This issue of Urban China has been bootlegged by C-Lab for Volume

Editor: Jeffrey Inaba

Managing Editor: Gavin Browning

Editorial Consultant: Benedict Clouette

Graphic DesignGlen Cummings & Dylan Fracareta

Urban China EditorsJiang Jun & Zhu Fei

Volume: An Indie quarterly for architecture to go beyond itself

Editor in Chief: Arjen OostermanFounding Editors: Ole Bouman, Rem Koolhaas, Mark Wigley

Volume is a project by ARCHIS + AMO + C-Lab + Urban China

Archis Lilet Breddels, Joos van den Dool, Amir Djajali, Christian Ernsten, Edwin Gardner, Maria João RibeiroAMO Reinier de Graaf

C-Lab Jeffrey Inaba, Benedict Clouette, Dana Karwas, Arielle Assouline-Lichten, Shumi Bose, Greg Bugel, Cody Campanie, Wayne Conger, Dana Karwas, Zach Heineman, Winnie Lam, April Lee, Kate Meagher, Talene Montgomery, Annabelle Pang, Jesse Seegers, Liz Stetson and Troy Therrien AMO is a research and design studio that applies architectural thinking to disciplines beyond the borders of architecture and urbanism. AMO operates in tandem with its companion company the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. www.oma.nl

ARCHIS is a magazine for architecture, the city and visual culture and its predecessors since 1929. Archis—publishers, tools, interventionsis an experi-

116 | 115

1 1 8 | 1 1 8

Animals in CitiesResearch and graphics by Shumi Bose, Talene Montgom-ery and Kate Meagher

Shopping for Go Bags Re-search and graphics by Talene Montgomery

Inauguration Photographs by Jesse Seegers

C-Lab would like to acknowl-edge the following for their kind support:

Mark Wigley, David Hinkle, Danielle Smoller and Janet Reyes, Office of the Dean, Columbia University GSAPP;

Devon Ercolano Provan, Julia Fishkin, Esther Turay and Melissa Cowley Wolf, Office of Alumni and Development, Columbia University GSAPP;

Ben Prosky, Director of Events and Public Programs, Colum-bia University GSAPP;

Jiang Jun and Zhu Fei, Urban China;

Richard Flood, Karen Wong and Benjamin Godsill, The New Museum;

Kate Meagher and Talene Montgomery for advertising sales;

Alison Laichter for assistance in Newark;

Shumi Bose and William Brian Smith for copyediting assistance;

and Jin Jung for printing coordination.

DisclaimerThe editors have been careful to contact all copyright hold-ers of the images used. If you claim ownership of any of the images presented here and have not been properly identi-fied, please contact C-Lab and we will be happy to make a formal acknowledgement in a future issue.

© copyright Columbia Univer-sity, 2009. All rights reserved.

32 |








2011

118 |

Animals in CitiesResearch and graphics by Shumi Bose, Talene Montgom-ery and Kate Meagher

Shopping for Go Bags Research and graphics by Talene Montgomery

Inauguration Photographs by Jesse Seegers

C-Lab would like to acknowl-edge the following for their kind support:

Mark Wigley, David Hinkle, Danielle Smoller and Janet Reyes, Office of the Dean, Columbia University GSAPP;

Devon Ercolano Provan, Julia Fishkin, Esther Turay and Melissa Cowley Wolf, Office of Alumni and Development, Columbia University GSAPP;

Ben Prosky, Director of Events and Public Programs, Colum-bia University GSAPP;

Jiang Jun & Zhu Fei, from Urban China;

Richard Flood, Karen Wong and Benjamin Godsill, The New Museum;

Kate Meagher and Talene Montgomery for advertising sales;

Alison Laichter for assistance in Newark;

Shumi Bose and William Brian Smith for copyediting assistance;

and Jin Jung for printing coordination & lulu.

DisclaimerThe editors have been careful to contact all copyright hold-ers of the images used. If you claim ownership of any of the images presented here and have not been properly identi-fied, please contact C-Lab and we will be happy to make a formal acknowledgement in a future issue.

© copyright Columbia Univer-sity, 2009. All rights reserved.

<

2011

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Crisis in Crisis