Depending on how much you already know about your city, this task will involve a fair amount of research and perhaps some site visits. There are three parts.
1) Confect together a fantasy itinerary for a CLUI tour of your city.
Where are the wastewater treatment plants? Where does your trash end up and where are the places they used to go? Where are the abandoned landfills, those now capped with park or forest preserves and possibly leaching toxic chemicals into underground aquifers?
Where are the water purification plants? Does your city get its water from hundreds of miles away? From another country? Where are the pipes, canals and aqueducts? Any reservoirs? Are there dams nearby? Desalination plants? Where are the control rooms surveilling the whole system?
Where is the electricity coming from? Nuclear, solar, hydro or oil? Are there oil refineries anywhere?
Where are the communication antennas showering the whole landscape with electromagnetism? Do you live in a city that's at one end of a submarine communications cable? If so, where does it enter into the continent? (Taryn Simon photographed once such entry point.)
How is your city managing to stay solidly in place? Where are the levees and flood control? Where are the avalanche tumuli, debris fields, anti-tsunami warning and protection system and wildfire surveillance network?
Any military bases nearby? How about abandoned ones? Or how about abandoned ones that's been adaptively reused or been sown with a replicant pre-settlement ecosystem? Among concrete bunkers and silos, wildlife now flourish.
Are there stone quarries, coal mines, steel mills, lumber yards, shipyards, Supermax prisons, land art?
The headquarters of supranational megacorporation? National science laboratories and testing grounds?
Look through CLUI's Land Use Database to see what could be considered CLUI-esque.
2) Map out these places.
It's simple. Just go to Google Maps, and below the logo on the left is “My Maps”. Click that link and then “Create new map”. The rest should be easy. It'll simply be a matter of searching the site and then tagging it with a placemark. The learning curve is low.
3) Let everyone know about it.
You can do so by leaving the link in the comments. If we get a good amount, we'll collect it all into a new post.
This is optional, but we do want to know about these places and so will others. It'll be interesting perusing through these fantasy itineraries, going on late-night scopic drives through CLUIrome and CLUIlondon and CLUIlosangeles. CLUIhongkong! CLUImexicocity!
