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Tuesday, April 20, 2010
A newly stumbled term, which we quite like, is flood hunting, or the act of traveling to sites of inundation. What compel flood hunters are probably the same as what compel other disaster tourists: curiosity, adventure, the thrill of the sublime, Nielsen ratings points. But we like to think that they partake in such a dangerous pastime for their own edification as well, i.e., to witness hydrological and geological processes previously only experienced second-hand and to gauge how the built environment reacts in the face of total systemic failure. So besides the rare desert floods and the Mississippi spilling over its banks, one could add to the agenda Los Angeles' concretized river filling up, acqua alta, the formation of quake lakes and the creeping high waters behind the Three Gorges Dams.
We also like to think that flood hunting could be a subgenre of tactical tourism, a critical activity that looks at spatio-cultural conditions largely invisible or ignored during dry periods but pronounced during flood events, e.g., New Orleans' socioeconomic inequity spatially demarcated by Hurricane Katrina and levee failures.
However, if flood hunting is too much of a cardiovascular thrill, a more relaxing option might be the gutter dérive, or the act of tracing urban stormwater runoff on the surface, the positive of sewer spelunking. It may sound like a boring way to spend a rainy day when you could be dry indoors tweeting or updating your Facebook profile, but if your city is topographically blessed or if it's Portland with its green streets or if it's a city in which Marti Mas Riera has been let loose or if it's a city of experimental gutter-scapes, oh, the fun you will have!
How about bulwarking, the act of rambling through monumental flood protection infrastructure? Should be popular recreation in our future climate changed coastlines.
The Great Climate Change Park
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Actions: What You Can Do With The City finally comes to Chicago at the Graham Foundation. Organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the exhibition features “experimental interactions with the urban environment [that] show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city.”
These “actions” tend to be modest in scale and budget, opportunistic and informal, communal and participatory. If broadly categorizing, they might fall messily under the heading of urban hacking. They are not the great tectonic reconfiguration of urban landscape and infrastructure dreamt up by messianic urban planners, urbicidal architects and despotic graphic designers. Rather, they are merely common activities like walking, playing and garden but reprogrammed with new tactics to “instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world.”
As there are 99 “actions”, we'd like to offer one more to round out the number: urban golf.
While the rules may differ in cities and even within cities, the game is invariably played in urban settings. Rather than in well-tended lawns, players tee offs on the street, sidewalks, alleys or on top of buildings. Urban parks, it would seem, are avoided, though certainly not a prohibited course.
One aspect of the game that we find interesting is that it isn't merely the manifestation of ennui among the hipster crowd. It's guerrilla theater with the requisite social commentary.
Quoting Wikipedia (though we might be quoting an outside text copied almost verbatim but uncited by a wiki editor):
Urban golf is seen by many as social commentary on the nature of golf and its traditional opinions and attitudes [i.e., elitist, sexist and racist club policies]. Considering golf pompous, dogmatic and quite often inaccessible, urban golfers worldwide have adopted many different urban environments as their new course to engage in this recreational pastime. Commonly, urban golf organisations tend toward using disused or under utilised urban areas to play golf, not just to reduce the risk of damage or injury, but also as a statement toward the development and reuse of the city.
We haven't used this meme on this blog yet, so: is there an iPhone app for that?
If not, it probably isn't too difficult to program an app that maps out an urban golf course, pinpoints where the teeing ground and “hole” are located, shows and vectorizes the streets or alleys or parks or bridges or whatever disparate features of the built landscape comprise the “fairway,” and lists what hazards to expect, for instance, traffic, storm drains and street furniture.
Wired to sensors strategically placed on buildings and lamp posts outside the course, this app could even forecast wind speeds at various urban canyons. Perhaps a popular feature would sync your urban golf calendar to Twitter or Facebook, announcing your scheduled tee off time in the hopes that you will be joined by other enthusiasts.
Once finished with one course, it will direct you to the next one and then further on to another and so on until the final hole. Collectively, these courses represent a new urban layer augmented physically and virtually onto the city. At the end of play, you will have explored your city from one end all the way to the other end, perhaps experienced it anew.
It's worth further fantasizing, meanwhile, this imagined urban layer becoming more and more codified. Teeing grounds become permanently delineated, not just marked with chalk. Viewing stands are placed next to the hole. Building facades that abut the fairways will be colored to denote this border. As urban golf becomes grotesquely popular and insanely profitable through sponsorship, these courses become permanent fixtures, like (18) stadiums but carved out of existing urban fill. Traffic and pedestrian flow will be diverted. Commerce will colonize their edges. And the city will grow thick around these recreational voids, encrusting the stadiums with an enveloping shell.
When urban golf suffers the inevitably crash in popularity, what happens to its walled game-spaces will be similar to The Stadium of Domitian, which later became Piazza Navona.
It's also worth further fantasizing the notion that playing through all 18 holes across the city is a form of tactical tourism. The photos decorating this post were downloaded from Urbangolf.fr. We may be embarrassingly stereotyping the people behind the websites, but we're imagining them to be part of an underground scene, whose members are mostly of African and Middle Eastern descent — the ones probably fictionally documented in La Haine. At night after a day of parkour, they trace the imaginary outlines of urban golf courses. Starting from the suburban ethnic ghettos that encircle Paris, from streets disconnected locally from Haussman's boulevards yet ironically connected via immigrations to the rest of the world, they infiltrate the interior arrondissements of the French capital.
From cramped public housing high-rises of the banlieues to fin de siècle hôtels particuliers, from ringed roads to the spacious Jardin du Luxembourg, from the outer flames of race riots into the City of Light, a new breed of urban critics embarks on a self-guided tour of spatial inequity and conflict.
Fore!
We ♥ Irish Handball Alleys
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Next month, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers will again be leading safaris to the beaches of Malibu. The safaris are free and scheduled as follows:
SUN Aug 2, 11:00am-2:30pm
SUN Aug 16, 9:00am-12:30pm
SAT Aug 22, 3:00pm-6:30pm
Spaces are limited, so e-mail info@laurbanrangers.org with your name, the number of people and preferred date as soon as possible.
The beaches you'll be touring are all public. In fact, all that stretch of wet Malibu sand are yours, mine, ours. All that awesome views of the Pacific, blocked from the road by developments that line the beaches, are your right.
But there seems to be a concerted effort by private property owners to obfuscate the lines of ownership, making the public feel like criminal trespassers in some exclusive enclave of millionaires and celebutants. If you aren't met by security guards at the very few public access entrances, this after navigating through barriers just to get to public parking lots, there are signs warning you that you are passing through “private property” and entering a “private beach.”
Thankfully, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers will show you how to hunt for these hidden entrances, spot the illegal signs, and map out the public-private beach boundary. There will even be a public easement potluck, one of the many activities you can do (legally) in your beach.
POSTSCRIPT #1: By demand, the rangers have added a fourth (sunset) beach safari: SUN Aug 23, 4:00pm-7:30pm.
POSTSCRIPT #2: A homeowner is seen and heard in this YouTube video calling participants in a Malibu Beach safari “a bunch of scumbags” and the ranger leading the tour “an ugly old lady.” The same guy later shouts at the group: “Go back to the valley!”
Friday, May 1, 2009
Inspired by a Dwell article published last summer — in which Geoff Manaugh, in his temporary guise as the magazine's Senior Editor, asked Matthew Coolidge, of The Center for Landscape Use Interpretation (CLUI), what makes his favorite city work — we have concocted a fantasy itinerary for an infrastructural tour of our HQ, Chicago. We, too, are interested in learning what makes the city function. From where does it get its water and electricity? What happens to our shit? What about our trash? Where is the nerve center overseeing all that traffic? 
Coolidge started at a wastewater treatment plant, so we'll also begin in one, the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant. It's the largest in the world, and if you live in Chicago, this is where your shit, condoms and dead pet gerbils end up eventually after swirling for miles and miles in a vortex network of underground pipes and tunnels.
It should be noted that Stickney doesn't yet have its own Wikipedia entry. If being zoned out of the city and exiled into the fringes isn't a sign of its off-center status, then its digital absence from the seemingly omniscient encyclopedia must surely point to a collective amnesia about this critical urban infrastructure. But then again, the general public is largely ignorant about such things, seeing how we've designed infrastructure to be invisible. Out of sight, out of mind.
If Stickney somehow represents one end point of something, then one starting point may be the Jardine Water Purification Plant, the largest capacity water filtration plant in the world.
“It draws raw water from two of the city's water cribs far offshore in Lake Michigan and sends nearly one billion gallons of water per day to consumers in the north and central portions of the city,” says Wikipedia.
Though Jardine is located on a prime lakefront location, unlike Stickney, it couldn't be more peripheral. Nearby is Navy Pier, that collection of kitsch suburban mall attractions. While one is rarely visited, the other is one of the most visited tourist destinations in the city, if not the most popular. Chicago would survive if Navy Pier is leveled to the ground, but it would struggle without Jardine.
Also nearby is Lake Point Tower. Until very recently, i.e., last night, we thought that Oprah Winfrey was domiciled atop this trefoil skyscraper, the only residential structure east of Lake Shore Drive, but apparently not. Still, it was always incredibly exciting to think that when one of the world's most popular, most powerful and wealthiest women gazed out of her palatial windows, the Picturesquely framed views of sublime Lake Michigan included that unrepentant slab of pure post-industrial functionality.
Also very nearby is the future site of Calatrava's Chicago Spire, if it survives the economic crisis.
And then there's the Deep Tunnel Project, “a large civil engineering project that aims to reduce flooding in the metropolitan Chicago area, and to reduce the harmful effects of flushing raw sewage into Lake Michigan by diverting storm water and sewage into temporary holding reservoirs. The megaproject is one of the largest civil engineering projects ever undertaken in terms of scope, cost and timeframe.”
Digging started in the 1970s, and it's still unfinished. The entire project is expected to be completed in 2019.
You can watch a YouTube video about the construction here.
Another hydrological megaproject is the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, completed in 1900, when according to landscape historian extraordinaire Jo Guldi, “we used to believe that civil engineering was going to transform civilization.”
The canal reversed the flow of the Chicago River, making it the only tributary besides the St. Lawrence River through which precious Great Lakes freshwater flows out. As an artificial conduit, it's a continuing source of controversy. Calls to re-reverse the river are growing louder, as some fear (perhaps overblown) that this diversion can be used by parched Western states as a wedge argument in their a bid to tap into the Great Lakes.
One good place to see the canal in active mode is at the Lockport Powerhouse. Alternatively, you can simply walk along the canal and then segue into Lockport to explore the urban landscape of a post-industrial, Midwestern suburban town.
For some reason, we didn't think there would be a quarry anywhere near the city, but there is one, Thorton Quarry, located just a few miles south. An even greater surprise is the fact that it's one of the largest in the world.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, what is now Illinois was south of the equator, and a warm, shallow sea covered the region. Reefs were formed, and these mineralized remains of corals, algae and sponges are what's being mined. We don't know how much of the construction materials in the city comes out of Thorton, but we like to think of the highways and skyscrapers here are made of this long lost equatorial landscape.
Now what about electricity? One interesting source is the Byron Nuclear Generating Station.
To our complete surprise, there are actually several functioning nuclear power stations in Illinois, making it ranked first among the states in nuclear generating capacity. Not all are located near Chicago, but there is a good clustering of them around the city, including decommissioned ones. Beyond the border is a Kuiper belt of sublimely radioactive landscapes, perambulant as though caught in the gravity well of inner city Hyde Park, the site of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor.
As with any tour, there needs to be some side trips, even for one that's already off the beaten track. For instance, one could go to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Before the construction of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, its particle accelerator was the largest in the world. This is where physicists have elucidated (and still continue to do so) nothing less than the fundamental construct of Nature and the landscape architecture of reality.
We certainly missed a few places, but you'll let us know which ones in the comments, right?
Monday, December 1, 2008
Using a recent article in the New York Times on Maryland's poultry industry, an itinerary could be cobbled up together that might begin at a “farm with 150,000 chickens.” There, peripatetic toxic tourists will marvel and then scale “mountains of manure” before undertaking a typical British ramble through the drainage basin of the Chesapeake Bay, scoping the terrain for lesser contour lines, for swales, for ditches where rivulets and streams spiked with phosphorous and nitrogen might be flowing en route to the estuary and its oxygen-depleted algae gardens — reading the landscape with the hermeneutic attention of a Talmudic scholar, as it were.
Like any rambler with rights of way, or for that matter the overwhelming odor from “650 million pounds of chicken manure” which drifts about, indifferent to territory and borders like a vaporous cloud, they will not be confined by and indeed can trespass over metes and bounds.
For fans of the vernacular architecture of pre-crisis industrial agriculture and Flickr habitué, there will be plenty of opportunity to take photographs of the tour's architectural highlight: “500-foot-long chicken houses [that] stretch from the roadways like airplane hangars” and whose “gigantic fans suction ammonia from the birds’ waste, filling the air for miles around.”
On agro
Monday, July 28, 2008
The famed beaches of Malibu are public; you are the owners.
However, there seems to be a concerted effort to confuse the public, to make one feel like a criminal trespasser in some exclusive enclave of millionaires and celebutants. If you aren't met by security guards at the very few public access entrances, this after navigating through barriers just to get to public parking lots, there are signs warning you that you are passing through “private property” and entering a “private beach.”
There are signs everywhere: “No Parking Any Time”, “No Stopping”, “Right to pass by permission” — the majority of which are false and illegal. It's as if the aristocracy along Central Park West and 5th Avenue has conspired to keep the public away from Central Park.
To see that the public is properly instructed on how to access the beach — your beach — the Los Angeles Urban Rangers provides an easy-to-use field guide [PDF]. From their website, you can also download a reprinted article, by Jenny Price, from LA Observed that gives you more detail.
Having both with you shouldn't necessitate carrying copies of the California Coastal Act and the state's constitution.
For those who are in Los Angeles this weekend, you can also sign up to a “safari” organized by the urban rangers, who will teach you how to navigate those invisible lines separating private-property and public lands. A “public easement potluck” is also scheduled on your beach.
