Learning from Logistics

Learning from Logistics

The network is the DNA of urbanization. In the 19th century railroads and canals provided both structure and stimulus for city development, while in the 20th century it was the highway that catalyzed urban settlements. This role has been taken over today by a new species of networks called logistics that curate the global flow of data, people and products. For our city fabric and the design disciplines, this development has enormous and partially unfathomable implications that are only emerging. In five chapters — 01 Site, 02 Plan, 03 Zone, 04 Circulation and 05 Architecture — the author describes the impact of logistics networks on architecture and urbanism. The concluding chapter Logistical Narratives profiles design scenarios for the critical integration and conceptualization of these contemporary time-space systems in the city.

How Net works Change Our Cities Clare Lys te r

Contents 01 – 14

Introduction Emerging Protocols of Post-Fordist Flow

17 – 190

Lessons 01 Site Urbanism After Geography: The Network is Context 02 Plan Double Vision: Total Design, Total Choice 03 Zone Split Second City: Time as Vehicle for Urbanism 04 Circulation Urbanism On Demand: The City as Service Platform 05 Architecture Smart Landscape, Dumb Building: Ground Rules

193 –201

Apply Conclusion: Logistical Narratives Logistical Players

203

Appendix Acknowledgements Image Credits Index About the Author

Introduction

Emerging Protocols of Post-Fordist Flow

Anywhere, Nowhere and Everywhere Locations such as Weeze, Kaunas, Lodz, Nador, Knock or Pula may not immediately ring a bell to even the most seasoned tourist. Weeze, a German town of 10,500 people and the site of a British Royal Air Force base that closed in 1999, lies close to the Dutch border, 30 miles (48 kilometers) from Duisburg and 43 miles (70 kilometers) from Düsseldorf. Kaunas is Lithuania’s second city, with 330,000 people, and is known in history as the location where Napoleon crossed into Russia with his army in 1812. Lodz is Poland’s second city, 84 miles (135 kilometers) south of Warsaw. Nador is a port in northeast Morocco, Knock is a pilgrimage site in the west of Ireland and Pula is the fifth-largest city in Croatia, not far from Trieste on the Italian border. Yet every year 15 million people in total pass through these places because each of them has an airport principally served by the world’s largest and most popular low-cost airline network, Ryanair.

Ryanair introduced the low-cost airline industry to Europe in the mid-1980s when it offered a cheaper alternative to British Airways and Aer Lingus for travelers flying between Dublin and London. In May 1997, after twelve years in business and with fourteen routes between Ireland and the UK, the company began to expand into mainland Europe by targeting small airfields with available landing slots within 100 kilometers of a major city. Lower landing fees at peripheral airports allowed the company to keep airfares low, while the logistics of flying to a less-busy airfield increased efficiency. Minor and dispersed airfields did not demand the same concentration of infrastructure, and low gate counts allowed for quick turnaround between incoming and outgoing aircraft. In fact, at twenty-five minutes between landing and takeoff, Ryanair claims to have one of the fastest turnaround times in the industry, enabling it to squeeze in up to two more flights per

1.1 Aaron Koblin, Flight Patterns, 2005

01 Site

18

A visualization of airline traffic over North America during a single twentyfour-hour period. Colors are coded to the 573 different types of airplanes (205,000 flights) traveling through North America on a single day.

50 miles 25 miles

Barcelona

Düsseldorf

Frankfurt

Hamburg

London

Lyon

Oslo

Paris

Pisa

Stockholm

Verona

Vienna

1.2 Ryanair terminal radii, 2010 Diagram illustrating the distances between airports used by Ryanair and closest major cities

day to a single destination. 2 For example, Beauvais (37 miles or 60 kilometers from Paris) and Charleroi (29 miles or 46 kilometers south of Brussels), which would become the company’s first European base in 2001, both offered extraordinarily cheap deals to Ryanair for the use of their airfields as backdoor portals to major cities. By the end of the year Ryanair was flying from Stansted, its UK base since 1991, to Skavsta (62 miles or 100 kilometers from Stockholm) and Torp (68 miles or 110 kilometers from Oslo), and by the summer of 1998 to Carcassonne (57 miles or 91 kilometers from Toulouse), Treviso (12 miles or 20 kilometers from Venice), Malmö, Saint-Étienne, Pisa and Rimini. In 1999, the number of routes increased to include Hahn (80 miles or 128 kilometers from Frankfurt), Biarritz, Ostend, Ancona, Genoa, Turin, Derry and Aarhus (three hours from Copenhagen) (figure 1.2). In 2000, a route from Prestwick, Scotland, to Beauvais (aka Glasgow to Paris) became the first of a series of flights characterized by the public as a nowhere-to-nowhere route. Yet in three years, the company had more than doubled its annual passenger count, to 7 million. Travelers found reason to go nowhere. Jokes circulated about Ryanair’s refusal to mention to its customers that it did not fly to major business centers or capital cities.

Just a few months ago a sleepy South Sweden town, with a rudimentary airport called Nykoping (roughly pronounced “no shopping”, and very aptly named) discovered that it was really called Stockholm South, even though it is not much closer to Stockholm than it is to Copenhagen.

Meanwhile, a disused airbase not far from Luxembourg has become Frankfurt (Hahn), and it is only a short 747 hop from Frankfurt itself, or a two-hour drive in good conditions... 3

Yet going nowhere was not only an economic phenomenon — more importantly, it became a cultural one. Ryanair, like other low-cost airline networks, preferred provincial cities ignored by legacy airlines and high-speed train systems. It specifically targeted countries with a shortage of trains, such as Sweden and Norway; poor services, as

19

Urbanism After Geography: The Network is Context

3.5 FedEx Memphis World Hub, Memphis International Airport, Tennessee, 2015 Interior view of packages being sorted at the company’s largest facility

91

Other logistical systems are just as fanatical about minimizing delays.

In airline transportation, time is not only measured by the duration of a flight but is also calibrated as turnaround time, the gap between a plane landing at a destination airport and its next takeoff, which includes taxiing time, passenger and baggage deplaning, maintenance checks, fueling and passenger and baggage boarding. Optimizing the turnaround of aircraft while on the ground is a major concern for airline carriers, and one of the reasons why Ryanair, the world’s largest lowcost airline, elected to fly to peripheral airports for frequent short-haul flights rather than major airfields that tend to get congested. With a twenty-five-minute turnaround time, Ryanair is the quickest in the business, a logistical feat that, as I discussed in Chapter 1, allows it to squeeze in an extra two flights per day to some destinations.

An important metric in this area, “enplaning” logistics — simply put, the act of getting passengers into their seats in the fastest time — is another illustrative case of the temporal nuances of air travel that has become almost a science of its own.17 Overall, quicker turnaround time enables more competitive rates and, combined with advances in reservation technologies and online services from baggage to passenger check-in, only amplifies the significance of time dynamics in the airline industry.

On 16 August 2008, Michael Phelps beat Serbian swimmer Milorad Cavic by one one-hundredth of a second to claim gold in the 100-meter butterfly at the Beijing Olympics (figure 3.11). Such a narrow time frame, barely perceptible by the human eye — despite the clock, most people in the stadium still believed that Cavic won the race — can be as momentous as it is negligible. (In Phelps’s case it was the former,

Split Second City: Time as Vehicle for Urbanism

03 Zone

Split Second City: Time as Vehicle for Urbanism

Lessons

04 Circulation

03 Zone

Urbanism on Demand: The City as Service Platform

116

“The fine arts of traffic management should be studied no less than the fine arts of parks and boulevards.” — Daniel Burnham 1

The reality of post-Fordist culture is that services have replaced things.

The city must no longer be conceived as a purely formal artifact but instead akin to a platform, a communication system that is generated by synergies between hard infrastructure, information systems and architectural space that supports the range of routines, lifestyles and experiences that globalization has to offer.

So you need a pair of shoes. No problem. Using your tablet, you click onto eBay or Amazon, where most likely there are hundreds of options to choose from. After a short time browsing, sorting and re-sorting results by color, size, price and heel height, you select a pair and hit the checkout button. The shoes are for a party on Saturday night — best to select priority shipping, as you want them to be on time. Who cares where they come from once they arrive, and no need to worry, for if they don’t fit, just send them back. In fact, you might order two pairs just in case. Logistics is a two-way system and change of mind is permitted. A confirmation email arrives in seconds. The shoes will be on your doorstep in twenty-four hours. You have no idea how all this works, and let’s be honest — you don’t really care. You are “black boxed,” a term used to describe how you and the vast majority of the capitalist world are slaves to regimes that you know nothing about.

For better or worse, at no point in history has the machine become so abstract, with such a large gap between production and consumption. Yet, this is a contradiction of sorts; on the one hand, we live in a physical world of shrinking space and unprecedented proximity — a global village — while on the other, we have never been so removed, socially (and intellectually) speaking, from the way it works. Anyway, all done, and now for your groceries. Peapod is bookmarked, so no need to browse the virtual supermarket aisles; after all, you always order the same list of things. You hit “accept” and pay, keying in the sixteen-digit Visa number you’ve memorized. Shopping is done

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Urbanism on Demand: The City as Service Platform

across large artificial landscapes that, unlike in World War I, also supported buildings and objects.30 The Hungarian-British architect ErnĂś Goldfinger, for example, is credited with creating a sun-shading device, the heliometer, that he deployed in camouflage projects developed in his London office. In the US, in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a series of factories, plants and airbases were covered as part of the initiative titled Camouflage California (1942); a project to cover the Lockheed-Vega plant and airplane facility in the Burbank area of the state is an illustrative case. 31 Images depict the installation not just as a thin, liminal surface but an actual three-dimensional suburban field propped up on stilts (400 wooden posts), with fake buildings and accessories (foliage, mannequins and rubber cars) on the upper surface that were supposedly moved on a regular basis to give the illusion of a real dynamic territory below. Photographs depict engineers and factory workers carrying on daily activities beneath this three-dimensional tapestry, comprised of painted canvas, chicken wire and netting, which from the underside acted as a suspended ceiling over a massive, newly rendered interior space. The 26-acre (10-hectare) Boeing facility in Seattle was also covered with a similar suburban disguise complete with ersatz parks, schools and homes, while the Douglas aircraft plant in Santa Monica was shrouded in a residential

5.7 Hidden floor panels of the Laurentian Library

05 Architecture

164

Artist Blake Summers and architect Ben Nicholson discuss a full-scale oil painting of one of the fifteen pairs of terra cotta panels hidden under the floor of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library (1524–1525). The paintings by Summers are based on research by Nicholson, who had spent over ten years analyzing the meaning of the geometric patterns on the floor panels, including their organizational role in the design for the library. The exhibition "Uncovering Geometry: Ben Nicholson at the Laurentian Library" was held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture from 11 December 1996 to 9 March 1997.

384-foot (117-meter) slope in Comuna 13 (figure 5.10), a neighborhood in Medellín, Colombia (2013), to allow quicker and safer circulation for residents. Ground here is not just an efficient transportation system — riding the escalator takes six minutes, when previously the hike uphill took thirty-five minutes, equivalent to climbing twenty-eight flights of stairs — but a social agent that has had dramatic impact on revitalizing the area by curbing violence. What’s most striking in the photographs that portray the project is the integration of the shiny, mechanized groundscape with its host setting of informal housing.

Zigzagging up the contours of the slope, the conveyance system, which is broken into six sub-sections, fuses with the terrain like a prosthetic, such that mechanical and natural ground merge together as a single image. It’s as if the equipment for distribution, sorting and handling is not only confined to logistical operations in the warehouse but is infiltrating the city.

5.10 Public escalators, Medellín, Colombia, 2012 Urban escalators act as a transportation system for up to 12,000 residents in Comuna 13, a shantytown in Medellín, Colombia.

The juxtaposition of the highly engineered concrete pathways with the informal development of the surrounding favela highlights the organizational presence of infrastructure (even more so than architecture) in the neighborhood.

EXTRA GROUNDS: The literal flow of ground achieved through the use of escalators, a circulation system normally associated with retail interiors, in the urban exterior was already present in Alison and Peter Smithson’s “Hauptstadt” proposal for the city of Berlin in 1957, which conceives the city as a bi-level organization — i.e., two grounds. Here, giant escalators are used to negotiate the distance between a new raised artificial urban platform and the existing city grade.33 The architects were intrigued with new organizational systems of the 1950s and 1960s and their implications for the built environment, and in fact the Hauptstadt project is also a useful precedent here beyond its novel use of escalators because it deploys ground as the primary means to formalize what the Smithsons called “an idea for mobility.” In creating

05 Architecture

168

2010, numbers are still below 2008’s total of 812.3 million passengers).

Between 2009 and 2010, the total number of passengers traveling by air in the twenty-seven European countries was almost 777 million.10 Moreover, notwithstanding continued concerns about higher fuel prices, the FAA reported in March 2012 that US domestic air travel is expected to nearly double in the next twenty years, reaching 1.2 billion passengers per year by 2032.11

Airbnb Type: Accommodation sharing network Date Founded: 2008 Location: San Francisco, California, US Founders: Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk

Range: Global Influence: Over 1 million properties in 34,000 cities 12

Expedia Type: Online travel services Date Founded: 1996 Location: Seattle (Bellevue), Washington, US Founder: Microsoft

Range: Global Influence: $34 billion in sales in 2012 Purchased its main rival, Travelocity, in January 2015, and announced plans to purchase Orbitz in February 2015

Facebook Type: Social network Date Founded: 2004 Location: Menlo Park, California, US (headquarters)

Founders: Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes Range: Global Influence: 1.3 billion users in 2014

Kickstarter Type: Creative funding platform Date Founded: 2009 Location: Brooklyn, New York, US Founders: Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler

Apply

Range: North America and some parts of Europe, Australia and New Zealand Influence: 5.7 million participants 64,000 funded projects

198

Netflix Type: Subscription-based entertainment network Date Founded: 1997 Location: Los Gatos, California, US (headquarters) Founders:Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings

Range: DVD rentals by mail in the US with streaming service in North America, South America and parts of Europe Influence: 50 million subscribers globally (30 million in the US) in 2014

Peapod Type: Food delivery network Date Founded: 1989 Location: Skokie, Illinois, US (HQ) Founders: Andrew and William Parkinson

Range: Regional (US East Coast and Midwest) Influence: 29 million orders and 15,000 food products available in 2014

Pivotdesk Type: Office sharing network Date Founded: 2004 Location: Boulder, Colorado, US

Founders: David Mandell, Jason Lewis and Kelly Taylor Range: US Influence: Unclear

Redbox Type: Office sharing network Date Founded: 2004 Location: Boulder, Colorado, US

Founders: David Mandell, Jason Lewis and Kelly Taylor Range: US Influence: Unclear

Rhapsody Type: Subscription-based online music service Date Founded: 2001 Location: Seattle, Washington, US Founder: Robert Reid

Range: Worldwide Influence: 32 million songs in catalog as of March 2015 11 million songs streamed in 2011

Southwest Airlines Type: Low-cost airline network Date Founded: 1967 Location: Dallas, Texas, US (headquarters) Founders: Rollin King and Herb Kelleher

199

Logistical Players

Range: North America Influence: World’s largest low-cost airline carrier, with 133 million passengers in 2013

Learning from Logistics

The network is the DNA of urbanization. In the 19th century railroads and canals provided both structure and stimulus for city development, while in the 20th century it was the highway that catalyzed urban settlements. This role has been taken over today by a new species of networks called logistics that curate the global flow of data, people and products. For our city fabric and the design disciplines, this development has enormous and partially unfathomable implications that are only emerging. In five chapters — 01 Site, 02 Plan, 03 Zone, 04 Circulation and 05 Architecture — the author describes the impact of logistics networks on architecture and urbanism. The concluding chapter Logistical Narratives profiles design scenarios for the critical integration and conceptualization of these contemporary time-space systems in the city.

How Net works Change Our Cities Clare Lys te r