The Territorial City: Edge of the Megalopolis by Harvard GSD

Neeraj Bhatia

The Territorial City Edge of the Megalopolis

Fall 2024

Studio Report

Neeraj Bhatia

The Territorial City Edge of the Megalopolis

The Territorial City: Edge of the Megalopolis Every foreground has a background. In California, the background is the Central Valley—a flat landscape that is used to harvest and extract resources to support other regions. It is no surprise that within the state, the greatest political, economic, and cultural divide manifests itself between the coastal cities and the inland valley’s hinterland regions. Coastal California adorns an image of scenic landscape, progressive environmental movements, liberal culture, and density, while inland California is characterized by resource harvesting and extraction, conservative values, and a depravity in social infrastructure. With distinctions in labor, wealth, race, climate, and education, these two regions are emblematic of the increasing divide between geographies of immaterial labor and resource consumption, and the exploitation of land and communities to extract and harvest these resources. While these “two Californias” have remained relatively distinct, the ongoing construction of the high-speed rail (HSR) infrastructure to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles will run through the Central Valley. Accordingly, this infrastructure will produce a spatial collapse between these two worlds and foster a new type of urbanism in the American context—the territorial city. The territorial city is comprised of extreme density and diffusion; of only network and nodes; of both rural and urban. Most importantly, it is a city made up of networked building complexes that can leverage architecture’s capacity to impact territorial issues. This studio focused on

collective housing complexes in the Central Valley to address the growing needs of the state and ongoing struggles with housing affordability. Specifically, the studio examined how to expand the domestic commons into a networked urban commons to produce decentralized models of care. Leveraging the network of the HSR, new forms of sharing physical and nonphysical resources, as well as engaging the benefits of scale, offer forms of support that were not previously tenable in hinterland environments like the Central Valley. Through identifying precarious subjects in the Central Valley, the studio considered how the high-speed rail can redistribute resources more equitably. Ultimately these complexes ask how architecture can foster empathy between these two Californias. Studio Instructor Neeraj Bhatia Teaching Associate Ella Larkin Students Iam Bhunto, Dalika Dharod, Connor Gravelle, Inmo Kang, Ella Larkin, Yue Liang, Botao Sun, Chloe Tsui, Ziyang Xiong, Zhian Yin Final Review Critics Elizabeth Christoforetti, Laura Crescimano, Anda French, Rania Ghosn, James Graham, Elisa Iturbe, Lydia Kallipoliti, Grace La, Jesse LeCavalier, Ana Maria Leon, David Luberoff, Ryan Neiheiser, Albert Pope, Ettore Santi, Paola Aguirre Serrano, Abby Spinak, Kearon Roy Taylor, Ed Wall, Sarah Whiting, Alex Yuen

Foreword 15

159

Rooted in Motion: Nested Cooperatives for Migrant Farmers Inmo Kang, Chloe Tsui

199

Precarious Produce: Agricultural Logistics and Food Access in America’s Breadbasket Connor Gravelle, Ella Larkin

253

The Spatial Formats of the Territorial City Neeraj Bhatia

Cultivating Collective Counter-Imaginaries Jesse LeCavalier

Essays and Projects 21

The Territorial City Neeraj Bhatia

Rail to Skill: Trade School as a Distributed Campus Iam Bhunto, Ziyang Xiong

The Means of Movement: Leveraging Logistics Yue Liang, Botao Sun

271

Reflections on the Territorial City Elisa Iturbe

Healthcare as a Decentralized Network Dalika Dharod, Zhian Yin

273

Contributors

Afterword

125

145

The Operationalization of the Background: The Central Valley as an Infrastructure Neeraj Bhatia

Foreword

Cultivating Collective Counter-Imaginaries

Jesse LeCavalier

Cultivating Collective Counter-Imaginaries

Jesse LeCavalier

Infrastructure is a key site of the social imaginary. It is an object and a system. It is tangible and abstract. Concentrated in spatial moments of experiential intensity but then also diffused across territorial abstractions. It has been a rare category of bi-partisan agreement, but it has also been a mechanism of urbicide and displacement. And yet infrastructure could be a site of transformational thinking and implementation. How is this collective imaginary cultivated and developed? And how to do this despite persistent infrastructural tropes that arrest the development of the collective understanding of the possibilities of infrastructure? The post-2008 stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), uses the term “infrastructure” 57 times but only in 11 instances does it refer to physical installations like roads and buildings. The more recent post-Covid Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) was more focused on the country’s ailing physical networks. In its 1,039 pages, “infrastructure” appears 904 times—on nearly every page and in every capacity. In the context of 2025, a short four years after the IIJA’s approval, its table of contents that once seemed routine now reads as utopian. For example, the following sections are just from DIVISION A—SURFACE TRANSPORTATION: TITLE I—FEDERAL-AID HIGHWAYS:

There is also DIVISION B—SURFACE TRANSPORTATION INVESTMENT ACT OF 2021, which includes provisions for multimodal freight and of course, rail. DIVISION D—ENERGY includes TITLE I: GRID INFRASTRUCTURE AND RESILIENCY with sections like: Sec. 40101. Preventing outages and enhancing the resilience of the electric grid. Sec. 40103. Electric grid reliability and resilience research, development, and demonstration. Similar forward-looking provisions are included in DIVISION E—DRINKING WATER AND WASTEWATER INFRASTRUCTURE and DIVISION F—BROADBAND. Relevant to the studio described in this publication, Sec. 22413. Rail Research and Development Center of Excellence created a fund-matching grant program between federal and local governments that would support, among other things: Basic and applied research, evaluation, education, workforce development, and training efforts related to safety, project delivery, efficiency, reliability, resiliency, and sustainability of urban commuter, intercity highspeed, and freight rail transportation, to include advances in rolling stock, advanced positive train control, human factors, rail infrastructure, shared corridors, grade crossing safety, inspection technology, remote sensing, rail systems maintenance, network resiliency, operational reliability, energy efficiency, and other advanced technologies.

While these items represent a kind of baseline, their recognition and provision were significant, in part because they were done so publicly. It is perhaps obvious that the current dismantling of public supply of infrastructure in the face of ample demand is to clear the way for private and corporate entities to fill the gap. Projects like the Brightline in Florida are promoted as positive examples of how the private sector can succeed where the public fails. These accounts often fail to mention the divergent missions and motives of a for-profit infrastructural system. To develop credible alternatives to this trajectory, cultivating infrastructural counter-imaginaries is especially urgent. That is, collective ideas for what infrastructure could be beyond what it has been before. But why is it hard to do this? Infrastructural systems, once completed, persist beyond generational awareness. As a result, there can be a tendency to assign them permanence and to imagine them outside the realm of transformation. Similarly, the work that public infrastructure does is often at foundational levels. For example, private “innovation” in the technology sector would not be possible without the very publicly funded information sharing network that we call the internet. These aspects of infrastructure tend to erode the possibilities to imagine it otherwise. Understanding the “function” of infrastructure is yet another obstacle. In the United States at least, infrastructure has become defined in technical terms and measured only in terms of its “efficiency.” But how is such a metric defined and measured? In Jennifer Karns Alexander’s The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control, she shows the ways in which Taylorist habits of mind spread beyond the shop floor into all manner of realms, subsequently determining the boundaries of possibilities. By enlarging the concept of infrastructure and its duties beyond the mere fulfillment of a function, designers especially can help demonstrate what this would be like. Infrastructures are often evaluated through this narrow metric and as a result other approaches are foreclosed upon. However, if we reframe our assessment of “function” we start to see a wealth of examples of it supporting richness of experience while also completing its task. Nineteenth-century examples of urban “meso-mobility” are just one example. The Santa Justa Lift in Lisbon helps people navigate the topographic drama of the city but does so through an act of urban theatricality that manages to integrate convivial slowness into the everyday without thematizing it.

Cultivating Collective Counter-Imaginaries

Sec. 11115. Congestion mitigation and air quality improvement program. Sec. 11123. Wildlife crossing safety. Sec. 11127. Nationally significant Federal lands and Tribal projects program. Sec. 11133. Bicycle transportation and pedestrian walkways. Sec. 11403. Carbon reduction program. Sec. 11506. Appalachian Regional Commission. Sec. 11509. Reconnecting communities pilot program. Sec. 11518. Permeable pavements study. Sec. 11528. Pollinator-friendly practices on roadsides and highway rights-of-way.

David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 36.

Jesse LeCavalier

Such examples can be regarded in contrast to modern megaprojects especially evident in the American West. Installations like the Grand Coulee Dam created untold environmental destruction while also creating work, arable land, and materiel for World War II. For David Nye, these works created a site of collective accomplishment, underpinned by a sense of pride associated with the democratic values of the United States and with an aesthetic dimension heretofore associated with overwhelming natural phenomena: “The citizen who contemplated such public improvements became aware of the power of democracy and saw himself as part of the moral vanguard, leading the world toward universal democracy. … Democratic virtue could be invigorated by the powerful experience of sublimity.”1 Such megaprojects increasingly became less ambiguous in their intent, as evident in the legacy of racist forms of urban dispossession and displacement, not to mention continued environmental destruction. However, infrastructure as a category is not fundamentally biased toward such tendencies. It just happens that much modern infrastructure seems to be so. How might we recover the transformative capacities of infrastructure without the corrupting tendencies of the megaproject? What if we thought of an infrastructural imagination as a kind of practice, one that benefits from sustained and routine exercises? What would it mean to undertake this practice collectively? Design studios such as The Territorial City are examples of a kind of collective practice in expanding reality. The design studio exists as a space of simulating futures that would be inadmissible in most other contexts, constrained as they are by political economies. This collective imagination of the future of HSR in the Central Valley is done with great care and dedication and the results tell a story of infrastructure imagined beyond its narrowly defined function.

Essay

The Territorial City

Neeraj Bhatia

The Territorial City

Neeraj Bhatia

In 2018, a group led by Robert Paul Preston and Tom Reed released their New California proposal to consolidate the rural hinterlands of California into a separate and distinct economy from the coastal and urban cities. The New California plan is strikingly similar to the 2016 Six Californias plan—a proposal by venture capitalist Tim Draper to split the state into distinct geographic and economic zones. Critics of the plan stated that the proposal’s intention was to draw lines between economically rich and poor zones of the state and form segregated enclaves. While the Six Californias and New California plans failed to qualify as a California ballot measure, the continual re-emergence of such plans points to the fact that in California there are highly regionalized politics, economics, and cultures. Within the state, the greatest political, economic, and cultural divide manifests itself between California’s coastline and the inland Central Valley. Coastal California portrays an image of scenic landscapes, progressive environmental movements, liberal culture, and density, while inland California is characterized by resource harvesting and extraction, as well as their associated infrastructures and byproducts. What these plans tend to ignore are the interdependent relationships between these zones, enabled by logistical infrastructures and characteristic of an understanding of capitalism as a form of world ecology. Separated by topography, wealth, race, forms of labor, climate, and pollution, these two Californias are emblematic of the increasing divide between the realities of resource consumption and the exploitation of land and communities to extract these resources. The ongoing construction of the High-Speed Rail to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco will run through this hinterland region, collapsing these cultures in space and time.

drought has shed light on the challenges faced by the heavy economic reliance on agriculture in the region. The high-speed rail is poised to diversify and make more resilient the economy of the Central Valley. While the Central Valley is hoping to shed its isolated character and reap the benefits of spatial integration, the byproduct of connectivity is the extension of the ‘periphery’ of metropolitan centers such as San Francisco and Los Angeles into this once-hinterland. The collapse and juxtaposition of these ‘two Californias’ will be most evident in the ‘bed-

The Territorial City California has embarked on an ambitious plan to connect major population centers— namely the Bay Area, Greater Los Angeles, and Sacramento—through a high-speed rail (HSR) network. Construction is already underway with estimates to have an initial section in operation by 2030 and most routes running before 2040. The high-speed rail will move at speeds exceeding 200 miles per hour, connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco in less than three hours. Due to the need for flat, inexpensive land to route this project, the high-speed rail will be constructed through the agricultural land of the Central Valley. The territorial implications of the high-speed rail are far reaching—including the redistribution of populations, economies, industries, and ecologies—for the lands that run along and adjacent to its vectors. It is hoped that the high-speed rail will be part of the solution in addressing the Central Valley’s high poverty rates, high unemployment, lower-than-average educational levels, and slow recovery from the 2008 economic crisis.1 More recently, the

room communities’ that border the Central Valley. It is these regions that are destined to become new peripheral centers. With some of the highest real estate and rental prices in the country, San Francisco’s economic success has ‘priced out’ populations to the exurbs. Smaller urban centers around San Francisco such as Lodi, Manteca, and Tracy are growing into ‘bedroom communities’ for the Bay Area. The concept of bedroom communities emerged post-WWII as a form of American urbanization, which began to shift populations out of city centers. The term is derived from the notion of a migrating population—spending their waking life in the city and returning to sleep in the peripheral exurbs. There is an intimate relationship between these communities and the city that they are tied to: growing prices in the core creates more movement to these peripheral exurbs, while faltering real estate in the city leaves abandon houses within these bedroom communities. These settlements are highly vulnerable to economic transformations and constantly in flux. A recent report revealed that exurbs are

The collapsing of the city and the hinterland (Image by Ella Larkin and Connor Gravelle).

The current bedroom communities of the Bay Area stretch over 100 miles into the Central Valley (Image by THE OPEN WORKSHOP).

The Territorial City

This studio examines this other California in hopes to project new integrative and sustainable models of large-scale infrastructural design and resource management. The studio moves between design and research in a transcalar fashion, focusing on the influence of high-speed rail on urban growth and resource management at the scale of both the Central Valley and specific nodal interfaces. The Territorial City explores how architectural form can promote economic, social, environmental, and political equity by integrating urbanization with resource management at a series of scales.

‘world city,’ which he termed the Ecumenopolis. While Doxiadis’s radical concept may at first seem absurd, its underlying principle was that cities are growing horizontally across the landscape, and eventually these clusters will join into a continuous mat of urbanization connected by infrastructure. Doxiadis’s theories have influenced several contemporary designer-theorists, from Lars Lerup’s notion of the continuous city to Albert Pope’s research on the megalopolis to Rem Koolhaas/AMO’s

Site visit to HSR construction sites, including the San Joaquin River Viaduct close to Madera (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

Facing page: Median household income of cities along the highspeed rail (Mapping by Iam Bhunto and Chloe Tsui).

The Territorial City

again on the rise, as the economy bounces back from the 2008 economic crisis.2 The development of the high-speed rail is predicted to increase the viable distance of bedroom communities from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento—which will now extend deep into the Central Valley’s hinterland, creating a megaregion. The concept of the megaregion is not new; in fact already in the late 1960s, Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis posited the notion of a

of urbanism (for instance, traffic), we sought the opportunities in what infrastructure provides? How can it help diversify economies and ecologies? How can it create new relationships between once distant cities? How can the highspeed rail be used to redistribute resources more equitably across California? This studio examines the design, impact, and opportunities of the highspeed rail in California both at a territorial and architectural scale. While these infrastructures are large-scale collective constructions, this stu-

Switches The strategies for the reconciliation of architecture and urbanism have typically looked toward the segregation of the city’s functions from its supporting infrastructures. For instance, in CIAM’s Athens Charter,3 the functions of the city (i.e., habitation, leisure, work) were treated as distinct entities, with an acknowledgment that infrastructure was critical to organize the various functions and ultimately reduce traffic. Within transport infrastructure, a further separation based on speeds (referencing Le Corbusier’s hierarchy from V1, roads, to V7, pedestrian paths) was proposed. One of the largest issues of the original railway and highway systems in the United States was their autonomy. As Keller Easterling has pointed out in regards to the highway system in the United States, “The Interstate Highway was segregated from interaction with other transportation modalities and valued as a frozen system of neutralized equivalence, or in network terms, as a dumb system with dumb switches.”4 These are but a few of many instances of the separation of architecture, urbanism, and infrastructure into disciplinary boundaries that have occurred over the last century. But what if instead of viewing infrastructure solely as alleviating a byproduct

dio is interested in how the design of the network for high-speed rail, as well as specific nodes, provides a venue to empower new agents—human and nonhuman—into this once top–down system. Leveraging infrastructure today requires the production of moments of transfer and exchange. This territory of infrastructure has yielded the spatial formats of surfaces, containers, and conduits.5 These formats have colonized vast swatches of peripheral urban environments and operate at a scale that is more closely aligned to global and regional logistics than to those of the city. How might we consider these spatial formats as the new foundations for design? How can the spaces of logistics be the center of new public realms? We examine new and existing large-scale infrastructural nodes to propose a series of HSR ‘switches’—a new typology of logistic distribution centers at the scale of architecture, that cumulatively reorganize the larger territory for a more sustainable form of resource management and cultural production. Ultimately, through the following design proposals, we speculate on the disciplinary agency of the architect to use form, program, geometry, and organization to have territorial effects that extend beyond the footprint of the architectural object.

Neeraj Bhatia

Atlas. As the city transforms from a megalopolis to a megaregion, a new type of urbanism is produced that has never been witnessed in the United States—the Territorial City. The territorial city is comprised of extreme density and diffusion; of only network and nodes; of both rural and urban. Most importantly, it is a city made up of networked building complexes that can leverage architecture’s capacity to impact territorial issues.

CALIFORNIA

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and information technology. Alongside these shifts in labor, a series of austerity policies— which broadly have focused on shrinking the social welfare state, deregulating labor, and promoting private markets as critical drivers of growth—have amplified inequities in the distribution of wealth. These transformations have caused an increasingly large sector of the population to live in precarity, which comprises all forms of flexible and insecure labor (from seasonal workers to homeworkers and freelancers), as well as extended beyond labor to “encompass other aspects of intersubjective life,

anxiety and insecurity while making it difficult to predict one’s fate, build a future, construct a life, and be politically active.8 Most of the sectors of labor that foster precarity—hospitality, construction, agriculture, retail, cleaning, journalism, information technology, design—are dominated by multinational companies whose priority is their shareholders (these are some of the predominant industries in the Central Valley). With the integration of China and other developing economies into the world labor market, there has been a downward pressure on wages in all Organization for Economic

Previous spread: The operationalization of the landscape through hydroscaping and agricultural production has set up specific economies and labor protocols in the Central Valley (Image by THE OPEN WORKSHOP).

California’s oil-intensive energy infrastructure (Image by THE OPEN WORKSHOP).

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The Territorial City

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including housing, debt, and the ability to build affective social relations.”6 Moving beyond traditional social status divisions, the insecurities of the precariat are both objective and material, as well as subjective and emotional. Not only are precarious workers less likely to have social rights and nonwage benefits, including access to decent affordable housing, health care, pension, and education, but the absence of these benefits also keeps individuals in a state of precariousness.7 This “financialization of daily life” fosters

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Precarious Subjects The term precariat is a neologism that combines the words proletariat and precarity. It has been used to capture the material and psychological uncertainty felt by a class-in-the-making, who are primarily a byproduct of neoliberal transformations in labor practices within advanced capitalism. Terms such as creative labor, network labor, service labor, affective labor, and immaterial labor reveal the diverse practices of labor that have emerged through globalization

For instance, in California, approximately 5.4 million people live within a mile of one or more of the 84,000 existing oil and gas wells. These communities are situated in high-risk areas and consist primarily of Latinos/Hispanics (69 percent), African Americans (10 percent), and Asian Americans (11 percent). As a whole, visible minorities make up 92 percent of the 1.8 million people living in these highly polluted zones.10 More than a coincidence, these environments of extraction tap into deeper

There are several types of precarious subjects in the Central Valley tied to extractive agendas that apply stress to the land and communities. Many precarious subjects are involved in forms of material and contract labor—agricultural workers, construction workers, undocumented workers, and oil industry laborers. In addition, the commodification of land for resource extraction and harvesting have led to more precarity in the natural world—due to contamination, habitat loss, and urbanization. The overlap between social and environmental issues is well documented.

cultural and social issues residing within the United States. Despite being the agricultural and energy center of the state, most counties in the Central Valley have higher rates of poverty than the California average. Unemployment rates are unusually high, and median household income lags behind the rest of the state. The ramifications of this extend down to social infrastructure—with decreased funding for education, social programs, and health access. What exists in the Central Valley is a population that has been put at risk and does not have the economic means to create a strong voice to adjust policy. Through the studio, students are asked to identify a precarious subject to design for and examine how to go beyond extraction by centering forms of collective care and solidarity.

Neeraj Bhatia

Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.9 It is important to note that the precariat is not a subclass, but rather a pivotal group in a global neoliberal economy. As precarious labor moved from a peripheral position under Fordism to a central position in late capitalism, flexible and uncertain work is being habituated over a larger swath of the population. Global capitalism necessitates a workforce with the precariat’s nimble characteristics to operate within the volatility of the market.

Central Valley construction site of viaduct and easements (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

Shinjuku Towers by Fumihiko Maki, a provocation on ‘collective form’ (Image by Maki and Associates).

active participation in the mechanisms of sharing, including the shaping of rules that sustain the commons and exploring the emancipating potentials of sharing.14 As such, commoning is a practice that is continually evolving, made and remade by the subjects involved in the commons. Through an ongoing process of working together, negotiating, and organizing, these practices produce what is to be named, valued, used, and symbolized in common. Ultimately, these practices create forms of social life—highThe Territorial City

Care and the Commons Acts of care are the most critical weapon against precarity. If we understand care as providing what is necessary for the health, welfare, protection, and maintenance of something or someone, these acts operate in direct opposition to the forces fostering precarity. As more and more people live in precarity, how might acts of care, solidarity, and mutual aid fill in for forms of support that have been gutted by neoliberal transformations of social welfare? The Territorial City examines how the sharing and commoning of resources allow for more community control, equitable distribution, and expansion of care. Centering the collective, not the individual, as the fundamental unit of society, how might an ethos of collectivity vis-a-vis the notion of the commons provide forms of care and social resilience against precarity? The commons revolves around a shared resource, which is managed and governed collectively by a community.11 Some of the earliest examples included land for herding or raising livestock. Not only was the land often held in common, but each person was also an equal stakeholder in the land and its resources (known as the ‘common good’ or ‘commonwealth’), and thereby in its success. This had effects on the maintenance of the commons—inherently creating a stewardship of the shared resource. Political scientist Elinor Ostrom’s documentation of several enduring common-pool resources reveals the integral role that communities have in establishing the rules, agreements, enforcement, and conflict resolution mechanisms around the commons.12 These often-overlooked social and political relationships between a resource and its commoners are now understood as central to the development and long-term maintenance of the commons. Not only does this expand the “dichotomous choice between state and market,”13 but it also expands the definition of commons to include its community of commoners and governance structures in addition to shared resources. User-managed governance of the environments we inhabit—from land ownership to buildings and domestic spaces—enables residents to be key agents in how resources are distributed, valued, and maintained. This link between the shared resource and its relational social framework is the core of the notion of ‘urban commons.’ The expansion of the noun ‘common’ to the verb ‘commoning’ entails the

lighting new forms of living, working, and being in common.15 The social systems produced by commoning and between commoners is a continuous form of social labor.16 As profit, expropriation, and competitiveness are not dominant influences, the social force formed around cooperation, negotiation, and sharing is distinct as it centers on solidarity.17 Through laboring and engaging in democratic processes, commoning practices provide a framework for care practices, fostering empathy and solidarity. How can the high-speed rail be leveraged as a distributed commons to provide new forms of care to the territory? Combating precarity, acts of care are predicated on collectivism—an acknowledgment that we are in it together and that power can be formed by acting and speaking in concert. Collective Housing Complexes While precarity manifests in many forms, the lack of access to housing is becoming an increasingly widespread issue exacerbating precarity in California. An ongoing series of statewide policies have attempted to increase density, overcome NIMBYism, and broaden affordability. While these initiatives are moving in the right direction, they still are largely rooted in the idea of private ownership. For instance, two

Facing page: The studio meets below the Kings Tulare Viaduct, surrounded by almond farms (Photo by CAHSRA).

The Territorial City

most commonly constructed housing types in the state include the micro-unit (primarily in urban areas) and the single-family home. Both of these types remain indebted to the notion of the autonomy of the unit and the commodification of space. Against this backdrop, the studio investigates how new typologies of commoning domestic spaces—communes, co-living, co-housing, cooperatives, among others—can provide affordability, social resilience, and platforms for care. In contradistinction to the micro-unit, which reduces the unit to its ultimate minimum of individual autonomy by reorganizing the relationship between the private and public realm—primarily by sharing particular amenities such as kitchens, dining areas, or bathrooms among other programs—residents in collective housing types can have access to a form of luxury without the economic burden. Not only does this create a higher quality of affordable life, it also enables the construction of new social units that replace the nuclear family. These alternative familial arrangements often share domestic (reproductive) labor, such as caregiving, cooking, cleaning, and the maintenance of the household. This labor, uncompensated and unrecognized in capitalism, can become distributed among many—making care both a collective and more visible form of labor. The construction of the high-speed rail will fundamentally transform where people live and work. Areas adjacent to planned HSR stops are already being purchased by developers. Without forms of resistance to the urbanizing forces of capitalism, we can predict that sites close to these stops will increase dramatically in value and residents living in precarity will need to move further and further into the periphery. Instead, how might lands acquired by the rail authority, which are now public, be utilized for collective housing complexes? This primarily consists of the lands for the rail stations as well as lands adjacent to the rail alignment. How can collective housing, public space, and the distribution of ‘switches’ form complexes that provide new forms of care and mobility to those living in precarity? Through the projects featured herein, students design these complexes for specific issues and the precarious subjects they affect. These housing complexes offer an alternative vision on how we might live and work in more collectivized ways.

15 16 17

David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (New York: Verso, 2012), 69. Guido Ruivenkamp and Andy Hilton, Perspectives on Commoning: Autonomist Principles and Practices (London: Zed Books, 2017), 1. See also Stavrides, Common Space, 32. Stravos Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons (London: Zed Books, 2016), 35, 2. De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia, 11. De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia, 207; Stavrides, Common Space, 272.

Neeraj Bhatia

Summary Report: California High Speed Rail and the Central Valley Economy (January 2015), 4. 2 Teresa Wiltz, “Returning to the Exurbs: Rural Counties Are Fastest Growing,” The PEW Charitable Trusts (blog), April 15, 2015, http://www.pewtrusts. org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/ stateline/2015/4/15/returning-to-the-exurb-rural-counties-are-fastest-growing. 3 Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973). 4 Keller Easterling, “Interchange and Container: The New Orgman” in Perspecta 30 (1999): 114. 5 Neeraj Bhatia et al., “Formatting Contingency,” in Pamphlet Architecture 30: Coupling (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), 8. See also “The Spatial Formats of the Territorial City” by Neeraj Bhatia on page 253 of this report. 6 Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, “From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks,” Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005): 1. 7 Sonia McKay, Steve Jefferys, Anna Paraksevopoulou, and Janoj Keles, Study on Precarious Work and Social Rights (London: Working Lives Research Institute, 2012), 7–8. 8 Neilson and Rossiter, “From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again,” 1. 9 Sonia McKay et al., Study on Precarious Work and Social Rights. 10 Tanja Srebotnjak and Mariam RotkinEllman, “Drilling in California: Who’s at Risk?” (Natural Resources Defense Council, 2014). 11 Massimo De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism (London: Zed Books, 2017), 10. 12 Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 90. 1

Project: Education

Rail to Skill: Trade School as a Distributed Campus

Iam Bhunto Ziyang Xiong

Rail to Skill: Trade School as a Distributed Campus

Iam Bhunto Ziyang Xiong

The Central Valley’s educational attainment lags behind the rest of California, with many choosing not to pursue post-secondary schooling. While current educational attainment is fairly tuned to job prospects, labor in the Central Valley is changing. As the immaterial labor market grows in the Central Valley, the region will struggle to meet the increasing demand for a middle-skilled workforce. If left unaddressed, the risk of unemployment will continue to develop over the following decades, compounding economic and social precarity already faced by the region’s residents. There are many challenges that individuals face while upskilling—tuition costs, time constraints, inability to relocate, intimidation of the institution, and lack of accessible pathways. Rail to Skill proposes a new educational platform that bridges the gap between high school and college, focusing on a new typology of a trade school as a distributed campus. While the arrival of the high-speed rail (HSR) could exacerbate existing disparities by accelerating economic shifts, there is also an opportunity to rewire this infrastructure to distribute educational resources more equitably throughout the Central Valley. This educational network decentralizes campus amenities throughout the region, embedding educational infrastructure within the city nodes and making this system visible at stations. This shared educational system removes traditional time barriers to education by decentralizing resources and providing a flexible, interconnected learning environment. By facilitating access through the HSR, education becomes more inclusive, accommodating to individual lifestyles and circumstances, and tuned to geographically specific labor needs. Right: Current HSR training center image was captured by Neeraj Bhatia during studio site visit.

Above: Total jobs by counties along the HSR line.

Rail to Skill: Trade School as a Distributed Campus

Iam Bhunto, Ziyang Xiong Above: Prediction of annual demand and supply of middle-skill job sectors (2020–50).

Rail to Skill: Trade School as a Distributed Campus

36 Above: Integrated chart and the Central Valley’s job sector by educational attainment and personal earnings.

Iam Bhunto, Ziyang Xiong

Above: Analysis of systemic barriers that compound different forms of precarity.

Right: Network plan proposal, the educational complex distribution along the HSR line.

Rail to Skill: Trade School as a Distributed Campus

BARRIERS

Iam Bhunto, Ziyang Xiong

Rail to Skill: Trade School as a Distributed Campus

40 Top: Study of the components of tradeschool education and their frequency of use.

Bottom: Proposal of curricular schedule on daily and weekly basis.

Following page: The processing loop proposal—the logistical representation of the new curriculum.

Iam Bhunto, Ziyang Xiong

Care Crossing Campus Iam Bhunto

Care Crossing Campus acts as a bridge to locally connect Chinatown to downtown Fresno across the infrastructural cut caused by rail. At a territorial scale, it merges job training, campus amenities, and the rail station, which is shared both within the system as well as with Fresno’s residents. The project adopts the public space type of the street and courtyard as an organizational framework to weave together different flows and scales of gathering. Students, local residents, and transregional travelers are brought together in a series of urban rooms, wherein education, daily life, and care co-exist. The courts also define the housing unit typologies above through their location. As a series of strips, longer dwellings become optimal for larger social units, while shorter strips are used by individuals or couples. By merging the station with trade-school education—classrooms, clinics, housing, and mobile classrooms—these programs become integrated with the city, removing traditional time and spatial barriers to education.

43 Top: City-scale map showing Fresno’s existing healthcare and educational resources.

Bottom: The prediction of Fresno’ middle-skilled job trends.

Care Crossing Campus

44 Above: The interaction between the project and Fresno urban fabric.

Iam Bhunto Above: Isometric composition of space, structure, and movement in Fresno station.

Care Crossing Campus

46 Above: Longitudinal section showing the thematic courtyards and their spatial interactions.

Iam Bhunto

Care Crossing Campus

48 Above: Floor plans representing the thematic urban rooms and space organization on the Common Bridge and the Co-housing levels.

Iam Bhunto

Care Crossing Campus

50 Top: Axonometric of the Common Bridge level showing urban activities in courtyards and their associated flexible programs.

Bottom: The different sizes of public and learning programs interact with the thematic courtyards.

Following page: View from coliving unit onto the main urban room.

Iam Bhunto

Care Crossing Campus

52 Top: Axonometric of the housing level showing the vertically connected public activities in courtyards.

Bottom: The composition of housing unit types responding to the courtyards’ functions and orientations.

Following page: Urban Room and Street for Everyone—the view from the housing level promenade connecting to public streets and urban rooms.

Iam Bhunto

Care Crossing Campus

54 Activating Fresno’s Street—the view from the Downtown Fresno street linked by the project’s plaza.

Iam Bhunto

The Flexible Underline

Ziyang Xiong

This project proposes a renewable energy engineering trade school in Bakersfield that combines educational infrastructure (classrooms, labs, maker spaces, library, and student center) with the rail station. Instead of proposing an object in the landscape, the project finds opportunity with the already existing rail viaduct, proposing a series of programs that would be hung from this infrastructure. As pedagogical models continue to evolve and new job sectors emerge, what becomes critical in educational buildings is their ability to adapt. Flexibility is foregrounded in this proposal by considering the structural systems. Structurally, a series of concrete cores replace traditional columns, allowing for longer uninterrupted spans. Between these cores and hanging floor plates, a hyper-flexible system of floor heights and widths can be produced, enabling a variety of housing and educational typologies in plan and section. The ground floor is completely liberated from columns, creating an open space that connects seamlessly with the surrounding environment, while also hosting a range of maker spaces. A fabric facade encloses and shades the building, while enabling reduced conditioning of the space. Spaces for students and the public are visually and physically interconnected, fostering a new vision for trade-school design, where education, community, and transportation co-exist and benefit from their proximity.

57 Above: Site plan—Analysis of existing urban conditions.

The Flexible Underline

58 Top: Collage representing schematic interpretation of the new school in Bakersfield.

Bottom: Diagrammatic proposal of the suspended structures.

Ziyang Xiong Above: Variations of the flexible housing units.

The Flexible Underline

60 Above: Isometric composition of space, structure, and movement in Bakersfield node.

Ziyang Xiong Above: Physical model showing the operable facade.

62 Above: Floor plans representing flexible space organizations on the ground and third floors.

Ziyang Xiong

The Flexible Underline

Ziyang Xiong

The Flexible Underline

66 Above: Longitudinal section showing space variation and connection.

Ziyang Xiong Above: Physical model showing the educational infrastructure intermixed with the HSR Station and hanging from the viaduct.

The Flexible Underline

68 Top: Cross section showing the HSR station and laboratories. Bottom: Cross section showing the student activity center and classrooms.

Ziyang Xiong Top: The visual interaction between visitors and students. Bottom: The student center with spatial flexibility and public visibility.

The Flexible Underline

70 Top: South perspective representing the materiality and ground-floor openness.

Bottom: Longitudinal section showing space variations and connections.

Ziyang Xiong

Project: Logistics

The Means of Movement: Leveraging Logistics

Yue Liang Botao Sun

The Means of Movement: Leveraging Logistics

Yue Liang Botao Sun

Over the past 20 years, retail shopping has evolved dramatically through how logistics has connected products to homes. New hybrid typologies of storage/shopping such as Costco have emerged, while companies such as Amazon continue to build a monopoly of e-commerce sales. Amazon is emblematic of how logistics can shape the retail landscape—offering unparalleled convenience through its efficient and expansive fulfillment network and their associated spaces. This model of rapid delivery and vast selection has set new unrealistic expectations for customers, which greatly impacts small businesses. Not only do small businesses have limited infrastructure, they also do not reap the benefits of scale, which results in lost revenue to thirdparty actors. Despite these hurdles, small retailers remain essential to local communities, contributing through unique offerings and personal connections that large chains cannot replicate. This project examines how small businesses can compete with growing online monopolies through reconsidering how products are moved, stored, and distributed through the Central Valley. It proposes the leveraging of high-speed rail (HSR) through providing exclusive shipping access for small businesses. Already in countries such as France, Japan, and China, HSR is being utilized to transport goods over long distances in a fast, cost- and energy-efficient manner. California’s growing HSR network presents a significant opportunity for small retailers to reduce logistical costs and improve delivery speed, giving them a competitive edge. With stations located in high-traffic areas, retailers can also tap into larger customer bases by having a physical storefront that is hybridized with storage. A series of logistical/distribution/market hubs are networked together to reinforce small businesses. In a diverse retail ecosystem, those that have access to logistical infrastructure also gain the market. Providing access to the means of movement is power in a world defined by choice and convenience.

75 Above: Diagram of Logistic Network.

The Means of Movement: Central The Means ValleyofHigh-Speed Movement:Rail Leveraging LogisticsLogistics Network

Botao Sun, Yue Liang

Top e-commerce Companies’ Sales

Amazon

Top: Annual sales of top-five e-commerce companies.

Ebay, Apple, Walmart, Others

Bottom: Amazon’s logistics network, including a Prime Air cargo plane, semi-trailers, and a delivery van, emphasizing its commitment to swift and efficient delivery.

The Means of Movement: Central The Means ValleyofHigh-Speed Movement:Rail Leveraging LogisticsLogistics Network

78 Above: Logistical centers are strategically placed at the confluence of low-cost land and infrastructural access. This is often on the periphery of cities, where one also encounters suburban housing. The building operates at the scale of urbanism and is internally organized like a micro-city.

Botao Sun, Yue Liang

The Means of Movement: Leveraging Logistics

80 Above: Logistics network across California, highlighting major distribution centers and the transportation infrastructure connecting them, including roads, rails, and ports.

Following page: Population density and income distribution in California’s Central Valley, highlighting urban centers and regional variations in socioeconomic status.

Botao Sun, Yue Liang

Small Retailer The Means of Movement: Leveraging Logistics

Big Retailer

Top: Cost differences between self-owned warehouses and shared third-party warehouses. Large retailers typically have lower storage costs, while smaller retailers pay more due to shared facilities and third-party management.

Bottom: Comparison of delivery pricing and speed. Third-party shipping services offer slower delivery at a higher cost, while large companies with in-house logistics achieve faster and cheaper deliveries due to streamlined operations.

Following page: The challenges small retailers face in today’s e-commerce landscape.

THIRD PARTY SUPPLIER

SELF-OWNED DISTRIBUTION CENTER

AMAZON FULLFILMENT CENTER

STORAGE

PRIVATE LABEL BRANDS

SELLING PLATFORM

E-STORE

AMAZON FULLFILMENT CENTER

SELL ON AMAZON

SELLERS

SUPPLIERS

SELLING

FBA

FBM

SELL ON AMAZON

SELF-OWNED STORE E-STORE

SELL ON AMAZON FBA

FBM

AMAZON

BRICK AND MOTOR

25% Competition from Brick-and-Motar Chains

BRICK AND MOTOR

E-STORE

35% Competition from Internet retailers other than Amazon

SELL ON AMAZON

SELF-OWNED STORE

26% Difficulty marketing my business well

SELF STORAGE

AMAZON FULLFILMENT CENTER

SELF STORAGE

30% My rent or occupancy cost is too high relative to my sales

BRICK AND MOTOR

67% My big competitors receive better pricing and terms from suppliers

AMAZON LOGISTIC

SELF-OWNED LOGISTIC

AMAZON LOGISTIC

THIRD PARTY LOGISTIC

AMAZON LOGISTIC

33% Mergers among the suppliers and/or competitors in my industry are creating an unfair playing field

THIRD PARTY LOGISTIC

FAST

THIRD PARTY LOGISTIC

Botao Sun, Yue Liang

Competition from Amazon, including its Marketplace

SHIPPING

SLOW

25% Overall customer traffic around my location is down 17% My customer base is struggling financially

10,000

100,000

CUSTOMER 1,000,000

10,000,000

100,000,000

Cost Calculation Unit Size: 1 Cubic Foot Product: Lamp Product Value: $50

Non-Amazon Envolved

Amazon Envolved

Shipping Speed

WALMART COSTCO TARGET

SELF-OWNED STORE

BIG RETAILERS

E-STORE

SMALL RETAILERS

THIRD PARTY SUPPLIER

75%

THIRD PARTY SUPPLIER

Top Challenges of Small Retailers

The Means of Movement: Leveraging Logistics

Above: Proposed Central Valley HSR Logistical Timetable, hybridizing trains for goods and people.

Next Page: Proposed movement of goods through a series of hybrid nodes consisting of market places, distribution centers, and housing.

Botao Sun, Yue Liang

Logistics Center Distribution

Market Place Distribution

Residential Unit Distribution

Logistics Transportation Layout

The Means of Movement: Leveraging Logistics

Botao Sun, Yue Liang Above: The high-speed rail logistics system streamlines the supply chain for small retailers in the Central Valley, enabling them to collect, store, and sell goods efficiently. By eliminating intermediaries, it provides a faster, more affordable platform for delivering merchandise directly to customers.

Housing Everything

Botao Sun

Already Stockton is emerging as a distribution hub due to its cheap land and close proximity to the Bay Area. The proposed station is located within a diverse and complex context—surrounded by residential housing, infrastructure, industry, and logistics. The design considers how a hybrid typology consisting of housing, distribution, storage, retail spaces, as well as the rail station can be tuned to address the various interfaces on the site—both in scale and program. The typology begins with the notion of a flexible shed that operationalizes the ebb and flow of goods to provide a range of other public amenities such as pop-up markets, exhibitions, seasonal festivals, and community gatherings. A new typology of retail storefront emerges, which considers a raw shopping experience situated within logistics. Designed sectionally through the layering of programs, residents flow through a new social hub, which seamlessly blends transportation, commerce, and culture. In essence, the building materializes the background of e-commerce and considers how it can catalyze new forms of public space and life.

89 Above: The Stockton High-Speed Rail station is strategically located at the intersection of suburban housing, the freight train distribution yard, and the industrial zone.

Housing Everything

90 Above: Trucks parked along the I-5 highway in California. This highway cuts through the Central Valley and is used heavily for transportation of commodities (Photo by Downtowngal, June 12, 2013, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?curid=26671449).

Botao Sun

AXO - Residential AXO - Station

AXO - Overall

Above: Axonometric Diagrams—Logistic Center and Market; Residential Units; Station; Overall.

Housing Everything

AXO - Logistic & Market

AXO

Botao Sun

Housing Everything

Botao Sun

Housing Everything

96 Top: Plan Level +0

Bottom: Plan Level +1

Next Page: Sections

Botao Sun

SECTION AA’ 1” = 40’0”

SECTION BB’ 1” = 40’0”

Housing Everything

Botao Sun

Housing Everything

100 Top: Plan Level +2

Bottom: Plan Level +3

Next Page: Sections

SECTION BB’

101

Botao Sun

1” = 40’0”

SECTION BB’ 1” = 40’0”

SECTION AA’ 1” = 40’0”

SECTION CC’ 1” = 40’0”

Housing Everything

102 Top: Plan Level +4

Bottom: Plan Level +5

Next Page: Zooming in to the residential units.

103

Botao Sun

104

Living with Logistics

Yue Liang

Situated on an isolated site in Bakersfield, this project begins with a simple factory typology and asks how it can be reframed to give a range of spatial scales and experiences. The project uses the structure of a truss to provide an undulating section to enclose the warehouse while allowing natural light to penetrate deep within the plan. As a clear-span, the warehouse is designed to be adaptable to a range of public needs that go beyond logistics. Designed for small retailers who are just starting their business and often store products within their home, the complex provides essential access to storage and distribution spaces. Housing units are integrated within the truss structure, offering direct access to storage shelves that connect seamlessly to the logistics zone. These shelving systems can also function as balconies when not used for storage. The framework of the building sets up a range of street and neighborhood clusters above, which leverage spaces below for work and play.

105 Above: Site Map

Enclosure and cores provide large span support

Undulating truss structure

Neighborhood clusters

Logistics and residential interface

Rail station

Living with Logistics

106 Proposed columnar structure by CAHSRA

107

Yue Liang Above: Exploded Axonometric.

Above: Plan Level +0

Living with Logistics

108

109

Yue Liang Above: Plan Level +1

Living with Logistics

110

111

Yue Liang

Living with Logistics

112

113

Yue Liang

Living with Logistics

114 Above: Unit Plan

Next Page: Axonometric Unit Diagram

115

Yue Liang

Living with Logistics

116

117

Yue Liang

Project: Health

Healthcare as a Decentralized Network

Dalika Dharod Zhian Yin

120

Healthcare as a Decentralized Network

Dalika Dharod Zhian Yin

The spatial infrastructures of healthcare, such as hospitals and specialist clinics, are based on a model of centralization around areas of density. This causes a vast unevenness in resource distribution particularly in hinterland regions where populations are spatially dispersed. In addition to this, populations in the Central Valley have higher rates of poverty and lower rates of healthcare insurance. How might the high-speed rail (HSR) be a vehicle to consider a distributed hospital made of fixed and mobile components to overcome issues of access? The project proposes a landscape of care that redistributes medical equipment, medical workers, and spatial health infrastructures through a decentralized network. Through this network, local centers can focus on addressing region-specific, community-oriented healthcare challenges, identified through our research. These centers would function as healthcare hubs that deploy mobile healthcare units to reach remote communities that have long suffered from limited access to healthcare. At the architectural scale, the project uses landscape as a medium to organize programs, community, and mobile infrastructures to create a new typology of health center. Located at the various Central Valley stations, these health centers are located where people aggregate, while the mobile units are able to reach areas where populations are distributed. Together, this forms a malleable system of local care that also obtains the benefits of a larger-scale hospital.

121 Collage portraying the leveraging of the high-speed rail into a new landscape of healthcare in the Central Valley.

122 Left: Distribution of hospitals along the High-Speed Rail.

Center: Travel time taken from the Central Valley to Tertiary Hospitals in large cities. Map highlighting the transportation and corresponding healthcare accessibility problem as faced by the residents of the Central Valley.

123 Right: Uninsured population in comparison to hospital density along the Central Valley. Almost 10 percent of the current population of the Central Valley is uninsured.

Healthcare as a Decentralized Network

124 Top: Aging populations in the Central Valley highlight geographic zones of concentrations such as the northern region of the Central Valley.

Bottom: The morphological condition of the valley creates a dust bowl, as revealed with heightened respiratory issues in the middle of the Central Valley.

125

Zhian Yin, Dalika Dharod Above: Valley Fever, a disease caused by a fungus that grows in the soil and dirt, is more prevalent in southern regions of the Central Valley.

126 Above: Systems diagram showing the distribution of medical equipment and medical schools.

127

128 Above: Proposed redistribution of healthcare services through disaggregating the centralized hospital into smaller healthcare nodes (both fixed and mobile) tied to the high-speed rail. As a whole network, the landscape of care provides the range of services found in a typical hospital.

129

Dalika Dharod

Healthcare as a Decentralized Network

130 Above: Master plan proposal for the new redistributed healthcare system.

131

Zhian Yin, Dalika Dharod Bottom: Detailed schedule for the master plan proposal. By having mobile units that can aggregate at times of higher demand, a smaller fixed healthcare node can be formed.

132

Bridging Care

Dalika Dharod

Located in Bakersfield, this project examines how a void space between two datums can act as a mediator between housing, the station, health services, and the community. Instrumentalizing the existing 55-foot-tall viaduct, the project hangs the housing units from this bridge. The tensile structure allows for flexible configuration of units that can be tailored to medical staff, caregivers, and patients. Health services emerge from the ground, with direct connection to the surrounding context. Between these datums a public plaza is created, which serves to expand the services and waiting zones for the station. This topographic landscape also hosts the mobile health units at different times of day, creating a dynamically programmed space. While data can reveal issues of access to healthcare services, what is less documented is the institutionalized nature of large hospitals, which is often intimidating to residents. By integrating health services with public life, the hope is to overcome these psychological hurdles through new spatial typologies centered on landscape.

133 Physical model showing a section of the project. Scale: 1:200.

Bridging Care

134

Housing units hanging off the bridge.

Top: Layers of the building as a landscape. While housing hangs from the existing viaduct, the community healthcare emerges from below. Between these datums, an open landscape of care and mobile health units creates a new typology for healthcare.

CAHSR bridge and platform with canopy.

135

Dalika Dharod

Four main cores together with the landscape supporting the bridge. Peripheral slopes that become the access points to the landscape and the cores.

Bottom: Landscape topography and housing units.

Carefully articulated, dynamic, and undulating landscape.

Bridging Care

136 Physical model showing a section of the project. Scale: 1:200.

137

Dalika Dharod

Essay

The Operationalization of the Background: The Central Valley as an Infrastructure

Neeraj Bhatia

The Operationalization of the Background: The Central Valley as an Infrastructure

Neeraj Bhatia

141

The simultaneous division and interdependence between “cultures of extraction” and “cultures of consumption” are tied to the structural arrangement of historical capitalism, which required continual expansion both horizontally—across the landscape—and vertically—into the earth, for resources. In time, through continual expansion, regions of consumption and those of extraction were increasingly separated spatially, yet interconnected politically and economically. These forms of expansion were contingent on what Marx has referred to as the “free gifts of nature”—exploiting and commodifying the unpaid work of natural processes over time. More recently, Jason W. Moore has expanded Marx’s notion through his concept of “cheap natures.” Moore’s cheap natures are found where one or more of the “four cheaps” exists—labor, energy, food, or raw material.2 According to Moore, growth and accumulation in capitalism require the continual search for the “four cheaps.” It is here that the frontier of capitalism resides, through the commodification of previously untapped natures.3 While the frontier of capital locates itself in many diverse areas of the planet—from sweatshops in Mexico to coal fields in China—sites of resource extraction are always situated within the frontier. Nowhere is Moore’s concept of cheap natures more evident than in this “other California”—the flat desert landscape of the Central Valley. Driving through this region today, one is confronted with a comprehensively operationalized landscape designed to sustain both the state’s and the country’s resource needs. The “four cheaps” are so prevalent and pervasive in the Central Valley that it continues to be profitable to invest in massive infrastructures that import water to the valley (one natural resource that the area is in fact lacking) for agricultural

operationalized landscape has become the central economic battleground for future food and energy security at both the state and national level. One might think that a 15-year drought would provide a productive impetus to radically reframe our societal relationship to the cheap natures of the Central Valley and its claim to distant resources, such as imported water. Instead, there are a series of proposed water projects on the drawing board, seeking to import water across increasing distances to support the continued operationalization of the Central Valley. Alternatively, how can we locate a singular California—one that situates the production of nature within and parallel to the production of society?

was the discovery of displaced ophiolites, a rock that typically occupies the deep stretches of the ocean floor, yet was discovered mysteriously atop California’s Sierra Nevada and Coastal mountain ranges.5 Through the theory of plate tectonics, it came to be understood that California was the result of the sliding of the Pacific plate under the North American Plate, a process that started approximately 100 million years ago. Plate tectonics are responsible not only for California’s existence but also its rich resources— horizontally across the plain and vertically into the earth. The shifting plates are what pushed up the Sierra Nevada Mountains as well as the Coastal range, while causing the ocean shore to retreat westward. Originating as an offshore region depressed by subduction of the Farallon Plate, the Central Valley was eventually enclosed by the uplift of the Coastal Range. This enclosure transformed the Central Valley into an inland sea, reinforced by draining snowmelt from the adjacent mountains. As an inland sea, the valley contained diatoms and plankton, which accumulated over the years to create an organic-rich shale. Subsequently, millions of years of sediment

Cheap Raw Material To understand how California’s Central Valley was “gifted” with major natural resources, it is helpful to examine California’s foundations.

With a lack of water, many farmers have been forced to abandon their crops. Photographed in the Central Valley in March 2015 (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

The Operationalization of the Background: The Central Valley as an Infrastructure

Geologically speaking, California is a relatively young state that resided below sea level for the majority of its existence. As John McPhee describes in his geological account, Assembling California, “for an extremely large percentage of the history of the world, there was no California.”4 It was not until the theory of plate tectonics emerged in the 1960s that the geologic displacement of California’s mountain ranges could be explained. One of the critical clues to understanding the state’s geologic structure

142

(one natural resource that the area is in fact lacking) for agricultural cultivation and to extract petroleum/shale resources. Situated between the Coastal and Sierra Nevada Mountains, this once difficult-to-access desert landscape is now globally networked through mega-infrastructural projects that connect to a vastly different California hundreds of miles away along the coast—a California that benefits from the unpaid work of the Valley’s nature. As the drought persists in California, this

Cheap Energy Cheap energy is a critical factor in the development of any frontier. As Moore posits, since the steam power revolution, the productivity of labor increased primarily through abundant cheap energy. Similarly, labor productivity has been shown to stagnate when energy prices rise, which is also closely linked to economic recessions.6 The productivity of labor rises because of mechanization—through advanced tools, technology, instruments, and infrastructure—that reduces the amount of labor per unit of yield. Moreover, energy discoveries produce wealth, which is often channeled into instigating new industries. California, like many regions of the planet that have experienced steady growth, has had consistent access to reasonably priced oil for over a century. This is primarily because energy was discovered locally—originally excavated from oil seeps by Native Americans and eventually industrialized in the late nineteenth century—sparking major growth periods for the state. California’s first productive well was drilled in 1865 by the Union Matolle Company in the Central Valley ( just east of San Francisco). At this time, the population of California was approximately 380,000 people, a fifth of whom were located in the San Francisco and Sacramento region.7 Just four decades later, in the early

1900s, California was the leading state in oil production and this boom continued into the early twentieth century—rising from four million barrels of production in 1900 to over 77 million barrels by 1920—to become the leading sector of California’s economy. Some of the largest findings included the Midway-Sunset Field (1894), Kern River Field (1899), Elk Hills (1911), and the Belridge South Fields (1911). Most of these discoveries were made in the southern Central Valley, more specifically in a region known as the 143

Neeraj Bhatia

accumulated within the valley as alluvial deposits from the adjacent mountain ranges. This had two effects—first, it created the extreme flatness of the Central Valley, and second, it consolidated nutrient-rich soils within the ranges. As the alluvial plain gathered more sediments, it reached depths measuring between 10,000 and 30,000 feet, the weight adding pressure to the organic material of the once inland sea. The result of California’s geologic history is intimately tied to the production of nature’s gifts in the Central Valley. The organic matter that once lived in the former inland sea, through millions of years of pressure, transformed into the large oil and shale deposits in the state. Additionally, it is the nutrient-rich soils of the Central Valley, coupled with its extreme flatness, that fostered an ideal region for agricultural production. Presently, the Central Valley covers 22,500 square miles and stretches 450 miles between the northern settlement of Redding to south of Bakersfield. While geology may have “assembled” the potential for resources in the Central Valley, human invention reterritorialized the Central Valley into a large infrastructure— horizontally and vertically—to cultivate, harvest, extract, and transport these resources.

San Joaquin Valley, which runs from San Joaquin County in the north to Kern County in the south. With the discovery of oil came riches that, among other things, spawned the boom of Los Angeles, massive real estate developments, the film industry, family dynasties, and new infrastructure throughout the state.8 Oil discoveries, real estate, and property rights were intimately related during this time. Several people who made it rich in the oil industry also entered the real estate game, and the boom in private property ownership enabled the discovery of more oil.9 Property rights created a haphazard framework for oil extraction. In settled areas, nineteenth-century land laws enabled private landowners to claim subsurface oil deposits from their land in a “rule of capture” system that encouraged competition with adjacent neighbors.10 Within federal and state lands, oil companies competed for access to large tracts of land that were purchased at relatively inexpensive prices. Without a comprehensive plan or overview of resources, this piecemeal competition began quickly depleting valuable lands—property rights, as opposed to market demand, were driving competitive production practices, with owners rushing to extract their oil before adjacent lease-

The North Belridge Oil Field along California State Route 33 approximately 45 miles west of Bakersfield (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

rapid increase in population was inevitably sprawled across the landscape, with each private owner vying for land and its potential subsurface riches, encouraged by the development of petroleum-powered infrastructure that increased reliance on the automobile.13 The well-known images of the endless horizontal city of Los Angeles and its dependence on the car have overshadowed another form of urban organization motivated by driving—that of the polynuclear arrangement of populations in the Central Valley that clustered into geographic “hot spots” of resources, moving quickly between these clusters by highway infrastructure. Over the years, the Southern San Joaquin Valley proved to be a fertile ground for continued oil discoveries. With steam flooding technologies, the valley’s oil production peaked in 1985. Following a drop in production from 1985 to 2011, in recent years, the state has experienced a new boom through unconventional oil extraction,

which covers an area of approximately 2,520 square miles between Central and Southern California, is the site of the majority of unconventional reserves. Even at the lower estimates of 10 billion barrels of reserves, this would position the Monterey Shale as a major competitor to the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. Presently, there are approximately 84,000 active and new oil and gas wells in California, most of which are located in San Joaquin Valley, but increasingly these wells require water to keep them feasible. While energy discoveries and cheap energy controlled California’s population growth, it also directly and indirectly instigated the development of infrastructure, sparked the growth of other economies, and contributed to technological mechanization to reduce labor power. Wealth, development, and speculation incited the purchase of large swaths of land in the Central Valley which were tapped vertically for oil and shale, and horizontally for agriculture. This three-dimensional operationalization of land in the Central Valley by two industries benefited from cheap energy, yet was heavily reliant on the input of water.

Conduit infrastructure networks across the desert landscape, connecting points of extraction, refinement, consumption, and export; North Belridge Oil Field (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

The Operationalization of the Background: The Central Valley as an Infrastructure

such as hydraulic fracturing. Fracking is not new to California, which has been employing the technique for several decades. What is new, however, is the more extreme process and technology associated with well stimulation that requires great amounts of water, chemicals, pressure, and energy. A modern high-volume hydraulic fracturing project uses up to eight million gallons of water per job.14 This makes fracking highly controversial, particularly in a region currently starved for water. The Monterey Shale formation,

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holders.11 The early twentieth century witnessed attempts by the federal government to repossess federal lands and the enactment of policies to control forces of supply and demand, which in effect determined how companies developed the land. The growth of the state’s population paralleled these discoveries and speculation: the population grew from approximately 1.5 million to 3.5 million residents between 1900 and 1920, with nearby Los Angeles alone increasing from 170,000 to one million residents.12 This

the spread of irrigation and its accompanying break up of large land holdings; increased availability of cheap labor; growing knowledge of California’s environment; and reduced interest rates.16 Already by 1910, intensive crops equaled extensive crops in terms of economic value in the Central Valley. This shift to intensive crops and their associated infrastructures required ample cheap labor, which in the context of California has primarily been assumed by immigrant groups

mid-1850s, California’s production exceeded local consumption and formed an emerging export economy. These farms differed from the family farms of the American North—not only were they larger, but they employed scale-intensive technologies such as gangplows, large headers, and combined harvesters. Powered by cheap energy, these instruments effectively reduced labor-power and thereby increased accumulation.15 By 1890, however, due to decades of monocrop grain farming, the land no longer yielded profitable harvests. This led California’s agriculture to shift from large-scale ranching and grain-growing to smaller-scale intensive fruit cultivation. There were additional reasons for the transformation from extensive to intensive crops during the early twentieth century, including increased demand for income-elastic fruits in urban markets; improvements in transport infrastructure; reduction of profitability of wheat due to falling global prices;

seeking upward mobility to other sectors of work—Chinese, Japanese, Sikhs, Filipinos, Southern Europeans, Okies, and Mexicans.17 Over the years, acknowledging the critical role and amount of labor required to sustain the agricultural industry, adjustments in policy have been made to ensure continual cheap labor. For instance, when WWII led to a siphoning of excess labor from the agricultural sector, the federal Bracero Program (1942) was initiated to supply Mexican labor to California. In spite of the termination of the program in 1964, the Mexican population still dominates the present-day labor sector.18 Based on a comprehensive report and survey published in 2005, an estimated 36 percent of the United States’ farmworkers were located in California.19 Virtually all of these farmworkers were Hispanic (99 percent) and foreign born (95 percent),20 many without legal work authorization (57 percent).21 Finally, and most importantly for the frontier, this labor was cheap—43 percent of all individual farmworkers and 30 percent of farmworker families earned less than 10,000 dollars per year, while 75 percent of all individual farmworkers

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Neeraj Bhatia

Cheap Food and Labor Agriculture has been a critical resource and economy in California dating back to the Spanish missions and Mexican ranchos that began around 1769 and operated until 1850. At the time, several miners were migrating away from the exhausted gold mines in Northern California and seeking new opportunities. The Central Valley had ideal conditions for wheat production—fertile soil, flat terrain, rainy winters, and hot, dry summers. Already by the

Pumpjacks arrayed across the landscape of the Kern River Oil Field (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

Mechanization to improve the quality of land was most evident in technologies to control water—primarily to drain the land and irrigate crops. Despite the nearly ideal conditions for growing, the amount of water obtained by natural means could not keep pace with increasing demand. Between 1869 and 1889, the share of California farmlands that received water by artificial means increased from 1 to 5 percent, and by 1929 was up to nearly 16 percent.24 At the same time, as early adopters of electric power,

well as of improving land. In the early twentieth century, California led the nation in adopting gasoline tractors, mechanical cotton pickers, sugar beet harvesters, tomato harvesters, and electric pumps. In 1920, over 10 percent of California’s farms employed tractors compared to less than 4 percent usage for the rest of the United States.23 The long dry season and flat terrain were ideally suited to this equipment, and abundant, cheap petroleum subsidized the substitution of labor for machinery.

half of California’s farms housed irrigation pumps, compared to approximately 10 percent across the rest of the United States. California accounted for about 70 percent of all the nation’s centrifugal pumps by 1940.25 The first half of the twentieth century’s valley water needs were satisfied vertically by pumping groundwater, which accounted for half of all irrigated acreage by 1950.26 While groundwater was perceived as an unlimited resource, it was already clear by the 1930s that the falling water table, subsidence, and salinization were the result of over-extraction of groundwater sources.27 At the same time that smaller-scale private groundwater technologies allowed for increasing

146

The Operationalization of the Background: The Central Valley as an Infrastructure

and 52 percent of all farmworker families earned less than 15,000 dollars per year.22 In California, the populations that have worn the role of cheap laborers often live in a continual state of precariousness—with little job security, income, or voice—that systemically implicates the individual in the production of cheap natures. Even though labor in California was cheap, mechanized techniques were widely adopted in California’s intensive horticulture industry, in hopes of reducing labor costs even more, as

A series of aqueducts and pipelines cross through the Central Valley, primarily moving water from Northern California to the Central Valley’s aquifers and agricultural land (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

17,100 jobs.31 The current United States Drought Monitor reveals that 99 percent of California is “abnormally dry” and 95 percent is experiencing some form of drought.32 During his term as California Governor, Jerry Brown responded with a plan to build a series of tunnels to transport water from Northern California to the Central Valley below the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which typically separates the two areas. Skimming off fresh river water before it enters the Delta’s brackish estuary, the 25-billion-dollar project centers on the construction of two large tunnels—each 40 feet in diameter and 35 miles long. The tunnels would drain the Delta’s fresh water and put pressure on local Northern farmers in favor of larger farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. Environmentalists have noted that removing too much freshwater from the Sacramento River before it reaches the Delta would change the salinity of the estuary and have associated impacts on the estuary’s ecosystems. Opponents of the plan cite the overtaxing of the delta’s ecological system and the unfair alliance to subsidizing larger corporate farms in Kern County and the San Joaquin Valley.33 More importantly, Brown’s initiative relies on a consistent ideological position that privileges hard infrastructural projects that commodify nature with an insatiable appetite for expansion, despite the increasing reality that the past century of terraforming, hydroscaping, and extraction has created a volatile situation predicated on limitless inputs. In fact, the new plan could be easily characterized by a description in a 1968 Department of Water Resources Annual Report, which stated at the time: California is in the midst of constructing an unprecedented water project for one essential reason—the State had no alternative. Nature has not provided the right amount of water in the right places and the right times. 80% of the people in California live in metropolitan areas from Sacramento to the Mexican border; however, 70% of the State’s water supply originates north of the latitude of the San Francisco Bay.34 While water has now become the key ingredient in the sustenance of cheap food and oil, we must challenge, reframe, and expand our relationship to this resource to be more than an element to be commodified. How can the production of water operate within and parallel to society to instigate a new cultural as well as industrial relationship to resources?

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the amount of arable land by looking vertically, larger-scale state and federal infrastructures were developed to redistribute surface water to the Central Valley horizontally across the plain. This was primarily achieved by hydroscaping—using manmade techniques to move large amounts of water to regions where it did not naturally occur. Both a large effort and a big capital expense, hydroscaping has been employed for the past hundred years to leverage the cheap natures of the Central Valley, with water acting as the key resource to unlock greater capital. With modest beginnings in 1913, the Colorado River Project was constructed to irrigate over 500,000 acres of land. The more ambitious Central Valley Project (CVP) was devised in 1933 to federally manage water in the Central Valley as part of the New Deal. Most of this water was transported from water-rich Northern California to the dry lands of the San Joaquin Valley, with approximately 70 percent of the water sent to farms and 30 percent to cities.28 From 1945 to 1970, the state’s irrigated land increased from five million acres to more than seven million.29 Following this trend, in the 1960s, the California State Water Project (SWP) started construction. The largest publicly built and operated water and power project, the SWP was comprised of a series of dams, canals, aqueducts, pipelines, and tunnels that transported water from the Northern California rivers to Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Central Valley. The SWP sends the majority of its water to cities, with only 30 percent of this water being allocated to agricultural irrigation in the Central Valley. Irrigation infrastructures have been the leading instrument in transforming the Central Valley from a dry, sandy, and isolated basin to a region with highly specialized agricultural land comprised of over 400 crops, many of which are unique to California. Presently, California harvests nearly half of the United States’ fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and the majority of this production occurs in the Central Valley. For the past 50 years, California has been the leading agricultural state in America, leveraging the unpaid natural gifts of the Central Valley to master accumulation with reduced labor power.30 The recent drought in California has forced the government to ration the amount of groundwater that farmers are allowed to tap. This has led to a vast amount of fallow land (approximately half a million acres), and unemployment rates have reached up to 10 percent in some communities. A recent study conducted by UC Davis predicted the future persistence of the drought would result in a loss of 1.7 billion dollars and

and spatial realities of these natures, associated infrastructures, and our relationship to them— implicating architects, landscape architects, and urban designers. What ties the work of the studio together is the understanding of the Central Valley as a comprehensively operationalized landscape of resource extraction associated with its production as a cheap frontier. Nature and infrastructure in this context have hybridized into a singular system that currently privileges a singular output—cheapness. The limit of the cheap frontier signals a new opportunity to rethink our relationship to nature as well as how the post-production of infrastructure can repay the unpaid work of the frontier.

Aqueducts and Interstate 5 run parallel to the coastal hills and work in tandem to irrigate and transport goods along the flattened landscape (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

The Operationalization of the Background: The Central Valley as an Infrastructure

148

Within New Natures While humanity has long distinguished itself from the rest of nature, it wasn’t until the rise of capitalism that humans were positioned as completely separate from nature. For Jason Moore, before nature could be rendered “cheap,” it needed to be situated as a separate, external object from society, and thereby controllable.35 The advantage of this separation was that cheap natures would create a foundation for a new law of value—one where the work of nature was unpaid.36 This shift, evoked by capitalism, from society in nature to society and nature, effectively formed a system of organizing nature in service to capital,37 creating its own ecology and continually expanding to new frontiers. New frontiers have both inputs (the four cheaps) as well as outputs (i.e., waste) that presume limitless expansion.38 While capital is infinite, we know that nature is in fact finite. How do we know when we are reaching the limit of an expansionist system that began almost 500 years ago? Declining ecological surplus and the rising price of the “four cheaps” suggest that since the 2003 commodity boom, this phase of capitalist accumulation is exhausting itself.39 At the same time, the accumulation of waste is lowering the productivity of unpaid nature, obvious in scenarios such as climate change.40 Instead of humans acting on nature, the limit of cheap natures could signal a return to humans acting within nature. This is not necessarily a romantic notion of humans living in smaller communities integrated within the natural environment, as much as an understanding of how we form a reciprocity between nature and society, and how we can “pay back” for years of unpaid work. Further, this would require an acknowledgment that nature in the frontier has been a controllable object for so long that it is difficult to separate it from or to return to an “untouched” form of nature. We have created an object, and now we must question how this object can perform in service to other value sets that privilege social and environmental reciprocity and robustness. This concept is slowly being developed through notions such as “natural capital,” which repositions nature as an asset, or “ecosystem services valuation,” which quantifies the “goods and services” of regional ecosystems with an aim towards environmental preservation or restoration, or both. While these new forms of environmental economics are promising, they remain abstract. Before a renewed economic system can gain traction, I contend that our cultural relationship to nature needs to be reformed. This can most easily be achieved through the material

12 13 14

17 18

20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

California Department of Finance, “Historical Census Populations.” Sabin, 10. “History of Fracking in California,” CAFrackFacts, accessed December 2, 2014, http://www.cafrackfacts.org/ fracking-in-california/history-of-fracking-in-california/. Alan L. Olmstead and Paul Rhode, “An Overview of California Agricultural Mechanization, 1870–1930,” Agricultural History 62, no. 3 (1988). Alan L. Olmstead and Paul Rhode, “The Evolution of California Agriculture, 1850– 2000,” in California Agriculture: Dimensions and Issues, ed. Jerome B. Siebert (Oakland: University of California Press, 2004), 6. Ibid., 18. Warren E. Johnston, and Alex F. McCalla, Whither California Agriculture: Up, Down or Out? Some Thoughts about the Future, Special Report Series, (Giannini Foundation of Agriculture Economics, University of California, August 2004), 13. Aguirre International, The California Farm Labor Force Overview and Trends from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (Burlingame, 2005), vii. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 26–27. Olmstead and Rhode, “The Evolution of California Agriculture, 1850–2000,” 7, 12. Ibid., 3. Electrical Times, January 2, 1948; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Agriculture, vol. 11, part 3. Olmstead and Rhode, “The Evolution of California Agriculture, 1850–2000,” 17. Johnston and McCalla, Whither California Agriculture, 13.

The Operationalization of the Background: The Central Valley as an Infrastructure

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Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers New World Paperback, 1967; orig. pub. 1894), 745. 2 Jason W. Moore, Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2014). 3 Jason W. Moore, “The End of Cheap Nature, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about ‘the’ Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future of Global Conflict and Cooperation, ed. Christian Suter and Christopher Chase-Dunn (Berlin: LIT, 2014), 288. 4 John McPhee, Assembling California (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 5. 5 Ibid., 116–20. 6 Jason W. Moore, “Wasting Away: Value, Waste, and Appropriation in the Capitalist World-Ecology,” World-Ecological Imaginations: Power and Production in the Web of Life (blog), April 1, 2014, https:// jasonwmoore.wordpress.com/tag/fourcheaps/. 7 It is worth noting that at this time, the population of Sacramento was approximately five times larger than Los Angeles. See California Department of Finance, “Historical Census Populations of Counties and Incorporated Cities in California, 1850–2010,” http:// www.dof.ca.gov/research/demographic/ state_census_data_center/historical_census_1850-2010/view.php. 8 “Oil! And the history of Southern California,” New York Times, February 22, 2008, http://www.nytimes. com/2008/02/22/timestopics/topics_uptonsinclair_oil.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 9 Ibid. 10 Paul Sabin, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900–1940 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2004), 15. 11 Ibid., 18. 1

37 Jason W. Moore, “Towards a Singular Metabolism: Epistemic Rifts and Environment Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology,” in New Geographies, no. 6, ed. Daniel Ibanez and Nikos Katsikis (Cambridge: Harvard GSD, 2014), 12. 38 Ibid., 15. 39 Moore, “The End of Cheap Nature,” 298. 40 Ibid., 308.

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28 Alexis Madrigal, “American Aqueduct: The Great California Water Saga,” Atlantic, February 24, 2014, accessed December 23, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/02/ american-aqueduct-the-great-california-water-saga/284009/. 29 This peaked at about 8.5 million acres in the 1980s. See Johnston and McCalla, Whither California Agriculture, 23. 30 American Farmland Trust, “Farming on the Edge,” accessed June 12, 2015, https://www. farmland.org/farming-on-the-edge. 31 Richard Howitt, Josué Medellín-Azuara, Duncan MacEwan, Jay Lund, and Daniel Sumner, “Economic Analysis of the 2014 Drought for California Agriculture” (report prepared for the California Department of Food and Agriculture by UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences and ERA Economics, 2014). 32 Madrigal, “American Aqueduct.” 33 Paul Rogers, “Is Jerry Brown’s Delta Tunnels Plan Repeating the Errors of High-Speed Rail?,” San Jose Mercury News, December 9, 2013, accessed November 15, 2014, http://www.mercurynews.com/ science/ci_24687722/california-detailsmassive-25-billion-water-plan-released. 34 California Department of Water Resources, The California State Water Project in 1968, Appendix C: Description and Status, Bulletin 132–68 (Sacramento, 1968), 3. 35 Moore, “The End of Cheap Nature,” 287–88. 36 Meaning, work that uses nature but is not regenerative of it. This has environmental and human consequences. Beyond the scope of this piece, the exploitation of the physical environment and its inhabitants in the Central Valley is “unpaid” and often linked. For more on this topic, see Tanja Srebotnjak and Mariam Rotkin-Ellman, “Drilling in California: Who’s at Risk?” (Natural Resources Defense Council, 2014).

Project: Migrant Workers

Rooted in Motion: Nested Cooperatives for Migrant Farmers

Inmo Kang Chloe Tsui

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Rooted in Motion: Nested Cooperatives for Migrant Farmers

Inmo Kang Chloe Tsui

California’s farmworkers, of whom the majority are immigrants, harvest the majority of the fruits and nuts that feed America. However, many of them have a hard time accessing adequate and reliable housing and social welfare, making them susceptible to forced migration across generations. This project speculates on how the new high-speed rail system in California could afford both physical and social mobility for these precarious subjects to transition stably into the communities that they serve and to build means of self-sufficiency. In considering the migrant farmers’ precarity across broader issues of safety, access, community, and ownership, how could the new master plan of the high-speed rail be designed flexibly to address their needs at both systemic and everyday scales? This objective is achieved in two parts: First, the master plan addresses farmers’ access to equity-building mechanisms by establishing a tiered farming cooperative conceived through the acquisition of farmlands that the rail commission has acquired. Second, it alleviates farmers’ seasonal displacement by building housing cooperatives at each of the Central Valley HSR stations, designed to build community visibility and means of self-sufficiency. The farming cooperative feeds harvested goods into the housing cooperative, systematizing food sovereignty. The housing in turn provides dwellings and off-season financing mechanisms for the farmers. Each housing co-op hosts a unique program, tailored to what its locality can provide or needs. The co-op network takes advantage of the rail to grant its members access to high-quality amenities through territorial sharing. With time, the project adapts to changes in demographics and living conditions as the livelihoods of migrant workers evolve. The project examines two nodes within the network: Merced with a community kitchen and Bakersfield with a community center.

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Rooted in Motion: Nested Cooperatives for Migrant Farmers

156 Above: Precarity to farm workers manifests in several ways—economic, social, and spatial. Living an “uprooted” way of life, these populations follow labor and

are not able to produce deep social bonds and the social resiliency that accompany these networks.

Right: A brief timeline on the history and reliance on migrant labor to sustain material economies in California and the United States more broadly.

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Inmo Kang, Chloe Tsui

Rooted in Motion: Nested Cooperatives for Migrant Farmers

158 Above: Current lifestyle of migrant laborers depicting the different forms of uprootedness.

Percent of Farmworkers with Health Insurance Unauthorized and migrant farmworkers were more likely to be without health insurance.

Temperature

Heat

More than one in three respondents experienced problems keeping a house cool (39%) or warm (36%)

Nearly half (43%) reported that their employer “never” provided a heat illness prevention plan as mandated under law.

33%

15%

Repair

Rest Breaks

20 10

58%

More than one-third (36%) of farmworkers said they would not be willing to file a report against their employer for workplace non-compliance.

38% 9%

Among those, about two-thirds (64%) said they would be unwilling to file a report due to fear of retaliation or job loss.

Only 9% of workers reported that a member of their household participated in WIC.

6% of unauthorized farmworkers were provided unemployment insurance by their employers

Nearly one in six farmworkers (15%) did not receive the minimum number of 10-minute rest breaks under state law

53%

13% of workers stated that they or someone in their household had received food assistance (SNAP) in the previous two years.

Long Unemployment Term

25% of health insurance for non-work related injury or illness

64%

Farmworkers are not protected under the National Labor Relations Laws (NLRA). Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA). 69% of farmworkers reported at least one period of unemployment with average duration of 16 weeks in the last 12 months.

Increased Vulnerability due to Hidden Nature of Labor Camps

75% of workers’ compensation insurance

42%

More than one third (37.8%) of the farmworker labor camps were hidden and they were significantly larger were more likely to include barracks than were visible camps

Transport-related Agricultural Deaths

This makes the residents even more vulnerable and making the providers of substandard housing less accountable to the public.

Transportation is the leading on-the-job kiler of agricultural workers in California.

Migrant and unauthorized farmworkers in California were more likely to have family incomes below the federal poverty level. All California workers

State-run camps house only 12,000 farmworkers, or approximately 1.5% of the state's farmworker population.

23%

Migrants

J F M A M J J A S O N D

46%

Settled

20%

Auhorized

19%

Families are limited to renting for a maximum 6 months period during the farming peak season (April-Nov)

48%

Usually only families qualify for that units are 2-4 bed rooms.

28%

s gra nt

20% single workers with no child

igr

Mortgage 8%

29%

Farmworkers were most likely to be renters (92%), to live in single-family homes (55%), and very few renters relied on employers to pay any or all of their rent (2%).

33%

Severe Lack of Homeownership

labor van

12%

14%

stic

raitero

Income Below Poverty Level

ride share

N ew co

Do me

an t

l Migran

Unauthorized

Limited Terms and Qualification of State-Run Labor Camps

Internatio na

Inmo Kang, Chloe Tsui

Health and Safety Risks at Home and Work

47%

45%

All California workers

50 40

17% of farmworker housing units were severely substandard and an additional16% were moderately substandard.

60%

58%

Auhorized

43%

Unauthorized

37%

13%

78%

Settled

Smoke Almost one-third (32%) claimed respirators were lacking but “always” needed when working in agriculture.

Migrants

Crowdedness 35% of farmworkers lived in “crowded” dwellings, defined as x>1 person per room

Compromised Worker Rights due to Workforce Fear

Limited Access to Health Public Assistance and Labor Rights

Lack of Vehicle Ownership and Alternative Modes

Rent 92%

migrants, 13%

64%

73%

unaccompanied RV/car Types of Living Space

Labor camp/ boarding/motel

Apartment 31%

Single-family home 55%

Above: A range of intersectional forms of precarity define a large part of a migrant laborer’s way of life.

9% 4%

100

settled, 87% 36% Lack of Companion and Loneliness 1 out of 7 California farmworkers are migrants, and they were more likely to be living apart (unaccompanied) from nuclear familymembers (parents, siblings, spouse, and children)

single parents 22%

accompanied 5%

has spouse but no child

159

32%

35%

Rooted in Motion: Nested Cooperatives for Migrant Farmers

160 Above: The cooperative provides access to equity and infrastructure to stabilize communities, while the high-speed rail allows laborers to remain in location and commute to agricultural sites.

production to migrant laborers.

Cooperative Members manage Merced

Madera

Fresno

Hanford

Bakersfield Communal Vans Job Training Safety Training

Regional Cooperatives gains consent

Land Acquisition Employment Benefits Health Insurance

Agricultural Cooperative

Territorial Cooperative

tem Sys ood F red ha

Sha red Ca re

OD grants far mlan ds / T

Housings

Experimental Kitchen

Residents precarious, often under-assisted and unaccompanied

various configurations of housing

Farmers Market

Almonds Transitional Housing

recent migrants

Co-Housing

undocumented

Peaches

operation

spoused

Micro Housing

CLT

Grapes

Recreational Center

single parents women

pr o v i d es tr ain ing

Oranges

Medical / Legal Center

single workers

Permanent Supportive Housing

ers memb ides prov

Sweet Potatoes

California Central Valley Worker Center

ms ste Sy

California HSR Authority

d nt an es re idiz s b su

Inmo Kang, Chloe Tsui

elect

Community Center

Regional Small Business Development Centers (SBDC)

California Housing and Community Development

Territorial Cooperative

elect

Housing Cooperative

Land Acquisition Home Provision

gains consent Amenities Management Membership Education

Regional Cooperatives

house

manage / pay equity

Merced

Cooperative Members

Above: Nested Cooperatives—A transcalar and multi-resource cooperative is proposed to slowly transfer the means of production to migrant laborers.

Madera

Fresno

Hanford

Bakersfield Community Outreach

161

Harvest Production

Rooted in Motion: Nested Cooperatives for Migrant Farmers

162 Above: After an initial investment by the state through the transfer of agricultural lands acquired through eminent domain, the cooperative is able to leverage this resource to slowly purchase farms from aging owners.

production to migrant laborers.

163

Inmo Kang, Chloe Tsui

Rooted in Motion: Nested Cooperatives for Migrant Farmers

164

Madera

Fresno

Madera-Fresno

Merced

Madera

Selma

Fresno

Madera-Fresno

Merced

Kings / Tulare

Madera

Main Nodes

Primary Nodes Path

Secondary Nodes

Secondary Nodes Path

Train Station

Migrant Housing Path / Van Path

Migrant Housing

Farm Trust Crops

Shafter

Kings / Tulare

Fresno

Madera-Fresno

Bakersfield

Concoran

Selma

Tehachapi

Bakersfield

Concoran

Shafter

Kings / Tulare

Selma

165

Inmo Kang, Chloe Tsui

Merced

Tehachapi

Bakersfield

Concoran

Shafter

Tehachapi

Rooted in Motion: Nested Cooperatives for Migrant Farmers

166 Above: Migrant workers harvest corn on Uesugi Farms in Gilroy, CA, on Wednesday, August 28, 2013. USDA photo by Bob Nichols.

production to migrant laborers.

167

Inmo Kang, Chloe Tsui

168

Kitchen on the Rail

Inmo Kang

How could a shared kitchen be a catalyst to bring community together, incubate new economic possibilities, and provide a platform for learning and teaching? Being in close proximity to the Bay Area and Fresno, the city of Merced already serves the surrounding towns robustly with its urban anchors, such as UC Merced and its county fairgrounds. It is expected to emerge as the next economic and educational hub of the Central Valley, fueling diverse job prospects and urban resources for the migrant residents. Building on these programs, the Merced co-op operates a large-scale community kitchen to provide an alternative economic path for migrant laborers. The kitchen, when extracted from the domestic environment and made visible, is a space that can provide not only the means of production but also the mechanism for collaboration and skill-building. Kitchen on the Rail’s goal is to foster cultural bridge-building, empower migrant residents as cultural ambassadors, and create diverse pathways for food-related careers and community integration. The building complex uses a datum to connect the rail with the community kitchen. The datum is supported by a series of “urban feet” that locally touch down to greet the city fabric in a nuanced manner. Above the datum, a series of housing types cater to different demographics and are linked by a shared terrace. Together, the complex brings visibility to the solidarities produced by gathering migrant laborers.

169

Kitchen on the Rail

170

171

Inmo Kang

Kitchen on the Rail

172 Above: Aerial view of Merced Station with housing rising from the datum of community kitchens.

Right: Merced Station hosting a regional culinary festival. The ground level opens up to the street, offering a new public plaza for the city.

173

Inmo Kang

Kitchen on the Rail

174 Above: Micro-housing towers cater to different demographics and their associated needs in collective living.

Below: Section through the station/ kitchen datum with housing above and urban activation programs below.

175

Inmo Kang

Kitchen on the Rail

176

177

Inmo Kang

Kitchen on the Rail

178

179

Inmo Kang

180

Common Ground

Chloe Tsui

Bakersfield, the southernmost node of the initial phase of highspeed rail development, has historically experienced the effects of urban sprawl with precarious minorities being pushed to the outskirts of the city. The site for the planned station is an undesirable plot due to its enclosure and isolation from infrastructure and water bodies. While this island is surrounded by a range of zones—commercial, residential, and industrial—it is currently difficult to access. However, given the future influx of people moving in and out of the city from this point of entry, might there be a reversal of fortunes for this site, and could it be reimagined as a neutral common ground? To foster a sense of stability through community, particularly for new migrants, shared spaces are considered at all scales: from between residents of a floor (cluster), to the housing complex (group form), to the city at large (common ground). The complex is comprised of homes for incoming migrant workers and families, a community center to connect existing outreach programs, and a dematerialized train station, which is distributed in a large public space. The housing complex is conceived through a flexible grid structure to accommodate evolving demographics and lifestyles. Units are arranged along a double-sided corridor to allow for public interactions on one side and private shared spaces that are easily adaptable on the other. The ground floor acts as an interface for the Bakersfield Housing Co-op, the Central Valley Co-op, and the California High-Speed Rail—where commuters and residents traverse through the decentralized train station and public programs. Operationalizing the shaded relief provided by the rail viaduct, chance encounters occur daily, creating solidarities within and beyond the migrant community.

181

Common Ground

182 Previous page: The planned HSR station in Bakersfield is surrounded by commercial, residential, and industrial zones; the site is considered an isolated, undesirable plot—an island. However, with the future influx of people moving in and out of the city, it can be reconsidered as a point of entry for people traveling across the Central Valley and a neutral, common ground.

Above: Unit plans for dorm, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom units.

183

Chloe Tsui Above: To foster a sense of stability through community, shared spaces are considered at all scales, from between residents of a floor (collective), to the housing complex (common), and with the city at large (public). The complex comprises multigenerational housing units, a community center, and a dematerialized train station.

Common Ground

184

185

Chloe Tsui

Common Ground

186 Above: During the winter the terrace becomes an extension of the living room for growing families.

187

Chloe Tsui Above: Co-living spaces open up to be a part of the complex’s shared circulation.

Common Ground

188

189

Chloe Tsui

Common Ground

190

191

Chloe Tsui

Project: Food

Precarious Produce: Agricultural Logistics and Food Access in America’s Breadbasket

Connor Gravelle Ella Larkin

194

Connor Gravelle Precarious Produce: Ella Larkin Agricultural Logistics and Food Access in America’s Breadbasket

Our project began on our field trip to California, where we witnessed a surprising contradiction: despite expansive farmlands responsible for a quarter of the United States’ agricultural output, in the Central Valley fresh food is scarce, expensive, and sporadically inaccessible. We now understand this to be a compounding circumstance that results from the intersection of systemic local poverty and market dynamics. Lured by higher profit margins in California’s wealthier coastal cities, the Central Valley’s abundant harvests are often extracted due to the perishability of produce. This means that residents in and around the California’s agricultural heartland are often the last to reap its abundant rewards. We propose to leverage the speed and breadth of the state’s high-speed rail network to carry reasonable quantities of highly perishable produce, cross-cutting existing distribution paradigms to delay and economize the extraction of fresh produce to coastal cities by precious hours or days. These interventions allow produce to remain within the Central Valley to be sold more affordably to its residents, many of whom face daily precarity in accessing basic ingredients for healthy, affordable meals. Imagined as a series food market and food logistics nodes tasked with circulating and distributing produce through the high-speed rail, the project looks to inscribe itself within the vast, often unseen forms of labor necessary to construct and maintain our systems of food access. In a state whose climate and economy alike place increasing strain on precarious systems of agriculture and access, might new modes of food access suggest new social relations? In flattening the space between farm and table, can the invisibility of the United States’ food system be rendered present and palpable?

195 Above: Photograph showing the current speeds through the Central Valley and the territory the project operates within (Photo by Ella Larkin).

Precarious Produce: Agricultural Logistics and Food Access in America’s Breadbasket

196 Above: Analysis of SNAP (California’s food assistance program) users across the state reveals large concentrations of users intersect with the path of the HSR. Through this we observed a spectrum of food access,

where SNAP enrollment peaks around city centers and then dwindles in suburbs, only to re-emerge in significant amounts in more rural locations. These large concentrations are represented in the darker shades of blue.

197

Connor Gravelle, Ella Larkin

Medium Soft Drink $1.10 2 Chicken Breast $9.46

Medium Fries Rice $2.00

Top: Analysis of grocery stores (white dots) and fast food restaurants (black dots) in Bakersfield. Fast food spots tend to accrue in poorer areas, while grocery stores dissipate.

10 Piece Mcnugget $8.19

Below: Food comparison study of a home cooked meal vs. McDonald’s, revealing a meal from McDonald’s is often times more convenient and cheaper then a healthier home-cooked dinner.

198 Above: This project aims to collapse the current time scale that people within the Central Valley experience in terms of food logistics. Often times people do not engage with or have direct access to healthy food options. Fast food chains become the easiest and most readily accessible option when people travel from work to their home.

199

200 Above: Dynamics of food distribution in California. Because fresh produce fetches high prices in coastal cities with broad consumer bases, the distribution networks are tuned specifically to extract produce from the Central Valley.

This process dispossesses local residents of fresh, affordable access to healthy fruits and vegetables.

201

Subsidiary

260 stores, 29% 5 publically held entities

Walmart Inc. 78

Albertsons Companies, Inc. 66

Right: Despite frequent conversation in the media about the corporatization of farming in the United States, the picture of agriculture in California is complex. Most farms remain small and family-owned, unlike in other areas of the country. However, the small size of these businesses puts farms at heightened risk under climate change and economic strain.

Target Corporation 48

218 stores, 25% 5 private companies w/ 15+ stores each

Chedraui 38

Kroger 30

The Save Mart Companies 91

Raly’s Supermarkets 61

Above: Chart annotating the structure of ownership for food access locations in the Central Valley. The increasing consolidation of grocery ownership around just a few companies tends to verticalize networks of food distribution, which often works against local residents’ interests of equitable access and produce freshness.

Nutricion Fundamental, Inc. 61

Winco Holdings, Inc. 15 Vallarta Sup., Inc. 15

407 stores, 46% Other, smaller private companies

Precarious Produce: Agricultural Logistics and Food Access in America’s Breadbasket

202

Walmart 73

Save Mart 67

Target 48

Safeway 45

Raley’s 41

Foox Maxx 23

Smart & Final 38

Bel Air Market 20

Quickeroo 17

Food 4 Less 19

Prime Time Nutrition 19

Vons 9

Winco Foods 15 Vallarta Supermarket 15 Albertsons 12 Foods Co 11

Nugget Market 9 First Step Nutrition 8 State Foods Supermarket 8 Basic Nutrition 8 Cost Less Food Company 7

Sav Mor Foods 5 Rancho San Miguel 5 Walmart Market 5 Food Source 5 Kids Nutricare 4 Baby Shop 4 Baby Nutritional Care 4

R-n Market 6 La Superior Mercados 6

Other 333 Sole Entity

203

Connor Gravelle, Ella Larkin

Small, Family-Owned

<$150k GFCI (Gross Cash Farm Income)

$150k-$349k

71%

Count

12%

25%

Land Area

13%

18%

13%

19%

70,521 farms

38,317 mi2

2% 2%

Product Value

17%

$350k-$999k $1m-$4.99m

M, F-O

43%

29%

>$5m

Varies

Large, Family-Owned

Non-Family

$45 billion

Precarious Produce: Agricultural Logistics and Food Access in America’s Breadbasket

204

41%

59%

Field Crops 210/1099mi2

59%

76%

Pasture 1577/743mi2

Citrus and Subtropical 280/410mi2

Grain and Hay Crops 381/456mi2

Deciduous Fruits and Nuts 1002/3251mi2

<$350k

Small Family-Owned

<$1m

Medium Family-Owned

Left: Photograph from our site visit to California showing the current state of the high-speed rail construction around its future Kings/Tulare stop. Carved out of surrounding almond fields, this 60-foot easement is to remain fallow under current plans. Our project sees this as a mode of security theater eliciting irresponsible damage to the human and more-than-human ecologies of the Central Valley (Photo by Connor Gravelle).

<$5m

1.19

1.38

1.04

0.94

0.43 <$150k

1.92

6.57

Rice 489/161mi2

84%

55%

Vineyards 459/751mi2

32%

25%

44%

Truck, Nursery, and Berry Crops 770/617mi2

205

Farmland within 30 miles 7488mi2

62%

Connor Gravelle, Ella Larkin

Other 5168mi2

>$5m

Large Family-Owned

Non-Family

CHSR agricultural holdings

Top: Diagram delineating the various kinds of cropland within 30 miles of the high-speed rail’s track. Above: Various sizes of typical Californian farms. If one were to add up all the land the rail authority likely owns, its cumulative farm holdings would be among the state’s largest.

Precarious Produce: Agricultural Logistics and Food Access in America’s Breadbasket

206 The high-speed rail’s land is not simply neutral and has come into possession of the high-speed rail authority through broad use of eminent domain by the state. While the rail often piggybacks existing infrastructure corridors in urban centers, much of its land outside cities has been cut out of existing farmland.

Where its path bisects or blocks access to farms, the state has often had to buy parcels of land (the black hatch shown above). The total area of this farmland adds up to about 43 square miles, an area larger than almost 93 percent of Californian farms. In a sense, this makes the high-speed rail authority a major rightsholder in California’s agricultural industry.

The state currently plans to let this land remain fallow, creating a 60-foot-wide dirt line across the state. This project, instead, proposes to rethink the use of this territory and the infrastructure it supports as a way to remodel networks of food movement and access in California’s Central Valley.

207

Connor Gravelle, Ella Larkin

Public Urban Markets and Food Halls

Returns proceeds to

California High-Speed Rail

Agri. services Cheap distribution

Central Valley Farmers

California Agricultural Land Trust

California High-Speed Rail Authority Provides land

Produce

Land Produce Free distribution Land stewardship Crop support Negotiating serv. Proceeds Protection

LMI Rental Housing (Fresno, Modesto, Merced, Bakersfield)

Buy-In Farmers

Operates

Department of Housing and Com. Dev.

Farm Housing

Operates

Above: The project suggests the establishment of a land trust to represent the diverse interests inherent to this land. A 15-seat board is comprised of elected farmer representatives, local community groups, the rail operator, the rail authority, and seats from the state’s departments of Conservation, Food and Agriculture, Housing and Community Development,

and Fish and Wildlife. The organization of this land trust assures a balanced and flexible structure to handle the complexities of this interstitial public–private entity. Its mission is built around an equitable, self-maintained network for farmers to sell produce that allows us to bring inexpensive, fresh food to people across the Central Valley.

Right: The proposed crop distribution system piggybacks existing state highways in the Central Valley that crops already move around on, consolidating trucking routes to the rail stations. The plan introduces a series of agricultural logistics hubs at each of the high-speed rail stops at which crops can be loaded onto or taken off of the train.

Precarious Produce: Agricultural Logistics and Food Access in America’s Breadbasket

Semi-Public

208

Private

209

Connor Gravelle, Ella Larkin

Citrus/S

Avocados

Summer

Autumn

SEASONAL

W01

W02

W03

W05

Sports Family food distribution Heat relief shelters

Community support services

Water management services

Cabbage Tomatoes

Winter

Berry/vegetable crop harvesting Retention pond water release Frost cloth distribution Retention pond water release

Farm support operations

Mech. eqpt. distribution

Spring

Crop price negotiation serv

Broccoli

Arr. BOH FOH

Spinach

Crop harvesting

DAILY

210

Vineyards

Oranges (Valencia)

Services

Assorted

Morn. pickup

Arrivals

Food distribution

Farmers market Produce

Food hall (breakfast) Eating

Heat shelter (se

Olives Dates

rapes (Table) Grapes (Wine)

W06

W07

W09

W10

W11

W12

Spinach

vices

bush berries Strawberries

Lunch)

easonal)

Maintenance Aftern. pickup

(Dinner)

Food distribution

211

Grapes (Raisins)

Typical Semi Truck ~75 mph top speed

212

3544 ft3 freight volume / 34,000 lb max. load (double-axle)

Siemens Velaro 8-Car Trainset ~220 mph top speed (2.9x faster)

544 Maximum Passenger Load 544 × 200 lb = 108,800 lb + 8000 (baggage, etc.) = 116,800 lb theoretical load 3.44x greater load capacity

36,611 ft3 Interior Volume 10.33x greater volume capacity

Farm Freight Conversion

Farm

Top: This project envisions the conversion of some of the wagons on the high-speed rail’s trainsets into produce-carrying cars. This allows us to move produce faster, more directly, and with less carbon consumption than conventional semi-truck transport. At stops in more rural areas, produce will be put into the system, and, at urban nodes, produce is removed.

Processing Facility

Agricultural Node Bottom: Compared to current distribution structures, the project’s network moves produce faster, more efficiently, and with fewer middle actors. This reduces food costs and relieves some of the pressure to extract perishable produce to the coasts, allowing it to remain in the Central Valley a bit longer than currently for sale at local farmers markets.

Consolidation Center

Cargo Set 1 (Offloading/Onloading)

213

Distribution Center

Cargo Set 2 (Onloading/Offloading)

Grocery Retrofit window plugs Store

Table

12’ x 6’6” cargo door

Distribution Node

Farmers Market

Public Transit

Table

214

Kings-Tulare: Living with the Land

Ella Larkin

Living with the Land builds upon the unique rural nature of the Kings-Tulare stop, speculating on how an agrarian community can be formed that is actively living with the land as part of the land trust agreement. They till land as laborers of the land trust and utilize the speed of the high-speed rail and surrounding infrastructure to allow food to linger within the Central Valley. The project reimagines the agrarian shed as a container for food logistics, markets, and an agrarian commune. Comprised of both agricultural workers and “work-from-home” immaterial laborers, this node considers the different forms of exchange and value that can be brought together through the high-speed rail. Instilling a new porosity to the viaduct, the shed stitches the divided land together physically and socially.

215 Left: Photograph of the Kings/Tulare node depicting the construction presently occurring and the substantial amount completed. This development provided an early framework to the design of the project, making it essential to really consider the land beneath the rail and how the space could be activated by

Barrier

WFH - Tech Workers

Costly industry to break into Stress of Industry Challenges of rural life

Barrier

Lack of young farmers

Lack engagement with nature Longing for community

Weather Markets Supply Shortages

the Agrarian community. How can this Agrarian shed stitch back the land that has been spliced by the rail, and produce new ways to utilize the land that would otherwise be left to fallow? (Photo by Ella Larkin)

Above: This Agrarian community brings together both the tech worker and farm laborer who are experiencing varying levels of precarity—but by merging these two labor forces, new learning and forms of collective living will emerge. These two groups allow the exchange of knowledge and job security through the land trust.

Kings-Tulare: Living with the Land

216 Above: The viaduct cuts directly through the farmlan, creating a “Dead zone.” Housing is then placed adjacent to the rail to support as well as establish an Agrarian community comprised of various people.

Bottom: These moments of porosity establish variation along the housing bar, allowing moments of both introversion and extroversion. The cuts become the main moments of transition between the two housing bars. They both provide moments of passage, as well as flexibility for programs to expand depending on the season.

217

Ella Larkin

Micro MicroGardens Gardens

WFH WFH

Sqaush Sqaush Courts Courts

Housing Housing

Food FoodLogistics LogisticsHub Hub

Pubic Pubic Restroom Restroom

HSR HSRStation Station

Clearings Clearings

WFH WFH

Housing Housing

Fitness Fitness

Basketball BasketballCourts Courts

Rec Rec

Bus BusStop Stop

Housing Housing

Bottom: This porosity helps dictate programmatic use of the shed and the large amount needed to support this

Parking Parking

Movie projection projection Movie

Long term food Long term food storage storage

Job Job Training Training

Housing Housing

Clearings Clearings

Above: Clearings are created by subtracting from the housing bars to produce intentional openings. These clearings allow both goods and people to traverse through the housing bars.

Playground Playground

Land LandTrust Trust Org Org

viaduct viaduct Farming FarmingStorage Storage

agrarian community. Programs requiring higher levels of natural light are placed closer to the clearings while others (like crop storage, projector screens) are either completely or partially enclosed by the programmed bars. The vastness of the shed allows this hyper-flexibility of programs.

Major Movement Movement Vessels Vessels Major

Farmers FarmersMarket Market

Pubic Pubic Restroom Restroom

Laundry Laundry

Housing Housing

Commutter Commutterrail rail Clearings Clearings

Kings-Tulare: Living with the Land

218

219

Ella Larkin

Daytime x Market Phase 01 - Market in Flux Full-capacity market.

Movie Night x Shed Phase 02 - Market transitions into projector viewing space.

220

221 Top: Ground Plan Work-Out Facilities Squash Courts Basketball Facilities Corn Hole Yoga Studios Collaborative Work Spaces Classrooms Admin space Bus Stop Parking Train station Commuter Rail Food Processing Loading Zones Picnic Space Projection Screens Grill zones Farmers Market Small planters Access to Fields

Left: Second-Floor Housing Plan. Hydraulic lifts provide both accessible housing as well as the unloading/loading of produce onto the HSR. Typically two residents will share one restroom and six will share one kitchen, but will have access to the other common spaces along the floor. Both farmers and work-from-homers will be housed with the same units, prompting more overlap within the entire community.

Kings-Tulare: Living with the Land

222

223

Ella Larkin

224

225

226

Fresno: Climatic Entanglements

Connor Gravelle

This proposal for a hybrid train station / farmers market / neighborhood canteen / housing cooperative extends and dramatizes the logic of perishability governing California’s agricultural systems at the scale of architecture. As a node in a larger proposed network of produce distribution along the high-speed rail, it imagines a space in which commuters, pedestrians, and tourists as well as trains, buses, produce, unaffiliated bystanders, and various other ecological forces come into intimate entanglement around the logistics of food movement and climatological specificities of the Central Valley’s (warming) seasonal temperatures. The project borrows from California’s nimble agricultural vocabulary of lightweight and reconfigurable materials such as netting and plastic curtains to speculate about an architecture more attune with the unique indoor–outdoor potentials of a transforming climate. At once present yet transient, the station becomes a space of movement and labor, an atmosphere of intentional visibility meaningfully foregrounding the otherwise unseen expenditure of human and more-than-human energy alike to sustain food distribution and access. Humans

Bathing

Very Humid

Pomes

Root Vegetables

Nonmanual Labor

Melons Citrus

115 °F (46 °C)

Circulating

Produce

35 °F (2 °C)

Nuts

Manual Labor

Very Dry

Cruciferous Vegetables Exercise

Sleeping

Electric Motors

Berries

Cooking

Combustion Engines

Vehicles

Leafy Greens

227 This spread: Reference images—through a cacophony of misting systems, draped plastic sheets, and sprawling shade structures, the agricultural industry has developed a number of interesting techniques to nimbly respond to California’s diverse environmental conditions.

Image credits (top to bottom): PxHere.com, Adobe Stock (users Rattanachat, deyana, Sergej Vasilcenko, Jose).

Fresno: Climatic Entanglements

228

The Wire Mesh

The Strip Curtain

The PVC Curtain

Light Air Vapor Heat

This spread: California farms employ a broad range of flexible materials, all of which are lightweight, deployable, and readily reconfigurable, allowing farmers to negotiate the dynamic qualities of fruits and vegetables in the Central Valley across space and time.

The project began by cataloging and analyzing each for its capacity to modulate light, air movement, vapor, and heat. This permitted the curation of a gradient of climatic responses.

Th PV

rtain

229

Connor Gravelle

The Insulated PVC Curtain

The (Curtain) Wall

The Wall Wall

Light Air Vapor Heat

Tension Cable System

Operable Netting

Operable Netting Misting System

Misting System

Nested Netting

Operable Netting

Operable Netting Misting System

Misting System

Nested Netting

Vegetation

PVC Curtain Portable AC

Operable Netting

Operable Netting Misting System Concrete Frame Net Curtain

This spread: These material systems are interesting for their capacity to refashion basic assumptions about the construction and enclosure of architectural space.

They are often movable, allowing structures to adapt to the needs of climate and harvest. Layers of netting and mesh can be used in lieu of permanent, fixed walls

Glass Volume

to control shading, which can combine with humidity control tools like misting systems to regulate a porous but conditioned interior environment.

Fresno: Climatic Entanglements

230

Movable Posts

231

Connor Gravelle

Fresno: Climatic Entanglements

232

May

This spread: A series of vignettes explores the way the design dramatizes and foregrounds the labor of its continuous construction. Like a tent over a large field, the station’s enclosure comes and goes with the season, resizing and re-sheathing as necessary through the

June

May

year’s seasonal harvests. This process is continuously on display, daylighting the otherwise unseen labor of agricultural systems in the city.

June

May

June

233

Connor Gravelle

Fresno: Climatic Entanglements

234

235

Connor Gravelle

236

237

High-Speed Rail Station 1. Escalators from station platforms below 2. Agricultural logistics hub 3. Loading dock for semi-trucks and other delivery vehicles 4. Elevators from platforms to move produce and, when necessary, passengers

238

Bus Infrastructure 5. Fresno bus network stops 6. Greyhound office, waiting lounge, and bathrooms (shared with other depot programs) 7. Greyhound station stops Pedestrian Access 8. Pedestrian access from East Fresno (downtown, Fresno County Courthouse, etc.) 9. Pedestrian access from West Fresno (Chinatown and adjacent neighborhoods) Private Vehicle Access 10. Parking garage entrance ramp from street level 11. Elevators and stairs to parking garage 12. Rideshare drop-off Station Support Spaces 13. MEP building and egress stairwell from parking garage Shared Food Program 14. Farmers market (when active), otherwise programmed with public programming or reconfigurable public furniture (e.g., chairs, tables) when not in use 15. Kitchen for neighborhood canteen 16. Neighborhood canteen, maintained by land trust to be shared between Fresno public and residents 17. Demo kitchen pavilions for use by residents and public cooking classes 18. Shared kitchens for use by residents Other 19. Residents’ lobby, mailboxes, and station offices 20. Shower pavilions 21. Platform egress Landscape A. Sidewalk B. Concrete type 1, low permeability, medium rough finish C. Concrete type 2, high permeability, highly rough finish D. Crushed stone E. Open soil allocated to native vegetation F. Native grasses, shrubs, and trees G. Community allotment gardens shared between residents H. Primary pathways, low permeability, concrete type 3, smooth finish I. Secondary pathways, low permeability, concrete type 4, smooth finish J. Tertiary pathways, pavers K. Vents for tunnel system L. Benches

239

Parking Access Housing Layers of pathways, softscape, openings, and vents create an entanglement between atmospheres.

Fresno: Climatic Entanglements

240

Historic Depot Repurposed as Neighborhood Canteen

Rail infrastructure is relocated belowgrade to open the site’s urban presence. The station is meaningfully austere.

Logistics Hub

Housing structures are located along the site’s edges, nestled between the bustle of the station and its quieter periphery.

Pavilions with shared kitchens create interstitial spaces and activities between the housing and the rest of the station.

Shared Demo and

tchens, itchens howers

c Depot osed as Above: Moments extracted from the exploded detailing moments of entangleorhood axonometric ment between programs, spaces, and design elements. Canteen

Right: Exploded axonometric showing the various layers of construction that comprise the design of the complex.

Histo Repur Neig

Flexible Infrastructure

Primary Structure Primary Structure

New Structures

Humidity Maintenance

Shared Kitchen/Bathroom Spaces New Structures

Humidity Maintenance

Existing Structures on Site (Historically Protected) Existing Structures on Site (Historically Protected)

Historic Historic DepotDepot Repurposed Repurposed as as Neighborhood Neighborhood Canteen Canteen Shared Kitchen/Bathroom Spaces

Shared Shared Kitchens, Kitchens, DemoDemo Kitchens Kitchens and Showers and Showers

Parking (392 Spaces) Parking (392 Spaces)

Plantings Plantings

241

Secondary Structure

Housing Housing Secondary Structure

Mechanical Mechanical and and Garage Garage

Housing

Parking Parking Access Access

Housing

Fixed Architecture

Logistics Logistics Hub Hub

Union Pacific Freight Line Union Pacific Freight Line

Urban Ground Plane

Tension Tension Wire System Wire System

High-Speed Rail Station High-Speed Rail Station

Sub-Grade Program

Connor Gravelle

Shading Control

Lightweight Lightweight Net Structure Net Structure

Parking Parking Entrance Entrance

Bus Station Bus Station

Thin Pathways Thin Pathways

Secondary Secondary Pathways Pathways

Loading Loading

Openings Openings

Ventilaiton Ventilaiton Grates Grates

Fresno: Climatic Entanglements

242

Sunday This spread: The space makes the visibility of labor required to sustain food perishability highly visible. A mist curtain sometimes encloses the farmers market.

Monday

At times invisible in a cloud of vapor, the performative space of food access permeates the experience of the structure.

Sunday

Monday

243

Connor Gravelle

Fresno: Climatic Entanglements

244

245

Connor Gravelle

Essay

The Spatial Formats of the Territorial City

Neeraj Bhatia

The Spatial Formats of the Territorial City

Neeraj Bhatia

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If you want to understand what urbanism is today, don’t bother looking to the downtown cores of American Cities. That is an urbanism of yesterday. Instead, look at the periphery, and the periphery of the periphery. In these hinterlands, you are confronted with a sincere appraisal of who we are today. In these background spaces, infrastructure, landscape, and urbanism (and all their contradictions) collide and are negotiated through factors such as proximity, cheapness, invisibility, access, and excess. In this sense, the Central Valley is emblematic of contemporary urbanism. Examining the spatial structure of this vast operationalized landscape, we witness specific spatial formats of logistics that have been used to territorialize the land—namely, surfaces, containers, and conduits.4 Akin to how Rosalind Krauss positioned and qualified sculpture practices in her essay “Sculpture and the Expanded Field” some 40 years ago, the infrastructure of logistics could be qualified in an expanded field of design today.5 Using a Klein group diagram, Krauss identified three sub-practices of sculpture that had previously been buried within a generalization of sculpture. She qualifies

them as “site-construction,” “marked sites,” and “axiomatic structures.” In a similar effort, infrastructure’s expanded field exists between urbanism and landscape, and yields sub-formats of surfaces, containers, and conduits. These formats have colonized vast swathes of hinterland environments and operate at a scale closely aligned to global and regional logistics. “Surfaces” are planes of mediation that typically function at a territorial scale as they are primarily implicated in a form of harvesting or collection. “Containers” are architectural shells of enclosure often sited between the formats of surfaces and conduits—for storing, refining, or distributing a particular good. “Conduits” are used to transfer matter and energy across vast distances, cutting through local settlements, political boundaries, and ecosystems, and connecting to both containers and surfaces. These spatial formats typically reside in the “background” of spatial design, yet are increasingly organizing large tracts of land both in the hinterland as well as on the periphery of cities. Engaging in these background logistical formats holds promise for designers to have agency over territorial arrangements and could potentially offer alternate organizations that repay nature for its unpaid work. The following essay attempts to define, through photographs and text, how these formats operate.

e'&6$G

Infrastructure in the expanded field, Klein Group Diagram (Image courtesy of InfraNet Lab).

Title

250

251

Firstname Lastname

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Previous spread: Windmills arrayed along the Altamont Pass landscape operationalize topographic and atmospheric shifts into energy (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

increases, so does the scale of the surface. Simply put, more people benefiting from the products of the surface not only requires a larger surface but also more infrastructures to connect these surfaces into a larger logistical system. The Italian group Superstudio depicted the growing scale of a continuous artificial surface in their speculative project Supersurface 5 during the 1960s. Organized through an endless grid to enable the flow of energy, matter, and information, the proposal acknowledged the contemporary capacity for the surface to gather matter and connect the world globally into an integrated system. Similar to Supersurface 5, the Central Valley is a vast surface that is integrated by a network of conduits. Within this landscape, the environmental inputs partially determine how land is organized vis-a-vis agriculture and energy (i.e., oil, wind, and solar). The scale of extraction and harvesting goes beyond local needs—these surfaces produce nearly half of the United States’ fruits, vegetables, and nuts while leading the nation in milk production, with over 1.75 million dairy cows. For the past 50 years, California has been the top agricultural state of the country. Furthermore, there are currently approximately 84,000 active and new oil and gas wells in California, most of which are located in the Central Valley, making California one of the larger domestic oil players. Given the scale of production, large conduits and containers have been strategically located to distribute and stage these products.

Agricultural lands in the Central Valley take advantage of the geologic history that produced both flatness and nutrient-rich soils. Growing more than 230 crops, the Central Valley produces approximately 8 percent of the agricultural output by value in the United States (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

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Surfaces The surface has become the primary organizational format of contemporary urbanism. Deployed for harvesting and collection—agriculture, energy, water—the surface is predicated on scale and thereby often situated where land is cheap. While this condition is witnessed in accumulation scenarios for global-scale consumption, the project of the surface is also found in a variety of environments from sprawling suburban decentralized cities,6 such as Houston or Atlanta, to managerial environments such as airports and distribution centers. Consider the influence of the surface even at the building scale: from Mies’s free plan to SANAA’s Rolex Learning Center, the surface enables a flexible system that is not limited by traditional architectural elements such as walls, but rather more adjustable formats of furniture and objects. The nimbleness and flexibility of the surface allow for different forms of managing matter through time.7 While the surface can exist at several scales, its territorial scale is highly integrated into the front end of a logistical chain—where raw materials are harvested and gathered. In this manner, the surface is the most geographically specific of the three formats. Consider, for instance, agricultural fields, which are more robust within certain solar and soil conditions and are often situated in key zones of a watershed. The environmental inputs in the surface thus set up a field of opportunity for particular forms of harvesting. In this way, the surface is not necessarily a plane but a field of harvesting or gathering distributed over a vast area. For example, an array of windmills is often sited in geographically specific zones of air and temperature exchange to capitalize on greater wind velocities. The windmill itself is not a surface, but rather a component in a distributed set of points that are harvesting from an atmospheric surface. Similarly, a field of oil pumpjacks collectively tap into a geologic surface below grade. In both cases, the surface tends toward decentralization and diffusion—key characteristics of a soft system. This is to say that failure of any of these points does not result in catastrophe, as the surface relies on modest quantities distributed over a region. Failure in a surface is often the result of widespread environmental transformations (for instance, persistent drought in agricultural areas) or exhausting a finite resource (such as depleting an aquifer or oil basin). As the scale of logistical integration

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Previous spread: Running along Interstate 5, this canal is part of the Central Valley Project—a federal water management project—devised in 1933 to transport water from Northern California to Southern California (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

instance, a series of aqueducts that move water from Northern California to the southern part of the state for fracking, agriculture, and general consumption. The primary functions of the conduit, however, are downstream of the supply chain—creating zones of specialized manufacturing or refining and distribution or storage. While some conduits, such as pipelines, move through the landscape almost invisibly, conduits of human movement (rail, highways, and so on) tend to attract linear forms of urbanization. Today, the Central Valley is the focus of a large-scale high-speed rail project that will connect Los Angeles and San Francisco and move millions of people through this once-background landscape.

Crude oil pipelines in the North Belridge Oil Field in South-Central California (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

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Conduits Conduits, connected to both containers and surfaces for transferring matter and energy, are often accompanied by easements—zones around the conduit that are cleared to neutralize and tame the varied conditions that are to be navigated. The easement becomes the primary corridor for access, communication, maintenance, surveillance, and construction of the conduit. Moreover, compared to the conduit itself, the easement creates perhaps the most permanent condition of all—these zones are often deemed their own political-economic jurisdiction (such as a free-trade zone or zone with differing legislative requirements), a designation that attracts other infrastructures and activities that solidify particular characteristics within this vector. Conduits have a particular significance in logistical systems as they allow for the spatial separation between extraction, processing, manufacturing, and consumption. Forming a physical network across the globe, conduits ensure access to resources that are spatially remote—making them one of the primary technological artifacts for capitalist expansion and consumption. While the endlessness of the surface is incomprehensible to the human scale, the conduit as a type is tasked with interfacing between the scale of the territory and that of architecture. The integration between systems and geographies enabled by the conduit allows for the processing and manufacturing of goods to tap into cheaper labor markets that are often geographically removed from front-end logistics. More importantly, the conduit is a critical invention for making our resources an abstract commodity by separating sites of extraction from those of consumption,8 allowing those who benefit from these resources to be placed at a remove from the environmental costs of extraction. These consequences range from environmental contamination to inequitable labor practices to the production of urban residue once resources are depleted. The abstraction fostered by spatial detachment has characterized the conduit as a dissociated technology.9 The Central Valley was once a difficult-to-access landscape, which in the last century has been networked with highways, train lines, aqueducts, pipelines, and hydroelectric corridors. On the one hand, these networks have been used to provide scarce inputs; for

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Previous spread: Logistic distribution center under construction emerges along Interstate 205 outside of Stockton. As one moves away from the conduit, surface agriculture coats the land (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

square-foot complex can reach more than 40 million people with next-day delivery and 70 million within two days.11 It also is part of Kern County’s economic incentive program, which reduces taxes for companies, and many sites of the complex are eligible for foreign trade zone benefits, making it akin to a dry port. Across this landscape, distribution and logistics centers for IKEA, Caterpillar, Famous Footwear, and Dollar General, among others, have created a new form of urbanism, whose primary unit is the architectural container, and which is aggregated around territorial flows.

‘Almost-Architecture’ of the container—in its most dematerialized form, the container is reduced to a form of clothing. Shown here, plastic sheets draped over manure are ballasted with rubber tires, which fuse into a thickened skin (Photo by Neeraj Bhatia).

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Containers Containers are large shells of enclosure primarily used for storage and staging of materials. As such, they are always directly linked to conduits and in some cases surfaces, where the storage of harvested materials is required on site. In cases where the container is connected solely by conduits, it is usually sited within lands that are cheap yet in close proximity to urban centers to have access to labor and the eventual market. Containers are perhaps the least expressive form of architecture—their low, horizontal exterior profile is typically punctuated by a consistent pattern of openings that enables mobile shipping containers (often on trucks) to plug into and expand their structure. Their almost infinite interiors are reduced to their basic infrastructures (structure, lighting, and HVAC) to allow for ultimate flexibility. In this sense, the container is an infrastructure and enclosure for a surface project that operates at an architectural scale. This surface is organized as a micro-city whose logic of streets (trafficked by bikes, rickshaws, Segways, and forklifts) and “blocks” (of storage shelving) are the result of flow patterns and technologies such as the forklift. Architecture is reduced to a thin veil that separates the interior from exterior—yet both sides of this threshold are organized by similar systems of urbanization, albeit at radically different scales. This positions the container as both a type of urbanism and non-urbanism. The container was foreshadowed most insightfully by Archizoom’s No-Stop City, as a resultant form of the functionalist capitalist city. As No-Stop City envisaged, within the infinite scale of the interior, the flux of staging and storing materials is tied to the dynamic qualities of the market and is accommodated through the soft reconfiguration of the interior.10 As a statement on the flexibility of the interior and the inflexibility of architecture, the container reduces architecture to its elemental state of weather enclosure. How permanent and formalized this enclosure is, however, depends largely on the durability of the materials in question. In some cases, forms of “almost-architectures” appear to store materials for brief durations. In the Central Valley, the largest aggregation of containers occurs at the intersection of Interstate 5 and Highway 99, a region known as Tejon Ranch Commerce Center. About an hour north of Los Angeles, the 20-million-

Opportunistically located along conduit infrastructure in proximity to the Bay Area markets, yet distant enough to benefit from cheaper real estate, logistics centers displace agricultural land along the I-205 outside of Stockton (Satellite image from Google Earth).

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. III, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 745. 2 Jason W. Moore, Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2014). 3 Jason W. Moore, “The End of Cheap Nature, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about ‘the’ Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future of Global Conflict and Cooperation, ed. C. Suter and C. Chase-Dunn (Berlin: LIT, 2014), 288. 4 Neeraj Bhatia et al., Pamphlet Architecture 30: Coupling (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), 8. 5 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44. 6 Alan Berger, Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 26–27. 7 Alex Wall, “Programming the Urban Surface,” in Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 233–49. 8 Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 143. 9 Ibid., 143–44. 10 Andrea Branzi, “PostFace,” in No-Stop City, ed. Andrea Branzi and Archizoom Associati (Orléans: HYX, 2006), 151–52. 11 Tejon Ranch Commerce Center, accessed 2018, http://www.tejoncommerce.com/ index.php/#about. 1

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The Other California The other California remains in the background yet produces the economic engine that drives the state. New high-speed rail infrastructure through this landscape will undoubtedly trigger new forms of urbanization that increase land costs and make this landscape more visible. Still, this flat terrain is opportune for harvesting, processing, moving, and staging resources. By understanding these new spatial formats of logistics, we can ask what it means to operate in the background. While the inclination of the architectural discipline while operating in the background tends toward aestheticization, these spatial formats are indifferent to aesthetics. They employ form and are organized in purely functionalist terms. To engage their logic requires designers to consider the systems at play and how these might be rewired to create more equitable landscapes. Despite this overview focusing on the physical form of these logistical formats, their underlying economic and political protocols are arguably as influential to their development and critical tools for rewiring. The landscapes of the Central Valley are both unique and not unique. They are unique in what they harvest, and the specific means of storing these materials. They are also not unique in that they are organized by spatial protocols that evaluate land, labor, and markets and reframe spatial zones of opportunity to render goods cheaply. These relational logics between the surface, conduit, and container, as well as the sub-formats themselves, are rich grounds to consider alternative forms of urbanism. The other California resembles “other” landscapes throughout the world that are increasingly organized based on global flows of resources and products. They are other because despite their scale and the shear amount of land they consume and organize, they are not integrated into a social, cultural, or design discourse. If the extractive frontier is territorialized through these formats, can the proactive design of these spatial types be used to benefit the typically silent subjects of capitalism?

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Afterword

Reflections on the Territorial City

Elisa Iturbe

Reflections on the Territorial City

Elisa Iturbe

architecture within a complex web of space and power, it does not induce the familiar paralysis so commonly felt at this scale. Rather, one is forced to recognize that architectural design has the capacity to question how space is claimed and assigned for certain uses. To put it slightly differently: space-making is an important force within any political, economic, and cultural milieu. The question is who has the power to make space, and whether those with the vision to propose alternative configurations might have the chance to change the DNA of contemporary territorial arrangements. The projects from the studio speak to this quite clearly, and one can see two important themes within the work. The first, decentralization, picks up on the ability of the rail to overcome spatial incongruity and distribute resources more equitably, giving rise to new networks of care and education, such as a distributed trade school and a decentralized healthcare network. The second theme studies the rail line from the opposite perspective: as an integrating force. Each station has the capacity to intersect constituencies and resources in unprecedented ways—including through land itself, since the rail line creates a new strip of public land along its edges. Housing co-ops, agricultural co-ops, and community land trusts suddenly find new opportunities in this context. In sum, this studio has presented students with several unique opportunities: to train their spatial intelligence to think across scales, to use architecture to create new spatial affordances for specific constituencies, and to imagine a mode of space-making that catalyzes new forms of care and cooperation—in short, new ways of life.

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Neeraj Bhatia opens the studio brief for The Territorial City with the provocation of “multiple Californias.” Whether there are six, as proposed in 2016 by Tim Draper, or two, as the brief ultimately implies, matters less than the fact that stark divides are active within the state, and they are paradigmatic of a globalized world. This is not only a matter of an urban-rural divide. Under a paradigm of fossil capitalism, the reach of commodity markets becomes planetary via the affordances of fossil fuels. The Central Valley is hardly the local hinterland to the urban coastline—it is an agricultural powerhouse that feeds the world. The distance, then, between the Central Valley and the places it feeds has grown wider and wider, exacerbating metabolic rift and cementing a spatial incongruity between productive and consumptive landscapes. In this context, the California High-Speed Rail (HSR) raises urgent questions: can these rifts be addressed? Under current models of development, this is not a given. Spatial connectivity is more likely to integrate real estate markets than address the metabolic rift between agricultural landscapes and cities—between agricultural labor and the consumer class. Herein lies the radical proposal embedded in The Territorial City: by recognizing that the HSR will inevitably alter land use patterns, the studio identifies an opportunity to design new nodes within the infrastructure that have the capacity to critically inflect, divert, subvert, or otherwise reclaim elements of this process. At stake is a model of growth and regional development defined by a new set of priorities. This, of course, raises crucial questions for architecture—in any work that is territorial in scale and political in nature, the impact of interventions at the architectural scale must be questioned. Here, the brief’s focus on a series of HSR “switches” is key. Bhatia defines these as “a new typology of logistic distribution centers at the scale of architecture,” creating an interface between the train and local resource management initiatives. While this undoubtedly situates

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Contributors

Neeraj Bhatia Neeraj Bhatia is a licensed architect and urban designer whose work resides at the intersection of politics, housing, infrastructure, and urbanism. He is Associate Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, where he is also Director of the Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design Program. Bhatia has previously held teaching positions at CCA, UC Berkeley as the Visiting Esherick Professor, Cornell University, Rice University, and the University of Toronto. Neeraj is principal of THE OPEN WORKSHOP, a transcalar design-research office examining the negotiation between architecture and its territorial environment. Select distinctions include the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy (2026), Architectural League Emerging Voices Award (2024), Canadian Professional Prix de Rome (2019), the Architectural League Young Architects Prize (2016), Emerging Leaders Award from Design Intelligence (2016), ACSA Housing Design Education Award, and the Fulbright Fellowship.

Elisa Iturbe Elisa Iturbe is an assistant professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Her work studies the relationship between energy, power, and form, with a focus on how the adoption of fossil fuels changed the spatial organization of the built environment, producing an urban and architectural paradigm unique to the carbon age—carbon form. This concept was first published in Log 47, titled “Overcoming Carbon Form,” which she guest-edited in 2019. She also cocurated and coproduced the exhibition Confronting Carbon Form at The Cooper Union, which exhibited original works in various media that define the spatial concepts of the carbon age. She has published in journals such as Log, AA Files, Perspecta, and e-flux, as well as several essay anthologies. Iturbe previously taught at The Cooper Union, Yale, and Cornell AAP. She is cofounder of Outside Development, a design and research practice.

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Jesse LeCavalier Jesse LeCavalier is an associate professor and director of the Master of Science in Advanced Urban Design at Cornell University. He uses the tools of urban design and architecture to research, theorize, and speculate about infrastructure and logistics. He is the author of The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and his design work has been recognized by the Sudbury 2050 Urban Design Competition, the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, the Oslo Triennale, and the Seoul Biennale. LeCavalier was the Daniel Rose Visiting Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Architecture (2017–19) and a Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan (2010–11). His work has appeared in Cabinet, Public Culture, Places, Art Papers, and Harvard Design Magazine. His essay “The Restlessness of Objects” was the recipient of a 2013 Core77 Design Award.

Colophon

The Territorial City Instructor Neeraj Bhatia Report Design Ella Larkin and Alicia Moreira Report Editor Ella Larkin and Alicia Moreira Report Production Alicia Moreira Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture Sarah Whiting Chair of the Department of Architecture Grace La Copyright © 2024 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Text and images © 2024 by their authors. The editors have attempted to acknowledge all sources of images used and apologize for any errors or omissions.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design 48 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA 02138 gsd.harvard.edu

Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies

Acknowledgments This design research would not be possible without the support of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies. In particular we offer our gratitude to Sarah Whiting and Grace La, and studio guests Margaret Cederoth (CAHSRA), Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher (SFMoMA), Jerome Keene (City of Selma), Boris Lipkin (CAHSRA), Rick Phillips (RP Place), Victoria Sandoval (CAHSRA), Peter Sokoloff (Foster + Partners), and Laura Tolkoff (SPUR).

Studio Report Fall 2024

Harvard GSD Department of Architecture

Students Iam Bhunto, Dalika Dharod, Connor Gravelle, Inmo Kang, Ella Larkin, Yue Liang, Botao Sun, Chloe Tsui, Ziyang Xiong, Zhian Yin