WET MATTER

Harvard

No. 39 — F / W 2014

Magazine

Wet Matter

Design

Who’s Afraid of the Ocean?

The Other 71 Percent with submarines and plumbed for resources. As sewer, conveyor, battlefield, or mine, the ocean is a vast logistical landscape. Whether we speak of fishing zones or fish migration, coastal resilience or tropical storms, the ocean is both a frame for regulatory controls and a field of uncontrollable, indivisible processes.

To characterize the ocean as catastrophic—imperiled environment, coastal risk, or contested territory—is to overlook its potential power.

The environments and mythologies of the ocean continue to support contemporary urban life in ways unseen and unimagined. The oceanic project—like the work of Marie Tharp, who mapped the seafloor in the shadows of Cold War star scientists—challenges the dry, closed, terrestrial frameworks that shape today’s industrial, corporate, and economic patterns. As contemporary civilization takes the oceanic turn, its future clearly lies beyond the purview of any head of state or space of a nation.

Reexamining the ocean’s historic and superficial remoteness, this issue profiles the ocean as contemporary urban space and subject of material, political, and ecologic significance, asking how we are shaping it, and how it is shaping us.

— Pierre Bélanger, Guest Editor

I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence.

— Jacques Cousteau, 1981

Pierre, I later learned, is an openwater swimmer—one who is interested in challenging the edges, the envelope, that frame our terrestrial orientation.

Our issue of Harvard Design Magazine introduces another orientation—a view from the ocean. It requires immersion, and even losing sight of shore.

If we are surrounded by water as swimmers and made of water as humans, why we do we collectively “fight” water’s power? How can we unlearn our binary, dichotomous relationship with the ocean? To let wet matter…

— Jennifer Sigler, Editor in Chief

I swim in white-tiled pools with straight black lines; in water where you can see the other side—where there is another side. The walls don’t move; they define and contain my chlorinated monotony.

In a messy, unpredictable world, this wet room is soothing. I count, measure, repeat. There are no sharks, no jellyfish, no rip currents.

I’m afraid of the ocean. And maybe I swim the way architects tend to think— in a language of measured perimeters, predefined routes, delimited territories.

Again and again, I approach the wall and turn, pushing off from the reliable edge.

“Wet Matter” began as a conversation about a continent. Why, asked Pierre Bélanger, is land always expressed as an absolute shape—a figure situated in the void of “not land”? Why this insistent focus on the dry, when in fact, the wet world with which land lives is itself matter, and the boundaries between the two are dynamic and evolving?

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When President Obama shut down the manned space shuttle program on August 31, 2011, our attention shifted away from the space race, back to earth, to the motion of the ocean. Three years later, the president invoked his legal powers through the 1906 Antiquities Act to create the largest protected marine zone in the Pacific Ocean. Three times larger than the state of California, bigger than any national park, this marine reserve contributes to an ocean nation whose waters account for more area than its entire landmass. Obama’s move signals the future of the health and wealth of the oceans, an inseparable dimension of planetary climate change.

Nevertheless, the ocean remains a glaring blind spot in the Western imagination. Catastrophic events remind us of its influence—a lost airplane, a shark attack, an oil spill, an underwater earthquake—but we tend to marginalize or misunderstand the scales of the oceanic. It represents the “other 71 percent” of our planet. Meanwhile, like land, its surface and space continue to be radically instrumentalized: offshore zones territorialized by nation-states, high seas crisscrossed by shipping routes, estuaries metabolized by effluents, sea levels sensed by satellites, seabeds lined No. 39 / Wet Matter

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The Bottom of the Bay, Or How to Know the Seaweeds* green algae (Chlorophyta), brown algae (Phaeophyta), and red algae (Rhodophyta). Anchored to the rocky bottoms by the holdfasts at their bases, these macroalgae remain stationary, moving only with the tides.

The one exception is the free-floating brown alga Sargassum, which thrives in the eponymous Sargasso Sea. As the densest biologic entity on the planet, marine algae produce both life and sediment in the waters of our oceans and estuaries. They are autophytic, creating their own food through photosynthesis. Thus they require water and CO², but they also need light. Their habitat is limited to the photic zone, a volume of water about 300 to 400 feet deep that still receives sunlight. In relationship to the depths of the ocean, this illuminated zone of algal habitat is just a thin layer of surface water, along with the narrow intertidal and infratidal zones at the continental coasts, estuaries, and embayments.

Algae are the primary producers of organic matter, the base of the food chain, and the principal source of oxygen for all aquatic life. And upon their death and decay, the algal biomass descends through the depths of the waters, becoming part of the sedimentary deposition that forms the bathymetry of the globe’s surface.

To know the seaweeds is to know the ocean.

Often described as the grasslands of the sea, seaweeds, those brackishwater dwellers, are commonly thought of as plants, but they have no roots, stems, or leaves, and no reproductive structures like flowers.

Castaways from the classic big three kingdoms—plant, animal, and fungi— these organisms belong to their own kingdom, Protista. Seaweeds are marine algae, in a world of their own.

There are two types of algae: the free-floating single-celled inhabitants of the pelagic division, suspended in the water mass itself, known as phytoplankton or microalgae; and the anchored inhabitants of the benthic zone, which includes the littoral intertidal edge and the illuminated sea floor, known as macroalgae, or, more commonly, seaweed.

All marine algae are essential to ocean health. Despite their small size, the phytoplankton that inhabit surface waters of the entire ocean account for over 95 percent of the vegetation of the sea. However, it is the proportionally smaller category of seaweeds that are so intriguing to humans, perhaps because of their size, visibility, and accessibility.

These seaweeds are categorized into three main groups, named after their predominant pigments:

Catherine Seavitt Nordenson 6

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spatial volume. Benthic thinking rescales the oceanic, reinserting the body. The photic zone is beyond vision—it provides us with dense illumination of a zone historically considered deep, dark territory.

This is a liquid kingdom of beautiful transparencies in green, brown, and red. The bottom is not only alive and living, it is live and lived.

A wonderful “weed,” indeed.

The study and collection of macroalgae, both scientific and amateur, thrived during the Victorian era. The British, particularly the upper classes, with their ample leisure time and coastal estates, loved collecting plant and animal specimens, seaweeds included. Zoos became an extension and display of exotic colonial holdings, and botanical glasshouse collections of tropical plants were assembled—along with the innovative large-span glass and steel structures that housed them— at the height of the colonial period.

Collecting, ordering, and naming the specimens of the natural world was a way of establishing control and affirming the hegemony of the anthropogenic footprint on the globe.

Yet the collection and categorization of seaweeds was often a much more local enterprise.

The collection of marine plants requires actual immersion into the waters of the littoral ocean—holding one’s breath with a snorkel mask, swimming, looking, gathering. It’s a very different relationship to data collection than that provided by sound waves reflected back to a vessel on the ocean’s surface, or by light waves generated by satellites circling the planet.

This buoyant airspace of the benthic recasts our notions of space and depth. Bottomness defies an understanding of the ocean as a Cartesian flat surface or a Euclidean

Body Boundaries

Film still from David Lynch’s Dune, 1984.

* E. Yale Dawson, How to Know the Seaweeds: An Illustrated Manual for Identifying the More Common Marine Algae of Both Our Atlantic and Pacific Coasts with Numerous Aids for Their Study (Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown Company, 1956).

Pages 4–5: Asako Narahashi, Zeze, from the series, “Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water,” 2005.

Page 6: Anna Atkins, Halyseris polypodioides (cyanotype), from Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843–53.

Catherine Seavitt Nordenson is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at City College of New York, and principal of Catherine Seavitt Studio. She coauthored, with Guy Nordenson and Adam Yarinsky, On the Water: Palisade Bay (2010), a climate adaptation proposal for the New York/New Jersey Upper Harbor.

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Jenna Sutela is a writer and artist based in Helsinki.

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Jenna Sutela

In Dune, science fiction writer Frank Herbert imagines a bodysuit designed to preserve the body’s moisture on the desert planet Arrakis.

Herbert’s “stillsuit” turns bodily fluids into potable water, consumed through a tube attached to the neck: “With a [stillsuit] in good working order, you won’t lose more than a thimbleful of moisture a day.”

To survive under water, humans require the minimum infrastructure of an aqualung and a wetsuit. The latter, invented by physicist Hugh Bradner in the early 1950s, provides thermal insulation, abrasion resistance, and buoyancy through bubbles of gas enclosed within a neoprene lining. It allows one to enter an environment suboptimal for human occupation: the cold and compressive world of oceans. Though protected, a wetsuited person retains contact with the wet environment through a thin layer of water maintained between the body and the suit.

These two post-terrestrial outfits function as mediators—forms of adaptation—between humans and water. Like umbrellas, rubber boots, and sea walls, they speak of our complicated relationship to aqueous ecologies: we are as dependent on water as we are on the technologies that seal us from it. In her book Alongside the Right to Water, posthumanist researcher Astrida Neimanis writes of “an ecology in which humans and other bodies of water (animal, vegetable, meteorological, geophysical) are always already implicated, as lively agents, in one another’s well-being.” Furthermore, geologists Dianna and Mark McMenamin suggest that we are reservoirs of the “hypersea,” connected aquatic environments. They imagine terrestrial organisms to be

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bonded by the fact that their body fluids commingle and that this connectedness forms a sea through which other organisms and nutrients can move.

Before atoms and bacteria were discovered, the concept of the body was understood as a system in which different humors existed in a state of relative equilibrium. Made up of earth (black bile), air (blood), fire (yellow bile), and water (phlegm), we were an element among the rest—an element in fusion. This idea went hand-in-hand with a belief that the body was porous and subject to penetration by the surrounding elements. Unlike a Cartesian body with well-defined boundaries, bodies were permeable down to their most intimate recesses. Bathing was used to restore balances.

Today, as the lines between the Internet and the ocean begin to blur, one may lose the feeling of a body boundary at the borderlands of material and virtual worlds. Submarine cables and data clouds provide a landscape for cyber-utopian, water-inspired online culture (#seapunk #slimepunk #icepunk). In the world of so-called virtual water—where we rely on a watery substrate that, among other things, keeps our screens lit up and wetsuits on the market— we wear a tail and fins.

Destination Whatever:

Supersudaca: Martin Delgado, Zuzanna Koltowska, FĂŠlix Madrazo & Sofia Saavedra

Touring the Cruise Industry of the Caribbean 10

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Costa Maya pier, between the Carnival Valor and Carnival Legend, 2007.

Costa Maya, Quintana Roo, Mexico, 2013.

With open, smiling mouths and wide, fixated eyes, a group of racially diverse “wholesome” families is featured against the new slogan of Royal Caribbean: “Our ships are designed to WOW.” Notable here is the emphasis on the ships’ design, rather than on any particular destination. As ships become more extreme in size, scale, and amenities, the travel experience is designed to make the floating vacation a familiar and comfortable one. The process of interiorizing hundreds of atmospheres into one floating mega-container has much to do with design, engineering, and management—but mostly economics.

And the effects of the current generation of cruise tourism in the Caribbean are only beginning to unfold.

Adrenaline Beach, Barefoot Beach Club, Dragon’s Plaza. Entering Columbus Cove, Freedom of the Seas sails into Royal Caribbean’s Buccaneer’s Bay. The bay is flanked by recreational attractions including the world’s longest zip line, Dragon’s Breath, and the Dragon’s Tail Coaster atop Santa Maria Mountain. The only landmark is the 19th-century citadel sitting above the horizon— 9,840 feet above sea level. The fortress is named for Henri Christophe Laferrière, a key leader of the first black slave rebellion that lead Haiti to independence from the French in 1804.

The boat, Royal Caribbean’s flagship, docks on the northwestern coast of Hispaniola Island, a territory called Labadee®—a registered trademark. Royal Caribbean leased the peninsula from the Haitian government on a 99-year contract. According to Royal Caribbean’s Port Explorer & Shopping Guide, the leased land is “strengthening the cooperative effort between the government of Haiti and RCCL® […] and has been solidified by extensive on-site development through the company’s investment of tens of millions of dollars.” Testifying to the economic humanitarianism of the deal, the guide mentions that “it is a clear vote of confidence in the people, nation, and future of the country as our guests continue to have the exclusive opportunity to enjoy a relaxing fun-filled day in the clear blue waters of Haiti’s northern coast. The sailors who joined Christopher Columbus and first came ashore here centuries ago obviously knew a good thing when they saw it.”

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Bigger Boats, Bigger Piers As ships grow, they become destinations in themselves, ultimately devaluing the role of land-based destinations. From the already impressive 961-foot, 2,200-passenger Queen Elizabeth in the late 1960s, the size and scale of cruising vessels has nearly tripled to a whopping 6,300 passengers (Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas). The increase in size of cruise ships, in width as much as in height, enables considerable spatial and programmatic complexity—streets, entertainment spaces, dining rooms, bars, pools, stores, water parks— with nonstop events that keep passengers entertained, day and night. Ships are designed as small, floating cities. Like an urban theme park, the ships include a multiplicity of landscape decks, terraces, surfing pools, and running paths that consume all available space on the ship’s roof deck.

Although the layout of vessels is organized around a double-loaded corridor down the middle—the “main street,” which provides each room with exterior views and direct access to amenities—it is the central kitchen that forms ships’ cores and ensures their functionality. Precisely engineered and impeccably designed, ship kitchens provide food tailored to a wide range of dining experiences, from luxurious, romantic dinners to basic midday snacks. Upwards of 15,000 meals can be served in one day, delivered through 30 different menus. Onboard infrastructure is vital: desalination plants for drinking water, crushing and compacting systems for recyclables, dehydrators and incinerators for food waste, with leftover ash disposed of offshore.1

Since the 1980s, RCCL® has held exclusive rights to docking at the once small fishing village and coastal town of Labadie, named for the first French settler in the late 17th century. Anglicized, Labadee® “was specifically designed and built to provide guests with a variety of opportunities to have fun in the sun.” As the guide claims, Royal Caribbean “is honored and proud to be a pioneering partner with a people and country which has such a rich heritage and the tremendous potential to become one of the Caribbean’s premier tour destinations.”

These private destinations—compounds really—have become the new ports of call for big cruise ships. Today, nearly 10 private islands are owned by eight major cruise operators in the Caribbean. By buying or leasing islands, or anchoring at unregulated, deserted stretches of beach, cruise operators can reduce the number of days in official ports and divert the expenditures of travelers to locations under control of the industry. Piers, once perceived as extensions of land that connected ship to destination, have today become extensions of ships. Usually fenced or cordoned off, these extensions are fictional territory: they guide travelers away from local neighborhoods and people, toward areas owned and scripted by cruise companies. They are programmed to deliver isolated, worry-free experiences, supplementing those offered by the ship itself—pristine water, white sand, Caribbean beaches. Off-site excursions are limited to day-trips to tourist-friendly destinations— a colonial city or pre-Hispanic archaeological ruin.

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The bigger the boat, the more plush the interiors; the more exotic the entertainment, the less relevant the destination. These floating worlds, with their new interiorized experiences, pay off. Onboard sales of goods now outpace ticket sales as the primary producer of profits, especially on Disney Cruise Lines, where the average passenger spends over $1,000 on a eight-day trip, making five-star resorts comparatively less expensive.2 While Caribbean destinations compete for the business of these floating hotels, the investment expected of ports to build and maintain big piers is ballooning, and is oftentimes out of reach. If Caribbean ports of call are unable to expand and modernize pier infrastructure to accommodate the increasing size of ships, tour operators look elsewhere for destinations that comply with burgeoning demand. In some cases, cruise companies share responsibility and investment for upgraded infrastructure with local partners. In other— more profitable—cases, they develop, manage, and operate ports themselves. Meanwhile, at “outdated” facilities, cruise companies negotiate anchoring fees to meager sums. Faced with growing congestion in the Caribbean and stiff competition from emerging economies worldwide, a port’s inability to upgrade leads to the danger of obsolescence and abandonment. This threat leaves ports paralyzed: investing large sums of money to upgrade facilities only leads to subsequent obsolescence, but not upgrading means no business at all.

As cruise lines operate more and more independently, distance between travelers and islanders grows at an alarming rate, with dramatic levels of dispossession and inequity.

For example, Royal Caribbean was noticeably absent in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, but provided continuous service to Labadee®. Indifferent to the crisis, President and CEO of RCCL® Adam Goldstein admitted on National Public Radio that the decision to keep business going as usual, on the edge of a disaster zone, was a “pretty easy decision […] a no-brainer.”3 Although the Haitian government requested that they maintain their voyages for both economic benefits and some relief efforts (they provided the transport of goods), maritime lawyer Jim Walker questioned motivations by asking, “Is it appropriate to sail into the idyllic port of Labadee, Haiti on a pleasure cruise when the dead remain unburied and the impoverished country writhes in chaos?”4 Cruise line operators now sometimes work like infrastructure banks, offering loans to governments at local destinations to fund cruise-based infrastructure projects.

In 2007, Carnival Corporation PLC and St. Maarten signed a $34.5 million agreement for the enlargement of their pier, anticipating bigger ships to revive the tourist economy in the British Virgin Islands. Destinations have no choice: upgrade their piers or die.

shore to avoid high taxation. Carnival (#1 in terms of market share), which owns Holland America Line (#4), is incorporated in Panama; Royal Caribbean (#2) is “based” in Liberia; and Norwegian Cruise Line (#3) is registered with the Genting Group in Malaysia. It’s a matter of economics. As journalist Elizabeth Becker noted, “during its two-decades-long civil war, Liberia earned at least $20 million every year by acting as the off-shore registry for foreign ships.”5 For the past decade, cruise tourists have made up about 40 percent of all tourists in the Caribbean, yet they have accounted for less than 10 percent of overall tourist expenditures. Despite periodic efforts to raise port passenger fees, they remain extremely low in the Caribbean. Bermuda charges $60 per visitor, far more than the majority of islands, which often charge less than $10 per visitor. Efforts

by Caribbean islands to form a united front as a way to collectively negotiate with cruise lines have been less than successful. If anything, governments feel compelled to give generous tax exemptions to lure ships into their ports and to contribute to local economies, regardless of how paltry the amounts.6 Black Clouds, Murky Waters Until 25 years ago, cruising was reserved for the wealthy of Europe and America. But growth in ship capacity has made luxury leisure available at much lower price points, closer to half the earlier cost given inflation. The increase in numbers means a decrease in operational expenditures, making cruising an affordable vacation for a larger population.

But greater economies of scale bring greater risks, with hazards on the rise: technical failures, navigational blunders, sanitation lapses, and health epidemics. For example, any given boat loads 24,000 bottles of water every week, which eventually turn into garbage. Destinations are often unable to treat the massive amount of waste, leading cruise ships to dump tons of it in international waters.7 It was not until 2011 that the Caribbean was designated as a “Special Area” (with regard to garbage only) by MARPOL, the UN-based International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships that regulates the dumping of waste overboard, including sewage, sludge, garbage, oil, and exhaust.

Although MARPOL was adopted in 1973, ocean dumping is still widely practiced, albeit regulated beyond a certain distance from “the nearest land.”8 Problems at sea don’t end with waste, they start there.

The larger the vessel, the bigger the engine, the bigger the risk of repairs, breakdowns, or fires. Shorter periods in port mean lower cycle times for repairs and inspections, much like planes. On February 14, 2013, Carnival’s Triumph, a post-Panamax 102,000-ton cruise ship, was towed into Mobile, Alabama, after being stranded at sea for nearly five days. The ordeal began with an engine fire, which despite being quickly and safely extinguished, resulted in a loss of power and propulsion. The ship floated in the Gulf of Mexico with no running water, no air conditioning, and limited food and fresh water. Carnival’s inability to provide solutions for proper waste disposal for passengers and crew

Caribbean Incorporation The majority of cruises sail to the Caribbean and serve a primarily North American market, but not a single ship that cruises the Caribbean is Caribbean-owned—or US-owned, for that matter. Company headquarters are often on US soil, but most companies sidestep US incorporation and go off-

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Arrival by shuttle boat, Cayman Islands, 2007.

Fast food with Rosie the Riveter, Carnival Valor, 2007.

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Prisoners’ and slum dwellers’ view of La Romana, Dominican Republic, 2008.

Indian pictures on deck the Carnival Valor, 2007.

led news media to dub it the “poop cruise.” Carnival offered passengers a full refund in cash, $500, and credit toward another Carnival cruise. One passenger interviewed on the Today Show said of the crisis: “It was like post-natural disaster, but stuck on a boat.”9 A cruise operator like Carnival, with 25 Fun Ships in seven different classes (Fantasy, Triumph, Spirit, Conquest, Splendor, Dream, Sunshine, Vista) sailing to over 60 destinations, is no stranger to disaster on board. In fact, its 1972 inaugural voyage ran aground on a sandbar. And just one year prior to the Triumph disaster, the Costa Concordia (operated by Costa Crociere, a subsidiary of Carnival Corporation) capsized and sank off the coast of Italy, killing 32 passengers.

Jay Herring, former senior officer at Carnival and author of the book The Truth about Cruise Ships, says that safety during these catastrophes is of growing concern as ships become bigger and the number aboard increases.

He says that with more than 3,000 passengers, evacuation becomes a major problem: “Imagine you have this little bitty boat, bobbing up and down, and you’re trying to transfer passengers from a ship that’s essentially stationary, walking across a gangway. It’s just so dangerous.”10 The Costa Concordia wreck caused the cost of protection and indemnity insurance to skyrocket despite the fact that the captain was singlehandedly at fault for neglect.

The bigger the ship, the higher the risks. In January 2014, Royal Caribbean had to return its Explorer of the Seas to its port of origin in Cape Liberty, New Jersey, after an outbreak of norovirus symptoms—nearly 20 percent of its 3,000 passengers and 5 percent of its 1,100-person crew suffered

from extreme diarrhea and vomiting, setting the record for the highest number of passengers and crew sick onboard a vessel in recent history. Seasickness is no longer just from the seas; nowadays it comes from the ship itself.

The Terrorism of Tourism As massive cruise ships sail away from their old ports of call and lay course toward small, nearly uninhabited territories, the ratio between visiting and stable populations on shore shifts. In some isolated islands of the Caribbean, high season produces extreme spikes in population— Cockburn Town, in the Turks Islands, for example, quintuples during peak cruise season, with neither conflict nor negotiation. When boats undock, destination ports and leisure infrastructure are essentially abandoned.

Cruising in the Caribbean sometimes results in massive land vacancy, creating idle lands and unoccupied territories that remain unused by locals, melancholically waiting for the arrival of the next floating city to bring meaning and money with it.

Tourism is a global economic force, and the annual growth rate of the cruise industry—around 7 percent— shows remarkable stability.11 This statistic is a testament to the industry’s resiliency, despite recent global recessions.

According to the Cruise Line Association, in 1970, cruise ships worldwide carried about 500,000 passengers annually; 40 years later, that number reached over 20 million, a growth of nearly 4,000 percent. In spite of modest beginnings, the three companies that grew the industry have become the largest operators in the world. Norwegian began sailing

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economic albatrosses, en route to somewhere other than paradise.

in 1966, Royal Caribbean in 1968, and Carnival in 1972.

These three companies not only survived the advancement of the airline industry as prime examples of transnationalism; the maritime experience of programmed leisure, guaranteed happiness, and catered fun that they provide, it seems, is the perfect antidote for the point-to-point logistics of the aerial age.

But, in an industry nearly monopolized by three companies, competition for exotic destinations grows ever fiercer. The Caribbean and the Mediterranean comprise more than 60 percent of all cruise destinations, with the rest divided between Asia, South America, Alaska, and Australia.

During the winter months, two-thirds of cruises travel to the Caribbean. Although the cruise industry, and tourism more broadly, has been relatively successful, its success— calculated in passenger miles and smiles—comes with unknown injustices, where profits often come at the expense of destinations that continue to risk economic atrophy.

If tourism accounts for one of the biggest sectors of the world economy, and cruise tourism is its flagship industry, at what costs must tourism come in the future? And what role do North Americans—as the dominant cruisers—have?

The growing inequalities between cruise tourists and largely dispossessed local populations must be addressed, and cruise companies need to be held accountable.

In the foreseeable future, the rise of itineraries to Private Destinations™, and FUN© packages designed for 20 million happy passengers, may become hotly contested political issues. The increasingly large, floating fantasies cruising the warm waters of the Caribbean will potentially become

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Opening spread: Detail of a satellite image showing the Costa Concordia days after the luxury cruise ship ran aground in the Tuscan waters off Giglio, 2012.

Pages 14–15: Fun day at sea on the Carnival Valor, 2007.

Pages 20–21: Thomas Hirschhorn, Concordia, Concordia, Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2012.

Supersudaca is an architecture and urban research collective founded in 2001 in Rotterdam, and now based in South America and Europe. They use the workshop format with students from various universities worldwide to launch campaigns for projects that contain a highly political component including direct actions on public space, research on Caribbean tourism, experimental housing, rating agencies, and China’s influence in Latin America, among others.

This article is based on research funded by the Prince Claus Fund. With special thanks to Emily Waugh.

1 See Wendy Littlefield, “How a Cruise Ship Feeds 4,000,” The Atlantic (July 15, 2009), http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2009/07/how-a-cruise-ship-feeds-4-000/21299/2/.

2 Cruise Market Watch, “Financial Breakdown of Typical Cruiser” (2014), http://www.cruisemarketwatch.com/home/financial-breakdown-of-typical-cruiser/.

3 National Public Radio, “Royal Caribbean Provides Tourists, Relief to Haiti” (January 19, 2010).

4 Jim Walker, “Haiti to Charge Royal Caribbean Passengers $2 More to Visit Labadee,” Cruise Law News, August 19, 2014, http://www.cruiselawnews.com/2014/08/articles/caribbean-islands/haiti-tocharge-royal-caribbean-passengers-2-more-to-visit-labadee/.

5 Elizabeth Becker, “Destination Nowhere: The Dark Side of the Cruise Industry,” The Saturday Evening Post (November/December 2013), http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/17/healthand-family/travel/the-dark-side-of-the-cruise-ship-industry.html.

6 Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association, Cruise Industry Overview – 2014: State of the Cruise Industry (Pembroke Pines, FL: FCCA, 2014) 7 Mike Melia, “Caribbean Cruise Ships Dump Garbage at Sea,” Associated Press, March 1, 2009, http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Caribbean-cruise-ships-dump-garbage-at-sea-3169729.php.

8 See annex 4 and 5 from International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, http:// www.imo.org/About/Conventions/ListOfConventions/Pages/International-Convention-for-thePrevention-of-Pollution-from-Ships-(MARPOL).aspx.

9 Quoted in Monica Hesse, “Carnival Triumph Disaster: A Drama of Discomfort,” Washington Post, February 15, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/carnival-triumph-disaster-a-dramaof-discomfort/2013/02/15/021265f8-76e2-11e2-8f84-3e4b513b1a13_story.html.

10 Quoted in Scott Neuman, “As Cruise Industry Grows So Have Its Problems,” NPR, February 15, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2013/02/15/172108211/as-cruise-industry-grows-so-have-its-problems.

11 See Jean-Paul Rodrigue with Claude Comtois and Brian Slack, “Transportation, Economy and Society,” in The Geography of Transport Systems, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013); and Jean-Paul Rodrigue and Theo Notteboom, “The Geography of Cruises: Itineraries, not Destinations,” Applied Geography 38 (March 2013): 31–42.

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Backstroke

Luis Callejas

In 2008, while working on the competition for the aquatic center in Medellín, Colombia, I discovered a blog by Australian architect Marcus Trimble that evocatively described a line of consecutive coastal pools in Sydney, Australia. These oceanic pools, built between the early 1900s and World War II, and located amid spectacular coastal landscapes, became the pragmatic and poetic source of inspiration for my open-air aquatic center in a South American city located more than 250 miles from the sea.

While the pools in Medellín were hundreds of miles away from sharks and poisonous jellyfish, for us, the project faced a challenge of greater order: it was about generating an aquatic landscape, instrumentalizing the program demanded by a professional swimming facility. The competition brief asked for a compact building in which to host professional swimming competitions, synchronized swimming events, and two pools for training. However, Medellín is a tropical city where it is possible to perform open-air competitions yearround, without the need for a contained atmosphere.

We won the competition and our project was completed in 2010. One year later, I went to Australia on a pool-hunting tour in the company of Trimble, and we visited many of the oceanic pools that inspired our inland ocean project. The trip was as much about verifying my reading of the pools through Google Earth and Max Dupain’s photographs as it was about initiating a deeper investigation of ocean pools in order to cultivate techniques for projects to come.

The Sydney ocean pools were initially constructed as a way to domesticate a wild coast that posed too many risks and inconveniences to swimmers and surf lifeguards in training. They also constitute the first governmental attempt to carefully choreograph and control ocean swimming and public bathing, which at the beginning of the 20th century was still partially banned.

Many of these pools were initially segregated by gender, and their architecture was more about hiding naked bodies than protecting bathers from sharks and potent rips.

Some of these pools are carefully excavated to control the tide and influx of seawater, while others are simply demarcated with concrete walls to keep sharks and waves out of the way of lap swimmers. In the most precarious cases, the pools are outlined only by fences that create a minimal sense of enclosure and safety.

The “Icebergs Pool” might be the most architecturally explicit example. Built in 1929 as a facility that would allow local lifeguards to train in the winter months, its architecture highlights a third challenge beyond

public modesty and domesticating rough waters: defying weather.

When I saw the Sydney pools on Google Earth for the first time, I had the impression that it was possible to achieve different levels of domestication with a few geometric variations. It was different to look at these pools than to look at, for instance, Álvaro Siza’s pools in Leca da Palmeira. While Siza’s pools are masterpieces of landscape integration, making the most of a dramatic, rugged, coastal landscape, the pools in Australia focus on the domestication of a wild aquatic territory.

In Medellín, we wanted to replicate that experience of an inland ocean, of swimming in a protected territory surrounded by waters with completely undomesticated conditions. And while Siza’s pools were guidelines for the geometry, the anonymous Sydney pools (most of them delineated by engineers) gave us the principles for the geometric variations. Regardless of geographic location, these landscapes of domesticated coasts have proven to be much more than inspirational—they are the outermost pieces of architecture at the edge of an island continent. The Sydney ocean pools—bathrooms and dressing rooms included—are the architectural interface between the city and the ocean in a country and continent where anything that is not the coast is a hinterland. This is a situation that my projects attempt to replicate, though often with more complex programmatic demands. My images from that pool-hunting tour have ended in collages for projects that attempt to act as interfaces in geographies as distant as South America and Scandinavia.

Clockwise from top left: Bondi Icebergs Pool, Sydney, 2011.

Luis Callejas, Edgar Mazo, and Sebastian Mejia (Paisajes Emergentes), Medellín Aquatic Center, 2010.

Wylies Baths, Sydney, 2011.

Luis Callejas, Kunst Dokk, Baltic art park competition.

Luis Callejas is an architect and Lecturer in Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is the founder and director of lcla office, author of Pamphlet Architecture 33: Islands, Atolls (2013), and in 2013 was awarded the Architectural League of New York Prize for Young Architects.

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Camps, Corridors, and Clouds:

Inland Ways to the Ocean

Charlie Hailey 24

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Under the equatorial sun of early April 1995, the Kenyan government closed the coastal refugee camp Utange, where refugees fleeing Somalia’s civil war had arrived by boat four years earlier. Almost overnight, the camp had become Kenya’s largest. Buoyed by its proximity to the Indian Ocean and its direct line to Nairobi, Utange’s trade network—along with those of other coastal camps—competed with both established businesses and the region’s informal sector known as jua kali.

Swahili for “hot sun,” the term describes those working in the open without shade or infrastructure. Responding to this

unwanted market competition, as well as security concerns, the government repatriated some of Utange’s refugees but relocated most far inland to the rapidly growing camps of Dadaab. This relocation would come to typify the trauma of dislocation and the extreme hardships that remain in Dadaab today. The refugees would be left to find livelihoods away from both coast and economic corridor.

In this environment, clouds of information, rather than coastal and urban centers, would offer them prospects for connectivity.

Ethiopian and Somali refugees stand on the deck of the ship USS Pearl Harbor arriving from the Kenyan port of Mombasa, over a month after they were rescued at sea, 2010.

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In eastern Kenya, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) protects and assists more than 300,000 displaced Somalis at Dadaab, where an archipelago of five camps constitutes the world’s largest refugee settlement. Charged with fostering the growth of developing countries, it promotes overland trade corridors as “ways to the ocean” and, by extension, as paths to global economic well-being, like the roadways nearly 400 kilometers west of Dadaab. Away from coastlines, across borders, and consequently separated from livelihoods, physical displacement from home, rather than simply “disconnection” from an ocean-based global economy, typifies these refugee camps.

Camps like Dadaab move toward a triple interiority: geographically landlocked, politically adrift, and economically blockaded. In spite of these barriers, Dadaab’s logistics of aid—increasingly reliant on information and communications technology (ICT)—has leveraged distant data corridors to provide cloud access and enable digital interactivity, allowing it to become not just a surrogate state but an inland camp with its own inherent possibilities for livelihood.

While the High Commission struggles to connect other camps with inferior low-bandwidth information clouds, Dadaab has tapped into the system of high-speed data streams that move into ports through undersea cables.

Already relational and labile, already transnational, camps like Dadaab are poised to float on inland seas of data and communication.

Camps are not cities, but they point toward an urbanism of connectivity in spite of displacement and isolation.

Moreover, they cannot be viewed passively as mere symptoms of the times—Giorgio Agamben has warned of exceptions becoming the rule—but should be read actively as first warnings of emergency and beacons of possibility.1 Dadaab’s camps originated out of necessity—urgently needed shelter and assistance for thousands of Somali refugees in Kenya’s remote northeast. But this necessity, as with many refugee camps, is lodged between circumstances of control and autonomy—a host government restricting mobility, international agencies providing limited aid, and a population trying to make do within a camp now home to a generation that has only known camp life.

government maintained a transit camp near the city of Liboi to process arrivals, transferring refugees inland to Dadaab—53 miles from Somalia and 143 miles from the coast.

One year after opening, Dadaab’s first three camps were full. Population density has varied among the camps, but the densest, Dagahaley and Hagadera, are each equivalent to placing the Bronx in central Texas. Altogether, Dadaab’s camps cover the same area as Newark, New Jersey’s 41 square miles—with nearly twice the population— and combine for an average population density on par with San Francisco. Today, Dadaab constitutes Kenya’s third largest population center.

Dadaab’s five camps register the diverse morphologies and strategies of camp planning: Ifo’s hastily cleared, dust-laden site; Dagahaley’s skewed Roman castrum grid; Hagadera’s architect-designed layout (Swedish architect Per Iwansson planned the camp in May 1992); Ifo 2’s consolidation of self-settled zones in July 2011; and Kambioos’s ostensibly sustainable, more expansive grid built one month later.

These camps rest on land already set adrift by postcolonial politics, a situation that further exacerbates Dadaab’s geographic isolation. Otherwise ambivalent about the region’s infertile land and its nomadic Somali pastoralists, the Kenyan government retains emergency rules and extrajudicial powers set up by the British in the late 19th century, leaving most social structures intact but rigorously inhibiting mobility.

Corridors: Trade and Information Kenya’s population density makes it easy to identify the north-south trade corridor from Mombasa’s port through Nairobi on to Uganda. No such population corridors move parallel to the coast, and only fragments of moderate density float over the country’s least populated and most remote regions. Far to the east, close to the Somali border, Dadaab flashes with a density comparable to Nairobi’s core. From Dadaab, a line of moderate density funnels the short distance eastward toward Somalia.

Dadaab’s Dilemma The UNHCR’s Handbook for Emergencies states, “In emergencies, it is essential that regular situation reports reach the outside world.”2 The reference to an “outside” condition sets up the opposition of camp interior and world exterior. A recent report summarizes this schism as the “Dadaab dilemma,” in which the host country rejects the assimilation of refugees, who, in turn, resist voluntary repatriation. The study also posits that Dadaab “must be one of the most researched communities in the world,” suggesting that a profusion of data looks in on a situation.3 Dadaab, a complex of five camps named for the village it satellites, peaked at nearly half a million inhabitants in 2011, 20 years after Somalia’s civil war forced migration into the semi-arid landscape of Kenya’s North Eastern Province.

When the war created its first surge of refugees, the Kenyan

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A view over the parched land in Dadaab, 2011.

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Refugees gather at the market at Hagadera in Dadaab, 2011.

For both trade and aid, inland access has posed unique problems, particularly for developing countries and remote refugee camps. The 2013 report The Way to the Ocean advocates the establishment of corridors for landlocked developing countries to support global trade connections.

Focusing on East Africa, it emphasizes three main trade transit corridors, one of which is the Northern Corridor that runs from Mombasa through Uganda. This argument extends back at least as far as the UN General Assembly’s 1957 resolution on trade expansion for landlocked countries; but unimproved road infrastructure, port delays, and border crossings continue to inhibit time and cost reductions ideally provided by corridor systems. Additionally, hinterland economies—even with proposed “tiered nodes,” smaller-scale markets, and inland container depots— remain outside the corridor’s reach. Humanitarian aid is mentioned only as an interference, noting increased storage costs and transportation and supply issues.4 Other corridors carry information as well. Undersea cables circumnavigate Africa’s landmass and enter the continent at its primary ports. Maps of this infrastructural system recall 16th-century portolan charts that colonized a continent with navigational rhumb lines and toponymic scrawls. Cables offer higher bandwidth and less interference than satellite feeds, and, by some estimates, these lines now carry as much as 95 percent of international communications. Noting that ICT drives new economies,

Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki compared the system to the Northern Corridor’s railway line, and Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete called his port’s cables “the ultimate embodiment of modernity.”5 In spite of Africa’s growth, problems with demand aggregation—the pooling of customers for a particular service—have limited high-speed Internet access for those away from the corridor and outside population centers.

But aid no longer exclusively follows traditional corridors of air, ground, and sea; and a multi-agency project called DadaabNet has begun delivering high-speed, low-cost Internet access. DadaabNet’s cloud requisitions one small but significant link to this burgeoning conduit system.

Clouds: Protection, Exchange, and Durable Solutions In June 2006, a text message sent from within the camp arrived on the cell phone of a UN World Food Programme senior official: “My name is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”6 This text reversed the communication flow. It was coming from inside, and it did not follow the traditional corridors of relief—physical goods moving from donor to camp. Instead, Sokor’s text moved through a data cloud. Like camps, clouds are fleeting masses that combine mobility with agglomeration. Like refugee camps, data clouds lack complete systems

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of on-site infrastructure; they are also networks—relations of people and things—that rely on but also stimulate off-site infrastructure. Power defines interiors, but when communication moves inside out, through an enabling cloud, camps might become resources rather than products of aid.

Though cell phones are not as omnipresent in the camps as Sokor’s text might suggest, they are nonetheless tools for security, ranging from outgoing emergency calls that report violence, to incoming texts on the weather forecast.

Among the necessities at the camp, refugees rank cell phone connectivity on par with the provision of food, and cell phones have proven to be critical devices for refugees to trace relatives.

Also critical to camp life is the exchange of funds, and Kenya leads the world in so-called mobile money.

Designed initially as a system to microfinance loan repayments, M-Pesa—M is for “mobile” and pesa is Swahili for “money”—reduces transaction costs through cell phones for a demographic known as the “unbanked.”

Mobile money allows for remittances to flow into the camp.

Funds from Mogadishu, Nairobi, London, and New York move seamlessly across Dadaab’s protective thornbush walls. Within the camp, refugees enlist one of more than 20 M-Pesa agents for transactions that complement circulations of capital in Kenyan shilling notes and traditional exchanges like bartering within the camp. For those with cell phone access, M-Pesa is a work-around to traditional banking systems and provides a more flexible alternative to the fixed points of Western Union and other wire transfer outlets. This regional and transnational exchange allows for what anthropologist Michel Agier has called an “embryonic economy,” a system born with limited economic infrastructure.

In 2010, Dadaab’s camps brought economic benefits of $14 million into Kenya, and the annual trade activity for Dadaab’s three oldest camps is $25 million.7 In Hagadera, there are hairdressers, dressmakers, carpenters, mechanics, electricians, and cell phone repair shops; Dagahaley has electronics repair shops, tailors, bakeries, caterers, phone charging businesses, and cobblers; and Ifo is home to cyber cafés and bicycle repair shops. Though the older three camps hold the most diverse and established businesses, the two newest sites add services—Ifo 2 has more tailors, dressmakers, and joiners, and Kambioos has bakeries, tailors, and beauticians, along with weavers and more cell phone technicians. Pointing out that Mogadishu only has “two major mobile phone repair shops,” The Dadaab Dilemma suggested that the five camps might eventually— if repatriation occurs—help expand the services and training currently offered in Somalia.8 On March 31, 2014, seven years after Sokor’s text, the UNHCR sent a tweet from its inchoate Innovation department: “Not business as usual at UNHCR. How ‘the cloud’ is breaking the cycle of dependence among #refugees http://ow.ly/vdDFE @refugees.”9 When the agency tweets, it engages a mobile network that, as it turns out, many refugees in camps were already using. But the tweet was a significant

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event—if not simply in its recognition of what was already happening, then with its implications for aid.

For the refugee agency, the aid worker had to become the knowledge worker. With a focus on distance learning and refugee access to technology, particularly as a way to self-reliance and potential livelihood, ICT is at the core of this new office, making that tweet emblematic of the system by underscoring the idea that humanitarian aid now follows alternative corridors. The UNHCR realized ICT could provide a long-term way to organize aid and communicate with residents in protracted settlements—that, indeed, clouds might support the agency’s drive for “durable solutions.” At Dadaab, the program supports seven secondary school laboratories for community technology access, but this project could not have occurred without DadaabNet. DadaabNet: The Networked Camp In the summer of 2011, drought and continued conflict forced 1,000 refugees per day into Dadaab’s already overpopulated camps. Later that year, as the total population neared a half million, USAID invited NetHope, Cisco, and Inveneo to develop a more reliable Internet service and communications infrastructure for the interaction of Dadaab’s 17 aid agencies and NetHope’s consortium of 34 NGOs. The sheer scale and complex-ities of aid necessitated higher speeds, greater connectivity, and increased stability.

DadaabNet’s connectivity thus changes the relation between aid provider and refugee. Physical camp planning typically isolates agency headquarters from refugee settlements, while the networked camp makes room for collaborations and potential livelihoods.

The camp’s aggregated demand allowed Inveneo to partner with Telkom Kenya to introduce high-speed services by linking back—a process known as backhauling—from its Dadaab tower to the international fiber optic cable network. And broadband replaced the slow and often unreliable satellites originally deployed independently by each agency.

It was the nascent and patchy cloud system’s incapacity to handle the camp’s aid logistics that gained the camp access to the distant fiber corridors.

Eastern section of portolan-style world map showing the coasts of Africa, the Black Sea and Aegean regions, the Arabian peninsula, the Indian subcontinent, and eastern Asia, ca. 1552.

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In its March 2014 report, Inveneo projected that 100,000 youth in the camp would gain access to Internet-based training in the next two years, and the Norwegian Refugee Council offers online education programs at five centers within the camp.10 As the intranet expands, a wider area network can support distance learning, social networking, microfinancing, and entrepreneurial microwork projects. And in June 2014, more than 1,000 students completed the Norwegian council’s one-year program. Expanding on these successes, Dadaab camp should build on DadaabNet, and the network’s cloud infrastructure can be a foundation for improvements to the camp’s vulnerable built environment.

Inland camp is a mesh of people, things, and actions. In Bruno Latour’s terms, it recognizes the refugees amid things like cell phones, donkey carts, firewood, water jugs, goats, and thorn bushes as “entities that engender their space,” localizing the global to “provide more space” and to make room for a “possible collective.”12 In spite of their extreme hardship, Dadaab’s camps are specific places from which people now originate and which hold the connections made among people and things. Even before DadaabNet, refugees had already begun the process of locating inland spaces with informal economies and networks of transnational social ties. And, not ironically, in another transmission document, albeit one 18 years earlier in 1996, the UNHCR noted that Somali refugees carried out a practice known as “following the cloud,” a nomadic pastoralism of moving according to changes in climate, unfettered by borders and unchallenged by dangerous coasts, following both rain and opportunity.

With movement restricted by displacement, another cloud might offer a degree of relief. People seek livelihoods, and with access, even by degrees, even away from coast and corridor, people will seek to improve those livelihoods.

Inland Camp: External Relations “Inland” is a multivalent term: Geographically, it is a landlocked condition, a movement toward a mainland’s interior, often away from the sea. Politically, it implies distance from borders and urban centers. Socioeconomically, it describes an infield condition, denoting power consolidated and internalized from fields and systems. It is this third situation—within the aforementioned triple interiority of geography, politics, and economics—that allows refugee camps to counter the isolation and interiority of the other two. Based on porosities of legal and administrative edges, and workarounds of its informal economies, inland is the possibility for the refugee camp to leverage the external systems that originally defined its interiority. Based on the logistics of connectivity—linking network cloud and telecommunications corridor—it finds alternative flows of capital, information, and communication in spite of isolation and interiority.

The inland camp is a place derived from conditions that lead to what has been called a “surrogate state.” Even if the camp is kept out of the nation and apart from jurisdiction, it is already transnational in terms of mobile money and Internet connectivity. It demonstrates the difference that economist Paul Collier identifies between being landlocked and being e-locked. Inland camp marks the possibility of external relations with the global interiors of capital and hard infrastructure. Without prospects for the latter, the camp is an imperfect model that must exploit this distance through soft infrastructure.

Inland camp is a workaround within a system that remains unfixed. Economically, the densely populated camp fits into a demand aggregation model. But ultimately it is also a social network with desires for agency and selfreliance. Now, seven years after Collier’s analysis, the inland surrogate state of Dadaab’s camps does not refute his argument but broadens the instruments by which landlocked nations might engage global markets. The UNHCR’s expansion of aid to include technological innovation for self-reliance and livelihoods, and DadaabNet’s localization of previously inaccessible telecommunications infrastructure, redefine what Collier calls the “lifelines for the landlocked,” which now rely neither exclusively on good neighbors nor on ways to the ocean, but on clouds of information and access.11

Cold Meets Wet

Room of the Sleeping Fish, National Engineering Research Center for Agricultural Products Logistics, Jinan, 2014.

Opening spread: Bird’s-eye view of Ifo 2 camp with original Ifo camp in background, 2011.

Charlie Hailey is Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Florida, and author of Spoil Island: Reading the Makeshift Archipelago (2013) and Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space (2009), among other books.

The author thanks Kimberly Nofal for her research assistance.

1 See, in particular, Agamben’s Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Cesare Casarino and Vincenzo Binetti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). See also Charlie Hailey, Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009) and Campsite: Architectures of Duration and Place (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2008).

2 UNHCR, Handbook for Emergencies, 3rd ed. (Geneva, 2007), 134.

3 Christine Kamau and John Fox, The Dadaab Dilemma: A Study on Livelihood Activities and Opportunities for Dadaab Refugees (Nairobi: Intermedia Development Consultants, 2013), iv, 1.

4 UNCTAD, The Way to the Ocean (New York: United Nations, 2013), 5, 17, 26.

5 Quoted in Zuwena Shame, “JK: New Telekom Era Is Here,” IPP Media, July 24, 2009, http://www. ippmedia.com/frontend/index.php?l=5095.

6 See the press release from WFP, “An SOS Phone Text from a Disaster Zone,” June 21, 2006, http:// www.wfp.org/stories/sos-phone-text-disaster-zone.

7 B. Hansen Enghoff et al., “In Search of Protection and Livelihoods: Socio-Economic and Environmental Impacts of Dadaab Refugee Camps on Host Communities” (Report for the Royal Danish Embassy, the Republic of Kenya and the Norwegian Embassy, 2010), 43, 75.

8 Kamau and Fox, The Dadaab Dilemma, 23, 40.

9 Tweet sent from @UNHCRinnovation, March 31, 2014, https://twitter.com/UNHCRInnovation.

10 DadaabNet Project Report, March 2014, http://www.cisco.com/assets/csr/pdf/Dadaab_Project_ Report.pdf. Internet access fees have also decreased: bandwidth prices went from 260 Kenyan shillings (approximately $3) per megabyte in November 2013 to 190 shillings ($2) per megabyte in early 2014.

11 Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 179.

12 Bruno Latour, “Spheres and Networks: Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization,” Harvard Design Magazine 30 (Spring/Summer 2009): 141, 142.

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Nicola Twilley is the author of the blog Edible Geography and cofounder of the Foodprint Project. With the Center for Land Use Interpretation, she recently curated an exhibition exploring North America’s spaces of artificial refrigeration and is currently writing a book on the same topic.

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Nicola Twilley

The freshness of fish is the most fragile freshness of all. Indeed, for much of human history, the inland consumption of fresh seafood has been a logistical impossibility.

Within the past century, however, two distinct design approaches to the construction of a bridge between sea and city have emerged: one cold, the other wet.

In the United States, Clarence Birdseye’s invention of a commercial quick-freezing technique in the 1920s, along with a piece of pork-barrel politics on the part of Massachusetts state senators, resulted in the creation of a national network of temperature-controlled channels. For the first time, an Atlantic cod or Pacific salmon could migrate across the continent; the ocean’s bounty could systematically be sucked through the cold chain to emerge in fish-stick form on the plates of landlocked Americans.

In Chinese cuisine, however, a fish is not fresh unless it’s alive. Here, the ocean must literally be brought to the city. At the edges of the country’s wet markets, flatbed trucks hold stacked salt water-filled polystyrene cubes connected through a tangle of tubes to a tank of liquid oxygen that provides continuous aeration. Starved for 48 hours to prevent the build-up of ammoniac wastes, fish travel in a small, simulated sea that is chilled and laced with anesthetics to slow their metabolisms.

Though expensive, messy, and only moderately successful, this mobile ocean routinely supplies Walmart outlets in central China with enough live fish to fill their walls of scoopyour-own tanks.

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In Jinan, the unremarkable capital of Shandong province, I recently witnessed the most miraculous advance in the architecture of fish preservation. On the third floor of a university building, tucked between the TimeTemperature-Tolerance Lab and the Small-Size Instruments Room, is the Room of the Sleeping Fish. In it, a bespectacled scientist in a white coat described, in a whisper, how he uses refrigeration like a lullaby, to send fish to sleep.

Four rows of five fish-filled blue plastic barrels stood covered in green netting and hooked up to a system of chilled, brine-pumping pipes that, he explained, very gradually, over 24 hours, cool the water in each barrel to just above freezing.

Lifting a corner of one barrel’s netting, I looked down on a lone flat, gray turbot. It lay unblinking and motionless but for a slow and hypnotic rotation around the bottom of the barrel with the flow of the chilled water. The scientist reached in with a small net, deftly scooped the sleeping fish out of the barrel, rolled its sides together gently, and slid it, still dreaming, into a clear plastic poster tube.

Kept cool, and flushed with oxygen, the fish can then travel in suspended animation for 72 hours. When it reaches its destination, the fish can be reanimated by simply dropping it back into water—a rude awakening that it seems to shake off with a few vigorous fin flutters.

“Completely fresh!” added the scientist, his face glowing with pride. “We invented this method here.” The cold and the wet are thus combined, bringing the living ocean to the city in the architecture of a dream.

The Smell of Money:

Fishmeal on the Periphery of the Global Food Economy

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The Minister of Fisheries, General Javier Tantaleán Vanini, depicted as a giant fish who swallowed the industry whole, uttering, “There was no other way.” Caretas, no. 477 (May–June 1973).

Chimbote, a fishing port on Peru’s arid northern coast, has earned an unfortunate reputation for its smell.

“Entering the city is rather like putting your head inside a rotting fish,” warned an online travel guide in 2009, cautioning travelers to stay away.1 Visitors and residents of its mostly working-class neighborhoods must contend with the thick odor of fishmeal, a powder of concentrated proteins used in specially formulated feeds for farmed fish, poultry, and swine. Chimbote was at the epicenter of the fishmeal boom that took hold of Peru and Chile after World War II. Its location on the Ferrol Bay, one of the

few protected harbors on the Peruvian coast, allowed convenient access for vessels harvesting the dense shoals that flourished in the bay and beyond. With global commodity markets hungry for fish proteins and a rapidly expanding fleet eager to net them, boomtown Chimbote ushered in an era of frenzied growth in the 1950s and 1960s, as tens of thousands of migrants arrived in search of work, settling in barriadas (slums) they built around the plants on the outskirts of the urban core. Fishmeal transformed the city into a site of wrenching social and environmental change that would fundamentally shape its urban character.

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Chimbote, 2009.

The fate of this beleaguered city is linked both to the highprotein diets of distant consumers, human and animal alike, and to the dynamic marine ecosystem off its coast.

Along the western edge of the South American continent flows a great river within the vast ocean, carrying cold water northward from the Antarctic as it collides with the nutrient-rich upwelling from the deep offshore trench.

Nineteenth-century European scientists named it the Humboldt Current for the indefatigable Prussian naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, who observed the phenomenon during his famed voyage to the New World between 1799 and 1804. The Humboldt Current, which forms the world’s most biologically productive marine ecosystem, has been as significant for oceanography as the tiny anchoveta (Engraulis ringens), its most important species, later became for the global food industry. Ancient Peruvian civilizations relied upon its resources, depicting fishes in the iconography that adorned their ceramics and architectural monuments.

Visitors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries marveled at the sight of immense schools of silvery fish leaping into the air as myriad marine creatures—sea birds, sea lions, and bonitos—feasted upon them. Within the Ferrol Bay, anchoveta were once so abundant that boats had little need to sail outside it to fill their holds. Today these waters are

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a dead zone, and the seafloor is coated with a thick sludge of industrial effluents from fishery and steel production.

In many ways, Chimbote’s trajectory reflects the worldwide expansion of fisheries in previously untapped oceanic regions in the second half of the 20th century. As mechanization rapidly increased the harvesting capacity of fleets, onshore plants and offshore factory ships scrambled to process and market the fish caught. When Peru and Chile began producing fishmeal, large-scale fishing, with the exception of a handful of tuna canneries and the occasional incursion of foreign tuna fleets off the coast, was practically nonexistent in the region. Demand for the commodity in the Global North had steadily risen since the late 19th century, when agriculturalists, who initially used it as fertilizer, discovered the utility of adding it to feeds for captive animals. Nutrition scientists referred to the “unidentified growth factor” that only fishmeal could provide. In the era of the “designer chicken,” fishmeal became central to the technology of poultry production: it helped the young to grow more quickly, boosting their immunity to disease and decreasing time to market.2 Germany, which later became the top importer of Peruvian fishmeal, was the first nation to use it on a large scale in animal feeds, made mostly from herring harvested by Norwegian fishers in the North Sea.

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The Rise and Fall of the “Peruvian Pittsburgh” From an industrialist’s point of view, Chimbote in the mid-20th century was ideally suited to fishmeal production.

Situated at the northern end of the Ferrol Bay about 262 miles north of Lima, surrounded by wetlands in a rainless coastal desert, the town had long been the object of imperial designs. In 1871, US-born industrialist Henry Meiggs began construction on a railroad that would connect the Ferrol Bay to the Huaylas Valley coal mines in the Andes.

Meiggs built a company town with tidy wooden houses to replace the traditional reed huts. A few years later, the United States sought to establish a Navy port there, but the two governments failed to reach an agreement. Others saw the sleepy hamlet as a future beach destination for elite tourists from Lima. But by the early 1940s, still with barely 4,000 residents, Chimbote became a focal point of government plans to develop the domestic iron, steel, and coal industries. International experts arrived to assess and advise the city’s development. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, US engineers drained the socalled malaria swamps around the city center. In 1943, the state-run Corporación Peruana del Santa began building a hydroelectric plant on the Santa River, which empties into the Pacific just north of Chimbote, and prepared to construct a steel mill on the coast (both opened in 1958).

In 1947, the Peruvian government hired modernist architects Josep Lluís Sert and Paul Lester Wiener to design a masterplan for the city’s expansion. Concerned with what they viewed as the growing degeneration of urban life, their “Chimbote Project” envisaged a cityscape that featured a civic center overlooking the bay, neighborhood units for different income groups, a green belt separating the residential and industrial zones, and an experimental forestry and garden station. Although the Peruvian Ministry of Public Works approved the pilot plan, the program was abandoned for reasons unexplained in the historical record.3 Contrary to the architects’ vision of ordered, green development in this desert city, Chimbote quickly transformed into a haphazard “Peruvian Pittsburgh,” defined by its smoky haze and masses of struggling workers.4 But fishing, not steel, became the core of Chimbote’s urban ecology. In the early 1960s, the registered tonnage of the city’s industrial fishing fleet increased 39 times in six years, while the installed capacity of processing plants multiplied by 19. Migrants poured in from the highlands, living in informal settlements lacking water and sewerage.

The 1961 census counted an urban population of 58,990, far surpassing the Chimbote Project’s estimated 40,000.5 Renowned Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas lived in Chimbote during the boom and set his last, unfinished novel amid the chaos. In it he described scenes from a dystopian reality: “The stench of the sea displaced the reek of the smoke from the boilers in which millions of anchovies were coming apart, melting, exhaling that rather foodlike odor as they were boiling and sweating oil. […] And the smell of the water that gushed out of the factories onto the beach made jellylike worms rise out of the sand.”6 Officials in Lima had banned fishmeal production in the early 1960s in

Josep Lluís Sert and Paul Lester Wiener, sketch for the masterplan of Chimbote, 1948.

The United States produced fishmeal using sardines from the Pacific coast and menhaden from the Atlantic and Gulf regions, primarily to supply domestic poultry and hog farms.

But heavy fishing pressure and shifting ocean conditions off California led to the collapse of sardine stocks in the 1940s, and poultry production in the southeastern United States and Northern Europe ballooned after World War II, creating unprecedented demand for the commodity. In the 1960s, herring populations across the Atlantic also experienced severe declines. With producers and brokers struggling to meet the needs of modernizing industrial farms, the opening of the Humboldt Current fisheries came at an ideal moment.

Fishmeal made from the Peruvian anchoveta was unparalleled in both quantity and quality. The sheer abundance of the species off the country’s North Coast gave the region a competitive advantage in the global marketplace, dramatically tipping the balance of trade away from traditional Northern European and US producers after 1960. Peruvian fishmeal production far eclipsed that of Chile, where anchoveta were fewer, and where other fishmeal sources—sardines, pilchards, and mackerel—were not populous enough to sustain a boom on the magnitude of that which occurred in northern Peru. New fishing technologies such as sonar and nylon nets facilitated the detection and harvest of entire schools at once, while second-hand boats and processing equipment imported from the defunct California sardine industry made it cheap for entrepreneurs to enter the business. A rapid increase in global demand, a surplus of used machinery, and seemingly limitless quantities of marine proteins transformed the Humboldt Current—with Chimbote at its center—into the newest hinterland of the global food industry.

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response to a flurry of complaints over the rancid odors the processing plants released, a move that gave further impulse to the industrial expansion in Chimbote.7 In 1970, a major earthquake off the coast of Chimbote devastated the region’s highlands, propelling a new wave of refugees to come to the city at the peak of the fishmeal boom. David F. Belnap, the Los Angeles Times Latin American correspondent, visited in 1971 and wrote about the “stinking city,” but to residents who made their living from the industry, fishmeal meant unequivocally “the smell of money.”8 The golden age of the first Peruvian fishmeal boom was short-lived. Government leaders were reluctant to limit harvests and ineffective at enforcing the few regulations that were in place, while policy changes produced clashes among local fishermen’s unions, political leaders, and industrialists. In 1971, the Peruvian anchoveta catch reached an all-time high, but on New Year’s Day in 1972, the mysterious murder of Luis Banchero Rossi, the industry’s most prominent magnate, seemed to presage the catastrophe that would devastate the entire industry.

Following more than a decade of heavy fishing, overharvest during the spawning season coincided with the warming of coastal waters associated with El Niño, and the anchoveta populations collapsed. The ensuing crisis swept the domestic economy, paralyzing the fishing fleet and processing plants, and leaving workers without their source of livelihood.

The Peruvian military regime of General Juan Velasco Alvarado responded by nationalizing the fishmeal industry in 1973, creating a huge bureaucracy of approximately 27,000 employees. Global commodity markets reeled as supplies of fishmeal plummeted, driving up prices of eggs, meat, and soymeal, a competing high-protein commodity.

The crisis effectively ended Chimbote’s heyday as the fishmeal capital of the world, but the story of industrial fisheries in the Humboldt Current marine ecosystem did not end there. In contrast to the single-species Peruvian anchoveta fishery, vessels and fishermen in Chile often moved among different coastal eco-zones, and industrialists harvested sardines, pilchards, and mackerel for fishmeal production. Prior to a 1991 law that linked fishing quotas to administrative zones, Chilean fishermen and vessels could adjust to oceanographic shifts by moving to new marine regions within the same national territory. Some northern industrialists fished in the cooler southern waters or relocated their plants there after exhausting local stocks. In the late 1970s a sudden abundance of mackerel off the south-central coast near Talcahuano fueled a new boom in fishmeal production, while the Peruvian industry still languished from the anchoveta collapse. In both Chimbote and Talcahuano, the fishmeal industry attracted scores of newcomers who lived and labored in precarious conditions in order to produce concentrated fish proteins for export. The shifting tides of the marine ecosystem, human migration, and international trade flows thus created several “stinking cities” along the Peru-Chile coast.

Ocean fisheries demand that scholars reconceptualize scale, both temporal and geographical, in the history of environmental change. As a site irreversibly transformed

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Fishermen pull a basket filled with anchovies aboard a fishing boat off the coast of Chimbote, 2012.

by the development of the fishmeal industry, Chimbote cannot be understood apart from global processes. El Niño’s dramatic arrival in 1972 highlighted the dependence of the post-World War II global food economy on distant oceanic regions and their little-known ecologies. For nearly two decades, Chimbote struggled to recover from ecological and economic ruin: in 1978, one study reported that 90 percent of the population lived in slums, and 75 percent of those residents lacked water and sewerage services. In the absence of the anchoveta, a sudden increase in sardine populations fueled hopes for a renewed canning industry, but El Niño once again imperiled the fisheries in 1982. In the Humboldt Current, climate oscillations regularly cause shifts in the marine ecosystem at multiple time scales—from seasonal to interdecadal—thereby changing the temperature, intensity, and direction of the upwelling, and directly shaping the density and distribution of fish schools. The dynamism of this system requires flexibility in regulatory institutions and policies: new bio-economic models couple the ecological and economic dynamics of fishmeal and oil production to account for the unpredictable shaping forces of El Niño at the global economic scale. Peruvian anchoveta stocks—and Chimbote’s downsized industry—recovered during the 1990s, and the city once again became the principal fishing port of Peru.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the anchoveta remains the “most heavily exploited fish in world history.”9 In the late 20th century, the intensification of aquaculture (fish farming) created a new source of demand for fishmeal and oil that surpassed that of poultry and swine producers, and the flow of concentrated fish proteins shifted away from the United States and Europe toward fish farms in East Asia, Scandinavia, and Chile. With the world’s fishmeal supplies highly vulnerable to oceanic fluctuations in the Southeast Pacific, researchers continue to search for alternative high-protein feedstuffs (made from insects or rapeseed, for example). But these products have yet to efficiently replicate the composition of proteins and nutrients found in anchoveta and similar species.

Chimbote is emblematic of the far-reaching, and perhaps unexpected, impacts of the technology of global food production. The manufacture and export of

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Chimbote harbor, date unknown.

resources from commercial development. The Norwegian press recently published an exposé blaming Chimbote’s fishmeal producers for the languishing state of the urban environment and its negative impact on public health, pressuring government and industry to decisively address the pollution problem. A two-year plan for 2014–15 aims to reduce and monitor emissions, and to measure the social impact of the bio-ecological recovery of the Ferrol Bay. This 21st-century reality is far from the ordered city that Sert and Wiener imagined 60 years ago, where workers would find respite in neat green spaces that were to balance the urban-industrial aesthetic. But as leaders commit to replenishing the environmental and social health of industrial cities, Chimbote residents can begin to dream of more fragrant horizons.

fishmeal and oil constitutes a long-distance transfer of energy between animal and human food systems. But the environmental costs of converting feeds to flesh at a large scale are seldom considered in the equation of livestock production. As a result, fishmeal-producing regions must cope with compromised marine ecosystems and the notorious “smell of money,” an outcome of noxious liquid and gas emissions. In the early 21st century, abandoned industrial infrastructure punctuated Chimbote’s dilapidated downtown beachfront, and residents continued to inhale the odors and particulate matter—suspected causes of high rates of respiratory illness—that permeate the poorly sealed buildings of many of its neighborhoods.

Yet the city’s fate is far from sealed. Heirs to a strong tradition of labor unionism, chimbotanos have taken to the streets to demand industry regulations. Peruvian policymakers have imposed quotas to protect anchoveta stocks, dramatically shortening the production season.

Fishmeal plant emissions declined during the 1990s as firms updated their equipment and the industry consolidated during the process of reprivatization under President Alberto Fujimori, and most have moved away from the urban core to a new industrial zone. In 2002, the Peruvian government created a commission to study possibilities for the ecological rehabilitation of the Ferrol Bay. The following year, Chimbote native María Elena Foronda Farro won the Goldman Environmental Prize, gaining international recognition for her community advocacy work as cofounder of the NGO Natura. Peru created the Ministry of Environment in 2008, signaling a renewed commitment to address environmental concerns, although a new law curtails the agency’s ability to protect natural

Opening spread: Detail from Josep Lluís Sert and Paul Lester Wiener, sketch for the masterplan of Chimbote, 1948.

Pages 36–37: Chimbote, 1929.

Kristin Wintersteen is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Houston.

She is currently completing her book Protein from the Sea: The Global Rise of Fishmeal and the Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem, exploring the relationship between oceanic fluctuations and the boom-and-bust cycles of industrial fishing along the South American Pacific Coast.

“North Coast: Chimbote,” Peru Guide (Llama Travel), http://www.peru-guide.com/peru_06_The_ North_Coast_050_Chimbote.htm (site discontinued).

2 William Boyd, “Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production,” Technology and Culture 42, no. 4 (2001): 631–64.

3 Town Planning Associates, the Josep Lluís Sert Collection, folders SA328 (1945) and B075T (1948), Frances Loeb Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

4 E. J. Clearly, “Chimbote: El Pittsburgh Peruano en Potencia,” Boletín de la Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros 3, no. 17 (1944): 3–27.

5 Ancash, Peruvian National Census, vol. II (Lima: INE, 1961), 6.

6 José María Arguedas, The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below, trans. Frances Horning Barraclough (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 43.

7 See Nathan Clarke, “Traces on the Peruvian Shore: The Environmental History of the Fishmeal Boom in Chimbote, Peru, 1940–1980” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009).

8 David F. Belnap, “‘Stinking City’ Center of Key Peru Industry,” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1971, A8.

9 FAO, “Species Fact Sheets: Engraulis Ringens,” FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, http://www.fao.org/fishery/species/2917/en.

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Why Fight Them When We Can Eat Them? well-intentioned gifts. Killer bees are believed to have escaped from Brazil after being imported to increase honey production. Their migration led them through the rest of South America, through Central America, and as far north as Canada. The Russian zebra mussel, now pervasive throughout Europe and the United Kingdom, is rumored to have been transported to North America in the late 1980s through the ballast water of ships traveling through the St. Lawrence Seaway, linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes.

They are the probable source of avian botulism that has subsequently poisoned tens of thousands of birds in the Great Lakes region. The water hyacinth is alleged to have been brought by the Japanese to North America as a gift to visitors of the World Cotton Centennial in 1884, but almost immediately began disrupting lakes, rivers, and ponds. Its presence inspired the Hippo Bill of 1910, which called for the importation of hippos from Africa to control the hyacinth’s invasion and as an alternative meat market in America; it lost by a single vote.

As a chef and impassioned fisher, I see invasive species like us, as migrants. My view is an unclassical one. Wherever they come from, they are a vast untapped resource

Traditionally, sushi is a method of preparing fish based on what is regionally available and fresh.

Until recently, it would have been inconceivable to use fish from anywhere beyond our backyards to make sushi. But refrigeration, the cold chain, and global transport have changed everything.

There are great benefits to using sustainably produced, fresh, local fish. When fish are imported from far away, many of those benefits are negated by the high economic and environmental costs of transportation.

Bycatch, or the process of unintentionally catching fish and other marine life, is a global concern, contributing to declining fisheries and increased mortality rates. It is often through bycatch that invasive species are discovered; these species prey on the native population upon which local industries and local ecosystems depend. Our greatest challenge today is to avoid importation by transforming locally available ingredients into delicious, regionally specific cuisine. Invasive species like Russian zebra mussels, Asian carp, or African killer bees are part of that new cosmopolitan and culinary culture.

Myths and legends explain the introduction of invasives through accidental release, escape by neglect, inadvertent transport, or

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aphrodisiac. The first time I ate this fish, its scrotum-like squirts were arranged as if a sunflower in the middle of a bright orange plate. As I bit into a sack, it burst with salty, viscous, warm liquid. Though I couldn’t see the liquid, I could taste that its color was yellow like phlegm; it took all of my will power to keep it in my mouth and a bit more effort to swallow it.

What if we could learn to enjoy these predators, instead of spending millions of dollars fighting them?

Approaching food without judgment, prejudice, or expectation is essential.

They are gifts to humankind; our palate is simply underdeveloped.

The next time I tried sea squirt, I scraped one off of a pier and sliced open its tough outer membrane to reveal a soft, mango-like orange flesh.

With barely a pause, I slurped it into my mouth. This time it was good.

for food with an underdeveloped market. Just because there isn’t an existing economy for these species doesn’t mean they can’t be delicious.

A taste for exotics has the potential to curb the dominance of invasive species in our ecosystem. It provides the seafood industry with a greater supply of native seafood and reduces the stresses on populations already being fished.

Contrarian thinker and designer Buckminster Fuller once recommended that we should “dare to be naive.” I believe that this is the only way to truly accept new ways of doing things, including eating. If “a man’s palate can, in time, become accustomed to anything,” as Napoleon once said, then we can also believe Pliny who claimed that “of the whole realm of Nature the sea is in many ways the most harmful to the stomach, with its great variety of dishes and tasty fish.”

As climates change and water levels fluctuate, we need to adjust our expectations for viable food sources.

Invasive species may provide a way forward. Asian stalked tunicate, also known by its appetizing name, “sea squirt,” has taken over what used to be blue mussel habitat from Maine to New Jersey. Indigenous to the Philippines, the sea squirt is considered a fouling organism and a pest by the shellfishing industry.

In Korea, however, it is consumed as a delicacy and thought of as an

Page 42: Invasive wakame, invasive common periwinkles, invasive European green crabs, and invasive Asian shore crabs (seasoned and oven crisped until their shells are brittle enough to eat), all shaped like a mammalian heart; prepared by Bun Lai. Bun Lai is the James Beard Award-nominated chef of Miya’s Sushi, the first sustainable sushi restaurant in the world, founded in 1982 by his nutritionist/environmentalist mother in New Haven, Connecticut. Currently, he is living in a chikee while learning traditional fishing, hunting, and ethnobotany from members of the Miccosukee tribe of the Everglades.

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Absolut Vodka, United Kingdom, 1986. Agency: TBWA.

Johnson’s Baby Oil, USA, 1960s.

Yamaha Marine, Italy, 2013. Agency: BBDO.

Rolex (Submariner), United Kingdom, 1968. Agency: JWT.

United States Navy, USA, 2010. Agency: Lowe Campbell Ewald.

FedEx, Brazil, 2010. Agency: BBDO.

Dolce & Gabbana (Sicilian Folk Collection), United Kingdom, 2013.

Sony (Micro-TV), from Esquire, USA, 1963.

Corona, USA, 2012. Agency: Cramer-Krasselt.

Hermès (Oxer bag), United Kingdom, 2014.

Tide, USA, 1957. Agency: Benton & Bowles.

Ballast Water

Ballast water being pumped from the Eagle Boston into New York Harbor, 2010.

Rose George is a journalist and author. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Scientific American, and many other publications. She is the author of Deep Sea and Foreign Going (2013), Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, Food on Your Plate (2013), and The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters (2008).

Davidoff (Cool Water), United Kingdom, 2002. Agency: Peter Schmidt Group.

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Rose George

In 1991, a cargo ship arrived in Peru. As is customary, the ship probably flew a yellow flag to signify that there was no disease on board and to request “free pratique,” or entry into port. But the ship would not have been required to declare what was in its ballast water, which may have been Vibrio cholerae; more precisely, Vibrio cholerae O1 biotype El Tor serotype Inaba, a strain usually found in Asia. By the time Peru’s resulting cholera epidemic concluded two years later, about 14 million people across Latin America had been infected, 3,500 had died, and the country had spent $1 billion containing the disease. The cause of the cholera has never been proven, but the most plausible assumption is that a ship’s ballast water was the vector.

Balancing a ship is a precise skill. All ships can sink and ballast water is a crucial defense against that universal truth of the sea. If a ship is mostly empty of cargo, filling compartments around the hull with water helps keep it stable.

Every year, the world’s 100,000 or so freighters use 10 billion tons of ballast water, taken from the sea. Because species and bacteria are sucked up with the seawater, 7,000 alien invasive species are also imported every hour. These organisms compete with native species, disrupt local habitat, or have damaging or pathogenic effects. Though most of these traveling fish larvae, crustaceans, invertebrates, algae, and microorganisms won’t survive the trip, some do, such as the zebra mussels that have infected 40 percent of the Great Lakes or the Chinese mitten crab, a dreadful burrower that has eroded river systems in Europe and North America.

There is red tide algae, which can multiply to form visible and alarming blooms; or the round

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goby, a highly adaptable and invasive fish that, once liberated from its usual predators, breeds rapidly and threatens commercially important fish species by preying on their young and eggs.

Ninety percent of world trade travels by ship, and analysts predict that the industry will grow annually by at least 2 percent in years to come. The International Maritime Organization (IMO), responsible for mandating technical guidelines for the maritime world, issued the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments in 2004, requiring ships to install on-board ballast water treatment. Like all IMO conventions, it has to be ratified by 30 states, or 35 percent of world tonnage, before it comes into force. It’s now at 30.25 percent.

Panama, the largest ship registry in the world, hasn’t ratified it. Shipping insiders say that the convention lacks approved ballast water management systems and inadequate testing standards, so flag states are holding back. And after a severe industry recession, the costs of installing the systems are unpalatable to many ship owners and operators. Even so, enough states have promised to ratify the convention this year that the mobility and fluidity of those alien invasive stowaways may finally be checked.

Moving Ships Over Mountains:

From the Conquest of Nature to Political Ecology at the Panama Canal

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Fitzcarraldo—who had organized a failed trans-Andean railroad venture and started an ice business in the jungle— personifies the madness and genius of extractive capitalism.

To move his 320-ton, three-story vessel to the rubber, he locates the point where the inaccessible river system comes closest to a navigable river. He then employs hundreds of indigenous people who, with the help of an array of pulleys and ropes, drag the ship over the ridge separating the rivers.

Fitzcarraldo’s project encapsulates the long history of transportation engineering conceptualized as the conquest of nature. Never mind that Herzog’s fictional protagonist was based on a real 19th-century Peruvian rubber baron named Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald (who had a steamship disassembled and carried between river basins). As modern myth, his ambitions echo those of generations of colonists, capitalists, and engineers who dreamed of linking bodies of water via overland routes.

The construction of the Panama Canal (1904–14) was the iconic Fitzcarraldian project of its era. Famously described as “the greatest liberty Man has ever taken with Nature,”1 the lock canal was designed to lift ships up and over an isthmian mountain range, thereby connecting the Atlantic and Pacific by water—an astonishing technical feat.

Its opening was presented as irrefutable evidence of the world-making power of engineering and an index of modern humans’ increasing liberation from geography.

Despite the canal’s status as a symbol of the historical human triumph over nature, today it demands constant large-scale environmental initiatives—dredging sediment, controlling invasive water plants, and managing land use— to function as designed. From this perspective, the history of the Panama Canal should be understood as the ongoing production of a regional environment conducive to transit, rather than as a century-old conquest. This history illustrates that by reorganizing land and water, infrastructures have the power to alter how and whom environments serve, giving rise to ecological distribution conflicts.

Film still from Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, 1982.

Picture this: a hulking white ship moving up a forested slope. Surrounded by undulating green mountains, the boat sits far from open water. The image is arresting not only because such a vessel seems out of place in the continental interior, but because the juxtaposition of ship and mountain in the same frame distills the modern ambition to overcome physical geography in the name of fluid communication and exchange.

The Canal Builders In the early 20th century, public confidence in engineers’ capacity to remake the earth’s surface seemed boundless.

Canals were seen as conduits for both profit and progress.

For example, a 1908 article in Panama’s Star and Herald newspaper rapturously described a proposal to build a 1,000-mile-long waterway across Russia, linking the Baltic Sea and Black Sea. The canal, the author claimed, would “dwarf” the interoceanic canal completed at Suez in 1869, and the one then under construction in Panama. Reflecting the era’s optimism—and hubris—the author concluded: Another wonderful canal scheme which is being enthusiastically taken up in Italy, contemplates nothing less than the joining by this means of Genoa and Lake Constance. To do this it will be necessary, of course, to cross not only the Apennine Mountains, but also the Alps.

This it is proposed to do by a means of a new invention of locks, involving the construction of a series of inclined tubular lifts. It may yet be possible to travel by steamer over the loftiest mountain range in Europe.2

In Fitzcarraldo (1982), filmmaker Werner Herzog tells the story of an aspiring Irish rubber baron, Brian Sweeney “Fitzcarraldo” Fitzgerald, in the early 20th-century Peruvian Amazon. Fitzcarraldo schemes to make his fortune by accessing a rubber concession that has remained untapped because violent rapids prevent ships from traveling that far upstream.

Without a means of transporting latex to processing facilities and markets downstream, the region’s natural wealth has no commercial value.

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Preliminary survey for dredging activities, 1927. Left to right: J. G. Claybourn, superintendent; C. M. Butters, assistant engineer; R. E. Sneider, captain of Grader; E. Hallen, official photographer.

The construction of the Panama Canal, a 48-mile-long aquatic staircase of six locks across the Cordillera Central mountain range, was funded and managed by the US government. The actual work was carried out by a multinational and multiracial labor force dominated by black West Indians that peaked at 56,000 in 1913.3 The central excavation site was the nine-mile-long Culebra Cut through the continental divide, where steam shovels, trains, dynamite, and laborers moved tons of earth to redirect water from the Atlantic-bound Chagres River to the Pacific. However, earth moving in Panama was but one manifestation of a sprawling political and economic project.

When it opened, the canal was the lynchpin of an emerging US imperial network. US government projects in Panama followed decades of territorial expansion and the recent acquisition of islands in the Atlantic (Puerto Rico and Cuba) and the Pacific (Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, and Wake Island). In the 1903 Panama Canal treaty, the newly independent Republic of Panama (formerly part of Colombia) granted the United States use and control in perpetuity of the Canal Zone, a 10-mile-wide, 500-square-mile enclave around the projected shipping lane that bisected the isthmus. Panama also granted the United States “the right to use rivers, streams, lakes and other bodies of water within its [national] limits for navigation, the supply of water or water power.”4

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Like many lock canals, Panama’s waterway was designed to use river water stored in summit-level reservoirs. The US government dammed the Chagres River at two points, creating Gatun Lake in 1914 and Madden Lake in 1935, to provide sufficient water for navigation through the annual dry season and to control floods in the rainy season.

Expropriating more land for both reservoirs from Panama (under the 1903 treaty terms), the United States appended it to the original Canal Zone, marking the beginning of an expansionist hydropolitics that has persisted into the 21st century.

Assembling Global Maritime Infrastructure During the 18th and 19th centuries, the great age of European and North American canal building, the excavation of canals and dredging of rivers for shipping dramatically lowered freight costs, leading to expanded extraction and manufacturing.5 Navigable waterways facilitated the movement of commodities, goods, and capital between the interior and the coast, extending the ocean further into the countryside and vice versa.6 By the time Panama Canal construction began, some US politicians and business leaders sought to extend existing domestic water transportation networks to establish a transoceanic infrastructure. These actors envisioned the future isthmian canal as the nexus of Atlantic-Pacific maritime

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the first of two chambers, at which point massive steel gates slowly close, sealing the chamber. Then, a lockmaster opens valves upstream—the next “step” up the staircase—and gravity pushes water through culverts the size of subway tunnels embedded in the concrete chamber walls. It flows into cross-culverts beneath the chamber floor and then erupts upward. The water rises in the chamber, lifting the ship up from sea level. The process is repeated in the second chamber at Miraflores and then at Pedro Miguel, the next lock complex, before the ship—now at 85 feet above sea level—travels through the Culebra Cut and across Gatun Lake. At the Gatun Locks on the Atlantic side, the ship is lowered back to sea level and exits.

While passing through the locks, each ship drains an astounding 52 million gallons of fresh water into the oceans— approximately the same volume of water as 78 Olympic swimming pools or the daily domestic consumption of half a million Panamanians.11 The water use is an artifact of design decisions made over a century ago. After much negotiation, the lock dimensions were set at 965 feet of usable length, 106 feet of usable width, and 39.5 feet of usable draft. By fixing the locks’ size, engineers also established the Panamax shipping standard (vessels that maximize lock dimensions), which has had significant implications for ship and port design worldwide. Meanwhile, in Panama, the locks have formatted enduring tensions around water and land management.

In the century since the canal opened in 1914, traffic has increased from around 1,000 transits per year to nearly 13,000. Because administrators control an obligatory point of passage (or chokepoint) on Atlantic-Pacific trade and can charge high tolls, water shortage anxieties are also economic concerns. The political ecology of canal water has grown more acute as ship traffic has increased in tandem with scientific understanding of El Niño and climate change.

The environmental conflict, simply put, is that canal administrators’ efforts to optimize the water supply impinges upon alternative forms of land use in the surrounding region, particularly agriculture.

The Machete and the Freighter Transportation environments are reorganized in standardized ways to facilitate movement: airplanes use runways; space shuttles need launch pads; trains follow tracks; tractor trailers stick to paved roads; and ships travel engineered waterways. At their edges, these infrastructures unfold into worlds with different socioeconomic priorities reflected in the organization of both the built and natural environment.

In the case of the Panama Canal, the increasing hydrological demands of shipping brought administrators into environmental conflict with rural people in the surrounding region.

The Chagres River basin has been defined in many ways over the centuries. The region’s moist and wet tropical

An indigenous man uses a machete to deforest the area surrounding the Panama Canal. Film still from Construction of the Panama Canal, 1903.

routes linked to a “deep water” network of US inland waterways: rivers, canals, and lakes dredged to the same depth. Between 1906 and 1910, the Lakes-to-the-Gulf Deep Waterway Association coordinated plans to link the Great Lakes, Mississippi River, and Gulf of Mexico to Pacific ports via Panama. During the same period, numerous port facilities were being built or modernized throughout coastlines in the Americas in anticipation of changing ship traffic.

The global economies of the 21st century have accreted around historical aquatic infrastructures. Maritime transportation remains the cheapest way to move large volumes of cargo, accounting for approximately 90 percent of global trade by volume.7 The shipping industry funnels waterborne traffic through maritime chokepoints like the Panama Canal, Suez Canal, Strait of Malacca, and Strait of Hormuz, which, as a result, continue to be critical sites of infrastructure construction and capital investment.

In 2014, the Panama Canal, which is busier and more profitable than ever,8 celebrated its centennial anniversary in the midst of a decade-long, $6 billion expansion project.

After decades of US government administration (1914–79) and a lengthy transfer period (1979–99), the canal is now managed by a Panamanian state institution called the Panama Canal Authority. The expansion project, expected to be complete in 2016, includes the construction of a third flight of much larger locks and the dredging of wider, deeper navigation channels.

The expansion of the Panama Canal to accommodate new generations of massive container ships is emblematic of a long-term trend toward globally integrated intermodal transportation systems and shipping at larger economies of scale. By allowing cargo to be better consolidated and stacked high on deck, the “container revolution” of the past half-century increased the demand for maritime transit services worldwide by reducing labor and shipping costs.9 At the Panama Canal, where container ships now make up more than half of all transits, containerization increased the maximum cargo capacity per vessel (and, thus, raised toll revenue). But as the industry has expanded, so too have its environmental reverberations.10 A Thirsty Canal Among the Panama Canal Authority’s most pressing concerns is securing a fresh water supply sufficient for yearround navigation. To understand why water is such a concern, we first need to understand how the relationship between lock design and traffic shapes water use within the context of a highly seasonal precipitation regime.

Consider an average transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic: After a ship has waited for hours or days (an average of 40 vessels are in the queue at any time), a Panama Canal “pilot” takes the helm and steers it to the first set of locks. At the Miraflores locks, the ship—typically assisted by a tugboat and guided by electronic locomotives or “mules”—enters

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Panama Canal construction workers drill holes for dynamite in bedrock as they cut through the mountains of the isthmus, 1913.

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forests—largely secondary growth marked by periods of clearing and succession—have been characterized as a malarial landscape, an agricultural frontier, and, since 1977, a managed watershed, to name only a few.

In September 1977, Panama’s populist military dictator General Omar Torrijos and President Jimmy Carter met in Washington, DC, and signed treaties guaranteeing that the United States would transfer the canal to Panama at the end of the century. Earlier that year, in May, a long drought significantly reduced streamflow in the rivers around the canal. When the storage reservoirs dropped well below their normal operating levels, administrators enforced draft limits, forcing some customers to reduce their ships’ cargo or be rerouted thousands of miles south around Cape Horn.12 The drought precipitated a decisive shift in environmental management with lived consequences.

The drought of 1977 was not the first time that canal administrators enforced draft restrictions, but it was the first time that shallow water was identified as a problem caused by human-induced environmental change. Administrators and analysts argued that upstream deforestation by campesinos increased reservoir sedimentation (reducing storage capacity) and diminished dry season streamflow. By blaming campesinos, however, they elided the political and economic drivers of deforestation.

Within the context of water shortage and anxieties about the economic future of the canal, campesinos’ machetes, historically championed by the Panamanian state as a symbol of national identity and rural development, took

on negative associations. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, state institutions had actively settled and developed the rural headwaters of the canal watershed through a frontier colonization program called “Conquest of the Jungle,” in which campesinos were encouraged to clear forests with their hatchets and machetes. In the wake of the canal treaties and drought of 1977, however, the state implemented new environmental regulations and forest protection initiatives intended to “produce” more water for the canal, including the establishment of two national parks. In a strange inversion, the canal—historically framed as an epochal conquest of nature—was suddenly represented as part of a fragile and threatened environmental system, while the campesino and machete were recast as symbols of environmental destruction and cultural backwardness.

Of course, water scarcity was irreducible to campesino land use; it was the outcome of processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales that converged around the aging technical system of the canal, including seasonal and climatic patterns, global shipping and trade regimes, and regional municipal and industrial water use. The lock canal established the conditions of possibility for scarcity by using so much fresh water and linking global commercial exchange to the flow of a river that fluctuated between seasons and across years. However, the environmental politics of infrastructure went largely unanalyzed because interventions focused on changing individual behavior.13 The management, maintenance, and expansion of modern transportation infrastructure demand extra-

Two cargo ships sail into the Miraflores Locks, Panama Canal, 2006.

ordinary amounts of land, fresh water, and natural resources.

At 13,000 transits per year, watershed forests around the shipping lane have been reimagined and reorganized as natural infrastructure—a critical buffer against droughts and heavy traffic—transforming environmental management into a new form of dispossession. The campesinos that converted forests to farms and pastures in the Panama Canal watershed in the late 20th century were not “backward” people spontaneously destroying forests, but participants in a multiscale rural development project that also involved state institutions, international development banks, and multilateral organizations. This infrastructure, like the Panama Canal, was designed and assembled to transform landscapes and livelihoods on the isthmus to support a specific economic vision. Then, as conditions changed, transportation displaced agricultural development.

If moving ships over mountains symbolized the imaginary of 19th- and 20th-century engineering, then natural infrastructure reflects an emerging managerial ethos. We must recognize that the progressive impulse to reorganize landscapes to provide “services” like water conveyance and flood control may have political and redistributive consequences. As the case of environmental management around the Panama Canal suggests, such efforts may bring designers and managers into tension with previously existing (if often unacknowledged) infrastructures and their material and meaningful legacies.

Opening spread: Film still detail from Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, 1982.

Ashley Carse is an anthropologist and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal (2014).

Parts of this essay appear in slightly altered form in Ashley Carse, Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). The author would like to acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (Award #1257333) while conducting this research.

James Bryce, South America: Observations and Impressions (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 36.

“Canals New and Old,” Star and Herald, May 4, 1908.

Michael Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).

4 Convention for the Construction of a Ship Canal (Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty), November 18, 1903, Article IV. 5 Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Claude Comtois, and Brian Slack, The Geography of Transport Systems (London: Routledge, 2013), 49.

6 See, for example, William Cronon’s discussion of the Erie Canal and US Midwest in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991).

7 For a useful overview of the maritime chokepoint phenomenon, see Rodrigue et al., The Geography of Transport Systems, 30–41. Maritime transportation figures are for 2006 and cited in the same work, 265.

8 In 2013, the canal logged 12,862 transits at an average of about $144,000 per ship, collecting a total of $1.85 billion in tolls. Panama Canal Authority Annual Report 2013, http://www.pancanal.com/eng/ general/reporte-anual/2013/flash.html.

9 On the “container revolution,” see Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

10 Most research on the environmental dimensions of transportation emphasizes the industry’s large direct effects via water, air, and noise pollution. My focus here is the subtler, indirect environmental effects of transportation related to land and water use and transformation of the built environment.

11 This comparison is particularly salient because the rivers and reservoirs that feed the canal also provide potable water for Panama’s largest cities and a variety of other industrial and agricultural uses.

12 On the origins of watershed concern, see Frank Wadsworth, “Deforestation: Death to the Panama Canal,” in US Strategy Conference on Tropical Deforestation (Washington, DC: US Department of State and US Agency for International Development, 1978), 22–25.

13 See Ashley Carse, “Nature as Infrastructure: Making and Managing the Panama Canal Watershed,” Social Studies of Science 42, no. 4: 539–63.

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Miraflores Locks, Panama Canal, 1978.

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Bodies, Boats, and Borders

Sara Zewde talks to Rebecca Gomperts about performing rights online and in oceans.

SARA ZEWDE Can you talk about your work with Women on Waves and its partner organizations?

REBECCA GOMPERTS I founded Women on Waves in 1999. It was a conceptdriven organization. The idea was that by using a Dutch ship, we could provide legal abortions in international waters to women in countries where abortion was illegal.

The idea of the ship was the basis of the organization.

I was trained as a medical doctor and as an abortion provider, and at the time I was sailing with Greenpeace.

I had a political awareness and an awareness of the medical urgency—that unsafe, illegal abortion is one of the biggest problems of women around the world, and is the main cause of women dying as a result of pregnancy. This practical idea of the ship generated so much knowledge and so many stories of suffering.

For me, it was not just about women or about rights, but about diminishing suffering, which is one of my life philosophies.

Women on Waves turned the idea of the ship into a practical campaign. It started in 2001, when we sailed to Ireland to provide abortions to women in international waters. The concept of the ship turned out to be very powerful. It became a catalyst for debate, discussion, and change, because it was this totally unapologetic gesture: women were taking control over a taboo, abortion, and they were doing it in what is typically thought of as a male domain, the seas. On top of that, it suggested piracy and mimicked the methods of big, international business by exploiting international law. It was smart.

We were just a couple of people, and we rented a ship. But people thought we had a whole fleet of ships sailing the world, and that is still the perception of the organization. The reality is that Women on Waves has one paid part-time employee, and that is me. I am paid to work one day a week. The rest is campaign-based. Once every two or three years we sail the ship to a country in coordination with local women’s groups. The ship is such a powerful gesture that it changes people’s reality, their visions, their preconceptions.

In 2006, I founded Women on Web, a much more practical partner organization. It uses the space of the Internet to provide medical abortions to women that have no access to legal, safe abortion services. Women have a consultation with a doctor online, and then the medical abortion is sent to their homes in pill form.

On the ship, we perform comparatively few abortions, but this symbolic gesture is what makes an impact.

The more low-profile, hands-on work is being done by Women on Web.

The Langenort, a Women on Waves gynecological clinic/ship, waiting for permission to enter Poland’s Władysławowo Harbor, 2003.

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SZ It’s clear that a ship sailing the sea with a few physicians onboard cannot provide an effective solution, and that your tactic is to position the work as a spectacle. What is the symbolic power of Women on Waves?

RG In countries where abortion is illegal, abortion is hidden.

But it’s not as if it doesn’t exist—women are having abortions everywhere, but there is no public, visible mark. Women on Waves is just that. The ship comes into a harbor saying explicitly that it is going to provide abortions. Many of these countries like the idea that they are keeping abortion outside of their boundaries, so the whole dialogue becomes performative for all parties involved. Ten years ago, the Portuguese Minister of Defense forbade our ship to come in and sent warships to international waters to stop us. They said we were a threat to the national security of the state. Our ship had to stay 12 miles away from land, within international waters. The idea that the women are actually in the country, and that abortion is happening in the country, is what upsets people. It enters their domain—it penetrates the false reality that abortion does not exist in their country. So the best the Portuguese could do was to keep our ship in international waters.

The fact that the ship was there, that it was visible, was a catalyst for mobilization. An object can inspire protest; people can concentrate around it. One of the most worrying trends is the idea that Facebook and Twitter are mobilizers of protest. A lot of people are investing their time in social media activism, but they forget that real-life presence makes the difference. In Morocco, the whole harbor was sealed off to prevent the press from entering. But we had arrived earlier than we said we would, so we got some of the press in through a back entrance of a harborside hotel. They were able to take some pictures, but the Moroccan government claimed that the images were fake—that it wasn’t the actual Women on Waves ship. They said the real ship was outside, in international waters, and that Women on Waves never entered the harbor. So, the idea of instrumentalizing the real thing—the object—is that it acts as a catalyst. It is so essential in any form of protest, activism, or demonstration, that there is a visible, physical presence. A lot of organizations underestimate that. That is why Occupy, for instance, was so powerful.

Rebecca Gomperts aboard a ship in Valencia. Film still from Vessel, 2014.

SZ You have been able to exploit an absurd and glaring loophole; this arbitrary 12-mile measure could give so many women the freedom to have a safe procedure.

The fact that just 13 miles away from your ship women are dying of unsafe procedures is infuriating. Have you purposefully sought to frame your work through the absurd?

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RG That is absolutely what we are doing. On the other hand, a ship that sails up and down a coastline is not a real solution because the obstacles are huge. The need is much bigger than the capacity any ship can handle, and the protest is so fierce. It could never be sustainable.

The ship’s physical presence is also its vulnerability. That is why Women on Web is helping so many more women than Women on Waves, but the collaboration between the two is what makes them both successful.

Medical abortion has been revolutionary for women; it has changed the world. Now, with access to certain medicines, women can have safe abortions, whereas before they needed to have a skilled doctor. Cytotec, which is produced by Pfizer, is available around the world

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because it is used for stomach ulcers. Women on Waves aims to produce high-impact, high-visibility campaigns, to make women aware that they can use pills to induce their own abortions safely. In Morocco, this medication is readily available in pharmacies. It’s called Artotec, and you can buy it for $10. For $10 you can have a safe abortion. But until our campaign, nobody knew about it. Even pro-choice doctors we spoke to said, “No, it doesn’t work! It’s dangerous!” But because we are very connected to the scientific world and scientific development—we are not just activists—we can say in response, “It does work, and it is safe.” So, the ship’s agenda and message depend on the local context, and we develop them in partnership with local women’s groups.

Women on Waves produces safe abortion stickers in multiple languages.

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SZ The image of a boat at sea could be perceived as one of isolation. However, in your work the ocean is a space of solidarity. What is the experiential aspect of being a “woman on waves”? What does it mean for the procedures to be done at sea, on waves, in the space of the ocean?

RG My experience of the ocean has actually been one of great intimacy. When you are on a ship, you are with a small group, in a small space, in a huge sea. There are miles of sea under you. There are miles of sky above you. It’s a space of enormous reflection and freedom. I think that has to do with the fact that there is an endless horizon. Your view when you are in a city or on land is determined by the blockage of the horizon, either by buildings or trees. There is only one space in the world where nothing is blocked, and that is at sea. The sea has an endless view of the curves of the earth. Onboard our ship, as on any ship, everyone is dependent on one another. For our patients, it is a literal form of survival: we are equipped to give them life-saving treatment. And as a crew member, you know that if anybody makes a stupid mistake, the ship can sink—you go down, and you drown. The notions of saving a life and the intimate interdependency onboard really reinforce one another.

SZ Your work highlights the global nature of the abortion issue, but how are you able to plug back into the local contexts and the political spheres of the countries you sail to?

RG The problem is global in the sense that it is a social justice issue everywhere. Women do not have access to safe abortions for a wide range of legal, logistical, or financial reasons. Even in countries where abortion is legal, it may not be covered by health care insurance, so in these cases, women who do not have money will not have access to abortion. Women face all kinds of obstacles in trying to access these services, wherever in the world they are. On the other hand, local realities differ. At the moment, abortion is supposedly legal in Texas, but it is much more difficult to have a safe abortion there than in Kenya, for example, where abortion is illegal. Why? Because in Kenya, a woman can walk into a pharmacy and get the medicine she needs to induce a safe abortion for a few dollars. But in Texas, there may be a lack of services for miles.

SZ How do you engage with all of these diverse local realities?

RG You just have to know them all. We constantly research these different realities because we are advising women all over the world about their options. We advise some women in Texas to go to Mexico to buy Misoprostol

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from a pharmacy there. In whatever country—you name it—we know women’s options. Misoprostol was banned in Brazil and is now available only in hospitals. We can tell a woman in Brazil to travel to a nearby country where abortion is legal. No one else would ever tell her that. We know the local contexts and the safety zones.

SZ You studied both medicine and visual arts. What is the relationship between those disciplines for you? What role, if any, does art play in your practice and your activism?

RG I am interested in universality. I think that art, science, and practice are mutually informing. I have a PhD in medicine, but for me art has always offered the opportunity to do things outside of the obvious. In my work environment—with doctors and activists—many people have preconceptions of what it is they should be doing. The objective of art is to redefine reality—the work you do, the things you see, the materials you are working with. In order to be a good researcher, a good activist, a good human being—a humanist—it is important always to be redefining, rethinking, reforming, and even undermining what you do. Art taught me that. But for me, that approach only has meaning through the combination of multiple spheres and elements. I appreciate artists whose work has a political and social impact, beyond art for its own sake—the Yes Men, for example. There is also an artist in the Netherlands named Jonas Staal who is challenging preconceptions of people, states, and policymakers. Good science does this too. Good science is always questioning the validity of its preconceptions. In that sense, art and science are not so different.

A map from the Center for Reproductive Rights with categories of the world’s abortion laws, 2014. Red: to save the woman’s life or prohibited altogether; orange: to preserve health; yellow: socioeconomic grounds; green: without restriction as to reason.

Page 74: The Langenort, a Women on Waves gynecological clinic/ship, in international waters off the coast of Figueira da Foz, 2004.

Sara Zewde is in her final year of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She holds a Master of City Planning from MIT and a BA from Boston University. Zewde was named the 2014 National Olmsted Scholar by the Landscape Architecture Foundation. She has a keen interest in the social and cultural meanings of ecological processes.

Rebecca Gomperts is a physician, artist, and women’s human rights activist. Gomperts grew up in the harbor town of Vlissingen, Holland, and moved to Amsterdam in the 1980s where she studied art and medicine simultaneously. After being a resident physician and environmental activist on the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior, Gomperts started Women on Waves and later Women on Web.

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Building Soft

Hilary Sample & Byron Stigge

Contrary to concepts of stability and durability espoused by the United States Army Corps of Engineers’ motto, “Building Strong,” there are alternative, adaptive building processes that respond to the of coastal regions. Within and along coastal zones, ancient and new types of structures stand side by side, displaying ingenuity and historical longevity, with admixtures of technique and technology. Constantly readjusting and recalibrating, these alternative techniques adapt to environmental dynamics and seek to capitalize on perpetual ebbs and flows of water, weather, and wind, mud, sand, snow, and ice. These “soft” construction techniques are constantly operating and responding to alternating calendars of climatic and oceanic forces: tides, temperatures, storms, sea levels, and coastline patterns. Whether along the shore or inland waterways, above or below sea level, the array of practices in the following folio demonstrate how No. 39 / Wet Matter

some flexible and mutable building typologies can be more successful than those based on principles of rigidity and strength. Here, slow systems, soft structures, and weak infrastructures form a collective lexicon of spatial interventions—like dancing on a volcano or surfing a tsunami—across the coasts and the contours of future urbanization. By looking deeply at what is often overlooked, many architects and engineers have learned lessons based on centuries of trial and error rather than on well-proven theories. Seen from and toward the ocean, these forms and formations (sometimes deformations) reflect the accelerated pace of change occurring across generations, in a revolutionary way. Highly precise yet often barely planned, they are passed down and reconditioned; their adaptations calculated in fractions of inches, often occurring in a matter of hours, minutes, or seconds.

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. PalaĂštos in )Quitos, Peru, . . (erZog de -euron, %lbphilharmonie, (amburg, Germany, . . %nnead Architects, F.R.%.$., "rooklyn, .ew 9ork, .

4. Stilted house, Galveston, Texas, 2014.

5. Shigeru Ban Architects, Watertowers Hafencity, Hamburg, Germany, 2013.

6. Herzog & de Meuron, PĂŠrez Art Museum Miami, Florida, 2013.

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Whether by stilts, piles, or posts—in silt, sand, or mud—the most natural response to rising water and wet ground is to raise a structure aboVe Ûood leVel ,iKe a perch, the JacKing oF structures houses, sheds, or plants) enables millions of people around the world to live in landfall regions, swamps and storm basins, lagoons, marshes, and mud Ûats, or Just simply plain mucK )n the mud of the ,agos ,agoon lies the largest Úshing village -aKoKo) and oldest sawmill /Ko "aba) in West Africa; on the sandy beaches of Florida’s Gulf Coast stand vacation beach houses; the banks of the Chao Phraya River are home to some of 4hailand’s most afÛuent; and the PalaÚtos in 3outh America allow the rivers to be densely populated. Raising infrastructure on stilts—like a pipeline, power line, or highway—enables Ûora and fauna to Ûourish

below. Think of FDR Drive in Manhattan or, a more extreme example, the trans Alaskan pipeline, which is raised nearly Ăšve feet off the ground across its entire 800-mile length to prevent the tundra below from melting as the 120ˆF crude oil Ă›ows through it.

Coastal communities in tropical zones, viewed as slums, often offer cheap, transitory entry points to mega-urban economies.

Semipermanent structures on stilts provide cheap and affordable housing platforms for migrants to begin work as Ăšshers, loggers, or dredgers along unregulated coasts, outside of ofĂšcially designated inhabitation zones. Mostly made of hardwoods that resist decay black locust, mahogany, red mulberry, osage orange, teak, and PaciĂšc yew), rot-resistant piles are critical materials in tropical climates,

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while steel or concrete are employed in wealthier regions. Coastal areas in Western temperate zones are populated mostly by wealthy landowners, where views are pricey and private ocean access is for the privileged. With the establishment of new base Ûood elevations by the Federal %mergency Management Agency F%MA) in the 5nited States, the raising of houses along coasts has become a big business. In some cases, it’s cheaper to elevate than to relocate.

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Leaking

For many Americans who live in Ûoodplains and along coastlines, wet is the new dry. In dense, highly concentrated urban areas, the raising of towers, skyscrapers, or roadways above the 100- to 500-year Ûood line is simply not a solution. Nor is it always technically possible. Instead, it is simpler and cheaper to succumb to changing water levels by Ûooding the ground Ûoor and basement of a building. Coming to terms with this wet, coastal reality, building owners are not only accepting Ûooding, but are also inviting it in. This is the difference between precaution and prevention. Completely inverting the conventional, base-dry approach to Ûood prevention, the solution is simple basement machine rooms go to the roof, making room for ground-Ûoor tenants who won’t go out of business if their Ûoors get Ûooded. 5nlike

1. Mies van der Rohe, Ûooded Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, 2013.

2. Venice, Italy, 2013.

3. Milos, Greece, 2011.

4. SHoP Architects, %ast River Waterfront %splanade, New 9ork, New 9ork, 2014.

5. Baca Architects, Amphibious House, ,ondon, 5+, 2014.

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out of the wet zone during acqua alta.

The cost of damage repair is far more economical than the cost of insurance protection. In the case of Mies van der Rohe’s famed Farnsworth House in the Fox River watershed, which Ûoods almost annually (an element that Mies incorporated into his original design), a few holes in the house are plugged with caulking, curtains are tied up with plastic garbage bags, carpets are rolled up with twine, and furniture is propped up on milk crates, with doors swung open to let river water run through the space. After the Ûood, a wipe down and simple mop restore the house to working order.

heroic building raising, waterprooÚng, or building massive barriers, wet prooÚng minimizes damage during periodic Ûooding without even attempting to stop it.

Like both Brooklyn Bridge Park during Hurricane Sandy, and the 9atsuhigata tidal Ûats in Tokyo during daily high tides, a robust and Ûoodable ground can resist the effects of saturation and wave action while incurring minimal damage. Contrary to convention, Ûooding neither destroys land, nor prohibits access. For the %ast River Waterfront %splanade by SHoP Architects in New 9ork City, or the many lagoon restaurants in Venice, the reality of wetness has created a culture accustomed to rain boots and stylish galoshes. Venetian business owners line and rim Ûoors with marble tiles, keeping essentials

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Weakening

In storm basins and seismically active regions, stable ground can suddenly shift and become liqueÚed. In densely populated coasts, abrupt shaking from earthquakes can destroy buildings and urban-scaled infrastructure in a matter of seconds. Seismic shifting underwater often leads to tsunamis whose giant waves swell and overtake shorelines, with narrowing estuaries accelerating and amplifying the speed of sea surges. Along coasts, seismic and subterranean hazards are inseparable from hydrologic and meteorological hazards.

Since the 1755 earthquake that nearly destroyed the entire city of Lisbon and the 2011 tsunami that dramatically transformed Tohoku and the Sanriku Coast, structural engineers have been forced to

1. %arthquake springs, Fire Bureau Building, 9okosuka-shi, *apan, 2005.

2. InÛatable rubber dam, Ramspol, the Netherlands, 2002.

3. Miami Beach coastline, Florida, 2010.

4. 5tah State Capitol, Salt Lake City, 5tah, 2005.

5. Mills-Peninsula Health Services, Burlingame, California, 2007.

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rethink the concepts of strength, rigidity, and stiffness associated with large territories. Notions of Ûexibility and failure have become central, radically contradicting the intractable notion of strength inherent to the conception of strong skyscrapers. To absorb energy, Ûexible structures allow buildings to move and bend so much (through ductility and base isolation) that steel can stretch without snapping. Windows may shatter and walls may crack, but a building’s structural integrity remains, allowing occupants to safely evacuate.

Beyond steel and concrete, dynamic structural systems now include materials like rubber, hydraulic Ûuids, TeÛon, and even compressed air. Thanks to giant rubber gaskets and ball bearings, Parkinson & Parkinson’s Los Angeles City Hall and the KPF-designed

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Roppongi Hills Mori Tower in Tokyo allow the ground below to move while the structures stay relatively still, absorbing seismic energy.

Properly tuned, dampened, and calibrated to just the right amount of Ûexibility, buildings in California, *apan, and throughout the so-called PaciÚc Ring of Fire have risen over 50 stories in height.

Diffusing incoming wave energy, barrier islands, dunes, mangroves, and underwater seagrass work in much the same way, across larger areas, by stabilizing the bottom of the sea. Along Úlled wetlands of coastal plains or rocky shores, where companies concentrate power near harbors and airports for global trade and communications, cosmetic destruction and designed deformation are now underlying principles that allow building structures to safely fail.

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Slipping

Life on a houseboat brings with it the freedom of living on water, a space between solid ground and Ûuid sea, far from picket fences and sidewalks, gates or grass—but in Sausalito, once the home for radicals and postwar hippies, free berthing and the promise of untethered infrastructure have become sought-after, six-Úgure real estate.

From the historic houseboats of Sausalito in the San Francisco Bay, to dock houses on glacial lakes of Northern Ontario, to boat houses on the Chicago river, to temporary pontoon bridges of the Kumbh Mela in India, Ûoatation structures provide both temporary and sometimes permanent ability to dock, berth, and moor structures in Ûuctuating, unstructured places. Adaptable to deep waters, natural harbors, and even intertidal regions, Ûoatation facilitates easy and

1. Makoko, Lagos, Nigeria, 2013.

2. Kumbh Mela, Allahabad, India, 2013.

3. Studio Gang Architects, WMS Boathouse, Chicago, Illinois, 2013.

4. IJburg, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2011.

5. MOS, Floating House, Ontario, Canada, 2005.

6. Lake Titicaca, Peru, 2012.

7. James Corner Field Operations, Seattle Central Waterfront, Washington, 2010–20.

8. Kiyonori Kikutake, Aquapolis, 1975.

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instant docking for military, domestic, or festival purposes in almost any water environment.

One of the most extreme examples is the Kumbh Mela, a mass pilgrimage of Hindus who bathe in one of India’s sacred rivers and create a temporary metropolis Ûoating over the Ganges River. To house, feed, and service more than 80 million pilgrims during the 55day festival, a community of steel welders fashion approximately 100 miles of steel-plated roads, 18 pontoon bridges, 340 miles of water pipelines, and 600 miles of electricity wires, all of which are dismantled afterward. Held every 12 years at the Triveni Sangam, the conÛuence of the Yamuna, Ganges, and Saraswati rivers, the festival is believed to be the largest peaceful gathering in the world.

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5nderlying all Ûoatation structures are docking and gangway systems that can move upward and downward with water levels and vessel sizes. Much like the mechanical gangway for airplanes, shorebased access systems are vital, Ûexible, and adaptable to the shifting tidal ranges and water levels during onloading and ofÛoading, docking and disembarking.

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Swapping

All that is Úxed can be moved. Buildings are often thought of as fragile and enduring, but if architectural icons like the Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown-designed Lieb House from 1969 can be moved from the shores of New Jersey to Long Island by barge, crib, and truck in a single day, for about $100,000, then anything is possible.

Moving and relocating structures is not only simple and straightforward, it’s a surreal spectacle. In the summer of 1996, the moving of the Cape Cod Lighthouse (standing 170 feet tall) in Massachusetts drew more onlookers than it had in the 20 years prior. People were curious to see how a 450-ton lighthouse could be transported. Built in 1797 atop a 500-foot cliff, the lighthouse was in danger—large chunks of the cliff had been steadily dropping away during major blizzards and

1. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Lieb House, New York Harbor, New York, 2010.

2. Minga, Patagonia, 2011.

3. Outer Banks, North Carolina, 2013.

4. Bayanihan, Philippines, 2012.

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example, the bayanihan in the Philippines, gotong royong in Indonesia, Imece in Turkey, harambee in east Africa, and barn raising in the American Midwest.

As novel as it may seem, relocations—big or small—are extremely common. Though barely detectable, relocation is rarely considered a legitimate architectural strategy. Relocation of houses seems complicated, but the process can be prepared in a matter of days or weeks and carried out in just a few hours.

storms. The 450-foot westward move was accomplished on rails, with a structural girdle wrapped around it, in less than three hours. Its smaller cousin, the Nauset Light, was moved to its new foundation, 300 feet to the west as well, by Ûatbed truck in less than three days.

Mechanical moves in the industrial West mimic the manual moves of the Global South. The process of minga (from the Quechan mink’a, “solidarity effort” or “collective work”) is a method of building relocation performed in Chile—the techniques employed are roughly the same as those from three centuries ago. The community of farmers and Úshers comes together to move a building to a more fertile location, for better access to resources, or to a safer position.

Minga is one of many community-driven endeavors, including, for

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How Climate Change Might Save the World:

Metamorphosis

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Ulrich Beck

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Climate change is one of the most pressing issues faced by people and governments across the globe. Does it have the potential to alter the political order of the world? My answer is yes, it does—but in ways different from what we might expect. I have seven theses on how climate change is changing the world.

First Thesis

completely different. Those who make decisions are not accountable from the perspective of those affected by risks, and those affected have no real way of participating in the decision-making process. It’s an imperialistic structure; the decision-making process and its consequences are attributed to completely different groups.

We can only observe this structure when we step outside of a nation-state perspective and take what I call a “cosmopolitan perspective,” where the unit of research is a community of risk that includes what is excluded in the national perspective: the decision makers and the consequences of their decisions for others across space and time.

Until now, discussions on climate change have focused on whether or not it is really happening, and if it is, what we can do to stop, contain, or solve it. But this emphasis on solutions blinds us to the fact that climate change has already altered our “being” in the world—the way we think about the world and engage in politics.

Three facts illustrate this thesis:

Second Thesis

Rising sea levels are creating changing landscapes of inequality—drawing new world maps whose key lines are not traditional boundaries between nation-states and social classes, but elevations above sea or river. This is a totally different way of conceptualizing the world and our chances of survival within it.

The concept of metamorphosis embodies the power of change toward cosmopolitan horizons of normative expectations.

Metamorphosis differs from the more commonly used concept of transformation. Transformation lacks the specificity of metamorphosis—the major change into something different, the replacement of one frame of reference with another. Transformation theory is occupied territory; it implies associations— post-socialism, teleology, and unilinearity—which are all counterproductive here. Therefore I have chosen the term “metamorphosis,” applying its conceptual content and associations from literature, biology, and art productively within the social sciences.

Climate change is creating existential moments of decision.

This is unintended, unseen, unwanted, and is neither goal oriented nor ideologically driven. The literature on climate change has become a supermarket for apocalyptic scenarios. Instead, the focus should be on what is now emerging—future structures, norms, and new beginnings.

Climate change produces a basic sense of ethical and existential violation that creates new norms, laws, markets, technologies, understandings of the nation and the state, urban forms, and international cooperations.

If we consider how the issue of climate change fits into the current perspective in politics and the social sciences, we can see the limitations of what I call “methodological nationalism.” We frame almost every issue, whether it relates to class, conflict, or politics, in the context of nation-states organized within the international sphere. But when we look at the world from the perspective of climate change, this framing doesn’t fit. A new power structure is embedded within the logic of global climate risk.

When we talk about risk, we have to relate it to decision making and decision makers, and we have to make a fundamental distinction between those who generate risk and those who are affected by it. In the case of climate change, these groups are 90

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I call it Verwandlung, or, in English, “metamorphosis.”

Metamorphosis is not evolution, not reform, not revolution, not transformation, not crisis. It signifies a different mode of change and a different mode of existence. And it calls for a scientific revolution (Thomas Kuhn) from methodological nationalism to methodological cosmopolitanism in the social sciences.

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extent to which they to which they accord central importance to (1) the reproduction or (2) the transformation of social classes with regard to (3) the distribution of goods without bads or (4) the distribution of goods and bads. The most interesting—and the most dominant—group here is the one that concentrates on goods without bads, and thereby focuses on the reproduction of class throughout the history of the 20th, and maybe the 21st-centuries. As such, it keeps practicing the conventional sociology of class, ignoring empirical realities—ignoring the social explosiveness of global financial risks, climate risks, flooding risks, or nuclear risks that constitutes the very metamorphosis of social inequality.

The shift in perspective in class analysis that I am suggesting is profound. Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu all focused on the production and distribution of goods without bads. They did not theorize risk as an explicit and systematic object of production and distribution. Marx focused on the relation of exploitation; Weber focused on the relation ship between power, market, and change; and Bourdieu was aware of the role of economic and social risks in life, but nevertheless focused on different forms of capital, stressing the continuity of class relations over time.

In order to theorize and research the metamorphosis and radicalization of social inequalities in risk society, I introduce two concepts: the “anthropocene class,” focusing on the ocean as anticipated catastrophe that produces all kinds of inequality, and the “risk class,” which sheds light on the intersection of risk positions and class positions.

Both the epistemological monopoly of class analysis on the diagnosis of social inequality and the methodological nationalism of the sociology of class have contributed to the fact that established sociology is empty-handed, practically blind, and disoriented in the face of the radicalized, transnational, risk-class society power shifts and equality conflicts that we witness today.

There are transfigurations of world power structures in which the victims of climate change are repositioned. Although they are victims, and might remain victims with further deteriorating situations, they are also, due to the metamorphosis of social

Metamorphosis is about a new way of generating and implementing norms in the age of climate change. A brief look at the history of world risk society illustrates this concept. Before Hiroshima happened, no one understood the power of nuclear weapons; but afterward, the sense of violation created a strong normative and political momentum: “Never again Hiroshima!”

Violations of human existence like Hiroshima induce anthropological shocks and social catharsis, challenging and changing the order of things from within.

“Never again Holocaust!” This metamorphosis decouples our normative horizons from existing norms and laws. I am referring here to something profound. A former basic principle of national law was that an act could not be judged in hindsight against a law that did not exist at the time the act was committed. So while it was legal under Nazi law to kill Jews, it became, in hindsight, a crime against humanity. It was not simply a law that changed, but our social horizons—our very being in the world. This is exactly what I mean by metamorphosis. In the case of climate change as a moment of metamorphosis, nature, society, and politics coalesce.

Given the reality of cosmopolitanization, the rebirth of the national outlook is paradoxical. It is the national outlook in public and academic discourse that blinds us to the alternatives for climate change action that we see from a cosmopolitan point of view.

Third Thesis

“Class” is too soft a category to capture the political explosiveness of socio-material inequalities in the age of climate change.

National class society is based on the distribution of goods (income, education, good health, prosperity, social welfare, largescale national movements like unions). World risk society, on the other hand, is based on the distribution of bads (climate risk, financial risk, nuclear radiation), which are confined by neither time nor territorial borders.

To clarify my view of the metamorphosis of social inequalities in the age of climate change, it is useful to consider other conceptualizations of social inequalities at the beginning of the 21st century. These positions can be distinguished according to the 92

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as transnational actors, organized voices of transnational politics. Even Zurich is a mini-New York; it is not one, but many world cities in one, with a strong red-green coalition urban government, and few chances for conservatives to regain power.

There are also basic contradictions. Urbanization used to be defined in opposition to nature. Nowadays, it is the other way around: “green urbanism” is everywhere; “sustainability” has become normalized. Everything is now about greening.

But these kinds of deconstructions are legitimizing the new normative horizon of cosmopolitan expectation. World cities are creating a new world of inclusiveness, where the potential to transform the law is growing. Making this new potential visible is what my theory of metamorphosis is all about.

In world risk society, global cities might reclaim a central role, similar to the position they occupied in the pre-national world.

Humankind began its adventure in politics in the polis—the city. The city was democracy’s pioneer. But for millennia, cities relied on monarchy and empire and then on newly invented nation-states to produce and reproduce social and political order. Today, the nation-state is failing to properly address global risks. Cities, historically the social ground for civic movements, might in today’s cosmopolitanized world of global threats once again become democracy’s best hope.

horizons, inevitable reminders on the global map of cosmopolitan responsibility. They might not be visible through a national frame, but they are there.

Fourth Thesis

We are undergoing a metamorphosis of the landscape of global actors through which nation-states are becoming cosmopolitanized.

On the one hand, nation-states are realizing that there are no national answers to global problems, even facilitating networks of global cities as cosmopolitan actors. On the other hand, national institutions are still subject to and products of the imagination of sovereignty.

Normative cosmopolitan expectations thus produce both cosmopolitan nations and renationalizing nations. Renationalizing nation-states are paralyzing cosmopolitan cooperation; international conferences fail. In the context of renationalizing states, the world city is becoming the main cosmopolitan actor, working in cooperation with NGOs and civil society movements. This represents an increase of power and action possibilities for world cities in relation to capital, lawmaking, and so on.

So to find answers to climate change, we should look not only to the United Nations, but also to the United Cities.

Fifth Thesis

Sixth Thesis

World cities are rising as cosmopolitan actors.

Global risk is not global catastrophe. It is the anticipation of catastrophe. It implies that it is high time for us to act—to drag people out of their routines, pull politicians from the “constraints” that allegedly surround them. Global risk is the day-to-day sense of insecurity that we no longer can accept.

It opens our eyes and raises our hopes. This encouragement is its paradox. There is a certain affinity between the theory of Weltrisikogesellschaft and Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope.

Weltrisikogesellschaft is always a political category; it creates new kinds and lines of conflict and liberates politics from existing rules and institutional shackles.

This again is what I mean by metamorphosis. Climate change might in fact be used as an antidote to war. We are

Social movements are important for setting the cosmopolitan frame, but they do not create collectively binding decisions. For this, there is the nation-state, with its monopoly on lawmaking.

But the influence of the nation-state is eroding. World cities are becoming a more important space for setting collectively binding decisions. Why? In the city, climate change produces visible effects; climate change incentivizes innovation; cooperation and competition transgress borders; and political response to climate change serves as a local resource for political legitimation and power.

A new power structure is emerging; it is composed of urban professionals in world cities—urban transnational classes with varying historical backgrounds. Cities are being legally redefined 94

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Global risk comes as threat and brings hope.

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undergoing a transition from the threats emanating from the logic of war to those arising from the logic of global risk. In the case of war, we find rearmament, resistance to enemies or their subjugation; in the case of risk, we see cross-border conflicts, but also cross-border cooperation to avert catastrophe—this is what I refer to as cosmopolitization. Thus life and survival within the horizon of global risk follow a logic that is diametrically opposed to war. In this situation it is rational to overcome the us-them opposition and to acknowledge the other as a partner, rather than as an enemy to be destroyed. The logic of risk directs its gaze toward the explosion of plurality in the world, which the friend-foe gaze denies. Weltrisikogesellschaft opens up a moral space that might (though by no means necessarily will) give birth to a civil culture of responsibility that transcends old antagonisms and creates new alliances as well as new lines of conflict.

Global risk has two sides: the traumatic vulnerability of all, and the resulting responsibility for all, including one’s own survival. It forces us to remind ourselves of the ways in which the human race jeopardizes its own existence. Consciousness of humanity thus acts as a fixed point. The risk of climate change generates a Umwertung aller Werte (Friedrich Nietzsche), a transvaluation of values, turning the system of value orientation upside-down—from postmodern cultural relativism to a historical new fixed star by which to mobilize solidarities and actions. This is the case because global climate risk contains a sort of navigation system in the otherwise storm-tossed seas of cultural relativism.

Whoever speaks of humankind is not cheating (as PierreJoseph Proudhon and Carl Schmitt put it), but is forced to save others in order to save him- or herself. In Weltrisikogesellschaft, cooperation between foes is not about self-sacrifice, but about self-interest, self-survival. It is a kind of egoistic cosmopolitanism or cosmopolitan egoism. We have to distinguish between a neoliberal form of self-interest and the self-interest of humanity.

But metamorphosis is not a direct line to a cosmopolitan future, in a normative political sense. In fact, the opposite is the case: metamorphosis is highly ambivalent. While victims of cli96

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mate change such as small island states are being repositioned on the global map, there might still be new imperialistic orders emerging. The danger of “climate colonialism” is very real.

We have to take a cosmopolitan outlook to make these vulnerable situations visible, tangible, and ask what consequences for thought and action they have in the West. How can we give them a voice in “our” political processes? This would indeed require a redefinition of national interest.

Seventh Thesis

Let’s make a thought experiment. Climate change skepticism can be a strong position. What then is the counterargument?

My counterargument refers to the French philosopher Blaise Pascal and his pragmatic “proof” of God. Pascal argued: Either God exists or does not—I don’t know. But I have to choose God, because if God exists, I win; if he doesn’t, I don’t lose anything.

Let’s compare the belief in God with the belief in man-made climate change. Like Pascal, we do not know if climate change is “real.” Despite substantial evidence, a basic uncertainty remains. We need to accept that it is impossible to know if a natural catastrophe is actually the consequence of man-made climate change. This uncertainty creates a critical political moment of decision.

There are two scenarios. First, we deny climate change, which would mean that every catastrophe highlights the irresponsibility of deniers. Second, we accept that climate change is real, take responsibility, and confront the overwhelming scale of necessary moral and political change. As in Pascal’s case, there are good, practical reasons, even for climate change deniers, to accept that it is real. Climate change may change the world for the better.

Seen as a global risk to all civilization, climate change could be made into an antidote to war. It induces the necessity to overcome neoliberalism, to perceive and to practice new forms of transnational responsibility; it puts the problem of cosmopolitan justice on the agenda of international politics; it creates informal and formal cooperation patterns between countries and governments that otherwise ignore each other or even consider themselves enemies. It makes economic and public actors

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Opening spread: Huge waves crash over the sea wall at Cheyne Beach, Ilfracombe, North Devon coast, England, 2014.

Ulrich Beck is Professor of Sociology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the London School of Economics, and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris. He is also principal investigator of the European Research Council project “Methodological Cosmopolitanism—In the Laboratory of Climate Change.” He has authored or edited more than 45 books, including Distant Love (with Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, 2014), German Europe (2013), and World at Risk (2009).

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Theo Deutinger & Elena Megia Nieto

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accountable and responsible—even those who do not want to be accountable and responsible. It opens up new world markets, new innovation patterns, and the consequence is: deniers are losers. It changes lifestyles and consumption patterns; it reveals a strong source of future-oriented meanings, in everyday life and for legitimation of political action (reforms or even revolutions). Finally, it induces new forms of understanding and caring for nature. All of this happens under the surface of the mantra of disappointments and disillusionments at the Wanderzirkus of one climate conference after another.

From this perspective, climate change means first the metamorphosis of politics and society that has to be discovered and closely analyzed through the social science of methodological cosmopolitanism. This is not to say that there is an easy solution to climate change. Nor is it to say that the side effects of side effects automatically create a better world. And it is not even to say that the active, sub-political and political metamorphosis is fast enough to counter the galloping process of climate catastrophes that might throw the entire planet into droughts, floods, chaos, starvation, and bloody conflicts.

But ultimately, catastrophe, too, would be a metamorphosis— the worst mode of metamorphosis.

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Polymetallic Nodules Exploration Areas in the Clarion-Clipperton Fr Nauru - Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. Kiribati - Marawa Research and Exploration Ltd Natural resources are hot. And as suppliesTonga - Tongapotato-sized lumps Offshore Mining Ltdcontain varying amounts für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe on dry land become exhausted, of manganese, cobalt, copper, and nickel. Only Kiribati: Marawa Exploration Ltd.Resources Research UK - UK Seabed Resources Ltd ChinaResearch - Chinaand Ocean Mineral and Development Associ countries around Germany: Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften world hastily work to secure exploitableUK - areas applied one year later, Russia made theUKSBR2-B) first official for at the ISA (UKSBL2-A, Japan - Deep Ocean Resources Developmentthe Company und Rohstoffe offshore territory. submission to establish new outer limits of the Russia - Yuzhmorgeologia China: China Ocean Mineral Resources Research Belgium - G-TEC Minerals Resources NV Today, a country’s marine economic area is continental shelf to harvest the nodules; since and Development Association USA claims - minig rights of the US (non ISA member ) South Korea - Korea Ocean Research and Development Institute defined by its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), then, 74 such claims have been filed at the UN Japan: Deep Ocean Resources Development Co. ISA Reserved areas France InstitutResources français NV de recherche pour l’exploitation de la mer Belgium: G-TEC Sea- Mineral a 200-nautical-mile-wide territory offset from the office for Oceans and Law of the Sea. South Korea: Korea Ocean Research Development Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechand Republic, Poland, Russia, Slovakia - Interoceanm APEIstates Area of particular environmental interest national coastline.

This regulation grants With technological advances in harvesting Institute special rights to explore natural (oil)EEZ and marine Exclusive the seabed, mining for minerals in the deep Economic Zones (VLIZ, 2011) France: Institut français de recherche pour l’exploitation (fish) resources, including their applications in ocean is now easier and less expensive than ever. de la mer Bulgaria, Cuba, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Slovakia: scientific research and energy production (wind Consequently, the ISA needs to get all hands Inter Ocean Metal farming). on deck. To date, only four spots have been Nauru: Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. Practically, this means that if a country reserved for mining in international waters, yet Tonga: Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd. owns a tiny rock somewhere in the ocean, the with a combined area half the size of Europe, United Kingdom: UK Seabed Resources Ltd. United Kingdom (areas applied for at the ISA) rock has an exploitable surface of 166,331 square these “spots” introduce a new continent to the Russia: Yuzhmorgeologiya miles, which equals the size of Iraq. If EEZs hapworld of resources.

United States (claims; non ISA member) pen to overlap, the states involved must delinISA reserved areas eate boundaries—a rule that has led to decennia APEI Area of Particular Environmental Interest EEZ Exclusive Economic Zones of dispute. Yet there is more “land” to claim and more squabbles ahead, since the 200-nautical miles definition was supplemented at the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea III (adopted in 1982) with a clause that allows the expansion of this zone up to the continental shelf.

The continental shelf is defined as the natural prolongation beyond EEZs; however, it may never exceed 350 nautical miles from the baseline, or 100 nautical miles beyond the 2,500meter isobaths. The 1994 ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea established the International Seabed Authority (ISA) to organize and control all mineral-related activities in the international seabed area, which Theo Deutinger is an architect, writer, and designer of socioare beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. In cultural maps. He is the founder of TD, an Amsterdam-based 2000, the ISA made its main legislative achievearchitecture firm. ment to date, the regulation and governance of Elena Megia Nieto is a Madrid-based architect and designer. exploration for polymetallic nodules. These Clarion-Clipperton Fracture-Zone, 2014.

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Un huracán de lenguajes

Héctor Tarrido-Picart talks to Victor Hernández Cruz about about weather, wind, and words.

HÉCTOR TARRIDO-PICART Your work as a poet is deeply concerned with place.

Could you talk briefly about the relationship of your work to the ocean and other “fluid landscapes”?

VICTOR HERNÁNDEZ CRUZ I started writing poetry while living in New York City.

Those early poems are full of buildings and bricks.

It’s almost like I had to vomit out the urban landscape— to clear it away—so I could get in touch with the tropical setting deep in my bones. I was trying to take the buildings out of the way, to destroy the city and get back to the trees, the blue skies, and the rural setting I came from.

My mother grew up in the 1920s, a devastating time for working-class people in Puerto Rico. Her family came from the agricultural town of Aguas Buenas, which produced tobacco. My grandfather was a tobacconist, a cigar maker. My mother’s first job was despalillado tabaco—that’s the process of taking the stem out of tobacco leaves from the center and dividing the leaves in half. She would pile them up and take them to the chinchal, the tobacco shop. The rural culture she grew up in was analfabeto—illiterate—but there was a reader, un lector, who would come and read to them at work. He would read them books, newspapers, magazines, and the tobacco workers would listen as they worked. It was a tradition that existed in Cuba and in other Latin American countries as well. So they had all “heard” the Spanish and French classics!

Stringing tobacco on a farm near Barranquitas, Puerto Rico, 1942.

HTP In Cesar Andreu Iglesias’s Memorias de Bernardo Vega, he recounts that the tobacconists kept this tradition when they moved from Puerto Rico to New York.

VHC Yes—at the turn of the century, the whole campesino class was out of work, so they migrated to America.

The tobacconists founded Spanish Harlem and it grew very quickly. Iglesias’s book explains how Sephardic Jews, who owned many of the buildings, opened them up to Puerto Ricans because they spoke the same language. Otherwise, the Puerto Ricans would not have gotten in; there was a lot of racism.

HTP When did you move to New York?

VHC I left Puerto Rico in 1954 by propeller airplane, but an earlier generation was migrating on ships, landing in Williamsburg, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Two of the boats are very famous in our collective memory, The Marine Tiger and The Coamo. I was five years old, and when you are five years old, your language is intact. In Puerto Rico, I played in the mountainside; there was a river flowing nearby. My mother washed clothes with my grandmother on the river bank, and we played, diving down the mountain with cardboard boxes. It was quite a shock to suddenly change from that world to New York.

I still speak both languages with an accent. So when I

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speak Spanish in Puerto Rico, people know I am not fully from there, and when I speak English in New York City or anywhere in the States, people know I am not fully from there. I feel like I am borrowing both languages—like the two languages are just visiting me.

HTP But in a way, the languages are fluid for you.

VHC I express myself in both, but I don’t feel fully accomplished in either. I am at my best when I am in a bilingual situation. It’s a constant learning process within the framework of both languages. One poem leads into another and all the poems are related. It’s a struggle between agriculture and urbanity, which is the story of my life.

HTP This flow is also connected to music—would you say that that your poem “Problems with Hurricanes” has some influence from the Plena genre of music, “Temporal”?

VHC Well, the Plena contains elements of popular humor, which often makes fun of tragedy. For me, that is a jíbaro thing: hard times mean that people have to make do with what is: A los malos tiempos, buena cara [when the going gets tough, the tough get going]. So I think we as a people are that way, and as a writer, I’m that way.

I try to experiment with both language and with content. For me the undertone is música: I grew up with Latin music in New York, which is Cuban music; you know, salsa has that African clave, which is an African binary system of three-two: tat tat tat, tat-tat, tat tat tat, tat-tat, tat tat tat, tat-tat:

It’s a law of clave, a key, the foundation of which is used in traditional West African dance and music. The Cubans brought the son montuno and the guaguanco, which eventually became salsa. So I grew up with that music, with this African clave bouncing around in my head all the time. And it gives the rhythmic patterns to my poetry. Sometimes, it just shows up in my poetry— that cadence, that cha-cha-cha, shows up all the time.

Rafael Tufiño, Plena no. 11, 1955.

HTP I think your poem “Side 14” really captures your battle between the two languages. You write: Night news knocking on the door Who is not who is it Locks and chains Walking on the island of trakatraka politeness Dreaming of other islands realizing they are One and the same pain and pleasure Snow and sunshine are companions Through an invisible string we walk to each other

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VHC Yes, it’s a study of contrast. Context and contrast. I now live in Morocco. There are so many languages here. The king might address the country one day in Arabic and the next day in French. I am in a meltdown of languages, totalmente. I’m in chaos, in a storm. Un huracán de lenguajes.

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HTP I wanted to ask you about hurricanes! Most people in the United States have not had the same experience with hurricanes as people that have lived in the Caribbean.

Climate models point to the Northeast as an area that will likely be hit increasingly by hurricanes. Would you say that the Northeast is gradually becoming Caribbeanized or tropicalized?

VHC Yes, weather patterns are changing. We’ll see what happens. We deal with hurricanes better in the Caribbean. There is less stuff to get damaged. Of course there are always leaves and trees and fruit flying around, but in a setting like New York, there’s so much more matter to be displaced. A hurricane in New York would be a horrible experience.

HTP In “Problems with Hurricanes” you talk about the normalization of hurricanes in the tropics. In the Caribbean, people have come to accept this condition; they know that when a hurricane hits, they may not have water or electricity for a couple of months. So people just plan for these events and life goes on.

VHC A mad man once told me a story about what happens in a hurricane. Va a caer un aguacero de frutas de la montaña y todo lo que está en la montaña va a bajar como aguacero pa’ aca abajo [A storm, with raindrops of mountain fruit, is pending upon us, and everything that is in the mountaintop will come down as a great shower].

I wanted to make a poem out of this, so I started playing with his words, and came up with “Problems with Hurricanes.” It was translated into Turkish and Chinese.

I don’t know how it sounds in Chinese, but I know the Chinese had a hurricane recently, so I think they can relate to the poem.

HTP You spend a lot of your time moving between Puerto Rico and Morocco. Some of your poetry touches upon that migratory condition. Today, more and more people live in a state of constant migration, moving back and forth between the United States and Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti. How does your poetry relate to that condition, and to current discussions about immigration?

VHC History is fusion, history is movement, history is never stay where you come from; that’s what made history.

Ideas move across seas. Never stay where you come from. That’s what got the Spanish to come to the Americas, that’s what got the Arabs moving out of the Middle East and conquering land from Persia to North Africa and Spain. There would be no history if there were no migration. That’s the story of my body, my bones, and my blood cells. If I am going to speak about Puerto Rico, a part of me is in Andalucía, a part of me is Africa, a part of me right there as a native person. You are always growing and learning from that fusion of elements.

HTP Can you elaborate on the rural landscape of your early childhood that you mentioned before? How does it relate to your poetry today, especially to your current context of Morocco?

VHC The majority of what I write is still through my memories.

My memories of the island are strong; my memories of the migration are strong. In the future, I am going to be writing more about migration and the meeting of different cultures and landscapes. When walking up six flights of stairs, something magical happens to a house.

You know you are in a different setting because of that climb. Here in Morocco, there are huge landscapes that are countryside; whereas in Puerto Rico the countryside is beginning to merge with the cities, becoming part of the centro of the pueblo. Agriculture is very rich in Morocco, and people take care of themselves in terms of the food they eat, the animals they have … all of the food here is local. You eat a pear, melocotón, and it’s much sweeter, fresher, much better than anything I have experienced in Puerto Rico or New York. Fruits here are real fruits. People here make their own bread; they take the dough to a community oven. It is a very different life than in Puerto Rico or New York.

I write about Morocco, but my main focus is still the

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Caribbean and the Caribbean Sea—the Puerto Rican or Nuyorican setting. I have to rely on memory, mixed with my imagination, so I can write about a world that has disappeared. Son mundos que siguen desapareciendo [they are worlds that keep disappearing]. The urban setting that I grew up in the Lower East Side, for instance, has been gentrified. There are lots of “real Americans.”

When I was young we were all immigrants, and the people that were there who we thought were americanos, were not americanos, eran judíos, italianos, and Irish people who were themselves migrants. But since the gentrification of New York, the waves of middle class, the so-called real American, real Anglo-Saxon Americans are coming into the neighborhood and changing the whole landscape. I used to live in a railroad flat, where one room followed the other room in a straight line.

The apartment opened up to the kitchen, the heating was done with a potbelly stove. The apartment did not have central heating—as a matter of fact I remember the workers installing central heating, and it took them a whole summer. But when we got there in the early 1950s there was none of this, the railroad flats were very cold and we had to roam the streets looking for wood to put in the potbelly stove.

Cover of Victor Hernández Cruz’s Tropicalization (1976).

HTP Your book Mountain in the Sea includes a quote in the foreword by Puerto Rican historian Fernando Picó from his Historia General de Puerto Rico: “The Caribbean is much more than the sea that appears on maps. When spoken of, we reminisce a constellation of islands, tongues and races; we remember colors, smells, cadences, rhythms and rites; we anticipate hidden treasures of a fantasy that disdains scientific certainties and logical thinking. For many of us that live in the shores of the Caribbean, it is an entity of imagination rather than a geographic unit.”1

VHC We are an older culture and group than the Anglo-Saxon north. We are the origins of the Americas. What came here was from Andalucía—the Andalucía that was under the influence of the Moors. Granada fell back to the Christians in 1492, the same year that Columbus discovered the Americas. After the Christian Reconquista, the culture that came to us was from the Andalucían Moorish culture. Nosotros somos los moros del Caríbe—we are the Moors of the Caribbean. The culture of the guitar, of the décimas.

The Spanish language includes something like 3,000 Arabic words—but these are not just words, they are also culture—rhythms, music, cuisine, things that are part of us and were part of Andalucía. And by the time Spanish explorers left the peninsula, the strongest language and culture was Moorish Arabic. We have to decipher that and what it means to our lives and to our history, because history is going on right now. We are part of it. We are transforming it, feeling it, constantly discovering it. My writing is doing exactly that.

Victor Hernández Cruz at the Academy of American Poets Forum, New York City, 2008.

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Translation by Héctor Tarrido-Picart.

Page 102: Vilaire Rigaud, Hurricane, ca. 1998.

Héctor Tarrido-Picart is a graduate student of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Victor Hernández Cruz is a Nuyorican poet. He is the recipient of many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship. His most recent published poetry collections include In the Shadow of Al-Andalus (2011) and The Mountain in the Sea (2006).

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Sundarbans:

A Space of Imagination

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We see this representational chasm between earth and ocean in the Sundarbans, where the Ganges, flowing across the earth’s surface as a geographic entity, does not enter the sea so much as turns into a field of vegetation, thickened air, liquid mud, and salty water. It is difficult to separate the elements from one another in the Sundarbans—earth from water, water from air, air from earth—particularly in the monsoon. Clarifying what the ancients meant by Oceanus does not just present the Sundarbans in a new light; it also presents designers with a new imagination.

James Rennell, The Delta of the Ganges, 1778.

With the seas in the news for their rise, fanning an industry of fear and defense, the line between land and sea is called into question. This is a line drawn in maps, a line that, in the words of the 8th century BCE prophet Jeremiah, is “an everlasting barrier.” He goes on: “The waves may roll, but they cannot prevail; they may roar, but they cannot cross it.”1 The idea that these lines are both the edge of land and the limits of the sea is deeply set in the imagination, in feats of engineering, and in the practices of everyday life. It makes the sea’s rise a threat to land, a provocation to battle or retreat. This, however, is one reading of the coastline—a geographic reading

that places land and sea in competition for space on the earth’s surface. There is another possible reading: the coastline as the limit of earth that, when viewed from above, is subject to the points and lines of geometry (i.e., geo-metry or measures of the earth). Here, what lies on the other side of a coastline is not a sea; it is ocean, or what the ancients called Oceanus: the watery element that escapes the discipline of geometry. The ancients placed this element in its own sphere, subject to states and cycles of hydrology, making the coast not a geographic transition from land to sea but a chasm between the incommensurable natures of earth and ocean.

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remain true to form in this transfer. Anaximander may not have been the first to use points and lines in this manner— that is, to construct a map—but he and Hecataeus are widely believed to be the first in a tradition that sought to capture the entirety of the earth’s surface in a “world map.”

But why, asks historian E. H. Bunbury, do the ancients see “not a sea, surrounding the earth, as it became in later works on geography, but a mighty river, flowing all round the earth”?8 Bunbury does not have an answer, but Aristotle did.

He thought it possible that by “Ocean” the ancients referred to the transformative nature of the watery element—in particular, the ability of this element to become air-like and earth-like in addition to being water-like, doing so in a process that seemed to return it to a previous state.

The earth is at rest, and the moisture about it is evaporated by the sun’s rays and the other heat from above and rises upwards: but when the heat which caused it to rise leaves it […] the vapour cools and condenses again […] and having become water falls again onto the earth. […] One should think of it as a river with a circular course, which rises and falls and is composed of a mixture of water and air. […] And in this order the cycle continues indefinitely. And if there is any hidden meaning in the “river of Ocean” of the ancients, they may well have meant this river which flows in a circle round the earth.9 For Aristotle, the extraordinariness of Ocean lies in it being a river that flows not on the surface of the earth but on, in, and through earth, air, and sea. It is a flow that eludes the map, its edge being far too complex, fluid, and ephemeral to mark with points and connect with lines in the view from above, particularly when it is in the form of mist, fog, clouds, and currents, and when it is evaporating, precipitating, melting, sublimating, seeping, soaking, and blowing, not to mention circulating within the earth and through living organisms.

Ocean Before the word “ocean” came to refer to the vast expanses of sea that cover 71 percent of the earth’s surface, it referred to a river that flowed back upon itself. In The Iliad, Homer declares this ocean “the source of all rivers and all the seas on earth and all the springs and all the deep wells.”2 He images it on Achilles’ shield, forged by Hephaestus, the god of fire and patron of craftsmen, for the Greek hero’s battle against Hector in the Trojan War. At the center of the shield, he says, Hephaestus places the earth, sky, sea, sun, moon, and stars, surrounding them with two “noble cities,” one at war and the other at peace. Around these cities he sculpts a ring of fields and vineyards and beyond them a pastoral setting. Finally, “he forged the Ocean River’s mighty power girdling round the outmost rim of the welded indestructible shield.”3 To scholars like H. F. Tozer, this concentric description is a proto world map, representing a disc-like earth around which ocean flows as “a broad and deep river which was the parent of all waters—not only of the various seas, but of the rivers and fountains—and this stream flowed continually onward, so that in its revolving course it is spoken of as returning upon itself.”4 This geographic appreciation reaches back to Strabo who considered Homer “the founder of the science of geography.” To Homer, he writes, “Oceanus touches all the extremities of the earth; and these extremities form a circle round the earth.”5 What Homer did textually, Anaximander and, shortly after him, Hecataeus did geometrically. These natural philosophers of the Milesian School are believed to have positioned their eye high above the earth from where, looking down, they saw the edge of a landmass beyond which was ocean. It is a view, observes philosopher Charles Kahn, that “lends itself directly to geometric representation.”6 This perspective, says Kahn, allowed Anaximander to diagram the earth in a way that poets like Homer did not. Diagramming “requires not drama but a precise geometric arrangement, and nothing could be more alien to the poet’s state of mind.”7 Geometric representation involves sighting points that can be related by distance on the earth’s surface, points that can then be drawn to scale. These points do not change in their transfer from earth to “drawing board” as they have neither length nor breadth and therefore transcend scale.

Points can also be connected with lines of measurable length but no breadth so that they outline “things” (continents, rivers, roads, mountain ranges, islands, cities, buildings) that

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Alexander Pope’s sketch of Achilles’ shield from his draft of The Iliad. The shield is read as a concentric artifact and a prototype of the world map of the ancients.

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“The World According to Hecataeus,” from E. H. Bunbury’s A History of Ancient Geography among the Greeks and Romans from the Earliest Ages till the Fall of the Roman Empire, 1883.

Some may see this ocean in terms of the hydrological cycle, a diagram that captures the time and movement of water in the manner that the geographic map captures the space and form of land.

In the imagination of ancients then, Ocean does not necessarily encircle a flat landmass as much as it possibly envelops and permeates an earth sphere, forming its own fluid whole, a sphere in itself that fills the pores, interstices, and troughs at various scales in and on the earth and beyond it, air, and atmosphere. It calls for a different eye to appreciate this fluid whole. Homer, in his account of the making of Achilles’ shield, says that Hephaestus makes the shield with “five layers of metal”: Ocean is the base layer upon which he rivets four sheets, each smaller in diameter so that the shield thickens toward the center.10 It is possible that Anaximander and Hecataeus’s world maps had more in common with this layered artifact than with a concentric one, and that Ocean in their maps is not a peripheral presence but a separate enveloping and permeating sphere. Its watery element is, after all, unbound by the points and lines of geometry that hold the sphere of earth to its own more durable fissured and porous form.

Today, as this earth sphere continues to take shape with ever finer-grained topographic surveys and bathymetric measures of its surface beneath the sea, it is clear that the ocean does not meet this earth in a coastline; it rather meets it across a gap in image and imagination between the points and lines of geometry and the states and cycles of hydrology.

Sundarbans The representational chasm between earth and ocean can be anywhere, but it is particularly evident in the Sundarbans at the mouth of the Ganges. The French traveler François Bernier noted that the Portuguese, English, and Dutch traders in the 17th century all described this mouth as a

place with “a hundred gates open for entrance, but not one for departure.”11 It is an image that was very likely inspired by the confusing and confounding field that the Ganges becomes as it approaches the sea, a field of an ever emerging assemblage of plants, humidity, silt, and salt. The air is thick with moisture—an example of Aristotle’s image of the watery element returning to its sources of rivers via the sphere of air. But much of the flow of the Ganges at this point does not turn into air alone—nor does it simply enter the sea—it also turns into vegetation, becoming plant material and, to an extent, coursing through plants, plants that do not anchor in land so much as they anchor liquid mud, forming it into land, but just as easily letting it go. It explains why the Sundarbans eluded maps for centuries, its field-like condition being far too complex to mark and hold with points and lines of geometry in the view from above.

Yet today, this mouth is drawn in maps and described in textbooks, scientific accounts, and novels as a multiplicity of islands and a labyrinth of channels. Islands are the place of land and channels are the place of water. Vegetation is not intrinsic to the flow of the Ganges; it is rather an occupant of a divided surface, blurring the dividing line.

Nonetheless, its existence is a matter of choice rather than necessity. Documentary evidence suggests that from the 13th to the 20th century this occupant was seen as an unwanted “jungle”—a “wild tangled mass” of “bewildering complexity or confusion”12—and was slated for clearing to make room for settlement and agriculture. Today, though, it is respected as a mangrove forest, comprised of plants that have over the last two centuries been disentangled, individuated, classified, studied, and even cultivated. Scholars refer to them as halophytes—land plants that have been pushed to land’s edge by competition, adapting to a salty environment, developing ways to either tolerate salt or keep it from harming them by building barriers, directing it to disposable parts, or excreting it. The number of their species, together with the number of animal species they harbor, is said to be exceptional, a reason why the mangrove forest is protected from the clearing that was once encouraged, marked today

by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

The ground too is protected as part of the site, considered essential to it. It is a ground that continues to be described as W. W. Hunter did, as being in the process of island formation. These new lands are encircled by a river, which, 200 miles north of the sea, comes unbraided, dividing and uniting in ways that become less predictable toward the sea. The islands to the north are relatively higher and “fixed,” having formed in the distant past, edged now by flows that are “locked into their channels.”13 The younger islands in the south are “in an unfinished state,”14 still forming with silt deposited by the overflow of rivers. The larger grains of sediment fall in the immediate vicinity of the riverbank while the finer deposits carry farther south, creating a ground that after an initial rise slopes down away from the river. The process makes these islands into “natural basins, destitute of an exit for the water.”15 They are swampy morasses in various stages of wetness and at various levels of salinity—all of which depend on the mix of fresh and salt water that spills

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Sundarbans horizons, 2014.

over the river’s edge and on the rains that fall from above.

Halophytes have adapted to the rhythms of inundation, which can be regular but are often exceptional, particularly in the monsoon.

Many of these settling islands are protected; but a good number of them are settled upon by people. Some were settled in a time when the agricultural productivity of the cleared land was a colonial ambition; others have been settled more recently with land being either an investment opportunity or a last frontier for fringe populations.

Whatever the reason for their settlement, the infrastructure by which this settlement occurs is generally the same: raise the edge of islands with embankments to stop the inundation by the river. The consequence is a relatively dry ground; but it also means living precariously on “low ground” that is not only deprived of further depositions, it is made relatively lower by the rise in the bed of the channel beyond the embankment. The situation is worsened by rain that, together with water that overtops or breaks through embankments, has no exit from what is effectively a bowl.

The settlement of these islands is the subject of numerous studies and writings of a “human-nature” conflict. Amitav Ghosh’s 2004 novel Hungry Tide drew popular attention to it, and it is furthered today by news of tiger and crocodile attacks, devastation by typhoons and tsunamis, and the growing fear of sea-level rise. Voices on this conflict divide in many ways: insiders and outsiders, developmentalists and environmentalists, wildlife enthusiasts and locals who live off the forest, and so on. But despite the different articulations and positions, they all enjoy a shared ground: a place divided between land and water, islands and channels evolving toward a stability. It is not surprising that against this backdrop, embankments fill the imagination. In the words of one author, they are “crucial for the existence of human settlements on the deltaic islands.”16 The choice for government, it appears, is between embankments and retreat—and with the latter being unpopular, embankments are being aggressively promoted, raised, and strengthened with much international funding.

But surely the image of a ground exhausted in the divide between islands and channels cannot be taken for granted.

It is the product of a cultivated imagination that clears the ground of vegetation and all other sources of ambiguity to

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articulate a river that flows from land to sea, a flow best captured by the map with a view from above. This divided ground is a world apart from a river that flows across the earth as a geographic entity before it enters not a sea but the sphere of ocean, turning into a field of vegetation, thickened air, liquid mud, salty water, and everything else that the watery element can infiltrate. It inspires an eye that turns away from the plan view of the earth to a temporal and material appreciation of ocean. Embanking against the sea does not occur to the imagination here; instead, the imagination is drawn toward anchoring in the complexities of the watery element.

This could be the start of a new design trajectory that does not read the coast as a line between land and sea that needs defending, but a place where the incommensurable worlds of earth and ocean allow for infrastructure and practices that accommodate both on their own terms.

Opening spread: Sundarbans, 2014.

Anuradha Mathur is an architect, landscape architect, and Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. She is coauthor with Dilip da Cunha of Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009), Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006), Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001), and most recently, editors of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014).

Dilip da Cunha is an architect, planner, and Adjunct Professor at University of Pennsylvania School of Design. He is coauthor with Anuradha Mathur of Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009), Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006), Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001), and most recently, editors of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014).

Book of Jeremiah 5.22 (New International Version).

Homer, The Iliad, 194.

Ibid., 560–700.

4 H. F. Tozer, A History of Ancient Geography (London: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 20–21.

5 The Geography of Strabo, trans. Horace Leonard Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 1:13.

6 Charles H. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 81.

7 Ibid.

8 E. H. Bunbury, A History of Ancient Geography among the Greeks and Romans from the Earliest Ages till the Fall of the Roman Empire (London: John Murray, 1883), 1:760 9 Aristotle, Meteorologica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 133 and 71.

10 Homer, The Iliad, 483.

11 François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656–1668 (Westminster: Constable, 1891), 439.

12 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “jungle.”

13 W. W. Hunter, The Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. 24, Travancore to Zora (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 67.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Anamitra Anurag Danda, “Surviving the Sundarbans: Threats and Responses” (PhD diss., University of Twente, 2007), 51.

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Rereading:

Rachel Carson, “Undersea” (1937)

HALI FELT

KATE ORFF

It’s strange how our minds get stuck. In William Souder’s recent biography of Rachel Carson, On a Farther Shore, he writes about the Carson family’s poverty. They lived in a house on an orchard without electricity and plumbing.

After her father died, the family followed Rachel (at 28 their sole wage earner) to rural Maryland.

A neighbor remembered seeing the family sit down to dinner of a bowl of apples. That’s where I’m stuck—somewhere between the bowl of apples and Rachel’s “Undersea.” The apples are red and crisp, but not enough to satisfy.

The world Rachel describes in the essay that follows is lush, vibrant, bejeweled, yet free. That’s the tension I was interested in as I read; that’s where I found Rachel: between a contained notenough-ness and an overwhelming abundance.

My intuitive leap toward landscape begins with imagining the life it carries: mammals, mollusks, protoplasm. Rachel Carson may have never sketched a “designed” landscape’s outlines, but her essay “Undersea” is a love letter to the texture, viscosity, and fluidity of living water bodies. Here, water is visualized with a description so thick that by the end the reader is floating and swimming, perched on the shoal, and multiplying in the ooze—inhabiting a conceptual landscape more vivid than any physical reality.

She seemed to inhabit a similar space for most of her life. As a kid she lamented how reading one book required her to ignore all other books, and as a woman in the 1950s she fell in love with a married woman, Dorothy Freeman. The infinite nature of possibility was, for Rachel, so often reined in by reality. She and Dorothy spent precious little time alone with each other, but wrote letters constantly. “Oh darling,” Rachel wrote, “I want to be with you so terribly that it hurts!” How to hide such things from friends and family wondering how such a close friend was faring? They developed a system of letters within letters. Public letters included newsy information about day-to-day life and private letters, including passionate declarations of love, were enfolded within them. They called these letters “apples.”

Have you ever gotten letters from a lover who’s far away? Delicious, but they’re ultimately arguments for further action. Alone they cannot sate, just as Rachel’s published words alone could not have caused change. Warm bodies are still needed, and apples are still not enough.

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Life under sea is the opposite of the picturesque, with no middle ground to comfort us. It is both up close and visceral—with an unfathomable complexity of tentacles, barnacles, and pulsing gills—and inconceivably remote. Within this landscape, we “shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place” as an aesthetic measure.

Written in 1937, “Undersea” prefigures Carson’s well-known work Silent Spring in that only through a deep dive into seeing, inhabiting, imagining, and mapping the shifting systems of ground and water, and the intricate cycles of life and death, could she later forecast their total annihilation through chemical warfare.

In my work mapping the extents of the aquatic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and describing the vanishing bay landscapes and shoals of the eastern seaboard, I have come to see those fragments of shell and tenuous “strands of brown, leathery weed” on the beach as lifelines to rebuilding.

It is the specter not of the robust interconnected cycles of life as Carson has described, but their sudden unraveling that is the cosmic backdrop of future imaginaries.

1 Originally titled “The World of Waters” and written in 1935 as an introduction to a US Bureau of Fisheries brochure, this essay was deemed “too good” for a minor government publication but lost in a Reader’s Digestsponsored writing contest. Thus we begin in a state of in-between.

2 William Souder writes that Rachel used this byline to “enhance her credibility by permitting readers to assume that she was a man.” I think her writing betrays her; these baggy initials don’t hide the voluptuousness of what follows.

4 Just a few examples: Diana Nyad, who swam the 110 miles from Havana to Key West in 2013; Marie Tharp, who mapped 70 percent of the ocean floor between 1952 and 1977; and Sylvia Earle (aka “Her Deepness”), a marine biologist who, in 1970, led the first team of female aquanauts in the Tektite program. Rachel died in 1964, but damn if she didn’t prop the door open. As if to say, Come on in, ladies, the water’s fine.

3 My hero.

6 The ocean defies any traditional sense of scale—the body and being: it is movement and flow.

8 Much of the past 200 years of building modern coastal cities has been about the obliteration of these in-between spaces—our regional shallow water networks, bays, and shoals have been dredged, filled, and bulkheaded. Land won the last battle, but the conflict for possession continues.

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9 Daily lifecycles: - Light - Tide - Predation

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11 This paragraph engenders powerful spatial images of how the microelements of landscape topography and texture create a sanctuary for life to persist.

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5 Please do. No matter if you’re the type to take the quick plunge or to tip-toe in with arms outstretched, hooting about the chill—join us here in the water, where time and space are fluid and maybe Rachel is still alive, available for questions.

7

7 And what of other in-betweeners, Rachel? Us of inter- and trans-, the border-dweller and boundaryignorant, immigrants, refugees, and invaders? Do our agency and adaptability define the space around us?

And can you sense it? So that, upon our meeting, you would think, I do sense an aura of tide pool around her.

10 How is an environmentalist made?

Did you look too closely at the periwinkle and crab, fall in love before you saw oil and trash? Did sadness creep in then—did it become part of you—or did it replace your joy? When did the Rachel most people know, the Rachel of Silent Spring, appear? Did she peel off from the romantic Rachel, leaving her to write essays like this one so we’d fall in love, too, only to divide against ourselves—ecstatic at nature yet agonized by its fall?

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9

5 6

10 11

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13 I thought this was a typo until I came across a poem you wrote in 1928, as a sophomore at the Pennsylvania College for Women: “I know a marsh-girt hill where brown paths cross / And intermingle till they touch the sky.”

Some editors have changed your girt to grit, replacing an action with an adjective. See: rocks circling a pool, containing it. Or: a pool lined with rock grit, domestic—a shallow, sandy bowl.

15 How does an environmentalist teach?

Here, you structure your sentence like a maze—lost at first, we don’t quite know where we’ll end up. But then come the invaders: shore birds, ghost crabs, and man, all advancing until man draws ahead with his nets.

Is this your point? It’s all in the volume of action; patter and shuffle pale when compared to plunder.

19 Here, I am thinking of another Carson—Anne, the poet—who was writing about Emily Brontë when she said: To be a whacher is not a choice.

There is no where to get away from it, no ledge to climb up to—like a swimmer who walks out of the water at sunset shaking the drops off, it just flies open.

12 Scale: tide pool = sea.

14 The muck.

16 This almost bucolic image of the solitary clammer is a reminder that the piece was written in 1937, and probably predates extractive industrial-scaled plundering techniques of bottom trawling, cyanide fishing, and dynamiting. Violence in the sea.

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17 The undersea is a landscape in constant motion—breathing, sifting, clinging, and dripping. Landscape is sensuality.

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18 Flashing back to harvest of whales for oil … gory, horrifying image.

20 ESTUARIES: shallow water bodies = babies.

21 What few oysters and oyster larvae there are left in New York/New Jersey waterways often drift aimlessly in search of a suitable substrate until they expire. A heartbreaking image.

The urbanized sea is even less a solicitous foster mother. No substrate, no shallows, no protection—fast, dirty water.

19

14

By whacher she meant “watcher,” but the former was Emily’s spelling of the word, which some editors have confusingly changed to “whether.”

Look at your writing, though, and it’s plain to see: you watch and the world flies open.

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20

22 I’m in a cabin in the woods writing these words as the rain beats steadily outside. It is day and the world has gone liquid and dark. I’m huddled near the window to catch the light. I wish I could watch like you. I wish I could talk to you. I put my glasses on, take them off. Sit up, lie down, cross and uncross my legs. Sometimes in your writing I sense your retreat from the world, as if watching ensured your solitude.

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17

18 22

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24 Another watcher, of course. I mentioned her before—Marie Tharp, mapper of the ocean floor. Where you used words, she used pictures; and you both combined art and science to give the general public a more complete picture of the planet.

You both collected as much data as possible and then imagined your way into the blanks, neither of you afraid to assert your powers of hypothesis.

23 Landscape of time = topography.

25 Light + time—the anti-picturesque.

26 I’m imagining a meeting for you and Marie. You eye each other up, don’t necessarily smile; neither of you ever blended in, neither of you ever tried.

The beach breeze ruffles your hair as you both stare out to sea. Where did your stories begin?

25

MARIE: I was a girl in Pascagoula— RACHEL: I was in college— MARIE: —where the land is the same height as the sea. The waves licked my feet…

RACHEL: —reading Tennyson and came to the lines: “Comes a vapour from the margin…”

MARIE: My mother explained the tide and the influence of the moon.

RACHEL: “…For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward and I go.”

MARIE: Where did you go?

RACHEL: The Woods Hole Marine Biology Lab one summer, then Johns Hopkins. Fell in love with eels, but I didn’t finish my doctorate.

MARIE: [shrugs] I was at Columbia.

RACHEL: Wasn’t easy, was it?

MARIE: I ran away once. [She grins.]

Got fired. Then the Office of Naval Research hired me.

RACHEL: They called me a spinster.

MARIE: Ha! RACHEL: [Throws her a sharp look.] I was an author. And a biologist.

MARIE: And I was a geologist and a cartographer and an artist. They called my work “girl talk.”

RACHEL: [Raises eyebrows.] What did you do?

MARIE: Kept working. What did you do?

RACHEL: Kept working.

[They continue off down the beach, their voices mixing in with the waves.]

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26

24

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28 Before Marie, continental drift was scientific heresy, after her, plate tectonics became fact; before Rachel, synthetic pesticide use went largely unchecked, and after her the mainstream environmental movement was born.

32 What does an environmentalist do?

“Speak as they please,” wrote the poet Robert Browning, “what does the mountain care?” Or, as someone once told me: nature doesn’t give a shit about you.

It’s easy to be pessimistic, but Rachel gives us an alternative to the “safe obscurity of the surrounding gloom.”

“Sometimes I lose sight of my goal,” she wrote in a freshman paper nearly 20 years before publishing “Undersea,” “then again it flashes into view, filling me with a new determination. I may never come to a full realization of my dreams.” And then the next lines from that Browning poem: “Ah, but a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, / or what’s a heaven for?”

27 Water cycle—H2O flow.

29 Material flow and cycle.

30 Lifespan to become immortal, to return to the sea, to be dissolved, to be remade and reformed.

31 The inevitability of future inundation, of ice sheets melting, and “swarms of planktonic animals” returning seems somehow desirable to me now—to inhabit the undersea, to be obliterated, to be alone.

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30

28

29

31

32 Hali Felt is the author of Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor (2012), and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Alabama.

Kate Orff is the founder of SCAPE and Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She holds an MLA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Orff is the author, with photographer Richard Misrach, of the book Petrochemical America (2012), and coeditor of Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park (2012). She was named a United States Artist in 2012.

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Volume and Vision:

Toward a Wet Ontology

Kimberley Peters & Philip Steinberg 124

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The Lyubov Orlova being towed through the Narrows of St. John, on its way to a scrap yard, 2013.

When writing of the sea, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss describes a horizontal, planar surface of flatness that spreads over the earth with uniformity and repetition. This is an empty surface without character or depth, a 360-degree level overlay that covers the planet in a liquid film. The sea, for Lévi-Strauss, is a space of absence, unique in that it lacks landlike features: “I feel baulked by all this water which has stolen half my universe. […] The diversity customary on land seems to me to be simply destroyed by the sea, which offers vast spaces and

additional shades of colouring for our contemplation, but at the cost of an oppressive monotony and a flatness in which no hidden valley holds in store surprises to nourish my imagination. […] The sea offers me a diluted landscape.”1 Notably, Lévi-Strauss calls it a landscape. He fails to even consider an alternate perspective in which the ocean is appreciated as a moving, meaning-filled, threedimensional seascape; a space filled with material molecules, mobile objects, and voyaging subjects.

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In reducing the sea to a flat and empty surface, Lévi-Strauss reproduces a long-standing Western conceptualization in which the ocean is defined by its failings, in particular its failure to facilitate the “rooting” practices of placemaking, economic and social development, and state territorialization, all of which characterize land. In contrast to the static, empty surface derided by Lévi-Strauss, we join more recent scholars in holding that in the ocean “nothing is static[, n]othing remains the same,”2 and that “[even] in the strict horizontal of it all, unstable cascades are endlessly trading.”3 These “cascades” encompass not just water but a range of other geophysical states (ice, vapor), materials (sand, silt, shells, and countless organisms), and meanings.

This turn toward apprehending the ocean as dynamic, deep, and consisting of multiple, intersecting elements resonates with, but also adds new dimensions to, contemporary efforts at unearthing the “geo” that underpins geography.4 The earth is increasingly configured as a geophysical assemblage consisting of not just “solid land, but […] water, ice, subsoil, and the submarine,”5 as well as the air, atmosphere, and stratosphere. This shift is significant. The earth as solid ground has typically rendered it fixed and unchanging. In comparison, the earth as a configuration of multiple materials opens a vision of the world as mobile and emergent, not in a state of being but in one of becoming. From this perspective, the stable metaphysics of Euclidean thought is replaced by an ontology alert to a world of connections, networks, flows, openness, leakiness, and change—a three- (or four-) dimensional world.

While land can be thought of in a similar way (Doreen Massey reminds us that even mountains move),6 the sea provides a unique space for developing an understanding of fluidity. Its depth, its dynamic recomposition, and its material instability, readily apparent to even the casual observer, all lend to this reading. In short, what we call a “wet ontology” does more than shed light on the complex ways in which the ocean, as a space of depth and churning, simultaneously connects and divides the world in which we live. It also provides us with a way of thinking that destabilizes sedentary and surficial notions of “place” and “being” while revealing a dynamic world of relational becoming.7

Canada (the authority concerned) set about securing the ship. However, rather than return it on its course, the Canadian agency, “confident that prevailing winds and currents would direct the Lyubov Orlova into open ocean where it could do no immediate harm,”9 slipped the towline and let the vessel disappear into the vastness of the sea, never to be seen again. A website called Where Is Lyubov Orlova? allows interested parties to follow the story and report sightings, positioning these on a map of the Atlantic Ocean, where the vessel is believed to be drifting.

Consider also the March 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. The airliner is believed to have journeyed off course, crashing into the sea with 239 people on board. To date, there is little hard evidence of exactly where it might now be located. The seas—ever motionful spaces of drift currents and flux—move objects constantly. As such, over several months the search area shifted from the region where it is believed that the aircraft entered the water to a region identified by models as the most likely site that wreckage would have been transported by ocean currents. Likewise, after a few weeks searchers assumed that any large pieces of aircraft that had survived the wreck would have become too water logged to float on the ocean’s surface, and they therefore switched from an aerial, surface-scanning approach using visual methods to a sub-sea, three-dimensional effort where sonar has been the key technology.10 These examples draw attention to the volume of ocean space, the fluid motion of water, and how these properties complicate sensing and surveillance at sea. For political theorist and geographer Stuart Elden, current geopolitical understandings of territory are limited by the dominance of flat discourses that constitute space as area.11 The map is the example par excellence. In it, space is rendered as a flat surface that can be governed across, through carving territorial boundaries. Such an image fails to account for the world’s volume or the ways in which power works through, under, and over space. The representation of the ocean as a formless surface presents an external space of emptiness that contrapuntally reaffirms the territorial state as the fundamental spatial form of modernity.

To counter this areal (or surficial) bias in spatial-political theory, Elden contends that verticality is vital. Height and depth open up new dimensions of space that are utilized for political control. Yet, for Elden, adding a vertical element is not enough, for the notion of volume encompasses forces and patterns of “reach, instability, force, resistance, incline, depth and matter alongside the simply vertical.”12 Importantly, especially when one turns to the ocean, this world of volume is also a world of movement. The sea is both planar—horizontal, “shifting” laterally—and vertical, moving upward and downward, rising and subsiding with height and depth. The sea is a space that unites vertical and horizontal motion in co-composition,13 bringing attention to unrecognized volumes of hydro-space, while, as in the cases of MH370 and the Lyubov Orlova, concurrently obscuring the objects within.

Bringing Volume to Oceans Before embracing the ocean as a liberatory “theory machine” that frees our mind to envision a world of flows, let us recall that the ocean is also a “thing in this world.”8 And in its worldliness, the depths of the ocean offer not just dynamism and possibility but also murkiness and occlusion. The dynamic and deep geophysics of the ocean are as likely to confound attempts at describing the present as they are to enhance efforts at envisioning the future.

Consider the case of the Lyubov Orlova, a former Russian cruise ship that had been embroiled in a political mix-up of unpaid port fees and ambiguous ownership. In 2012, the towline linking the vessel to an American tug snapped in Canadian waters, en route to the Dominican Republic where the vessel was to be scrapped. Fearful that the vessel would collide with oil platforms, Transport

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Inmarsat, a satellite communications company, uses a wave phenomenon to analyze the seven pings its satellite picked up from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 to determine its location.

The US Navy’s Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle being deployed in the southern Indian Ocean to look for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, 2014.

Deep, Wide Scopic Regimes Returning to flight MH370, the depth of the ocean has played a key role in challenging rescue and recovery efforts.

The sea’s liquid materiality, its composition from loosely held together molecules, enables movement through and under the water’s depths as well as across its surface. Of course some more “solid” materials can also be subject to deeper engagements. Feet sink into grains of sand, permitting a haptic encounter with ground that is both hard and soft. Such materials produce a paradox: they have both surface and depth—and both can be experienced.

A second and related paradox is that even as the ocean’s depth reveals, it also obscures. In particular, the surface of the sea and its role as a reflector of light hides what is below.14 The result, as Lévi-Strauss inadvertently discloses, is that the ocean’s depth is lost to the imagination. When MH370 went missing, it submerged into the sea, requiring a new search protocol that has combined satellite-based visual technologies with ship- and submersible-based sonic sensors. These two methods seek to reconcile the fact that both light and sound waves are confounded by the material volume and movements of water. In combining these technologies, the searchers were compelled to rethink the “impenetrable striation” that, in modern social thought (e.g., Lévi-Strauss) and legal structures (e.g., the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea), separates surface from “the depths of ocean space.”15 Encounters with the sea’s voluminous nature, then, lead us to rethink the spaces that constitute the world. Oceans have unique depths, and amid the convergent relations between above-surface,

a “wet ontology” that takes the ocean as a conceptual foundation for understanding the world. On the one hand, the materiality of the ocean—fluvial, dynamic, opaque, and deep—creates a “moving target” for spatial theory. The ocean can never be stabilized long enough to be described, let alone known as a “place” or a series of “places.” Thinking with the ocean can be maddeningly frustrating in its persistent uncertainty. On the other hand, as a space of perpetual becoming, the ocean is ripe with possibility for thinking through ontologies of emergence—not the emergence of spaces that can never be seen in their entirety but rather the emergence of spaces that can be sensed through partial encounters.

Thinking with the sea thereby allows us to reimagine and revisualize how we gaze upon, understand, and then engage with space. A wet ontology gives us a material perspective that can be employed to more broadly comprehend the volumes within which we live: a world of fluidities where place is forever in-formation and where power is simultaneously projected on, through, in, and about space.

Conceiving the world via a wet ontology may not help us find the Lyubov Orlova or the remains of MH370. However, it will provide a basis from which to understand what we don’t understand and why we don’t understand it. Amid a field of knowledge characterized by uncertainty and undertows, a wet ontology may be particularly well suited for situating our understanding of space, society, and our fluid environment.

surface, and sub-surface matter is a three-dimensional world that requires new technologies of knowledge.

This is particularly pertinent in view of volume as capacity. Volume refers not just to three-dimensionality but also to the quantity of matter that may be held within a container. Oceans are vast, covering some 71 percent of the planet’s surface and containing some 321 million cubic miles of water. This volume too makes surveillance challenging. The Lyubov Orlova is a 295-foot vessel of 4,251 gross tonnage. It is not a small ship. Yet in relation to the size of the ocean and its vortex of swells, drifts, and currents, the ship is undetectable. Chris Reynolds, an officer with the Irish Coast Guard involved with the search when the ship was believed to be in the North Atlantic, noted how the ocean is “still far too immense for satellites to scan without first narrowing the search area.”16 Pim de Rhoodes, a salvage expert who searched for the ship when it first disappeared, stated, “Once it’s lost, the ocean is really too big to just go and look for it.”17 If you are unaware of a last position, a lost object at sea is nigh on impossible to find, even if it is floating on the surface.

Toward a Wet Ontology Notwithstanding Lévi-Strauss’s vision, the sea is not merely a planar, flat, monotonous area that offers only a horizontal field of vision. It is a space of flux, flows, and churning. It is deep, volatile, and ever changing. It is a volume that—with the persistence of depth and mobility—produces realms of invisibility that frustrate conventional forms of knowledge.

This suggests both the limits and the possibilities for

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Opening spread: Curtiss SB2C Helldiver crash landed during a training mission, and has now become an artificial reef off of Maui.

Kimberley Peters is a geographer and lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University. With Jon Anderson, she is the editor of Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean (2014).

Philip Steinberg is Professor of Political Geography and Director of IBRU, the Centre for Borders Research at Durham University. He is associate editor of Political Geography and author of The Social Construction of the Ocean (2001), among other works.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973 [1955]), 338–39.

2 Anna Ryan, Where Land Meets Sea: Coastal Exploration of Landscape, Representation and Spatial Experience (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 9.

3 Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 13.

4 See Stuart Elden, “Earth” (lecture, City-State Lexical-Political Workshop, Tel Aviv, June 2013), http://progressivegeographies.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/earth-citystate-workshop.mp3.

5 Stuart Elden, “Undermining Geopolitics: Sea, Seabed, Ice” (lecture, ArcticNet Conference, Halifax, December 2013), http://progressivegeographies.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/arcticnet-undermininggeopolitics.mp3.

6 See Doreen Massey, For Space (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004).

7 See Philip E. Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Adding Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking,” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space (forthcoming).

8 Stefan Helmreich, “Nature/Culture/Seawater,” American Anthropologist 113, no. 1 (March 2011): 132–44.

9 Mark Synnott, “Amid Hunt for Malaysian Plane, Ocean Swims with Missing Vessels,” National Geographic, March 19, 2014, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140319-ghost-shipmalaysia-airliner-atlantic-ocean/.

10 See BBC News, “Missing Malaysia Plane: What We Know,” June 26, 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26503141.

11 See Stuart Elden, “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power,” Political Geography 34 (May 2013): 35–51.

12 Ibid., 45.

13 See Peter Adey, “Vertical Security in the Megacity,” Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 6 (November 2010): 173–87.

14 See Stacy Alaimo, “Violet-Black,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 233–51; Ryan, Where Land Meets Sea. 15 Gastón Gordillo, “The Oceanic Void: The Eternal Becoming of Liquid Space,” in Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Spatial Power, ed. Ronnen Ben-Arie (London: Continuum, forthcoming); see also Philip E. Steinberg, “The Deepwater Horizon, the Mavi Marmara, and the Dynamic Zonation of Ocean-Space,” Geographical Journal 117, no. 1 (March 2011): 12–16.

16 Paraphrased in Synnott, “Amid Hunt for Malaysian Plane.”

17 Ibid.

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129

The Black Beach

Under the ocean, in the depths where thousands of Africans perished during the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas, technology corporations plan to bury the vast expenditures of energy necessary to cool the “cloud’s” storage machines. The entombment of these harbingers of totalizing computation is an indirect but haunting reminder of both the absolute expendability of Black bodies and their absolute necessity to the economic ascendancy of America and all subsequent elaborations of a human-centered world.

The Middle Passage has long constituted a persistent infrastructure of transmission across shaky, reverberant Black worlds. The warming of the globe is not the only force raising the levels of the ocean; there is also what James Baldwin referred to as “the fire next time,” the incendiary consequences of continuous assaults on collective Black life.

Avant-garde musician Sun Ra and other Afrofuturists set their sights on outer space as a means to deflect from the traumas of land and sea.

But beyond metaphors, extraplantary urbanization was the technical realization of the imaginations and capacities that Blacks honed in all of their passages.

Instead of reiterating sentimental tropes of human liberation, Sun Ra

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always pointed out that the great Black imperative was the need to “get technical”—that freedom is based on tracing pathways among discordant sectors and horizons.

What will Google find out when it encounters the supposedly lost and ghostly technics of that Middle Passage? Édouard Glissant asks us to think of a space between subjugation and its refusal that makes ambiguous the distinction between land and sea, here and there. In his essay “The Black Beach,” Glissant describes Le Diamant, a beach in southern Martinique, as having a “subterranean, cyclical life.” Le Diamant is an ever-swirling landscape of volcanic sediment and colored sands, indiscernible winds, falling rock and trees, and seemingly interminable backwash—a volatile, heaving place part of neither sea nor land. A solitary man is always pacing the beach at different speeds, never saying anything, but adjusting his steps to the chaos.

Glissant sees the walker as a metaphor for “the rhythm of the world that we consent to without being able to measure or control its course.”

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world’s flotsam—all of the flailing, rubbing against, working through, promiscuous mixing and friction that keep bodies, times, memories, and cultures moving.

Similarly, there is a “city” that cannot be enclosed or colonized, where there are no terms to contain people or things in common.

Regardless of the political reality of any city, there must be a way for these diversities to exist, at least partially, without differentials of force or value. To keep pace with the volatility of their continuous recombinant associations, no thing can become too indebted, too dependent on specific characteristics or relations.

Of course there are orders of things; things can only be comprehended through their incorporation, through being held in place, kept in line.

At least in the United States, blackness has long been the preeminent vernacular of both enforcement and freedom, of the refusal to “hold down the hatch,” born of being brought to the Americas in the “hold”— that instrument, that ontological nothingness of the Middle Passage.

AbdouMaliq Simone is Research Professor at the University of South Australia and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is author of Jakarta: Drawing the City Near (2014) and City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (2009), among other books.

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Interplay

Climate change causes sea level change, which is measured in fractions of an inch, but hurricanes and other extreme weather events model a sea that can quickly erase major settlements. In the United States—the bastion of global warming naysayers—hurricanes Katrina and Sandy have rewritten the rules about property and insurance. Along the coast, many are asking how to retreat, relocate, or concentrate development. Some homeowners spend $100,000 to elevate their homes, avoiding nearly the same amount in increased insurance. But in New Orleans, poverty, poor documentation, and a host of other problems have often paralyzed the city’s recovery, leaving a checkerboard of vacant lots and little ability to leverage investment.

Beleaguered planners typically say, “The financials don’t work.”

But maybe this failure of the financial industry is good news.

No matter its context, property is managed as a generic product.

Banks, insurance companies, and real estate firms quantify differences between assets with technical indicators to mark things like mineral resources, wind, or underground aquifers, which are added to the already bureaucratic layers of jargon—from mortgage points to actuarial tables—that game the

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replenishing programs; a clearing adds value by providing views and water retention. And, since the trade itself is worth a quotient of flood insurance, and since it becomes an increasingly viable mortgage, insurers and banks are drawn to invest.

Both incentivize transactions with lower rates and streamlined deals.

In many cases, a basic rating would simplify mortgage and exchange transactions, stripping away many of the quantitative languages and replacing them with qualitative indicators. Deadlocked and devalued properties could then be revalued and released into circulation.

Perhaps most important is the idea of interplay itself, as an art and an object of design. Rather than being restricted to the more familiar singular object form or masterplan, leveraging relationships and interdependencies allows architects and urbanists to organize a stream of objects. The artistry involves not the representations of planning arrangements, but the population effects in a larger reconstituted landscape. New habits of mind about counterbalancing interplay may inform the design of many spaces and territories like those by the sea.

buying, selling, and insurance of property. In this argot, many of the physical, volumetric, and climatic attributes of a property are ironically called “intangibles.” And when a property ceases to behave like money, it ceases to possess value.

What if, rather than relying solely on generic econometrics, a parallel market of spatial variables could offer more tangible risks and rewards as well as the agility to avoid and recover from either natural or financial disaster?

Imagine an entrepreneurial effort to create a property exchange focused on an interplay among properties. An information-rich index with the benefit of intelligence from urbanists, landscape architects, and regional environmentalists could rate properties for their complementary risks and benefits or their counterbalancing attributes. Like a matchmaking website, the exchange would rate not only properties themselves, but the benefits of changing use or swapping positions in their landscapes. It would rate or certify mortgage transactions that result in an advantageous relocation or consolidation of property with reduced collective risk. The more beneficial the swap, the higher the rating: a year-round coastal property becomes a seasonal vacation home; a municipality can aggregate land for levees, dunes, or sand No. 39 / Wet Matter

Keller Easterling is a writer, principal at Keller Easterling Architecture, and Professor of Architecture at the Yale School of Architecture. She is the author of the recent Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (2014), among other books.

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Built on Sand:

Singapore and the New State of Risk

Joshua Comaroff

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Causeway linking Johor, Malaysia, to Singapore, 2002.

Rendering of Forest City, a new development in Johor, Malaysia.

In June 2014, drivers crossing the causeway between Singapore and Johor, Malaysia, began to notice something strange. A slender sandbar, which had long stood in the middle of the narrow straits, had started to grow, and was slowly inching toward Singapore. Construction vehicles had arrived, and small barges passed continuously, dumping load after load of sand into the water.

Newspapers soon reported that this expanding mound was to become the site

of Forest City, a 2,000-hectare high-rise housing development jutting out from the Malaysian port of Tanjung Pelepas.

As this privately funded project crept toward Singapore’s national border, the security state doubtlessly felt violated.

In response, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong requested that the Malaysian government halt work on the project, and threatened to file a complaint with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg.

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Forest City and its backstory are emblematic of an emerging issue of a transnational order. Less obvious than the increased capital flows across territories is the flow of territory itself. That is, land. Or, more accurately, sand.

With the rise of sand trading, the nation-state has entered a dangerously fluid phase. With the coastal earthworks that are under way throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East—a series of reclamations so large that they nearly encroach on sovereign borders—territory has acquired an unprecedented liquidity.

The malleability of sand makes it a uniquely volatile substance. Its softness and scalability distinguish it from other modes of infrastructure. As journalist Chris Milton pointed out in a 2010 essay in Foreign Affairs, sand is a medium by which massive environmental change can be effected via incremental processes.1 It is granular—neither liquid nor solid—which means that it can be transported by the boatload or by the handful. In large quantities, it can be engi-

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neered into the most fundamental of all infrastructures: land itself. In contrast to the materiality of other “fixed” infrastructures, however, sand is removed and sold by a great number of agents, and is brokered by governing authorities at local and national levels. Many dealers are illicit, and allegedly trade without genuine receipts.2 As such, the transnational drift of sand leaves only the most fragmentary of traces. Disappearances are difficult to map and nearly impossible to quantify. A number of importers, including Singapore, consider the details of their sourcing to be confidential and a matter of national security. In this context, the physical basis of the state can be incrementally eroded or expanded, legally or otherwise, through the work of private actors— much to the benefit of expanding nations. It is a form of appropriation that differs rather dramatically from traditional seizures of territory, through war or colonial expansion.

Nowhere is Milton’s observation more true than in Singapore, where access to sand has become a matter of na-

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tional security; it is the key currency in a new geopolitics of risk. The “Little Red Dot” has, since 1965, dilated from 224.5 to 276.5 square miles. The target of a 30 percent (or three square mile) increase of the country’s original land area has been set for 2030. Much of this city’s Central Business District, and its showpiece Gardens by the Bay, occupy what were the straits separating Singapore and Indonesia at the time of independence from Britain. Singapore’s sand works, geographical in scale, have exceeded even the figural archipelagos of Dubai’s trophy housing boom.

The island’s expansion has been a colossal undertaking.

It is not merely a matter of coastal reclamation: Singapore is growing vertically as well as horizontally. This means that the nation’s market needs fine river sand—used for beaches and concrete—as well as coarse sea sand to create new ground. And the ground must be solid, as the lion’s share of Singapore’s architecture is high-rise. Foreign sand and aggregate, along with foreign labor, are essential in replicating the island’s ground in the sky. Both supply a burgeoning condo market and the ongoing rollout of a public housing program that serves more than 80 percent of the population.

For Singapore’s government, sand security is a safeguard of the state’s right to development. It is a precondition of fiscal and political survival. Sand, like money, must remain liquid for the economy to keep moving. The vulnerability of the island, its entropic tendency toward general decline, has long been imagined as a byproduct of its physical limits. The ruling People’s Action Party, which lays claim to the success of the housing initiative, has asserted time and again that the endurance of the nation depends upon a continual expansion of its market and its population. Both require Lebensraum.

For this reason, sand and aggregate are stored in vast stockpiles in the areas of Seletar and Tampines, and are sold to contractors when regional disputes threaten the availability of the material. Paradoxically, the management of coastal risk comes to greatly affect the territory’s interior. The large tracts of land dedicated to storing sand and gravel aggregate become securitized sites—their area is taken “off the map.”

The interior is leveraged such that the coast may grow.

The need for sand, then, is a kind of original debt: for the territorial state to survive, land must continually be introduced. Milton notes that .6 miles of new ground requires 37.5 million cubic meters of fill—around 1.4 million dump trucks’ worth. This translates into a de facto transfer of territory from other countries. Despite the accepted terminology, earth cannot be “reclaimed” from the ocean by the magic of sovereign right; it needs to be brought from somewhere.

Unsurprisingly, this process of expansion has become a regional sore point—whetting old tensions between the island republic and its neighbors. The geopolitical narrative is that Singapore, in an undiscriminating fever of consumption, has begun to absorb surrounding territory. In a climate of heated diplomatic exchanges, fewer options for legal imports remain. Malaysia ceased shipments of sand to Singapore as early as 1997; Indonesia instituted a similar ban after claims that several of its Riau Islands had vanished, only to reappear as part of the Singapore coastline; and Vietnam suspended dredging in 2009. In turn, Myanmar and the

Philippines have become principal sources. Cambodia also announced a freeze on river sand in 2009, but so much continued to disappear that locals joked of traveling to Singapore to plant the Cambodian flag.

Recently, nationalistic outrage has been joined by environmental concern, most pointedly the loss of fragile coastal habitat and sea-grass colonies. Many accusations allege ongoing smuggling from embargoed nations, as well as dredging at both seaside and river locations. Singapore, in keeping with its policy of transparency, has replied that it pursues its imports through lawful channels.

The island nation is hardly alone in its addiction. Sand has been called the “most wanted raw material on the planet.”3 Not only is it essential for construction, it is a key ingredient in the microprocessors and memory chips used in nearly all computer technology. Its legal trade is estimated at $70 billion per year. Environmental consultant Kiran Pereira figures the global annual sand consumption to be in excess of 15 billion tons.4 Even Dubai imports sand for construction, as do most other regions that build chiefly in concrete. Many of the nations that export sand to Singapore also require immense quantities for their own domestic projects. Diplomacy is thus burdened with negotiating the flow of sand, and territory, at multiple sites and scales.

To make matters more turbid, the nightmare of coastal reclamation occupies an imaginary and regulatory space created by several misunderstandings about territory itself.

These become urgent against both the backdrop of our “oceanic” moment and the apparent dissolution of that idyll of 19th- and 20th-century geopolitical thought, the grounded state.

First among these misconceptions is that territory is a finite and intransigent thing. A longstanding myth of the state, propagated by realist and idealist schools of international relations alike, is the solidity of physical boundaries.

In these traditions, the geo-body of the developed nation is thought to be, in the words of geographers John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge, a “set or fixed units of sovereign space.”5 Its peoples and economies were thought to be discrete and independent, its form and extents unchanging.

Stranger still, cultures and countries were considered naturally isomorphic. At its conceptual extreme, this involved the conflation, on maps and in cartoons, of the shape of the nation with cultural icons or founding fathers. In Thailand, it was the person of the king, fending off rapacious foreigners.6 In Italy, it was Garibaldi with a sword. This ignored an untidy fact: that the form of the state has been highly fluid, its edges in particular. Since its invention, the borders of the global map have been continually redrawn. This is clearest, perhaps, in postcolonial contexts such as Singapore, where the reapportioning of territory, and the development of the coastline, had much to do with the play of regional geopolitical strategies.7 The difficulty of sand likewise relies on a second error of territorial thought: the reified belief in the state as a unitary actor with sole control over its own space.8 That is, the state is mistaken for an object, rather than a web of processes.

Part of the failure of diplomacy, here, is precisely that it oc-

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Sand in Singapore is sourced from throughout the region, despite export moratoriums.

national boundary are changing—much to Singapore’s chagrin. But the controversy also shows how inchoate such works are with respect to the position of the state itself. The venture involves myriad actors, most of them above or below the level of formal governance. The investor, Country Garden Holdings, is a company majority-owned by China’s richest woman, Yang Huiyan. Country Garden’s minority partner is none other than the Sultan of Johor, a regional hereditary ruler. The contractors and sand suppliers are a constellation of private companies. The presumed buyers are global expatriates expected to migrate to Malaysia’s new Iskandar special economic zone, which is currently being built around the existing city of Johor Bahru. In particular, Forest City is positioned to cater to those priced out of Singapore’s condominium market, where high-rise prices rarely fall below 1,000 Singapore dollars per square foot. It is not quite clear who is realizing this new territory; it is almost certainly not “Malaysia” itself.

The challenge of sand is shifting and particular to each site. It articulates a nightmare both old and new: a radically liberated state, free of stabilizing ideologies such as soil and ground. Sand is an unstable and promiscuous alternative, quickly drained of historical and geographical traces.

Perhaps it is telling that in Hebrew “sand” and “secular” are homonyms. It holds allegiances to no nation, no religion.

Its form is transience. The fear goes: there is no more land; there is only sand.

curs at the “official” level. In reality, the problem ramifies through the myriad actions of substate and supranational actors: dredgers, contractors, developers, ecological activists, overseas investors and property speculators, and politicians at every scale.

Accounts of sand trading, by journalists and advocates alike, articulate terrors arising from the apparent dissolution of national integrity. Milton, for one, relates claims of seedy exchanges between foreign and local elements throughout Southeast Asia. Likewise, a damning 2010 report by environmental watchdog Global Witness describes clandestine dredging of rivers and coastlines, and flotillas of tiny barges carrying stolen ground to undisclosed locations.9 Erosion, as the undermining of both natural and human ecologies, plays a key symbolic role—it is the geophysical analogue of the “haze,” an annual pollution crisis forced on Singapore and Malaysia by Indonesian slash-and-burn farming. As sociologist Ulrich Beck noted many years ago, these are influences that “add up to an unknown residual risk […] for everyone everywhere.”10 In the immediate wake of Chernobyl, Beck was quick to point out that the mobility of vectors such as wind-born radiation and pollution—not to mention the contagion of financial disasters—dramatically undermines the notion of an impervious sovereignty. National borders cannot repel such invasions, particularly when the very materiality of those borders is itself in flux.

The complexity of this issue is exemplified by Johor’s Forest City project, the latest episode in the Asian “sand wars.” Clearly, this is a situation in which conditions at a

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Opening spread: Land reclaimation, Marina Bay, Singapore.

Pages 144–45: Bas Princen, Sand quarry (Bantam), 2013.

Pages 146–47: Bas Princen, Straits (sand trade), 2013.

Bas Princen’s photographs were originally published in Milica Topalović, Constructed Land: Singapore 1924–2012 (Zurich: ETH Zürich, 2014).

Joshua Comaroff is an architect, landscape architect, and academic geographer. Together with Ong Ker-Shing, he is cofounder and director of Lekker Design.

See Chris Milton, “The Sand Smugglers,” Foreign Affairs, August 4, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicy. com/articles/2010/08/04/the_sand_smugglers.

In fact, Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG and Alexander Trevi of Pruned have suggested a “forensic geology” to trace sand back to its origin. See http://bldgblog.blogspot.sg/2011/09/caverns-of-singapore. html.

3 Peter Dupont, “Sand Wars,” trans. Rafael Njotea, working grant proposal for the Pascal Decroos Fund, 2013/995, http://www.fondspascaldecroos.org/en/inhoud/werkbeurs/sand-wars.

4 See ibid.

5 John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge, Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory, and International Political Economy (London: Routledge, 1995), 83.

6 This was associated with numerous individual kings, but most famously with Mongkut. Likewise, the propaganda method of maps as human figures had a negative version. Like the famous Nazi “octopus” of American newsreels, Thai political cartoons often pictured Vietnam as an imperialist aggressor with a voracious, open mouth. This is shown in Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 113.

7 This had to do with the imperial tactics of large regions in the classically geopolitical tradition, for example in the influence of thinkers such as Alfred Mahan—especially where water power was understood to be the key to military superiority. It also had lasting influence on British planning schools that emphasized the development of the coast, such as Otto Königsberger. See Vandana Baweja, “A Pre-History of Green Architecture: Otto Königsberger and Tropical Architecture, from Princely Mysore to Post-Colonial London” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008), http://deepblue.lib.umich. edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/60709/vbaweja_1.pdf?sequence=1.

8 See Agnew and Corbridge, Mastering Space, 81–82.

9 See Global Witness, “Shifting Sand: How Singapore’s Demand for Cambodian Sand Threatens Ecosystems and Undermines Good Governance” (May 2010), http://www.globalwitness.org/library/ shifting-sand-how-singapore%E2%80%99s-demand-cambodian-sand-threatens-ecosystems-andundermines-good.

10 A much-debated argument, presented in Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans.

Mark Ritter (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 29.

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Ocean Sensing

Xiaowei Wang talks to Dawn Wright about data, disasters, and doubt.

XIAOWEI WANG You’re Chief Scientist at the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri), in Redlands, California. As a geologist and oceanographer, can you briefly describe your journey?

DAWN WRIGHT As a graduate student in the geography program at UC Santa Barbara I became involved with some of the professors in the geological sciences department.

Professor Rachel Haymon had just returned from a month-long expedition to map underwater hot springs on the East Pacific Rise, with the same vehicle that had been used to discover the Titanic a few years earlier. She had stored some data in a geographic information systems (GIS) export format, but had no idea how to turn that into an actual map. I expressed interest in her project and she took me on.

XW You learned GIS on the fly?

DW Yes, and that relationship continued when I joined the faculty at Oregon State University. Later, when Esri cofounder Jack Dangermond considered bringing someone on as Chief Scientist, I knew Esri well as both a user and a collaborator. I was honored to accept his offer, which included leading a new initiative to better apply Esri technology to the mapping and analysis of the oceans.

XW How far have we come since Marie Tharp’s contribution to the famous 1977 World Ocean Floor Panorama?

DW I highly recommend the recent book Soundings by Hali Felt, who describes how Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen developed the first map of the ocean floor, partly in collaboration with an Austrian landscape painter Heinrich C. Berann. Marie actually discovered the rift valley of the mid-ocean ridge system, which had important implications for the viability of plate tectonics as a theory. But, as a female scientist in the 1950s and 1960s, she wasn’t given credit for her ideas.

XW Were there holes or gaps in the data?

DW Yes, it took a lot of extrapolation to make the 1977 map. The cartographic beauty masked a lot of the inaccuracies. But to this day, it’s still the map for many of us who map the sea floor and for other kinds of oceanographers. It lends credence to the impact of beautiful, accurate, cartography done well with the best available data. And that impact is huge.

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XW How far has mapping the oceans evolved since Tharp’s work?

DW Today, our maps are of course much more detailed and accurate, as we have more ways to collect data. Esri’s aim in developing its Ocean Basemap is to provide the modern-day equivalent of the 1977 map with even more authoritative bathymetric data, as well as ocean floor feature names, water body names, and, in certain regions, derived depth values.

Anyone can contribute their high-quality, highresolution data to the Ocean Basemap, which is a foundation for ocean GIS. Individuals or organizations involved in ocean science, ocean conservation, maritime operations, or ocean management can deploy GIS feature overlays or web services, such as maritime boundaries, energy infrastructure, shipping activity, subsurface geology, ocean surface and water-column observations, nautical charts, etc., to dynamically mash up those layers with our bathymetry.

Marie Tharp, sitting at her desk at Columbia’s Lamont Geological Conservatory, 1956.

XW Satellites can do quick scans—can we do the same for oceans?

DW Satellite sensors that scan the earth are amazing, but they cannot see all the way through the water in most areas of the oceans. We do have a low-resolution global map of the ocean floor that comes from satellites, but it’s an approximation based on bumps in the ocean’s surface that reflect the earth’s gravitational changes— that is, where the largest mountains and trenches are.

Oceans are very different. Since we don’t have acoustics from space satellites—yet!—we have to use acoustics from ships and vehicles instead, similar to the way marine mammals navigate and communicate.

By sending sound waves into the water, we can make wonderfully detailed maps. It just takes longer to get detailed information. At sea we gather data on average at the speed of a bicycle, 10 to 20 miles per hour; in comparison, low-earth orbit satellites travel between 10,000 to 15,000 miles per hour, circling the earth two, even three times a day.

The Ocean Basemap, a cartographic representation of the earth’s bathymetry as contributed by government, university, and industry partners worldwide. This portion of the Basemap shows the western Pacific.

XW Can data come from other places?

DW Yes, absolutely—from a wide variety of local and regional jurisdictions, and at different scales and resolutions— even from crowd-sourced data.

XW How is that possible?

DW Given the appropriate sensors, everyone from local fishermen to university programs funded by the National Science Foundation or the US Navy can collect bathymetry.

XW What political questions does data bring up in relation to mapping and the future of marine spatial planning, especially with recent disputes about islands in Asia and ocean zones in the Arctic?

DW How should the oceans be used and by whom? This is where marine spatial planning factors in. One major objective is to make sure that everyone is at the table, so that it’s not just government making top-down decisions about offshore uses for a given area, but citizens, conservation groups, and small or large industries that are dependent on the oceans. GIS can truly bring these

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stakeholders together, face-to-face or online, looking at the same data, and sketching alternatives in a fully collaborative way.

XW Is ocean governance similar to Internet governance and the Wild West of the web?

DW In some areas, jurisdictions and governance are clear.

For instance, all US coastal zones have a state territorial sea extending from the shoreline out to 12 nautical miles.

And under federal jurisdiction, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is exploring new areas for offshore parks and new national marine sanctuaries, which is similar to planning a traditional park but with a twist. Governance on land is a bit more straightforward because boundaries are static. Oceans are different because they are constantly in motion and the “boundary line” is three-dimensional.

XW The boundary line?

DW Yes. Ocean boundaries can be difficult to understand and enforce, because they extend down from the sea surface to the sea floor, forming a three-dimensional volume. On land, a boundary is defined with a distinct line on a map and in some places a visible property division. But with marine spatial planning, maps typically show boundaries only at the ocean surface or the shoreline in two dimensions rather than three. People rarely think about space or property in terms of volume, but that’s the reality of oceans. Few people even realize that the United States has an offshore boundary, but it’s truly an ocean nation.

We actually have more ocean surface area than land surface area, if we count our National Marine Sanctuaries and marine reserves.

of the ocean crust at large faults and fissures, but the rate of motion is usually quite slow (fast seafloor spreading is akin to the rate that your fingernails grow). Huge tsunamis result from massive shifts in the ocean floor that are in turn caused by large earthquakes.

XW Should we rethink what a map is?

DW Yes we should. Within ocean observatories we’re getting vast quantities of data from shallow mapping systems; growing networks of buoys, sensors, gliders, and other kinds of vehicles; collecting data 24/7 from the ocean surface, throughout the water column and across the ocean floor. Depicting this information overload is forcing us to rethink the notion of a map.

It’s also very challenging to create a communicative map from a constant stream of data. Imagine, for instance, that you’re trying to map in real time all the tweets during a World Cup match. It’s a cacophony of thoughts, opinions, impressions—a stream of noise—so how does one make a decent map of all that? What do we include or exclude? How do we go from something that is stable with its extent, symbology, and colors, to something that is updated constantly, available at multiple scales simultaneously, and where the design of the map can or should be changed instantaneously? This is an exciting, evolving field of research.

The panoramic SVII camera pictured is used by Catlin Seaview Survey scientists to create a global baseline of the world’s coral reefs, Galapagos, 2011.

XW But you don’t abandon the core of mapping?

DW No, we certainly don’t abandon core cartographic principles. In fact, we need those now more than ever in order to make our maps effective at communication.

So we still want to focus on the enduring principles of representation: good design, legibility, accuracy, originality, and proper representation of the analytics. Even though just about anyone can make a map, we still need the proper training to make a good map. In a similar vein, we might all have cameras but there is still a great need for the eye and expertise of professional photographers. I believe the same is true for cartography.

XW Do we know what we don’t know?

DW In many cases, no. The search for Malaysian Air flight 370 is a good example. This tragedy is showing us how little we know of the Indian Ocean, and in general how little we know about the oceans globally. As the comedian Paul Rodriguez once said: “War is God’s way of teaching us geography.” My corollary to that is disasters are God’s way of teaching us about the oceans.

Oftentimes a tragedy or crisis brings to bear the resources needed to map and understand the oceans at the level of detail needed. But if we could do some things without waiting for the next major catastrophe, we would be much better off.

XW Are crisis and catastrophe compelling us to map the oceans differently?

DW Not differently in terms of technology, but in terms of detail, yes. In fact, we seem to careen from one crisis or catastrophe to another. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy,

Pisces V is a three-person, battery-powered, submersible, with a maximum operating depth of 6,500 feet.

XW But what about the high seas, beyond national boundaries?

DW That is the real Wild West. In terms of the fish being taken, the disputes over whaling, offshore mining, etc., “high seas governance” is becoming an increasingly important and urgent issue. The high seas are part of a holistic earth that we should all respect and govern together, even if they’re beyond our national boundaries. For example, if we allow pollution or overfishing to persist in the high seas, it will come back to us with serious implications for our lives and livelihoods, on the coast and on land.

XW Do you ever get seasick?

DW Yes, I usually get quite sick at the beginning of an expedition. It takes about 48 hours for my inner ears to adjust. Mapping a dynamic system like the ocean that is always in motion is challenging. For some people it’s very difficult to read or write during a bumpy car ride or on a fast moving bus or train. It’s similar for many of us trying to function at sea, trying to capture data from a platform that is constantly moving.

XW The ocean floor moves?

DW Yes, the ocean floor can be quite dynamic in places, particularly where there are volcanic eruptions, or shifting

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the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the tsunami in Japan, and the typhoon in the Philippines, we’ve been focused on coastal regions. These events indicate that we still have a long way to go before we understand the oceans well enough to prepare for and recover from disasters.

Yet other areas are completely ignored (there is no research funding to map them) because there is no catastrophe happening there at the moment (we think).

But even with the Japanese tsunami, marine debris across the Pacific will continue to be a huge problem, as will ocean acidification due to global warming.

XW Are the polar regions any different?

DW They are no different in terms of our need to map and understand them. Ironically, with the shrinking of the polar ice caps due to global warming, we’ve recently been able to map portions of the Arctic and Antarctic with less difficulty. But what we learn from these maps should engender more responsible use and protection of those regions.

XW Is scale a factor?

DW Yes, the enormity of the oceans brings with it the challenge of the time required to map them, but also forces us to focus efforts. Admittedly, some areas of the oceans are just flat and boring! They’re called abyssal plains and are very easy to map. At the 2012 World Oceans Summit in Singapore, someone rightly suggested that because we can’t instantaneously map all of the oceans, we should focus on active and dynamic areas, including coasts, and just leave the flat, boring abyssal plains alone for a while. We know they won’t change, and we can interpolate in many of those areas.

XW That’s so funny!

DW It’s true! It’s the lesser of several evils. Political will is often a major factor in providing research dollars for mapping.

The ocean community often compares itself to the space program. It’s extremely expensive to go to the moon, or to run experiments in space, and yet these things were accomplished—spurred in part by the political will of the Cold War. The ocean community is trying very hard to swing political will and public momentum toward better mapping, especially given that it would take a fraction of NASA’s budget. President Obama is trying to engender some political will given the complex realities of climate change, but it’s very frustrating with the current Congress. In the meantime, it seems we will have to wait for the next storm.

Page 154: Close-up of the Challenger Deep region within the Mariana Trench as portrayed in the Esri Ocean Basemap. Challenge Deep is the deepest spot on the planet at over 6.8 miles. The shallowest regions are indicated in red, moving to deepest regions in purple.

Xiaowei Wang is a designer and landscape architect based in San Francisco.

Dawn Wright is an ocean scientist, geographer, and Chief Scientist of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri).

Dawn Wright presenting at Esri’s first annual Ocean GIS Forum, 2013.

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Thalassophilia and Its Discontents

vessels that had ever been on any ocean—estimates are at about 400 feet long by 160 feet wide. The fleet reached the east coast of Africa, and for a brief period, before later Ming emperors discontinued ocean exploration, China had established itself as the preeminent sea power in the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Vasco da Gama’s voyages to India in the late 15th and early 16th centuries are still thought by many to have initiated “globalization” as we know it. Portugal did in fact constitute the first in a succession of maritime hegemons that operated according to the Western historical logic of sea power, a logic that would see the Portuguese arrival as filling a power vacuum left by the withdrawn Chinese. The one literary work based on Zheng He’s voyages—Luo Maodeng’s 16th-century Sanbao taijian Xiyang ji tongsu yanyi (Popular Romance of the Record of the ThreeJeweled Eunuch Descending upon the Western Sea)—is neither widely read nor critically acclaimed, and mixes supernatural combat with demons and spirits with intermittently interesting records of the voyage itself. In marked contrast with this text, and with the prosaic and matter-of-fact contemporary reports on Zheng He’s voyages (the most important and influential record being Ma Huan’s Yingyai shenglan [Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores,

Is the ocean good to think with?

So it would seem.

But when I began to think about oceanic matters some time ago, I was struck by what a Western story it was, by how odd and distinctive the Western hyper-mythography of the oceanic has been. And this is not because, as G. W. F. Hegel maintained, it was only Westerners who had taken to the seas. China was long an important naval power, and Chinese nautical technology was, for most of the last two millennia, the most advanced in the world.

However, before the 1988 television documentary series River Elegy, the ocean had inspired next to nothing in Chinese culture: there is no significant poetry or literary work on oceans, no tradition of seascapes, no ocean epics or adventures. Now that China is asserting its naval power in the Pacific—accompanied by the republication and public discussions of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History as a central text of oceanic mythography and strategic elementalism—perhaps this will change.

China’s earlier maritime supremacy was free of oceanic mythogenesis.

Muslim eunuch Zheng He, under the direction of the Yongle emperor of the Ming dynasty, made a series of voyages into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean in the early 15th century. His fleet of 300 ships comprised some of the biggest

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1433]), da Gama’s voyages inspired a monument in Western literary modernity: The Lusiads (1570) by Luís de Camões was the first national epic in the modern sense, referencing Greek and Roman epic tropes for the narration and glorification of national destiny on the global stage.

The capacity of the ocean to serve as capitalism’s myth element is shaped in part by the taming and control of the risks inherent in oceanic trade.

The recent “oceanic turn” across a variety of disciplines has provided questions and perspectives obscured by national or continental boundaries.

But a grain of sea salt is in order, and in earlier work I have drawn attention to the considerable mythogenic baggage that Westerners bring to the ocean. Oceans connect, to be sure, but so does nearly everything else. The phase of globalization inaugurated by European maritime exploration of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and just as significantly, the mythogenesis that accompanied it, made the ocean seem to be the primary medium of connectivity.

But this maritime telos of global modernity submerges a range of other modes of interconnectivity.

In recent times we have been facing an ocean that has been overfished to the point of species collapse, polluted with oil spills and leaks, with the garbage that collects in the Pacific garbage patch, and, most ominously, that is now threatened with a level of acidification

that could result in disturbances so massive that the chemistry of the earth could be altered. The Arctic is rapidly on the way to becoming ice free for part of every year, and thus open to the too familiar litany of anthropogenic maritime disasters: oil spills, over fishing, and militarization.

We are forced, now, to confront the ocean not as myth element, as figure of transcendence of imperial sublime, of imagined cross-cultural commons, but in its biological, microbiological, and chemical materiality, all of which have been and are being transformed by human activity in the Capitalocene.

Currencies

Water runs through the filtration system of Macao Water plant, a company that belongs to Sino French Water Development, a joint venture between Hong Kong’s NWS Holding Limited and France’s Suez Environnement S.A., Macau, China, 2008.

Page 154: Norges Bank announced the winning motifs in a contest to redesign Norway’s banknotes, including a colorfully pixelated reverse by Snøhetta Design and nautical themes on the obverse designed by the Metric System.

Christopher Connery is Ziqiang Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Shanghai University, and Professor of Literature at the University of California Santa Cruz. He publishes on contemporary Chinese politics and culture, capitalist geographies, and the global 1960s.

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Astrida Neimanis is co-organizer, with Janine MacLeod and Cecilia Chen, of the project Thinking with Water. She has published numerous scholarly and creative essays exploring ontologies of embodiment and relational ethics from the perspective of all bodies’ watery constitution.

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Astrida Neimanis

“Nature provides us with an inexhaustible source of inspiration and ideas,” claims Suez Environnement S.A., a global leader in water privatization, in an advertisement. For multinational corporations like Suez, putting your greenest face forward makes good business sense. But while the company’s marketing-speak may seem benign, or even environmentally conscious, this rhetoric greenwashes the ironies inherent in a purported reverence for nature’s intelligence.

Private sector participation in the provision of water and sanitation services stretches back centuries, though late 20th-century neoliberalism has ushered in a new wave of dubious hydrocapitalism. Allegations around Suez’s unethical practices in South Africa include refusing to extend regular water services to low-income neighborhoods, unacceptable rate hikes, and severance of services when people can no longer afford them. This past spring’s water shut-offs in Detroit remind us that accessible water services for the most vulnerable in any part of the world can still be sacrificed to smooth a path toward water service privatization.

And as Suez’s water management policies commoditize actual bodies of water, their advertisements commandeer water’s metaphorical potencies as well. The very idea of water and watery natures becomes a resource for capitalism. Cultural theorist Janine MacLeod has described global capitalism’s reliance on water metaphors to suggest that capital (like water) is essential to life, while reducing water to an exchangeable commodity: liquidity, currency, trickle down, cash flow.

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We should indeed look to watery natures for inspiration. We are all part of an oceanic commons that sustains and bonds all life.

Turning to water as design muse can thus be understood as a moment of recognition, where our own watery natures are amplified.

But when we hail the ocean as teacher, do we also consider the silent slippage between gift and theft, between use and usurpation?

What happens when the sea ceases to be an unknowable mystery, and is figured instead as inexhaustible resource? Water—as substance or idea—cannot be simply ours for the taking.

Even as the largest habitat on earth, the sea is less known to us than the moon. The oceanic turn is thus also a confrontation with the hopelessly alien. Aswim in this turn we have a choice: we can wonder at our enlivened intimacy with our oceanic Other and cultivate a sense of both humility and respect for the strange waters that sustain us, or we can size up waterlife as a new colonial frontier. At stake are the health of our bodies and the health of our waters, but also the integrity of water’s meaning. Like imperialists of former times, capitalist colonizers such as Suez know that empire-building relies not just on conquering bodies, but on capturing imaginations.

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Regional Design Thinking

Henk Ovink

When Hurricane Sandy hit New York, it changed the debate on climate change. New York is everybody’s city, it is part of our common memory and culture.

Devastated by Sandy, New York highlighted regional and international vulnerabilities, the demand to act, and the need to anticipate future scenarios.

Hurricane Sandy didn’t hit New York City alone; it hit an entire region, destroying and damaging more than 650,000 homes and hundreds of thousands of businesses. The storm exposed the complexity of regional interdependencies, tensions, and the disconnect between politics and people. Economically vulnerable communities were impacted most by Sandy’s devastating power, and were dependent on others to get back on their feet. Some say resilience is the capacity to bounce back after a disaster. But recovery is not enough; resilience means bouncing back better, differently, through collaboration, foresight, and innovation.

Amid the post-storm turmoil, President Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force initiated Rebuild

by Design, a multidisciplinary design, research, and recovery program. Supported by six philanthropic funders led by the Rockefeller Foundation, we launched a competition, acknowledging that “preparedness” and “resilience” are not only big-city problems. This was about the whole region: coastal communities in New Jersey, on Long Island, and along the Long Island Sound; the ecosystems in our bays and barriers; and the economic hubs and assets profoundly exposed to climate change. New York as a region can set a new standard for resilience and thus became an example for the world. Traditionally, politics is bound by borders— defined by jurisdiction. But in this case, the issues and interdependencies defy boundaries between cities, states, and nations.

Rebuild by Design started with a call for interdisciplinary teams to work with the region’s talent on a resilient approach for the future, looking for new standards and innovative approaches to preparedness.

We selected 10 teams out of 148 submissions from all over the world. Instead of looking for quick answers to local problems, our first step was to better understand the region through collaborative research organized

by New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge and its Research Advisory Group.

This phase resulted in a comprehensive report from which 10 design teams selected 41 opportunities for intervention. Each team was then tasked to develop an approach to one intervention, working with a community-based coalition on an implementation plan.

Supported by the Municipal Arts Society, the Regional Plan Association, and the Van Alen Institute, the teams developed their designs. The federal government dedicated $920 million to six winning proposals that showcase resilience through a comprehensive regional approach.

Rebuild by Design’s collective actions are a movement toward cultural change for resilience through strong new coalitions. This is adaptive, robust governance that enables time to think, creates room for progress, and constructs a framework for decision making. This is not about back-room plans or free rides; it is about governing by design, through a collective, inclusive approach.

Clockwise from top left: BIG: Lower East Side, NY. This protective system around Manhattan marries big infrastructure investments with a community approach to create “the lovechild of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.”

OMA: Hoboken, NJ. A comprehensive water strategy deploys programmed infrastructure and soft landscape for coastal defense (RESIST); guidelines and infrastructure to slow rainwater runoff (DELAY); a circuit of green infrastructure to manage excess rainwater (STORE); and pumps and alternative routes to support drainage (DISCHARGE).

PennDesign/OLIN: Hunts Point, NY. This proposal sets out four strategies: integrated and adaptable flood protection systems to safeguard the neighborhood and create public amenities along the waterfront; livelihoods and leadership efforts for capacity building and social resilience; marine emergency supply chain to enhance the waterways; and cleanways to improve air quality.

Scape/Landscape Architecture: Staten Island, NY. An in-water solution creates breakwaters that will reduce risk, revive ecologies, and connect educators and the public to the shoreline while inspiring a new generation of harbor stewards and a more resilient region.

MIT + ZUS + URBANISTEN: New Meadowlands, NJ. The proposal consists of a regional destination, which will be a large natural reserve made accessible to the public that will offer flood protection, an expanded transportation network, restored wetlands, and economic development opportunities for towns to thrive.

Interboro Partners: South Shore, NY. A set of interconnected interventions transforms the Mills River into a green-blue corridor that both stores and filters water, providing public space and room for new development.

Henk Ovink is a Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and is Principal of Rebuild by Design. He is Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Senior Advisor to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget at the Executive Office of the President, and former Director General of Spatial Planning and Water Affairs in the Netherlands.

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Between the Tides of Apartheid

Pierre BĂŠlanger

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with the assistance of Jean & John Comaroff

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When, in 1958, Nicholaas Francois Badenhorst was attacked by a shark, most likely a great white, the 29-year-old policeman was on holiday with his brother and a friend in the small resort town of Port Edward, off South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal coast. Like many other resort towns along the Durban coast, Port Edward survived on the seasonal tide of South Africans—mainly Whites—who migrated there every year for vacation.

That year was unusual. Typically, safety nets off the coast caught between one and 15 sharks annually, but 1958 set a record catch of 225, many of which were great whites.

Badenhorst was the sixth victim claimed in a spate of seven deadly attacks that occurred between December 1957 and April 1958. The resulting fear of future attacks shut down beaches, and panic-stricken tourists deserted the Durban coast. From Port Edward to Uvongo, most resort areas along the Indian Ocean coastline of South Africa became ghost towns for the next decade—a dark period known as Black December.

The international ocean organization Oceana recounts that “whaling vessels offshore were attracting sharks to the area; rivers were flooding and washing livestock out to sea, introducing new food sources and making the water murky; and there were more tourists than ever in the water due to recent resort development.”1 Port Edward, where Badenhorst was attacked, was precisely downstream from the Mtamvuna River (Zulu for “reaper of mouthfuls,” referring to havoc from flooding and bounty from fertility), whose nutrient-rich fresh waters contributed to turbid conditions with low visibility.

Vincent Bezuidenhout, False Bay (archival pigment print on cotton paper), 2011. Strandfontein Pavilion, Mnandi Resort, Monwabisi Resort, and Macassar Resort.

White Space The beach at Port Edward, located just south of the Umtamvuna Nature Reserve, was a reserve of a different kind—it was a space for Whites only, governed by the 1947 Law of Apartheid. The identity of the courageous 55-year old lifeguard who atempted to save Badenhorst was more unusual than the attack itself. In the bloody waters of Port Edward beach that afternoon, Badenhorst was pulled from the jaws of a shark by Zephaphiri Messeko. According to the report by Shark Research Institutes’ director Marie Levine, the middle-aged Messeko “waded into the sea, fought the shark, dragged Badenhorst’s body from its jaws and carried him from the water.”2 Messeko was not only a lifeguard; he was Zulu.

The state defined four racial groups, through which rights and zoning were defined: Black, White, Indian,

and Coloured (South Africans of mixed ethnicity). Mostly visited by Coloureds or Whites, Blacks were a rare site at beaches. Native to the interior, Blacks tended to be ambivalent about the sea, seldom learning how to swim.

Coloureds, on the other hand, were very much at home with the sea and coast, especially at the Cape, where they traditionally have been fisherman, fish vendors, and snoek-eaters.

While historically, certain populations did reside in particular regions, formal color-coded separation was constructed by the state. The 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act segregated all public facilities. Seeking to limit contact between races, the law became known as “petty apartheid,” as it defined space in terms of racial accommodation, separating “beaches, buses, hospitals, schools, cinemas, theatres and universities.”3 The act was an essential part of a racial segregation regime installed in 1950, when two major pieces of legislation were “designed to create the new ‘apartheid (apart) city’ ”4: the Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act. Whites were mostly concentrated along the shores and rich farmland of Paltteland, the Witwatersrand, and the fertile Natal interior; non-Whites were in what is known as the TBVC States (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei).

Newspaper clipping, April 12, 1958.

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To maintain appearances, the conceit of apartheid was always “separate but equal,” so parts of the coasts and beaches were set aside for non-Whites. For Whites, provisions and facilities were often more elaborate, like the Sea Point Pavilion near Cape Town’s city center with its formal pools, changing facilities, playgrounds, and restaurants. The logic of apartheid provision was not always crudely dualistic. Coloureds—who represented a mediating population in terms of race, culture, and status—had certain basic facilities, especially at the more “liberal” Cape.

On the coast, lifeguards like Messeko represented an exception to the rule. Working the shores of the Indian Ocean to promote water safety, he was part the South African branch of the Royal Life Saving Society, a multiracial association known to resist regimes of apartheid and systems of separation through a unified front of volunteers.

The coast itself represented an exception to the rule.

In the late 1940s, before the regime of apartheid was officially installed, the South African coast saw the development of a network of nearly 100 small seaside pools along its rocky and sandy shores. From Namibia on the west coast to Mozambique on the east coast, this network presents the nearly undocumented and untold story of political liminality— transgressions during an

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Tidal pool, Indian Ocean, Cape Town, 2006.

Tidal pool, Indian Ocean, Cape Town, 2006.

age of acute segregation. According to D. E. Bosman and D. J. P. Scholtz, who conducted “A Survey of Man-Made Tidal Swimming Pools along the South African Coast” in 1982, the pools “provide protected bathing conditions […] mainly for children and elderly people.”5 Although their history is incremental, presented under the neutral guise of engineering, their extensive geography along the coastline indicates the persistence of a low-lying and lowtech infrastructure, its success found in its informality.

Along shorelines, these tidal pools represented unsupervised spaces of public activity in what was otherwise a society with high levels of surveillance. The precision of wall heights had to be calibrated to fluctuating daily tides to prevent the unwanted buildup of sand and slippery algae.

The ebb and flow of visitors would follow the semi-durinal tide that would flush and replenish the pools twice a day.

When tide pools were carefully built, the depth between high and low tides nearly matched the engineered depth of the pools—from knee to waist—for children and the elderly to safely bathe, swim, and splash in the security of shark-free seawater.

As marginal spaces constantly in flux, the intertidal pools also attracted a cultural diversity rarely seen in South African cities or the interior hinterlands. They stood in contrast to what the 1950 Group Areas Act sought through its separation of race by space.

The pools were not fully integrated within the grid of apartheid rationality and control because they were seen as a practical necessity for the protection against sharks. Hence they offered relative unregulated places of opportunity and escape. Often separated by train tracks and highways from the “mainland,” pools were secluded spaces that united and mixed people. The vast 1,550-mile coastline of beaches and pools was simply too difficult to control and patrol. In between tides, as if offshore, beaches and pools edified a non-state, or extra-state, manifest as space of political others, obscured and under the cloak of its sandy geography and rocky topography.

Beyond the high concentration of children and families across the littoral landscape of shoreline beaches, pools were also places of youthful display and sexuality, illicit and marginal zones, places of cultural risk. Beaches and pools— especially within striking distance of big conurbations like Cape Town—provided places for mingling in the dark, in the “hidden security” of night. “Unmentionable” activities of all kinds, especially those forbidden by apartheid laws such as social and sexual interaction across lines of race and drug use, were fostered in these bathing waters. Outcast practices found temporary refuge on the coast.

Given the ban on non-White public association from the Group Areas Act, beaches and pools always held a shadow of danger along the coast, a threat to the state. Tidal pools, with

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Sea of Color We know today that sharks feed on sea turtles and dolphins, not humans, and that shark attacks are usually a case of mistaken identity. The waning hate and rising understanding of the complexity of sharks may have followed the fall of apartheid, but deep divisions still lie across state territories that once aimed at segregating and separating masses of people. The state operated without walls, although its color-coded policy to prevent movement did not inhibit the unrelenting cultural desire of diversity, to mix freely. Black surfers and lifeguards may be signs of today’s new beach culture, even if some Whites are said to have withdrawn to private swimming pools. It is the next generation of bornfrees who seem to be less inhibited beachgoers. If the pools have gone unnoticed and undocumented for so long, then they were, and perhaps still are, a collective myth. Their walls provided safety from surge: places to sit and see, swim and dry off, congregate and communicate, enabling free movement and mixing of sex, gender, age, and race.

Reinforced by the temporal nature of tides, it seems to be the absence of any visible infrastructure during an era of ultra-regulation and hyper-control that makes the pools so socially charged and politically significant. They are almost a-spatial, unthreatening, practically formless in their lack of perceivable engineering. As havens from previous regimes, the pools capture the enjoyment of tides as safe

their backs to the city, open to the sea, were not as regularly patrolled by the police as planned promenades or historic parks. Some, like Graaff’s Pool at Sea Point, were right under the watchful eyes of elite Jewish society. The pool, a transracial gay meeting place, was obscured from the street by an unusually high sheltering wall, making activities behind it very public secrets.

The pools also had an allure: a frisson of nature never fully contained by cultural, political, or engineered constraint.

One could sit alongside the breaking waves, and they would suddenly burst over the walls and everyone would be drenched, laughing and screaming. The idea that neither law nor structure could hold back the force of nature—the sea— was part of the pools’ liminal charm.

On these geopolitical margins, shorelines were key sources of “free space” for Coloureds. The ocean was their medium, whereas Blacks were mainly kept out of the Cape region. Given the contested nature of urban space—the conversion of land into fixed capital through property— the few non-White beaches were key sites for social, ritual, and political expression. These Coloured coasts represented the production of new publics, and the practice of extended kinship and courting, especially true during public holidays when large families would head out with food, alcohol, and music.

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places to swim and splash in the comfort of the sea.

Today, nearly two decades after the fall of apartheid, a sea of color—Blacks, Indians, Coloureds, and Whites— spreads across the beaches of the KwaZulu-Natal coast to reflect a new South Africa: no longer marked by separation, the clarity of blended colors is an optimistic symbol in the face of the dark past of apartheid. The beaches on the Cape now remain free, accessible, and culturally familiar. If there is black flag raised, it is only to signal danger when shark threats are particularly high—visible and accessible to all.

Remarkable, if not paradoxical, is the democratic structure of the subdued engineering and mute planning of beaches, shorelines, and tidal ponds along the edge of the southern peninsula of the African continent. The unrelenting drift that continually moves and forms the South African coast lies in stark contrast with the sharp teeth and exacting bite that segregation has left on its people.

The persistence of the coastal, extra-political presence thus lies in the form of the pool’s intertidal absence. It is unseen but sensed, low lying on high ground, forming new coasts and new contours of the South African state. Between the low and high waters of political maelstrom, these new grounds can be found before and after the tides of racial and spatial apartheid, in spaces where races are seen like different flows, perpetually mixing to form new ones.

Opening spread: A beach reserved for Whites, Durban, 1976.

Pierre Bélanger is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and codirector of the MDes Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His two books, Landscape Infrastructure: Urbanism beyond Engineering and The Landscape of Defense (with Alexander Arroyo), are both forthcoming.

Jean Comaroff is the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, and is the Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. She is also Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. Author of many publications on colonialism, governance, ritual, and embodiment, she is coauthor, with John Comaroff, of Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2012).

John Comaroff is the Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, and is the Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. He is also Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of many books and articles, and his research focuses on South Africa, postcolonialism, law, crime, and policing.

1 Cassandra Ornell, “South Africa’s Deadliest Year for Sharks,” The Beacon, August 3, 2011, http:// oceana.org/en/blog/2011/08/south-africa-s-deadliest-year-for-sharks.

2 Marie Levine, “Shark attack at Port Edward in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa,” Global Shark Attack File, GSAF 1958.04.03 / SA-124 (April 3, 1958), http://www.sharkattackfile.net/spreadsheets/pdf_ directory/1958.04.03-Badenhorst.pdf.

3 See “The Apartheid Government Agrees to Eliminate Racial Segregation in Theatres but Not in Cinemas,” South African History Online, http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/apartheidgovernment-agrees-eliminate-racial-segregation-theatres-not-cinemas.

4 Ibid.

5 D. E. Bosman and D. J. P. Scholtz, “A Survey of Man-Made Tidal Swimming Pools along the South African Coast” (18th International Conference on Coastal Engineering, Cape Town, 1982), https://journals.tdl.org/icce/index.php/icce/article/view/3766/3449.

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model for us, in its very narrative structure and cinematic flow, a different way of thinking and of feeling, one that stands in stark contrast to the model both emblematized and reproduced by the dam itself, one possessed by the spirit of the silted and muddy river. In this way, Watermark helps us recognize and generate a very different form of power.

Sean O'Toole reviews UIA2014 Durban

Xiaolangdi Dam, Jiyuan. Film still from Edward Burtynsky and Jennifer Baichwal’s Watermark, 2014.

Max Haiven reviews Watermark

cycles, hunting waters, or food sources have been disrupted.

The ghosts we see elude definition and are not easily exorcised from the imagination. Here is a living, cinematic Rorschach blot, a generative image of shared meaning. The dam is a profound archetype in the collective imagination: a materialization or solidification of unfathomable human (and nonhuman) energies that, in turn, shapes the future flows of human (and nonhuman) energies. It is no wonder that the filmmakers return to the dam so many times in their fluid, flowing cinematic narrative. The dam haunts us all, its traces accumulating like silt in the collective, global political unconscious.

And so, in the spectacle presented by the annual release of the accumulated silt at the Xiaolangdi Dam (attended by tens of thousands of onlookers, the images reproduced in hundreds of international newspapers and magazines), one is reminded of the Roman Saturnalia, the Carnival, and other similar festivals the world over where, for a limited period of time, the “world is turned upside down,” the social floodgates are opened, the rich become poor, the poor rich, and those dark, anarchic drives are let loose. All, it must be said, so that on waking the next day, we might find the social order restored, stronger and more resilient thanks to this spectacle of release. We are drawn to this aqueous mirage because in it we sense a letting go, an uncorking, a release of pent-up contradictions. And in this, the dam’s logic or order is glorified and its power reproduced.

How to challenge that power? Perhaps one has to critique the deeper logic of the dam within the very grammar of one’s art. Those eager to see an activist stance might wish Watermark more heavy-handed in its condemnations of the hydropolitics of contemporary globalization. Certainly there is a patent need for stark revelations and militant refusal. But one of the documentary’s key strengths is to

Dams crystallize flows of power. They define an upstream and a downstream, and they draw power from the cycles of ocean and atmosphere. Typically, dams create flooding upstream in the name of protecting and energizing downstream. It’s no coincidence that, by and large, they sacrifice more traditional, often indigenous villages and peoples upstream to empower downstream coastal cities that were founded or gained prominence in the age of mercantilist and capitalist globalization. Dams hold back not only rainwater and silt, but also time itself, replacing the river’s rhythms with the syncopations of progress, growth, and development. Touted as a source of renewable, clean energy, these hydroelectric monoliths compel us to ask: what sorts of sociological, economic, and political power do dams reproduce, and what histories and spaces do they cleanse?

Edward Burtynsky and Jennifer Baichwal’s majestic and meditative 2014 film Watermark opens with a beguiling image of ethereal abundance. Before we learn that this is the annual blowing out of 30 million tons of silt accumulated behind China’s second-largest dam, the Xiaolangdi on the Yellow River, we are, for a moment, witness to something both terrifyingly sublime and unsettlingly intimate. The existentially familiar flow of water, so often cited (indeed, marketed) as a source of relaxation and harmony, here is frenzied, alien, preternatural.

In this image we see ghosts. Not only the ghosts of the villagers displaced by the dam (200,000 souls in the case of Xiaolangdi, with an estimated resettlement cost of $1 billion); not only the ghosts of the workers who died building it; not even the ghosts of the innumerable nonhuman life forms whose migratory patterns, spawning

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On the weekend before the start of the 25th world congress of the International Union of Architects (UIA), visitors to Durban were invited to a welcome party and exhibition in Rivertown, a newly christened arts and culture precinct whose chief landmark is a modest 1914 red-brick building that revives an earlier purpose, but without the racist history.

A segregated tavern for black working men until 1968, the building has for the past two decades functioned as a storage and conservation facility for this wealthy port city’s municipal art gallery, whose holdings include a striking 1938 portrait of T. S. Eliot by avant-garde British painter Wyndham Lewis. In the evening twilight, I saw four young black workmen quietly bag rubble outside the newly christened Beer Hall, which still functions partially as gallery store, while a mixed-race grouping of architects, city bureaucrats, event sponsors, and city folk celebrated Durban becoming the first sub-Saharan city to host a UIA congress.

In 1995, a year after South Africa’s first democratic elections, I witnessed similarly festive scenes in Johannesburg, at the city’s first art biennial—there, a group of black workmen spirited away evidence of last-minute construction work on a repurposed power station. Not a lot has apparently changed in the hierarchy of South Africa’s building industry since then, a point forcefully argued by the country’s minister of public works at the Monday-morning opening of the four-day UIA congress. “We cannot be complacent that 20 years into democracy in South Africa, only 24 percent of built environment professionals are black,”

Thembelani Nxesi told delegates from 96 countries. Only 9 percent are female, added Nxesi, highlighting a continentwide problem.

“African women are at the bottom of the urban power hierarchy, with limited access to spatial decision making, planning resources, and education,” remarked Ghanaian researcher Epifania Amoo-Adare later the same day. Even the congress program inadvertently reiterated this imbalance with Brooklyn-based landscape architect Susannah C. Drake, founding principal of dlandstudio, the only female keynote speaker. Durban’s UIA organizers did, however, attempt a recalibration (if not demographically, then at least thematically) through their valorization of small-scale interventions and peripheral sites of practice, notably in slum settlements and informal markets. Their knotty rubric for achieving this was the expression “architecture otherwhere.”

Despite this concept’s unruly plasticity, many speakers responded intuitively and showcased examples of work that, in terms of budget, scale, and prestige, would usually rate as negligible and noncanonical. Often situated at the threshold of the formal, this species of practice is typically processdriven and the outcome of developmental interventions.

“Slum upgrading” is lazy shorthand; perhaps a fairer appraisal, one more in keeping with the mood of the UIA congress, is the democratization of architectural empathy.

Franck Houndégla, a Beninese architect and design activist living in France, discussed his involvement with micro-scale interventions at a Benin marketplace and water collection point in Chad, while Namibian-born Thorsten Deckler, who lives and works in Johannesburg, revisited the reorganization of a local slum settlement to facilitate the addition of formal infrastructure. Rahul Mehrotra, who showed a failed attempt by his Mumbai practice to create dignified sanitation in a local slum, ended his talk by quoting Polish chess grandmaster Savielly Tartakower: “Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.” The most recent UIA congress was largely about the tactics of informality. It was an adroit move. After all, we know there is much still to do.

Emmanuel Petit reviews Bernard Tschumi Retrospective The recent retrospective of the work of Bernard Tschumi at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, curated by Frédéric Migayrou and Aurélien Lemonier, displayed characteristics of a post-1968 blend of existentialist skepticism and a ludic and optimistic drive, as one might imagine in imaginary encounters between Albert Camus and Cedric Price, or Guy Debord and Johan Huizinga. The exhibition was further loaded with the aura of “French” thought, from Georges Bataille to Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault, and with Russian film theory, from Lev Kuleshov to Sergei Eisenstein. The origins of this peculiar conceptual concoction can be traced in part to the early Alvin Boyarsky years at the Architectural Association in London, where

UIA2014, Durban.

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architecture, following its discreditation as a bourgeois and “totalitarian” tool in the revolutionary 1960s, was redefined through the rise of the conceptual artist-architect—with Tschumi readily adopting this role.

The exhibition presented an intellectual project that hinges on the double grasp of architecture as concept and percept, and evidences Tschumi’s affiliation with a group of architects who thrived on the notion of paradox: architecture as both form and event, meaning and happening, object and social medium. Yet Tschumi has moved beyond the one-sided view of “negative utopias,” to which he was exposed during his studies; he has used the psycho-physiological perception of the city to engender inventive new situations in space and time. Architecture here is more generator than commentary, and its analytics are directed at the production of spaces rather than their explanation and critique. In fact, the framing of the exhibition as a retrospective is a just assertion that the work has now matured beyond the initial theoretical and analytical promise—that it has come into its own.

The exhibition opened with Tschumi’s early explorations of events inspired by the notational inventions of cinematography; it then speculated on sequential organizations of space—not least in the architectural type of the folly (Sequential Tower, 1980; Sequential House, 1981).

The show then broadened to illustrate projects and buildings in five thematic clusters: Space and Event, Juxtaposition Programs, Vectors and Envelopes, Context/Concept, Concept-Forms. All this was contextualized with information about Tschumi’s theoretical investigations, methods, and influences presented in a series of cubic red reference tables and a red wall that directed the flow of visitors through and around the exhibition rooms. “Red is not a color”—to invoke the title of his recent monograph—but marks the self-reflective moment of explication and theory (in the exhibition and the projects alike).

Notwithstanding the impressive variety of architectural solutions in the 40-some projects on display, one could not help but notice Tschumi’s struggle to both escape and extend the long shadow cast by his inaugural theories from the 1970s, typified in speculative projects from Joyce’s Garden (1976–77) to the Manhattan Transcripts (1976–81), and leading to the early commission of the Park de la Villette (1982–98). It is not surprising that one of the exhibition rooms was organized exclusively around the Parisian park.

This segment of the exhibition presented the inventive, suggestive, and poetic notations that became sparse in Tschumi’s work after the early to mid-1990s, when computergenerated graphics took their place. Curiously, with the shift to a new medium, the transcriptions of the early years, which suggested that architecture is reconceptualized from the ground up, were transformed into digital representations that come across as matter-of-fact and accepting of the conventions of the profession—in both form and script.

The central tenet of the exhibition could be described as the analytical approach to the perception of reality, according to which the real cannot simply be apprehended as a series of facts but has to be elevated into the cerebral form

Frédéric Migayrou, ed., Bernard Tschumi – Architecture: concept & notation, 2014.

of a concept. Tschumi makes this process his own, although the idea was promoted by many architects who entered the discussion just before or during the 1970s, when architectural culture sought the dispatch of the leftovers of modern functionalism. Defining one end of the intellectual spectrum is Peter Eisenman’s paradoxical play with the double reading of architecture as a sign of itself and of an external signified.

The other end of that spectrum is technologically driven architecture, which brackets out the question of meaning.

Tschumi resists both. He withstands the pretenses of formal autonomy as well as those of zeitgeist architecture; in contrast, he construes architecture as the spatial enabler of events, which are not internal to the historical “discipline” of architecture and therefore are not already formally coded and historically contextualized. Tschumi proposes an alternative to an active architecture of the zeitgeist—both the cultural zeitgeist defended by post-Koolhaasian “Dutch” architecture and the technological zeitgeist of contemporary parametricism and algorithmicism; his has the more “passive” ability to bear witness to the Zeitgeschehen. Accordingly, Tschumi chooses to always direct his attention to the present, which, in the medium of film as in literature, has often been transformed into what one can call a “thickened” present— unraveling through exegetic narration and cross-referencing (i.e., montage). Based on the “situationism” of life as it unfolds in its unpredictable yet specific manifestations, the core of Tschumi’s architecture is fundamentally a-formal, while his buildings evolve into spatial frames or containers, or “envelopes,” in his own words.

The conscious contemporaneity of Tschumi’s architecture has to do with the semantic neutrality of architectural form and the realization that even the

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simplest inscription of spatial boundaries has sociopolitical ramifications. For example, the stack of horizontal trays and the ascending loop in the Acropolis Museum (2001–09) do not, in their archetypal neutrality, signify or educate; yet they are responsive at a most fundamental level to the genius loci of the grounded Greek temple on top of the rock. In addition, the trays enable a particular type of organization of information in space as well as an engagement of bodily movement throughout.

Similarly to the “oblique function” as defined by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio in the 1960s, Tschumi’s architecture has focused on the psycho-physiological task of incubating social situations. One can ponder, however, whether the conceptual neutrality of the “envelope” entails an impartial aesthetic form as radically exchangeable as Tschumi seems to presume—whether, indeed, the wavy striation of the Dubai Opera House (2005), the additive sequencing of volumetric fragments in the School of Architecture at Marne-la-Vallée (1994–99), and the parametric facade graphism of the BLUE Residential Tower in New York (2004–07) can convincingly be argued to be in the service of the same intellectual program. Interestingly, the more recent “formal” projects, which Tschumi, Migayrou, and Lemonier regrouped under the notion of Concept-Forms, appear to be most true to Tschumi’s theory of architectural situationism. The circular receptacle of the Alésia MuséoParc (2002–12), the domelike umbrella of the Carnal Hall of the Institut Le Rosey (2009–14), and the bubble-diagram-like Elliptic City in the Dominican Republic (2005–) become semantically purged and formally so uncontaminated that their strong figures have assumed the dedicated service of the most fundamental idea of “containment” or “incorporation.” These later projects have transposed the neutrality that defined the point-grid of La Villette into a genuinely contemporary theme; indeed, Tschumi has reestablished an investment in the objecthood of the building, and so has superseded the “postmodern” dissolution of the architectural object into the urban field.

Throughout his career, Tschumi has defended the idea that architecture is an enabler of social events rather than a signifier thereof; the retrospective traced this intellectual pursuit, yet revealed that the function of architectural form for such a program has continuously remained a point of struggle for Tschumi.

David Gissen, The Mound of Vendôme: A Radical Landscape, 2014 (appropriated from Gian Marco Vallente, Le monticule de Vendôme).

David Gissen’s recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal (CCA), “The Mound of Vendôme/ Le monticule de Vendôme,” initiates a response to these questions by resurrecting a brief yet significant episode in the history of urban revolution: the Communard demolition of Napoleon’s column. Beyond academic inquiry, Gissen situates this resurrection—at least in his vivid introductory talk, available on the CCA website—in a broader effort by contemporary theorists and designers to reconstruct obscured layers or elements of urban ecology and speculate on the future of urban ecosystems.

The exhibition’s polyvalent centerpiece—a mound of sand, straw, branches, and abundant horse manure and construction debris originally intended to cushion Napoleon’s fall and thereby protect the square’s surface, the sewer below, and neighboring building facades—is presented as both an ephemeral monument and a kind of anti-monumental earthwork. For us, then, it carries politico-historical as well as socio-natural significance. In Gissen’s renderings, the mound lies before the column in dialectical tension. The magnificent column, meant to outlast us all, is confronted by its inglorious deathbed, an ad hoc pile that emerged in both concept and design from experiences of and responses to war and brutal Haussmannization. Following the removal of the statue, the mound was used as a mount—an altar or stage—supporting speeches, performances, and ultimately the declaration of the site’s new albeit short-lived name, Place Internationale.

The modest exhibition combined selected texts and images from the CCA archive with Gissen’s renderings of what the mound could look like if it were rebuilt on site, approximating its original form. It also includes a mock petition calling for such a reconstruction. But what are we to make of Gissen’s revival of the mound as an icon of urban insurrection, a provocative earthwork to be remade? Visiting the exhibition after viewing Gissen’s introductory talk, I was struck by how little the materials on display promoted Gissen’s stated political and more speculative interests in the

Lucas Freeman reviews The Mound of Vendôme At the center of the Place Vendôme in Paris, a statue of Emperor Napoleon I towers over the square atop a massive bronze column. Napoleon’s status as ruler at Vendôme, however, was once deeply contested: his likeness was banished in spectacular fashion by the Paris Commune in 1871, when the monument was torn down. Yet today the square bears no permanent trace of this contestation.

Should it? What could we gain from rendering the square itself more honest and archival? Architectural historian

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mound. Effectively, the exhibition ends with a propositional image of a simple arrangement: the mound in front of the column, in the empty square. But how might the actual reconstruction go? How would it participate in the future ecology of Paris? What is the social or socio-natural potential in this proposed project? Gissen’s renderings are people-less, with the socio apparently suspended. What of the moundas-soapbox? Is Gissen interested in staging something of that sort that now? Do the renderings act as provoking, propositional images, or do they simply remind us of an episode in the history of urban revolt? The original, lively mound was a politico-natural site that should inspire us today, as Gissen’s introductory talk powerfully conveyed.

But I wonder whether the casual exhibition-goer would have felt this sense of potential. Though rich with historical research and details, greater visual speculation on the possibilities for rebuilding the mound, and how it might be used, might have boosted the show’s friction and intrigue.

But perhaps Gissen prefers to leave this speculation to us.

“observe, record, feel, sense, sketch, imagine, interact with others,” she writes: “Such an explicit set of ‘issues’ had not been provided in previous workshops, thus demonstrating the firm’s increasing desire to ensure that participants focused on what [Halprin’s office] deemed most critical.”

Several plazas, malls, and fountains reintroduced in City Choreographer are designs based in civic ritual and responsive action. And several are places that in my experience of growing up in the Bay Area were often reduced to the domains of skateboarders and the homeless, with the occasional lunching office worker or radio station event. An example of how fast, ambitious civic projects such as Lawrence Halprin & Associates’ Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco could fall from grace: in the middle of a 1987 concert, U2’s Bono climbed onto the Embarcadero Fountain (designed by Armand Vaillancourt) and spray-painted the slogan “Stop the Traffic, Rock ‘n’ Roll,” the graffitied sculpture a reflection, perhaps, of changing collective rituals and a shift away from participation built on consensusminded civic engagement. Yet as contemporary theories of agonism and tactical action interrogate participation in the urban realm, Halprin’s scores still resonate with the need for a means to express formal and informal urban investigations.

Reinterpreted today, they offer frameworks and cautions for a reurbanized America.

Mimi Zeiger reviews City Choreographer In City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America, Alison Bick Hirsch positions her assessment of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin smack in the middle of “urban renewal America.” It’s a place of suits and hippies, of superblock masterplans and Jungian encounters, of ripping holes in the urban fabric and patching them with good intentions. It’s an America that today is stripped bare of any utopian impulse and seen as a largely dystopic failure of policy and design. Released five years after Halprin’s death, the book comes at a time when several major Lawrence Halprin & Associates designs face critical renewal. James Corner Field Operations is at work on a second redesign for Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis, originally converted from a street to a pedestrian mall in 1967 and then revamped in the 1980s. In downtown Omaha, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates recently overhauled the 1974 Gene Leahy Mall (originally Central Park), a sunken landscape and waterway on the site of a former rail yard. Fort Worth’s Heritage Park Plaza, closed in 2007 for structural reasons, may reopen in 2016. Meanwhile, it sits on a Texas endangered historic places list.

Hirsch’s argument, however, is about process, not preservation. She focuses on the choreography of the firm’s landscapes and the influence of dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin, his wife, on those processes. The 1969 book The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment documents Halprin’s absorption of “scoring” an environment as a counteraction to top-down design.

Hirsch takes a reader through the evolution of his “motation” practices that evolved over a decade, from a sequence- and experience-based framework emphasizing the cyclical (R)esources (S)cores (V)aluation (P)erformance process, into the participatory Take Part Workshop used in service of redevelopment and masterplanning.

Lawrence Halprin & Associates, Lovejoy Fountain Park, Portland, 1966.

The making and enactment of scores has seen a recent revival as art methodology, especially within social practice art. “Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966–71,” an exhibition of scores, photographs, and other documents, is on view this fall at the Graham Foundation.

The technique is seductive in its synthesis of systematic rigor and potential for open or unexpected outcomes, as seen in vintage images of “Driftwood Village” circa 1966, an Experiments in Environment Workshop held on the beach at Sea Ranch—a composition of bodies and ad hoc construction.

Seaside frolics, however, are difficult to apply to urban conditions. In the service of city government and development, Lawrence Halprin & Associates projects of the 1960s and 1970s straddled, often uncomfortably, the countercultural divide. To be hip or to be square? According to Hirsch, projects such as the cascading Lovejoy Fountain in Portland immediately drew hippies to splash and provoked the city commissioner’s ire.

Hirsch interprets Halprin’s philosophy as caught between the influences of Anna Halprin and his modernist training. Intermittently, Hirsch holds Halprin to his ideals, questioning just how “open” his scores were in practice.

Of a three-hour “experience walk” held in 1973 as part of the Cleveland Take Part Workshop, where a racially and economically diverse set of participants were asked to

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Max Haiven is Assistant Professor in the Division of Art History and Critical Studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He is author of Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power (2014), The Radical Imagination (with Alex Khasnabish, 2014), and Cultures of Financialization (2014).

Sean O’Toole is an arts journalist and critic based in Cape Town. With Tau Tavengwa, he is the coeditor of the magazine Cityscapes.

Emmanuel Petit has taught at Harvard, MIT, and Yale, and currently is Sir Banister Fletcher Visiting Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. He is the editor of the forthcoming Reckoning with Colin Rowe: Ten Architects Take Position, and author of Irony, or The Self-Critical Opacity of Postmodern Architecture (2013), Schlepping through Ambivalence: Writings on an American Architectural Condition (2011), and Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change (2009).

Lucas Freeman is an independent writer and editor with a background in political philosophy and architectural history and theory.

Mimi Zeiger is a critic, editor, curator, and founder of the architecture zine loud paper.

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6 10

13 5

15

8

6

11

19

28

33 1

34 31 9

21 6 18 3

14 24

176

Harvard Design Magazine 2

27

29

25