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Still from The Energy Pilots 2011 promotional video. photo: Koby Barhad, Courtesy of The Energy Pilots.

In early 2011, an initiative was launched in the U.K. to confront the widely held belief that low-carbon energy technologies are not cost-competitivecost-competitive

related tag:
funding

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by David Zhai and Simon McGown
A backup city for Tokyo. with fossil fuel offerings. The Energy Pilots research program set out to analyze a number of economic strategies commonly used in industries outside the energy sector. Each strategy was to profitably manipulate economic exchange mechanisms, unlike the low-carbon energy industry’s traditional service-for-flat-fee ($/kWh) model.

The research program’s central hypothesis, which guided its operation, stated that the development of new economic strategies and business models could financially advance low-carbon technologies to meet or exceed the affordability of fossil fuel businesses. The more difficult question that confronted the program was concerned with public acceptancepublic acceptance

related tag:
reception
of alternative business practices, many of which could potentially compromise the benevolent image of green energy companies. In an effort to study these reactions as well, The Energy Pilots established the following three-part method, which it made public at the U.K. Energy Research Centre’s Sparks Energy Symposium in late March 2011.

Energy Pilots representative presenting at the Sparks Energy Symposium in March 2011. photo: Ludwig Zeller, Courtesy of The Energy Pilots.

The Energy Pilots began each of its case studies by identifying a business model outside the energy sector with analogous ties to a certain technology or business within the low-carbon sector. The model would be transposed to fit the energy business as closely as possible, with calculated organizational shifts and minor modifications to physical structures. The research program then constructed representative physical models that it hoped would approximate the interactions between members of the public and the new business. The program would deploy these representative devices in public spaces, in an effort to study responsesresponses

related tag:
participation

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When monitoring and modification collide. to its proposals. Early on, The Energy Pilots focused on five case studies that came to define the program itself—each directed by the program’s bespoke method.

FIVE CASE STUDIES FOR PROFITABLE LOW-CARBON ENERGY:

CUSTOMER STRATIFICATION MODEL
The first pilot was possibly the most implementable. The “Customer Stratification Model” borrowed business structures used in the banking and mobile phone industries, among others. Businesses in each of these industries stratify their customers into several pay rate tiers; from premium to basic. Customers paying a higher rate get enhanced services, while those paying a lower rate may actually receive artificially diminished services, like caps on minutes of phone usage. Based on this model, The Energy Pilots program architected a tiered structure for low-carbon energy providers, in which basic customers would pay a reduced rate and would be limited to evening and nighttime energy consumption. By securely shifting a large load to off-peak hours, energy companies would be able to avoid the use of peaking plants or expensive storage systems, saving costs and increasing the net profit from services provided. As a way to model and study the social consequences, the program proposed the system to possible users, along with a simple home energy storage device that could be plugged in overnight and harnessed in the morning for minimal energy needs, like making toast. Analysis is ongoing, though responses from base-rate customer groups were tepid in early studies. Cost saving may be a driving factor for adoption in lower income brackets.

ADVERTISING CAPITAL MODEL
The second test in the series proposed to offset costs by appropriating available infrastructure components as advertising channels, aptly dubbed the “Advertising Capital Model.” A number of advertising channels were put forth in early discussions between Energy Pilots researchers, including energy bill advertisements. But the option that called for the most involved investigation pitched a type of advertisement messaging akin to aerial skywriting. The aircraft itself was replaced by a wind turbine, adapted with nontoxic smoke emitters attached to the column of the structure. According to the design proposal, the smoke emitters would synchronously excrete billows of smoke, carried by the wind, to form smoke-pixel typography in the sky. These messages would be visible from great distances and thus would likely draw a sizable revenue stream.

Turbine printing schematic rendering. Courtesy of The Energy Pilots.

As an unprecedented and experimental proposal, The Energy Pilots called for further investigation to help forecast social reactions to the hypothetical strategy. The program constructed a scaled-down representative device, featuring four smoke emitters, and reaching a height just under five meters tall. An Energy Pilots operator at the base could trigger the emitters individually to modulate the smoke patterns, approximating the visual effect of the proposed advertisements. Over the deployment period, public reactions ranged from intrigue to rage, with much conversation interspersed. On a particular deployment mission in London’s Victoria Park, a group of footballers were halted mid-game by the turbine printing demonstration, watching as the bubbles of smoke billowed out of the machine and drifted across the park. As the demonstration concluded, focus returned to the ball, and the match resumed. Wind printing deployments have now ended, and the results of the tests are being presented to energy researchers for review.

Energy Pilots researchers deploying the Wind Printer device in Victoria Park, London. photo: Daniel Adderley, Courtesy of The Energy Pilots.

THRILL ATTRACTION MODEL
Platforms such as the U.K. Premium Bond system attract buyers by leveraging the psychological thrill associated with the chances of winning a prize. In this case, each time a bond is purchased, the buyer is entered into a lottery with a (1 in 26,000) chance to win £1 million. The Energy Pilots proposed that this same psychological motivator could be used to attract energy customers to a more costly low-carbon service, and devised the premise of a solar lottery. In this hypothetical system, a customer is entered into a lottery when they pay their bill, reframing bill payment as an entertainment activity.

The Energy Pilots research focused on precedent lottery programs to provide direction for the solar lottery. Many of these earlier lotteries amplified customers’ excitement (and therefore demand) by crafting a sense of fanfarefanfare

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spectacle
around the proceedings and selection of winning numbers. The Energy Pilots borrowed this strategy as well and developed early schematics for a solar lottery-ball tumbler. The tumbler was designed to be an add-on to centralized solar plants, using the excess heat generated by the plant to tumble oversized lottery balls atop the tower.

Solar Lottery schematic rendering. Courtesy of The Energy Pilots.

Again, the program directed its effort toward researching social perception of this proposal, and did so by constructing a reduced-scale solar lottery-ball tumbler. The device incorporated a parabolic dish connected to a steam generator, which rotated numbered balls within a chamber and eventually dispensed the winning numbers at random. General reactions to the solar lottery were overwhelmingly positive, though correlations between mood and weather are suspected since the solar lottery-ball tumbler is only deployable on sunny days. A small but noteworthy minority of interactions with the public revealed a concern regarding the imbalanced nature of lotteries as funding mechanisms, since many participants have poor comprehension of the statistical likelihood of winning. Despite the high levels of interest, the social viability of this model is still being assessed by energy professionals.

Energy Pilots researcher testing the Solar Lottery Tumbler in Hyde Park. photo: Diego Trujillo, Courtesy of The Energy Pilots.

ALTERNATE SERVICE MODEL
The fourth case study explored by The Energy Pilots program focused specifically on the needs of an emerging technology—the solar updraft tower. This uncommon technology generates electricity by capturing passively heated air under a massive canopy and channeling it up through a tower, rotating a turbine. Maintenance and operation of an updraft tower can be minimal, but construction of the plant requires large amounts of up-front capital. As a way to provide investors with an increased sense of stability, The Energy Pilots recommended a business model that could provide a concurrent revenue source unimpeded by fluctuations in energy prices.

Schematic rendering of an addition to the solar updraft tower. Courtesy of The Energy Pilots.

The Alternate Service Model suggests that the solar updraft tower owner could provide an entertainment service using the exhaust from the plant, allowing visitors to launch objects of their choice out the top of the tower for a fee. Like the prior business models envisioned by The Energy Pilots, this proposal demanded intensive social testing before it could be confidently presented as a viable strategy for updraft tower developers. To test the public reactions, an updraft replicator was constructed using an industrial air chamber and launch tube. The assembly was used to launch items with public participants, often beginning discussions around the viability of this model as a funding mechanism. Interest in launching was very high, substantiating the efficacy of the business model. Researchers were surprised by the range of items that individuals reported they would like to launch. Suggestions by the public included items such as cremation ashes, love notes, and birdseed. After further consideration, many respondents grew uncomfortable with the thought of low-carbon energy services being subsidized by a service that would deposit debris in nearby deserts.

Energy Pilots researchers deploying the Updraft Replicator, with the Wind Printer visible in the background. photo: Daniel Adderley, Courtesy of The Energy Pilots.

EXTREME TOURISM MODEL
A fifth and final study conducted by The Energy Pilots found inspiration in the likes of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space travel services. This model aimed to bring in preliminary capital from extremely wealthy patrons by offering a unique extreme tourism service. In this case, The Energy Pilots detailed a model specifically for operators of enhanced geothermal systems that run anywhere between 5 and 10 kilometers deep. The plan would open these geothermal facilities for exclusive “Hyper-Historical Tours” before being commissioned, capitalizing on the implicit scale and potential danger of traveling down into these subterranean shafts. This early revenue would drastically offset the cost of excavation, subsequently making energy virtually free for most consumers.

Schematic diagram of the proposed Hyper-Historical Tour. Courtesy of The Energy Pilots.

In order to examine social reaction to this proposal, a simulator was constructed and deployed in the vicinity of costly events taking place in London. Wealthy opera and theatergoers were offered a chance to test-drive the tour, with complimentary champagne in hand. After experiencing the simulated tour, many of the public participants were intrigued by the idea and suggested they would be willing to pay for a service like this one. When questioned on cost, participants felt it should cost less than Branson’s space travel service. There was no ethical hesitation voiced by participants in these studies.

THE ONGOING INQUIRY
The research conducted by The Energy Pilots program is still being analyzed, and the organization has yet to release decisive indications regarding its founding hypothesis. Meanwhile, the financial viability of low-carbon energy technology is still generally considered too low to implement at scales that would meaningfully affect the planet’s rising carbon levels. But some of the models developed through the program, though financially risky, could yet prove to be disruptive modelsdisruptive models

related tag:
disruption
in the low-carbon energy sector. Recently, several businesses have indeed begun to experiment with divergent business strategies that could challenge the conventional $/kWh model. ¹ ² ³

The most difficult question that remains unanswered by The Energy Pilots asks where our society’s collective moral compass will point if we’re presented with ethically challenging routes to low-carbon energy futures. We will almost certainly have to make compromises to correct our course toward viable climate. Are we willing to live with smoke advertisements filling our horizons, solar lotteries luring us, or detritus in our deserts? What cultural sacrifices are we willing to make to reach a state of low-carbon energy generation? What is a sustainable future worth?

–

Elliott P. Montgomery is the founder of The Energy Pilots, a project he developed while at the Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions program. In this and his other works, Montgomery uses speculative design methods to probe social and environmental implications of emerging technological scenarios. He currently teaches design strategies at Parsons, The New School for Design and has practiced as a design consultant for clients such as Autodesk, GE, LG, Honeywell, and the NYC Department of Education. His work has been exhibited at institutions around the world, including the Museum of Art and Design, the Shanghai Powerstation of Art, the Cite du Design International Biennale, and The Storefront for Art and Architecture. Montgomery is a former design research resident at the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E, a Core77 Design Award Winner, and an Andrew Carnegie Scholar.

1. Dean Kamen was issued a patent in September of 2011 that enabled LED advertising on inflatable wind turbines. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/09/inflatable-wind-turbine.html ^
2. Energy Plus aims to lure customers with air miles, while manipulating energy rates to turn a profit. This company is not working exclusively in low-carbon energy, but proposes a model that could be seen as ethically challenging to many. https://www.energypluscompany.com ^
3. Bjarke Ingels Group’s design for a waste-to-energy plant called Amager Bakke, which incorporates a ski slope, broke ground in early 2013. http://www.archdaily.com/339893/bigs-waste-to-energy-plant-breaks-ground-breaks-schemas/ ^

Half-Acre/Half-Life under production, and public opening, November 2012. Photograph courtesy of the author.

BIOPLASTICS!
Where that little word “plastics” was once synonymous with cheap abundance, pop-futurist aesthetics, and a promising career, “bioplastics” might be today’s equivalent, now that the toxic reality behind that initial optimism has caught up to us. Bioplastics implies a similar material and formal progressiveness mixed with a comforting appearance of environmentalism—it’s good for us, but we get to keep our bad habits. But what exactly counts as a bioplastic? Must it be 100% derived from plant material to earn the “bio-” designation, or are synthetic agents permitted? Are all plastics included in this category compostable? Biodegradable? And under what conditions (of heat, pressure, and bacterial flora)? And what might these qualities offer for architecture?

A prevalent bioplastic resin, polylactic acid or PLA, is derived from many starches, but corn is emerging as a primary source. A major industry player, NatureWorks is owned by Cargill, the largest corn producer in the world.¹

QUESTIONING “BEST PRACTICES”
The notion of “best practicesbest practices

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best practices
” in design means employing design elements that by definition pose the least possible risk—selecting among the materials and methods that have known properties, applications, and results rather than questioning their origin or composition. They are “black boxes,” in the parlance of Bruno Latour, delivering reliable results without making their contents known. One of the critical roles of architectural research, then, might be to question the premises that underlie those best practices, and interrogating the idea of material performance rather than operating within the assumptions offered by a field that has long since solidified particular attitudes toward material. Asking questions through research is a means of opening the many black boxes that appear throughout design practice—whether a product handed down from the building industry or a persistent disciplinary claim. The best questions, then, are those that attempt to disclose the technical criteriatechnical criteria

related tag:
criteria of performance
and cultural values attached to a practice or an idea. “What is this?” can be a useful question in producing knowledge about a given thing, while “Why do we care?” prompts us to position that knowledge in the world.

A base recipe of sugar, corn syrup, and water cooking to hard-ball phase. Photograph courtesy of the author.

BIOPLASTICS?
(De)composing Territory (2012–13) is an experimental project that emerged from a curiosity about the growing industry of ecoplastics—their mysteriously coded variations, their source materials and additives, their relative environmental merits, and the cultural conditions around their evident popularity. There’s a satisfaction in being told the coffee lid or food container you’re using originated in a Midwestern cornfield, and relief in believing that it will disappear. This disappearing act will happen later, of course, at an engineered lag that will not inconvenience us. (Premature loss of rigidity plagued early corn-plastic products like disposable cutlery and trash bags, which often began to disintegrate while still in hand.)

The built-in impermanence that is fundamental to bioplastics as a class is at the center of this research. In order to find latent potentials of contemporary bioplastics—and to disassociate them from ready-made products where their use is predetermined—the project staged the full life cycle of bioplastic production and decomposition, from making to unmaking. This process involved some unlikely techniques for the designer–researcher, such as sourcing corn syrup in bulk, cooking a range of recipes, forming molten substances into various shapes, and observing their decay under different environmental and material conditions. The dual sites of experimentation, then, were the kitchen and the field.

Early structural test of cast and inverted panel. Photograph courtesy of the author.

IN THE KITCHEN
Tapping into a network of resources² exposed an array of DIY approaches to producing bioplastics. Existing recipes for starch- and sugar-based plastics formed a starting point from which a few “standards” were refined for a repeatable process with (mostly) reproducible results. We positioned ourselves as strictly agnostic observers, maintaining an attitude of “not-knowingnot-knowing

related tag:
uncertainty
” as we tried recipes iteratively and tested the result (mostly in the form of witnessing their failures of structural integrity). It required a leap of faith to imagine that the countertop procedures of mixing and cooking ingredients all easily found in a grocery store, might have any direct architectural consequence. Scaling upScaling up

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simulation
production from the capacity of an electric hot plate to larger batches cooked on a propane keg burner yielded larger components; but the real discovery (via many sticky failures) was not a matter of scale but a matter of understanding where design could have agency in the process.

Prototype for a bioplastic component with a structural spine with flanges more vulnerable to the elements. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Failed structural form on a humid day in the studio. Photograph courtesy of the author.

LEARNING THE LIMITS OF CONTROL
Shifting attention from a set of desired forms produced from controlled casts, the design research took note of what was actually contributing to the end product’s variable qualities. What led to a more or less rigid, more or less self-structuring, more or less attractive bioplastic? On the one hand, there were the controllable variables: cooking temperature, proportions of starches to water to stiffeners, length of the reaction time in the pot. But what became apparent by further repetition of the cooking-forming-cooling process and better control over these techniques of making was the degree to which additional variables, of which we had little control over, affected the results. Environmental factors such as ambient room temperature, direct sunlight, humidity, and (most dramatically for the “field test” installation) wind introduced another level of complexity in both the production and subsequent stability of the material. Rather than attempting to curb these environmental agents, we allowed a sort of loose feedback between recipe-adjusting, form-making, and the effects these external agentsexternal agents

related tag:
externalities
brought on. Experimenting with bioplastics in the kitchen suggested a design approach in which environment becomes a co-producer of an architectural experience.

Prototype composed of two recipes in full sunlight. Photograph courtesy of the author.

The “field test” installation moved the full cycle of production (and decomposition) on-site. Photograph courtesy of the author.

IN THE FIELD
In the material experiments, quality had an explicit relationship to the energetic and chemical interactions occurring throughout the bioplastic’s making, and unmaking, suggesting an architecture generated through a series of phase changes. To test this premise at a larger scale, and in a less controlled setting, the bioplastic production moved from kitchen to field. If the decay of an architectural material is anticipated, or even expedited, what would that mean for the spaces, landscapes, or territories these delineate?

Following the initial cooking tests and iterative prototypes, Half-Acre/Half-Life (2012) was a live field experimentlive field experiment

related tag:
real world laboratory
and public installation sited on the grounds of an educational farm. More than fifty handcrafted bioplastic panels enclosed approximately half an acre; like a porous fence, this temporary structure implied a pentagonal figure with an uncertain temporality. Environmental circumstances, such as rain and heat, all contributed to the speed at which the sugar-based plastic broke down, dissolving the territorial boundary.

Design entered the process as a way of directing this process of decomposition such that the bioplastic panels’ limited temporality would have some sort of agency, defining a site, producing space, and attracting various forms of curious creatures, human and nonhuman.

One of more than fifty site-cast panels in Half-Acre/Half-Life. Photograph courtesy of the author.

DESIGNING WITH UNPREDICTABILITY
This project developed from an ongoing interest in environment and urban systems, where architecture becomes a kind of interface that opens onto more extensive social and material landscapes. Within this framework, research provides a basis for determining how and where architecture might intervene, but in a way that resists the sense of causality that often afflicts architectural research. What’s interesting about this work is that things are repeatable to a point, but the inherent variability of things “in the field” demands a partially indeterminate attitude toward research—and indeed architecture always finds itself in a variable field of some kind, even when it pretends to occupy the neutral space of the laboratory.

(De)composing Territories is an attempt to advance the idea that experimental making can be one means for opening up the black boxes of design practice. If we think about and study architecture’s products and materials beyond their most evident use- and performance value, we might begin to understand the architectural things that we interact with daily as suspended moments within a longer series of phase changes, each with different qualities and capacities. Allowances for ephemerality or unpredictability place pressure on the idea of the designer as the author of particular qualities and effects. To position the designer as both author and investigator invites a productive instability from which to produce architectural knowledge.

Half-Acre/Half-Life. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Custom and repurposed kitchen tools aided in scaling up to the half-acre enclosure, while also lending an aesthetic to the production as a public event. Photograph courtesy of the author.

1. Royte, Elizabeth. “Corn Plastic to the Rescue.” Smithsonian Magazine. August 2006. (September 24, 2010) http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/plastic.html?c=y&page=1. ^
2. For more on the science of industrial bioplastics and suggestions for homemade versions, see E.S. Stevens, Green Plastics: An Introduction to the New Science of Biodegradable Plastics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). ^

Research team at work in the improvised site kitchen. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Meredith Miller is an architect and co-founder of MILLIGRAM-office. She is an assistant professor at Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, University of Michigan. milligram-office.net

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was funded through the Research Through Making Grant Program, 2012–2013, Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Design, University of Michigan; additional support from the Office for the Vice President of Research Productions Grant, 2013, University of Michigan. Installation site provided by Domino’s Farms. Research team: Nate Oppenheim, Peter Halquist, Lizzie Krasner, James Graham, Delia Guarneros, Laurin Aman. Cookbook graphics: Nick Safley.

Real Time Urbanism is an experimental method that tests an approach to cities experiencing conflict in the here and now. In the context of the Middle East, cities are often sites of protest, violence, and destruction but also places where societies and communities continuously reinvent themselves. Moreover, working in the Middle East, we often encounter spatial realities and built environments that challenge our existing models of urbanity, with extremely segregated and conflicted urban spaces, edge cities sharply contrasted with untouched landscapes, new construction embracing a tabula rasa, and highly eclectic urban spaces void of public life. They are sites of [sidenote tag="real-time testing"]immediate action[/sidenote] and reaction, where tactics prevail over strategies, where urban design becomes a [sidenote tag="performance"]performance[/sidenote] rather than an intervention. Real Time Urbanism considers the extremely temporary condition of urban environments in the Middle East and specifically cities in Israel/Palestine. Our works of urban action, in education and professional practice, can be seen as small-scale, yet with far-reaching interventions with varied social and urban impact. This project focuses on the context of an ethno-nationally contested environment and investigates the local implications of a society torn by political disputes within general issues such as climate change and social protest. - ON THE WAY TO THE SEA, BAT-YAM On the Way to the Sea transforms a no-man’s land that serves as a passage between city and sea into a place in and of itself. Passing through the site, a series of carefully positioned frames between the city edge and the seashore host an array of collective or intimate moments. Movable elements attached to the frames such as benches, tables, shades, and screens invite passersby to engage with the space in real time, creating opportunities for citywide events, a birthday party, a barbecue, and watching the sunset, while unexpected actions turn the project into a merry-go-round or a ground for meditation. The project operates as a piece of open-ended urban infrastructure. People can complete and reinvent the space, add plastic chairs to allow for more seating at the tables, stand on the benches, spin the tables, and sometimes turn public space into a private family affair.

Playing by Sunset. Photo: Yuval Tebol. Courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

Movable lazy chairs by sunset. Photo: Yuval Tebol. Courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

Bat-Yam residents testing out the furniture. Photo: Els Verbakel. Courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

Open Air Cinema. Photo: Els Verbakel. Courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

Plan drawing of the passage from city (right) to sea (left). Courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

RIVIERA SEASIDE GALLERY, BAT-YAM
An abandoned nightclub that housed a bustling night scene in the city of Bat-Yam, Israel turned into a seaside art gallery and artist colony within only a few weeks over the summer of 2011. A 1,200-square-meter grid of concrete columns became a space for artists to reside and develop on-site art both inside and outside the gallery. Due to budget and time limits, we stripped the building’s interior walls, and opened the space up to the sea letting the beach seep inside. Blurring beach life and art culture, the gallery became a hybrid of Coney Island-inspired neon signs and sand floors that evoked synagogues in the Caribbean along with their temporal qualities. The floor of stabilized sand, the rough interior, and the open façade create a space where you can visit exhibitions in a bathing suit with an ice pop. The opening exhibition very suitably invited Israeli street artists to intervene in the gallery, which was painted over a few weeks later. Like the tides of the sea, the gallery space opens and closes to different groups of artists and visitors, continuously transforming itself yet not completely erasing the traces of past events.

Entrance to the Gallery Space, with graphic design by Anna Geslev. Photo Yuval Tebol. Courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

The Gallery’s front porch with graphic design by Anna Geslev. Photo: Yuval Tebol. Courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

The abandoned nightclub before the intervention. Photo: Elie Derman. Courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

The Gallery’s opening street-art exhibition with graphic design by Anna Geslev. Photo: Yuval Tebol. Courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

The Gallery’s opening street-art exhibition with graphic design by Anna Geslev. Photo: Yuval Tebol. Courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

URBAN DUNE-SCAPE, RISHON LEZION WEST
Our design proposal for a new urban district in the western part of Rishon LeZion, Israel aims to combine dense urban environments with the endangered dune landscape along the Mediterranean seashore. Although new neighborhoods are continuously under construction, the urbanization process yields a high ratio of unbuilt spaces waiting for future development. The project developed a toolbox to provide an infrastructure for the growth of an urban dune-scape in bits and pieces. Each element in the toolbox, whether relating to high-rise housing, streetscapes or landscapes, contains the DNA of the proposed urban spaces as a whole, forming a hybrid between the natural and the artificial, between city and landscape

Building Rights and Density Study for Rishon LeZion West. Image courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

Vision for a Congested Urban Dune-Scape, Rishon LeZion West. Image courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

Building Block Strategy in 4 Steps, Rishon LeZion West. Image courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

Toolbox: inhabitable dunes, dune-scape hybrids, and urban ecosystems, Rishon LeZion West. Image courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

Vision for an Urban Dune-Scape, Rishon LeZion West.Image courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

COLORFUL CITY, EAST TEL AVIV
Our plan for East Tel Aviv prepares the area for the planned construction of approximately 2 million square meters of predominantly office space in the near future. While the area currently consists of low-density residential neighborhoods, abandoned industrial buildings, car dealers, office towers, and a few public buildings, the programmatic transformation will drastically influence Igal Alon Street, the main traffic spine, which currently serves as a thruway. In an attempt to turn Igal Alon from a road into a street, the plan developed a series of tactics to introduce interactive programs in the “waiting strip,” an area between the street and the future development that will start working according to the future vision for the street in anticipation of the office towers to come.

From White City to Colorful City: preparing East Tel Aviv for the construction of 2 million m2 of predominantly office space.Image courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

From White City to Colorful City: Existing buildings that will remain in the future compared to future built volume on Igal Alon Street only.Image courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

The principle of the waiting strip that will host interactive and collective programs in anticipation of future construction. Credit: Derman Verbakel Architecture.

_From White City to Colorful City: Vision for an Active, Livable, and Lively “Alternative Tel Aviv” in which the waiting strip can be implemented immediately in anticipation of future construction. Image courtesy of Derman Verbakel Architecture.

–

Els Verbakel is founding partner of Derman Verbakel Architecture and a professor at the Technion, Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning. Els obtained a PhD in Architecture at Princeton University, a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University and a Masters in Civil Engineering and Architecture from the University of Leuven.

Project Credits

On The Way To The Sea, Bat-Yam
Architects: Derman Verbakel Architecture; Location: Bat-Yam, Israel; Client: Bat-Yam Municipality & Bat-Yam International Biennial Of Landscape Urbanism;
Completed: 2010; Photographs: Yuval Tebol

Riviera Seaside Gallery, Bat-Yam
Architects: Derman Verbakel Architecture; Location: Bat-Yam, Israel; Graphic Design: Anna Geslev; Client: Bat-Yam Municipality; Completed: 2011; Photographs: Yuval Tebol

Urban Dune-Scape, Rishon Lezion West
Architects: Derman Verbakel Architecture; Location: Rishon Lezion, Israel; Client: Rishon Lezion Municipality; Completed: 2013

Colorful City, East Tel Aviv
Architects: Derman Verbakel Architecture; Location: East Tel Aviv, Israel; Client: Tel Aviv Municipality, Design Development.

Fundamentally geared as an exchange cycle of spatial questions and ideas pointed toward the future city, Studio Sangue Bom has been deeply engaged with Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, since 2009. As an Advanced Architecture Studio at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), our prime objective has always been to deliver projectionsprojections

related tag:
projection
that may spark new forms of dialogue and reach far beyond typical realms of architectural participationparticipation

related tag:
participation
. In doing so, Studio Sangue Bom has been privileged to perform a wide variety of experiments with new operational models and exchange formats, all of which have been instrumental in boosting and recalibrating its drivetrain.

Most recently, and as a key component of the much larger Studio-X Rio RdP Initiative, Studio Sangue Bom VI focused on an absolutely incredible slice of the city called Rio das Pedras (RdP). A super lively informal community on Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone, Rio das Pedras is one of the fastest-growing communities in the city. Ranked the third largest favela in Brazil, with an estimated population of between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand, its urban fabric is remarkably dense, diverse, and rich, with a seemingly endless array of extreme spatial permutations. While most informal communities in Rio de Janeiro are primarily located on the steep incline of its hillsides and mountains, Rio das Pedras is predominantly situated on a flat, extensive marshland at the edge of Tijuca Lake. This terrain condition has perpetuated a host of complex structural and infrastructural challenges, perhaps most notably including buildings that sink into the ground as they grow in height over time and an extensively polluted river (Rio das Pedras’s namesake) that dumps raw sewage into Tijuca Lake.

At the same time, Rio das Pedras carries a cultural vibrancy that is unique within Rio de Janeiro, as the great majority of its population is either first- or second-generation Nordestinos, people from Brazil’s northeastern states. Coupling this special charge with its approximately four thousand thriving businesses, a dynamically complex real estate system, its key location in the West Zone, and inevitable growth, it becomes clear that Rio das Pedras is poised for a future that has yet to be fully imagined.

Developing and delivering ideas for a new type of “Market-Matrix +,” Studio Sangue Bom VI held its midsemester mixer in March 2014 at CAIC, a municipal high school in the heart of Rio das Pedras. With thirty stellar students as our primary critics and collaborators, we set out to spark a productively chaotic exchange session as our initial handshake with this amazing place.

Rio das Pedras

Population Estimates: eighty thousand to one hundred thousand.

View over Rio das Pedras to Panela Rock.

Uniquely dense and diverse, Rio das Pedras is primarily growing vertically.

Compressive spaces permeate much of the fabric.

Rio das Pedras textures and flavors

With its external boundaries quite fixed due to complex historical/occupational negotiations, density will only increase over time.

(left) Studio Sangue Bom VI deep inside Rio das Pedras. (right) Noah Z Levy lugging the key gear to fuel the RdP MEGAMIX.

What types of spatial futures can we imagine here? (The fundamental question for Studio Sangue Bom VI.)

RdP MEGAMIXER Players.

Kick off!

GSAPP students present projects through facilitators to CAIC crew.

Excitement + Nerves = Careful Initiation. Spatial questions, terms, hunches, and projections begin the exchange.

(left half) Facilitator rotation. (right half) CAIC student rapidly selected to present GSAPP project to new facilitators.

Without any hesitation whatsoever, this super-impressive CAIC student presents the project he just learned about with his own twist on the spatial potentials at hand.

Calculated versions of dream scenarios and programs were read into the spatial depictions and notational maps through this round of presentations.

Self-initiated reference sketching in relation to reorientation /potential flexing of spatial construct.

Customized clusters of exchange and input.

New arrangements begin to generate their own dynamics

Shift again.

Orbital shifts, amplification of productive chaos…

Spontaneous Beat-Box/Freestyle MC session about the project at hand.

Two hours into the session: chaos achieved!

Full mix force.

More hip-hop.

SANGUE BOM!

–

Raul Corrêa-Smith is a Carioca who was born in New York. An Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at GSAPP, Coordinator of Studio-X Rio, Studio Critic of Architecture and Urbanism at PUC-Rio and co-founder of Faíscas (www.faiscas.org), Raul currently lives in Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro.

Keith Kaseman has lived in numerous places and cities including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Prague (CZ), New York, Alexandria (VA), and Philadelphia. He is a partner at KBAS (www.kbas-studio.com), co-founder of Faíscas (www.faiscas.org), and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture at GSAPP. Keith currently lives in Knoxville, TN.

Studio Sangue Bom VI
GSAPP Spring 2014
Studio Critics: Keith Kaseman, Raul Corrêa Smith and Noah Z Levy
Students: Jinglu Huang, Limeng Jiang, John Kim, Elizabeth Labra, Young Jun Lee, Yubo Liang, Dina Mahmous, Andrew Nicolaides, Tiffany Rattray, Diego Rodriguez, Tianhui Shen.

A situation room, installed by the authors at Columbia University Avery Hall in December of 2010 to monitor and deploy urban failures. All images courtesy of the authors.The Atlas of Failure imagines caricatures of contemporary urban fables like Mumbai, India; Juarez, Mexico; and Detroit, Michigan; and mobilizes them as new urban proposals. Existing failuresExisting failures

related tag:
state of exception
become testable hypotheses for future urbanisms. The cartoon becomes a valuable tool for diagramming cities. As these cartoons are assembled in the context of history and geography, it becomes clear that cities themselves are not failing; their drivers of change are merely superseded by new ones in the face of crisis, only to fail again in more interesting, exciting ways. Failure is almost never an end, but a hinge. The Atlas uses failure as a productive portal, sometimes flipping the architecture into a new order, and at times revealing the logic of inherent mitigation techniques.The Atlas is a qualitative complement to Buckminster FullerBuckminster Fuller

related tag:
Buckminster Fuller
and John McHale’s World Game (and the supporting World Resource Inventory), which supposed that world resources could be evenly distributed across the globe and end the need for conflict.

A page from the Atlas charting global trajectories of urban failure.The Atlas supposes that recombinations of existing urban ideologies could also be evenly distributed throughout the globe in order to generate resilient architectures for supporting existence amid conflict.A concrete definition of “failure” remains elusive, but several typologies emerge after looking at the histories of cities in crisis. Points of inflection in the growth rates of these cities characterize how each city reacts to disaster, inequity, and political unrest. The fallout of these decisions, strategies, successes, and failures is not tied to geography or trade alone. Failure is fluid, constituted by a network of complex interwoven forces.

A page from the Atlas comparing 3-D representations of population growth and associated world crises in our test cities.The Atlas draws form from reactions to failure. We have found that a majority of catastrophes are urban; architecture can neither predict nor account for them at the scale of a single site. Our fixation on crisis is not a grim one; rather, we wish to expose how contemporary architecture might anticipate reactions to impending upheaval.We have developed a genealogy of failure using the venerable Choose Your Own Adventure book series as a model for simulatingsimulating

related tag:
simulation
multiple hypothetical urban failures on a specific urban site. From this we have developed a codex of possible responses to a few of the contemporary paranoias that turn hostages into hosts.

These alternative futures are simultaneously critiques of contemporary socioeconomic and geopolitical attitudes and proposals of new architectural tactics that find their inspiration from unexpected sources. And now, for a fun gamegame

related tag:
games
, the hypothetical development of a site in the tri-state area:

This project was initiated by Kyle Hovenkotter and Trevor Lamphier in a studio taught by Laura Kurgan at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in the fall of 2010.

Kyle Hovenkotter is a designer and strategist in New York City. Currently, he is working with nbbj to design experimental, future-flexible workplaces for the tech and healthcare industries. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute. His independent work focuses on the impacts of globalization on cities at their breaking points. He holds a Masters of Architecture from Columbia University, and a Bachelors of Arts from the University of Washington.

Trevor Lamphier is an architectural designer in New York City working with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, contributing to both their art and architecture practices. His work co opts the familiar and redeploys it as an instrument of both design and critique. Previously he has worked as a Teaching Assistant at Columbia University GSAPP. He holds an Masters of Architecture from Columbia University, and a Bachelors of Design from the University of Florida.

After the stores have closed, cycle-rickshaw wallahs, who have spent their day ferrying passengers in three-wheeled man-powered cycles for extremely low wages, find a place to prepare dinner and sleep in Chandigarh, India’s abandoned plazas and emptied parking lots. They unpack cooking supplies and bedding from concealed locations like high ledges or indiscriminate plywood boxes secured to fences. Some store their belongings in crates tied to tree branches. Yet by 10 a.m. the following day, when the parking lots of these commercial districts begin to fill, the rickshaw wallahs have already begun vacating the area. They’ve packed and concealed their belongings, leaving few visible signs of their presence. Chandigarh, a capital city in northwestern India, is known around the world by architects and urban planners as the most extensive built example of the urban planning ideals of Le Corbusier. Although Chandigarh behaves like any city, emptying and filling daily with converging populations, it also exemplifies the systemic patterns by which communities remain blind to one another. A rickshaw wallah is rarely seen asleep, and because of this, the problem of his homelessness is somehow less real to the city’s public, which vacates these areas at night. As residents move through Le Corbusier’s “The City Beautiful,” a modernist utopia planned in the 1950s, they are either transported or trailed by a community of people who are largely invisible: the cycle-rickshaw wallah. The following images document my research of this community of rickshaw pullers and a subsequent collaborative signage project I developed with a local rickshaw union. My work attempted to understand the Chandigarh rickshaw wallahs by separating what they are from what they appear to be. They appear to be transient, but many have worked in the city for decades. They appear to be disorganized but have structured, if unconventional, unions. They appear to casually break traffic laws but must contend with confusing and out-of-touch policies. By identifying this separation, my goal as a designer and student of architecture was to understand how Chandigarh’s urban design is implicated in this process, how the design of a city might distort appearances. If urban design has the ability to distort or conceal our public image, it follows that design must also have the ability to clarify it. With this in mind, the signage project, developed with nine members of the New Kranti Rickshaw Workers Union, intended to [sidenote tag="witnesses" post1="2027"]make more visible[/sidenote] the appearance of the rickshaw puller in Chandigarh. What is his name? Where does he come from? How long has he been working? How far has he come?

In open spaces within the cities, rickshaw pullers find places to park their rickshaws and store personal belongings and cooking supplies. This photograph was taken in the early morning, before the rickshaw wallahs concealed their belongings and left for work. All photos and drawings courtesy of the author.

(left) Chandigarh’s singular architectural style has created omnipresent architectural details. The ledge located above the columns at left has become a handy place for immigrant workers to hide their bedding. During the day it is out of view, and when the market closes, it is only an arm’s reach away. (right) Chandigarh’s wealth of trees has afforded the city many things, including storage for the belongings of homeless residents.

(left) Signs were partially painted on-site in Sector 17. The nine members of the New Kranti Rickshaw Workers Union decided what details to display on one side. The name of the union and the founding year were displayed on the opposite side. (right) Portrait of Shravan Kumar, a cycle-rickshaw puller since 1995.

Lateral elevation of a cycle-rickshaw cart showing detachable sign.

Photograph of Shravan Kumar’s detachable sign.

Translation of Shravan Kumar’s detachable sign.

–

John Buonocore is a designer, carpenter, and prospective architect. As an undergraduate architecture student at Columbia College, Buonocore became interested in the ways architecture can be used as a tool for public advocacy. After graduation, he was awarded the Percival and Naomi Goodman Fellowship to research homeless populations in Chandigarh, India, and exhibited “Pulling People: Chandigarh’s Working Homeless” at The Tunnel Gallery, Barnard College.

Harbor Habitat Piers project SCAPE / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE + Bart Chezar Bart Chezar, Kate Orff, Gena Wirth, Lucas Rauch, Nefeli Kalantzi, Shimrit Perol Finkel (Sea Arc), Ido Sella (Sea Arc), Timothy McKinney, Tim Chezar, Michael Judge (PhD Professor and Chairperson of Biology, Manhattan College), Tom Outerbridge (SIMS Metal Management, Brooklyn NY), the New York Harbor School, Mauricio Gonzalez and Students, and the Cornell Extension Services Seagrass Center. All images courtesy of Scape/Landscape Architecture and Bart Chezar.

01.The Harbor Habitat Piers project advances research as a form of activism to test water quality and habitat viability, and to preserve and reimagine the post-industrial shoreline. This self-funded urban ecological experiment transformed two sites within New York’s Inner Harbor (site A) and Gowanus Bay (site B), both located next to sewage outfalls, and conducted tests for the presence and viability of blue mussels and eelgrass. Eelgrass in particular is considered an “indicator species” since contaminants negatively affect them.

02.How can we pro-actively test ecological design ideas in an urban setting? A journal article in Ecological Restoration described our methodology.¹

A01. At Site A, we chose to investigate the viability of the blue mussel. Blue mussels have the highest tolerance for contaminants, although ribbed mussels are more frequently seen in polluted waters. The installation is also monitoredmonitored

related tag:
real-time monitoring
for a range of species, including amphipods, eastern oysters, filter feeding tunicates, and sponge and algae species. This test site is located along an active industrial pier at SIMS Metal Management Facility, close to the mouth of the Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn, New York, which is a superfund designated zone.

A02. This project tests the use of fuzzy rope, a material already utilized in the aquaculture industry for recruitment purposes, for alternative restoration-oriented purposes. The project is temporary, as the rope has an expected lifespan of six to eight years. The project consists of thirteen fuzzy rope panels as well as test squares for low pH marine concrete. Three typologies were devised to test for the presence of blue mussels and other shellfish: a single-strand fuzzy rope, an intertidal panel, and a subtidal panel. The panels are designed to attract and host existing mussel larvae, providing a man-made substrate for bivalve recruitment where currently none exists.

A03. The site strategy was to retrofit the working pier with habitat enhancement structures that do not conflict with its active use. Thus, the project can test restoration efforts that can coexist with active urban industrial sites rather than focusing solely on abandoned post-industrial or parklike sites.

A04. The fuzzy rope panels were constructed during a public “Weaving Evening” event with a group of local volunteers, using simple rope-knotting techniques and a mix of typical marine rope and fuzzy rope.

A05. Panels were lowered into the bay at precise locations.

A06. Panels were removed from the water for observation and monitoring by a local university at two time intervals [what time intervals?]. We noted substantial blue mussel attachments on the fuzzy rope, in addition to an expanded species diversity over time.

A07. The project team worked with professor of biology Michael Judge of Manhattan College to monitor the fuzzy rope panel installation for species diversity and mussel recruitment number and size.

A parallel study was performed by SeArc, an Ecological Marine Consulting firm, to test biological recruitment on Econcrete tiles, a special low pH designed for marine construction. The tile prism was cast with an innovative concrete matrix designed to promote marine biological assemblages such as oysters, mussels, sponges, and tube worms. This concrete complies with the requirements for marine construction (compressive, flexural and splitting tensile strength, chloride permeability), and this sample utilized recycled glass from SIMS recycling facility, which hosted the pilot, as an aggregate. Glass is known as a good substrate for biological recruitment so testing for this underutilized resource for marine construction will have environmental benefits both above and below the waterline.

B01. At Site B, further out in the harbor, away from the canal mouth where water residence time is lower and flushing activity is more prevalent, we tested for the presence of eelgrass at a decaying pier that is no longer in active use. The pier, over time, has collapsed into the water, creating an accidental intertidal habitat.

B02. Eelgrass is an “indicator species” for water quality. Twenty “tortillas” (8-inch-diameter burlap circles) containing eelgrass cuttings were planted by Bart Chezar at roughly 4 feet below Mean Low Water (MLW). The cuttings originated from Orient Point, Long Island.

The eelgrass had a high survivability rate, although its numbers were diminished by the presence of mud snails. The pilot plot survived Superstorm Sandy and is still extant. Frequent site visits have noted the successful growth of eelgrass plot, a large colony of blue mussels, horseshoe crabs and sandy sedimented edges, oysters, upland vegetation, and bird nesting sites in a remarkable density of urban ecosystems.

B03. The purpose of this project was not only to test and monitor for the viability of eelgrass, but to map and highlight the role of intertidal habitat in New York Harbor, to envision a place for study and research of coastal green infrastructure and ecologies, to posit that this place could serve as a learning landscapelearning landscape

related tag:
education
by “deconstructing” the elements of a natural salt marsh and making them visible to students and community members, and to preserve and reimagine the post-industrial shoreline.

The associated proposal for a “deconstructed salt marsh” based on the remarkable existing landscape typologies explores the opportunity to repurpose this existing yet collapsed pier as a space for additional test pilots and posits that it could become a learning laboratory for waterfront habitat and a tool to generate civic engagement that will serve jointly as a host for science experiments for local ecologists.

A typical salt marsh consists of several well-defined biomes and physical features. These zones include subtidal marsh, mudflats and intertidal marsh, upper marsh, supratidal swamp, and forest. Within these zones there may be saltwater and freshwater pools. By deconstructed we mean breaking something into its elemental parts to understand how it is constructed and how its components function. Since we do not have the land or resources to (re)create a fully integrated (natural) salt marsh, we propose a deconstructed one. Along the pier we would create discrete components of each of the major elements of a salt marsh. This newly created salt marsh would be creatively integrated with the historic remains of the pier.

B04. The proposed project is intended to provoke a public dialogue about an approach to the redevelopment of this site, highlight the values of intertidal habitat in New York Harbor, and to explore the potential for integrating soft edges, scientific study, community engagement and educational programming into the urban landscape.

B04. The habitat mapping, eelgrass pilot results, and proposal were presented to the local community board and were commended and recommended for further study and advocacy. In addition to creating an important biological habitat, it would become an example within the community of how to take the evolving urban shoreline infrastructure and create a “soft edge,” a strategy being recognized as important in dealing with our future of rising sea levels and climate change.

Kate is the founder of SCAPE / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE and is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Columbia GSAPP.

"We have suffered from a long economic recession during the past twenty years after the 1990s bubble economy. Our GDP has greatly decreased and growth power diminished. We are hoping, however, [the National Emergency Management International City] will give Japanese people the new 'dream and hope' for the future... We would like to rebuild our nation through these endeavors." - Councilman Hajime Ishii, Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, October 24, 2011.

Transfer of Japan’s capital from 456 B.C. to present. All images courtesy of Zhai and McGown unless otherwise noted.

HYPERCAPITAL. The capital of Japan has transferred to a new location a total of 42 times. Each transition of the capital occurred at a moment of conflict, the overthrowing or death of an emperor. Each transfer marked a new era in Japanese society, a moment of rebirth in the midst of a national crisis. The following research will explore the past and present conditions that have evolved to form a new national capital, sponsor regional economic development, and speculate on new urban forms.

Regions affected by the Kanto Fire, and subsequent reconstruction plan.

01. CRISIS BREEDS OPPORTUNITY. Each national emergency brought with it the latent opportunity to rebuild the country in a new imagea new image

related tag:
model city
. With the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the emperor gained all symbolic, political, and military power over the country, moving the capital to Tokyo and beginning the process of modernization. But it was not until after the Great Kanto Fire of 1923 that sufficient land use laws and building codes could be applied to the urban fabric of Tokyo, radically transforming the city into a modern, cosmopolitan hotspot. Each renewal allowed for the further accumulation of capital, development, and population in the city, setting the scene for the catastrophic lossescatastrophic losses

related tag:
side effect
after the fire-bombing of World War II and the current unsettling threat of an earthquake in the near future.

Evaluation of potential capital sites based on proximity of transportation infrastructure and commutable distance.

02. FLOATING LIKE AN ISLAND IN A SEA OF GREEN. During the nineties bubble economy and after a thorough study of geological processes in the Pacific Ring of Fire, an increasing sense of alarm grew into a call for the expedient removal of the capital functions outside of Tokyo to prevent a catastrophic loss of Japan’s political infrastructure. Tokyo would remain the symbolic de jure capital of Japan, while an entirely new de facto capital devoted to the political needs of the country would be constructed in a safe yet central location not far from Tokyo proper. ¹

Economic analysis of transfer capital sites.

03. NEW CITY, NEW DIRECTION. Shento, the spiritual transfer of Japan’s capital, would mark the first peaceful transfer of political power in all of Japan’s history and would mark the regeneration of Japanese society moving into the twenty-first century. The new city would be separated from the economic interests of Tokyo and would instead promote the nation’s natural beauty, cultural heritage, and advancements in technology, especially in mobility and telecommunications infrastructures.²

Possible sites for a backup city in the Kansai region.

04. FROM TRANSFER TO BACKUP. From 1990 until 2004, several laws were passed, committees were convened, reports were commissioned, and ten candidate regions were pared down to three sites. But as the economic bubble burst in the mid to late nineties and political alliances devolved into infighting when politicians were faced with choosing a final site, the capital transfer plans have all but become a distant memory. Can Japan afford losing its capital in an inevitable crisis? A new proposal, led by Councilor Hajime Ishii, puts forward the idea of a backup capital city, and like a spare battery,³ it would be put into use only in the event of losing Tokyo in a natural disaster.

World Expos successful events, failed states.

05. A BACKUP CAPITAL, A NEW PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP. With public debts exceeding 208 percent and a declining and aging population, Japan is unable to pay for either transferring the capital to a new city or building a backup city to hold the capital functions in a time of national emergency. Instead, it must partner with private industryprivate industry

related tag:
funding
to gather the necessary funding for such a venture. The use of private–public partnerships have a long history in Japan, with the most recent examples including the international exhibitions held between 1970 and 2005 in Osaka, Okinawa, Kobe, Tsukuba, Tokyo, and Aichi.⁴ Each event required the complex coordination between state and private interests that would eventually demonstrate the technological and bureaucratic skills of the nation to both a domestic and international audience.

Hajime Ishii’s Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business, and Backup City (IRTBBC).⁵

06. FROM DEFICITS TO THE REVERSE PPP MODEL. In each case, international exhibitions temporarily increased government spending followed by a decline in spending and an increase in tax revenue.⁶ Each expo garnered profits for both private and public interests and increased economic opportunities through a combination of improved regional infrastructures and capital injection into local enterprises. But with the success of each of these events, the government developed a dependency on speculation and investment by local private interests by increasing government spending in the issuing of long-term foreign-invested bonds. This economic bubble, based on government debt and private speculation, would eventually burst, ending the intentions of many to move the national capital. The current plan reverses the relationship between public and private investment. Rather than the government injecting capital and building infrastructure in order to accelerate the private market, the current plan to develop a backup city at the site of Itami Airport in Osaka would rely on a 90 percent stake by private industry to build and operate an Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business, and Backup City, or IRTBBC.⁷ The new city would function as a private development, but in the event of a disaster in Tokyo, the backup city would rapidly transform into the nation’s temporary capital.

Kenzo Tenge’s 1940 proposal for a decentralized capital.

07. THE DISTRIBUTED CAPITAL. The ideological disposition to decentralize and to reform the government through this process is not a new concept. In Kenzo Tange’s 1942 proposal, the functions of the government would be dispersed along the newly developed Tokaido Shinkansen train lines running south from Tokyo toward Mount Fuji. The symbolic functions of the government would coexist at both ends of the line, one remaining in the emperor’s residence in Tokyo and the other at the foot of Mount Fuji, the geological heart of Japan, where all Asian nations would pledge allegiance to an alliance of Asian countries led by Japan. The national functions of government and leading business interests would be relocated to a central position between each of these symbolic nodes, thus dispersing the functions of government and providing an early attempt to decongest Tokyo for private development, a goal that remains to this day.

Travel-time map from Tokyo to capital sites: Maglev.

08. THE KEY TO DECENTRALIZATION. Whether in the earlier attempts to transfer the entire capital functions to another city or in the recent proposal to build a backup capital in Osaka, the key factor above all other considerations is a question of mobility. Any new capital or backup capital has to be within two hours of Tokyo.⁸ Currently, bullet trains provide trips between Osaka and Tokyo in less than two and half hours. The Maglev, or magnetically levitating train, has been in development since the 1980s and puts Japan on the verge of fundamentally changing the relationship of the people to the city. At a top speed of 517 kilometers per hour (321 miles per hour)⁹ the Maglev would reduce the trip to less than an hour. With the current average Tokyo commute an hour long, this new form of mobility will radically change and break the traditional boundaries of urban form. The landscape between Tokyo and Osaka will transform into one continuously merged urbanscape. The train’s first run is scheduled for 2020, trips between Nagoya and Tokyo are planned for 2025, and trips between Osaka and Tokyo are set for 2045.

The world economy of casinos, 2009–11.

09. LATENT ECONOMY. Besides Pachinko, horse racing, and the state lottery, which are legal, gambling is generally banned and discouraged in Japan. The new IRTBBC plans to function outside of these limits, allowing all forms of gambling currently available in international gambling capitals like Las Vegas and Macau to occur legally in Japan for the first time.

Pachinko revenue, 2009, compared to world’s top casino revenue 2009–11.

10. NEW STATE STRUCTURES.The potential to tap into the gambling market is a substantially lucrative bet for Japan, with the number of international tourists topping 2.4 million in 2010,¹⁰ a potential international gambling market worth $40 billion and a domestic Pachinko market worth $378 billion.¹¹ This influx of international capital and an already prevalent domestic gambling market would help finance the development of the new backup city as a viable and sustainable option for Japan. If the state were to finance and back the private development of Pachinko gambling within Japan, that alone would pay for the expense of the new connective Maglev train (Chuo Shinkansen) between Osaka and Tokyo 3.4 times over. New economies will drive the development of new state infrastructures.

Programmatic pairing of capital and Olympic functions.

11. THREE CLIENTS, ONE PROJECT. Combining the needs of the state and the interests of private industry, Japan could symbiotically create a new urban hybrid typology, the Hypercapital. The Hypercapital would distribute the capital functions along the seven stops of the Chuo Shinkansen Maglev. At each stop, a public–private partnership between the national and local governments, Japanese Rail Central, and a private casino-operating company would collectively build and operate key governmental facilities sponsored and financially sustained through private development. Added to this is a third element, the projected 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, as a way to spur private development, gain public support, and finance the distribution of capital functions. Whereas in most Olympic Games, venues are disproportionately centered in one city of a host nation, the 2020 Olympic Games facilities would be developed concurrently with each of the Hypercapital sites, further distributing the games and development between Osaka and Tokyo, bridging the two historic capitals of Japan into a new urban typology.

Proposed distribution of capital functions, and Olympic venues along future Maglev line running from Tokyo to Osaka.

12. HYPERCAPITAL. It is clear that Tokyo and the fate of Japan’s government are heading toward an imminent natural disaster if not a human-induced disaster through runaway deficits, debilitating sovereign debt, and a declining and aging population. But rather than waiting for the final blow and responding reactively to a devastating crisis, Japan now has the opportunity to be proactive. By combining government functions, private interests, the national aspiration of hosting the Olympics, and reforming the government and regional economies all through a distributed development plan along the Chuo Shinkansen Maglev, a new era for Japan is nearly within reach. For Japan, this is the era of pragmatic optimism, the era of the Hypercapital.

Japan’s new capital: the Hypercapital.

This project was created by David Zhai and Simon McGown in a studio taught by Shohei Shigematsu and Christy Cheng at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in spring 2013.

David Zhai is a spatial designer with an interest in the future of architectural practice and pedagogy, and the way that that design can help transform the way we live, work, and play. David’s work often explores opportunities of crisis, and the hybridization of form to create new typologies of space. David is currently pursuing his interests as a Designer at Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), and as an Associate in Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP where he is teaching in both the Core, and Advanced research studios.

Simon McGown is a Designer at Morphosis Architects in New York, NY specializing in higher education typologies and facade systems. He graduated from Columbia University with a Master in Architecture and a received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Texas Tech University. He is an instructor at Pratt Institute.

1. “Policy speech by governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara at the First Regular Session of the Metropolitan Assembly, March 1, 2003,” accessed April 15, 2014. link. ^
2. Timothy Hoye, Japanese Politics: Fixed and Floating Worlds. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall 1999): 147–8. ^
3. Julian Ryall, “Japan Considers Building Backup City in Case of Emergency,” The Telegraph, October 27, 2011. Accessed April 15, 2014. link. ^
4. Toru Aizawa, “Capital Function Relocation in Japan,” in Institute for International Studies and Training website (July 1, 2003), accessed April 15, 2014. link. ^
5. Hajime Ishii, National Emergency Management International City (Government of Japan: 2011). ^
6. Report of the Investigating Committee for the Relocation of the Diet and Other Organizations. Council for the Relocation of the Diet and Other Organizations. Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism. December 20, 1999, accessed April 15, 2014. link. ^
7. Alan Boyle, “Will Japan Build a Backup Tokyo?” NBC News, November 2, 2011, accessed April 15, 2014. link. ^
8. Report of the Investigating Committee for the Relocation of the Diet and Other Organizations. Council for the Relocation of the Diet and Other Organizations. Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism. December 13, 1995, accessed April 15, 2014. link. ^
9. “Does Japan Need a High-Speed Maglev Line?” in Nippon.com (November 5, 2013), accessed April 15, 2014. link. ^
10. Mure Dickie, “Tourists Flock to Japan Despite China Spat,” The Financial Times, accessed April 15, 2014. link. ^
11. “Japan’s Growth, Abenomics, and Investment Opportunities,” MarketWatch.com (May 7, 2013), accessed May 10, 2014. link. ^

In March 2014 the Fraser Institute, a conservative (or, more precisely, right-libertarian), Canadian public policy think tank published its annual worldwide report on mining companies. Built on the estimations of mining industry officials and administrators, the survey this year monitored the investment climates in 112 national and subnational “mining jurisdictions” (countries or provinces and states in the cases of Canada and the United States) in an “attempt to assess how mineral endowments and public policy factors such as taxation and regulatory uncertainty affect exploration investment.” The evaluation was conducted on the basis of the computation of three indicators: the Best Practices Index (BPI), the Policy Perception Index (PPI), and the Investment Attractiveness Index (IAI). The first considers the potential of mineral deposits and reserves and presupposes model situations or “best practices” in relation to legislation, taxation, and political conditions. The second rates environmental laws, legal system, taxation, claims in protected or disputed areas, political stability, freedom of trade, infrastructure and socioeconomic development. Finally, the third indicator averages the BPI and PPI, combining 60 percent mineral potential with 40 percent policy perception.

Following this rating system, the 2014 Fraser Institute report on global mining situates in the top ten mineral jurisdictions four Canadian provinces: Yukon, Newfoundland–Labrador, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Such a massive presence of Canadian mineral subjurisdictions at the top of the list is partially explained by Alain Deneault and William Sacher, the authors of a recent, alarming investigation about the status and role of the mining industry in Canada. Titled Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World’s Mining Industries (2012), the inquest profiles Canada in general, and the province of Quebec in particular, as “mineral states,” an unflattering and troubling definition inspired by the so-called narco-statesnarco-states

related tag:
state of exception

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The netherworld of the Phantom Tollbooth Plaza., or in the words of the Deneault and Sacher, “areas that have been taken over and are controlled and corrupted by drug cartels and where law enforcement is effectively non-existent.”

According to the same authors, eight features typify mineral states: high geological potential; public institutions designed to favor the channeling of public nonrenewable resources and profits generated by their extraction to a minority of private corporations; state’s use of legislation to guarantee unlimited access to mineral deposits to private actors; presence of state-financed infrastructures to facilitate the mobility of human and material resources; banking systems favoring the easy transfer of profits to other countries and absence of rigorous tax appraisals; low standards applied to environmental laws and working conditions; inexpensive access to energy sources; massive influence of the mining industry on public officials and governing bodies.

Interestingly, the province of Quebec, investigated by Deneault and Sacher as the most egregious example of a mineral state in Canada, does not appear in the top ten mineral jurisdictions of the 2014 Fraser Institute report. In fact, while Quebec ranked first on the Fraser Institute’s list from 2007 to 2010, presumably the years examined by Deneault and Sacher, the province dropped to the fifth position in 2012 and hardly reached eleventh place in 2013.

Kenneth Green, Fraser Institute senior director of Energy and Natural Resources, in a statement released to the media before the official publication of the 2014 report, attributed the dramatic drop in Quebec’s ranking as a desirable investment area for the mining industry to the new provincial Mining Act and proposed increase in royalties. More specifically, investors appeared to be discouraged by the uncertainty surrounding the delimitation of wilderness zones, parks, and archaeological sites, and the pledges to protect 12 percent of Quebec’s northern territory, together with the introduction of drastic limits to areas for industrial use. Moreover, reinforced environmental regulations seemed to create the “perception that special interests—rather than sound science—guide policy decision,” while the increase in mining duty (from 4 percent to 16 percent) together with the calculation of profits on individual mines instead of the multiple exploitation sites of a single owner (the loss on one mine therefore cannot be deducted from the profit of another) multiply the deterrent effect on investment. Green concluded his remarks with a warning: “When a jurisdiction loses mining investment, it loses jobs for skilled workers, wealth that goes along with those jobs, and the subsequent government revenue.”

Such an assessment of the situation has been contradicted by a number of voices and in particular by the Canadian Boreal Initiative (CBI), a conservation group, which is actively campaigning for the introduction of amendments to the new mining bill to accommodate aboriginal rights, promote best practices, and ensure both environmental protection and economic predictability while incorporating mining activities into a larger strategy of land use and planning. CBI has besides recently published poll results that uncover a growing hostility to mining in the province of Quebec, while other activists have been pointing out how the number of jobs created, like the revenues from the industry profits, are negligible. Besides, a recent survey conducted by Quebec’s provincial statistics agency attributes the effective drop in investment in the mining sector (from $5.13 billion in 2012 to $3.25 billion in 2013) to the abating of gold prices and the fluctuation in demand from China and other new markets. The same study also exposes how 96 percent of the 2013 investments was subdivided between three regions—Abitibi–Temiscamingue, Northern Quebec, and the North Shore—all of them characterized by remoteness and extreme climatic conditions.

In order to initiate a closer investigation of the mining industry’s extraordinary and debated impact on the economy of Quebec, the North Shore and the adjacent area of the Labrador Trough were selected among these three regions to test research tools and architecture’s agency in a research studio proposed to master students at the School of Architecture of the University of Montreal during the winter semester 2014. Led by Alessandra Ponte in collaboration with Stephan Kowal, Olivier Jacques and Son Nguyen, and titled Testing Ground: The Labrador Trough, the studio focused on a geological formation 1,600 kilometers long and 160 kilometers wide, spanning the Labrador–Quebec border. The Labrador Trough is a large iron ore belt developed on banded iron formations with lower levels of contaminants than other global deposits, which makes it a favorite of steel manufacturing. Mining operations in the region began in 1954 and continue to this day with investors and developers still projecting a substantial leap in production in the near future.

The Compagnie Minière Québec Cartier, founded in 1957, one of the major developers of the Labrador Trough, began mining at Lake Jeannine in 1959. The operation necessitated huge investments ($350 million), which included the building of a harbor (Port-Cartier), the construction of the city of Gagnon, of a concentrator, and of a railway line of 308 kilometers. In 1974, after the exhaustion of Lake Jeannine, mining activities moved to Mont-Wright. The move required the creation of 150 kilometers of railway track, of a new concentrator and of a new city, Fermont, which included the famous “wall,” a megastructure acting as a barrier from the north winds. Meanwhile other mining corporations kept alive the city of Gagnon (Sidbec-Normines through the exploitation of Like Fire), while the Iron Ore Company of Canada (created in 1949) developed, 500 kilometers North of Sept-Iles, the city of Schefferville (incorporated in 1955), and closer to Fermont, Labrador City (founded in the 1960s) together with the twin city of Wabush, to exploit and service surrounding mining sites. The opening of the IOC mines required the construction of a railway, which eventually connected Schefferville and Labrador City to the port town of Sept-Iles. The 1982 iron crisis profoundly affected the entire region, leading to the complete destructioncomplete destruction

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side effects

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A backup city for Tokyo. of the city of Gagnon and the abandonment of Schefferville. Mining activities continued near Fermont and Labrador City, keeping the cities alive while the First Nations inhabitants of nearby reservations slowly occupied the remains of Schefferville.

During the last decade, despite the global instability of markets and economies, the growing demand for iron ore for steel production of emerging actors, in particular China and India, has generated a new wave of mining investments in the Labrador Trough. Multinational corporations like New Millennium Iron Corp., Tata Steel, ArcelorMittal, Cliffs Natural Resources, and Rio Tinto are now prospecting and opening new exploitation sites in the region. However, in the current circumstances, corporations in most cases select to build temporary camp structures instead of permanent settlements to house the workers, while still heavily investing in transport infrastructure to facilitate the processing and transfer of iron ore and personnel. The model increasingly adopted, even if with some reluctance on the part of the mining companies, is the so-called “fly-in fly-out.” Employees work on a schedule of two or three weeks of twelve-hour days alternated to a corresponding period of rest in their hometowns and are flown in by company planes. The system appears better adapted to the investment boom that took place in 2005 and also to the life span of a mining site without requiring the colossal investment and social costs implied by the constructions of company towns of uncertain future. To this model corresponds the emergence of an industry specialized in the construction of rather comfortable prefabricated temporary housing and facilities adapted to extreme conditions.

The research studio focused on the various strategies of exploitation, settlement, and infrastructural support systems developed over the years in the region. Students, organized in teams, focused on specific topics and case studies. The first part of the exploration was completed in Montreal. To address the immensity of the territories under consideration, their remoteness and difficult access, a digital cartographic approach was favored. GISGIS

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GIS
software and parametric design tools; bibliographical materials; federal, provincial, and corporate databases of geotagged information were employed to map in time and space processes of exploitations and inhabitations. Six teams were formed to study the geology and geography of Quebec and Labrador, natural resources, mining operation and iron ore processing, infrastructures, actors and networks, world iron and steel markets. In an endeavor to map the complexities inscribed in the region, an eighteen-plate atlas was thus constructed.

1. GEOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHY OF QUEBEC AND LABRADOR Images and caption by Bianca Désirée Arciero, Marilène Blain-Sabourin, Maude Ledoux Plate 01.1 Expression of time and movement: The Labrador Trough is a geological formation that is home to a rich, dense concentration of iron ore within the Canadian Shield (a large mass of Precambrian rock that covers most of Canada). Located in western Labrador and Québec, it is a 1,600 km long belt composed primarily of sedimentary and volcanic rock running North-South through the Canadian Shield. The Labrador Trough is 2.3 billion years old and was created by the collision of secondary plates creating intense internal pressure, the distancing of the plates allowing for accumulation of water, the formation of sedimentary rocks due to rich sediments deposited by water, and the intense compressive forces creating large deposits of iron ore. Plate 01.2 Surficial geology: The movement of glaciers of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, 1.2 million years ago, sculpted the landscape of the region. The immense erosion due to the glaciation cycle has exposed the underlying bedrock whereby allowing the rock formations to be easily accessible at the surface of the Earth’s crust. The slow movement of the glaciers left behind widespread glacial sediments in the form of drumlins and crevices. This geologic history of erosion is what gives the territory its unique topography and the authentic character of the northern Québec landscape. Plate 01.3 Nordicity: Nordicity is a concept introduced by Canadian geographer Louis-Édmond Hamelin in the 1960s. The term expresses the degree of northernness of a region quantified according to 10 “polar values” which include human and natural factors: latitude, summer temperature, winter temperature, type of permafrost, annual precipitation, type of vegetation, accessibility (air and other), population density, and economic activity. Each factor can attain a maximum Polar value of 100 (at the North Pole the index therefore would be would have1000 polar value). This method of quantification permits the understanding of the shifting identity of arctic and sub-arctic regions over time. In the plate, the index of Nordicity is represented as calculated in the 1970s by Hamelin, and recalculated for the same 9 cities in 2013. ¹

2. NATURAL RESOURCES Images and caption by Catherine Alexandre Lacombe, Dale Byrns, Jérôme Descheneaux Plate 02.1 Natural Resources in Historic Context: (top) Reconstituted map of the province of Quebec. A collage of historic documents, the map reflects over time the complicity of cartography in the charting of natural resources as basis for their exploitation. The lower part of the image displays a fragment of the Samuel de Champlain’s map (early Seventeenth century), which included vignettes representing the inhabitants together with the fauna and flora of the region explored, while the upper part relays on satellite and GIS-produced maps to display contemporary interests. (bottom) Diagram of the exploitation of natural resources over time. Divided into main categories organized in chronological order (fur trade, fishery, logging, mining, hydroelectricity, pulp and paper, dairy products) the graph charts natural resources exploitation in the Côte-Nord region from the first European colonial ventures to the present. Plate 02.2 Forestry in Northern Quebec: (top) Distribution of the logging industry across the province. The map displays the location, type of wood and size of sawmills as function of their production (in thousand square meters). (bottom) Distribution of hunting and fishing grounds, forests and national parks, recreation grounds, protected areas and logging industry. A graph also illustrates the size of trees in relation to latitude. Plate 02.3 Wild Game, Hunting and Fishing Outfitters: (top) Fishing: Distribution of species and Quebec’s hydrographic network. All species are represented at scale. (bottom) Hunting: Inventory of the main outfitters across Northern Quebec, and available game. ²

3. MINING OPERATION AND IRON ORE PROCESSING Images and caption by Pierre Olivier Jacques, Marc-André Laniel, Audrey Touchette. Plate 03.1 Iron ore mining processing in the Labrador Trough: (top left) key plan showing the Labrador Trough’s mining sites and ports. (top right) Phases and relations of the mining development process. (bottom) Diagram presenting the correlation of exploration, exploitation and development. Plate 03.2 Mapping of selected mines and towns: Topographic surveys of the mining sites in relation with Labrador Trough cities (Montreal Island limits and Mount Royal topographic survey as scale reference). Plate 03.3 Iron ore processing and mining methods: (top) Mount Right’s mine case study. (center) Mount Right’s mine plan with circulations. (bottom) Diagram showing iron ore processing. ³

4. INFRASTRUCTURES Images and caption by Sébastien Carzunel, Josianne Gemme-Guimond, Érick Soulière. Plate 04.1 North Shore (Côte-Nord) Transportation: Accessibility is a key issue when addressing life in the North. This plate illustrates the reality of accessing towns and mining sites together with the network of air, land and water infrastructures. Access to Labrador City, Fermont and Wabush is achieved by air or road, and the difference in time between the two transportation systems is incredibly large. Towns located further north are more difficult to reach and rely only railroad and air travel. Plate 04.2 Power, Communication and Service Infrastructure: Hydroelectricity production is a key component of the economies of Quebec and Labrador. Gigantic dams, power plants, and a spectacular system of pylons and high-tension lines inscribe formidable imprints on their territories. These sub-arctic regions are also characterized by a scarcity of basic infrastructure for healthcare, education, telecommunication and emergency. Such infrastructural inadequacy becomes extremely pronounced further north as displayed in the diagrams. Plate 04.3 Mining Town Infrastructures of the Labrador Trough: The isolation of certain northern cities not only affects passenger travel but also the transportation and delivery of necessary commodities and the shipping of iron ore to the southern ports. The plate charts ingoing and outgoing movement and illustrates the different layers of infrastructure for each of the mining towns and how their shape and composition reflects the geographical situation. ⁴

5. ACTORS AND NETWORKS Images and caption by Kassandra Bonneville, David Gilbert, Emmanuelle Lauzier. Plate 05.1 Actors and Networks of the Labrador Trough: Inspired by Bruno Latour’s ANT (Actor-network theory), the diagram lists human and non-human actors interacting within the Labrador Trough. Plate 05.2 Mapping Actors: By geotagging actors, the graph shows the mining industry and First Nations networks, using the map of Quebec as template. Plate 05.3 Networked Subdivisions: A nonhierarchical distribution of actors allows networks’ subdivisions into layers of information: employment and workers unions,  aboriginal affairs, infrastructures, environmental laws and mining claims, fiscal policy for the mining industry and local economies. ⁵

6. WORLD IRON AND STEEL MARKETS Images and caption by Marie-Emmanuelle Auger, Laurianne Brodeur, Kateri Dozois. Plate 06.1 World Iron and Steel, Import-Export: (top) 2012-2013 steel production and use by geographical distribution. The thickness off each line indicates steel in million of tons. (middle) Changes in crude steel market share between 2002 and 2012 illustrating how China has become the world’s largest steel producer in only ten years. (bottom):2012-2013 iron ore production and use by geographical distribution; the thickness off each line refers to steel in million tons. Plate 06.2 Mining Companies of the Labrador Trough: (top) The five international mining companies operating on the Labrador Trough and their worldwide extraction sites. (middle) Tridimensional mapping of the main maritime routes for iron ore transportation. (in red) Tata Steel’s transportation routes. Tata Steel extracts in Schefferville (Quebec), and processes in Northern Europe for use in Asia. (Bottom) The five international mining companies operating in the Labrador Trough and their worldwide extraction sites. The lines’ width represents each company import and export rates. Plate 06.3 World Steel Market and Demographic Growth: (top) The Labrador Trough’s mining towns and their demographic trends in relation to the steel market over the last sixty years. (bottom) The opening and closing of the mines in relation to the steel and iron ore markets during the same span of time. The diagram also displays how the nationality of companies has changed over the years following the fluctuation and globalization tendencies of the market. ⁶ Tata Steel [www.tatasteelcanada.com], LIM [www.labradorironmines.ca]. Cyber Histoire [http://www.cyberhistoiregeo.fr], World Steel Association [http://www.worldsteel.org]. VALLIÈRES, Marc. Des mines et des Hommes, Publications du Québec, 2012. Recensement Canada, World Steel Association [www.worldsteel.org]. World Steel Association [http://www.worldsteel.org]

The research conducted in Montreal included seminars and presentations from two of the main mining companies operating in the area: ArcelorMittal (currently exploiting the mines of Fire Lake and Mont-Wright near the city of Fermont), and New Millennium, part of the giant Tata Steel (now in the process of opening a new mine in proximity to Schefferville). An independent surveyor under contract with Cliffs Natural Resources was also interviewed. The meetings with the representatives of the mining companies were quite informative and productive. Interestingly, both companies did not appear to follow the Fraser Institute’s criteria in describing the way they operate. The benchmark controlling their assessment of efficient investment is the relationship between the cost of exploitation and the market price of the iron and steel. For example, as was explained to us by the surveyor working for Cliffs, the unbalance between the two had just provoked (at the end of February 2014) the permanent suspension of operations of the mine in Wabush and the layoff of nearly 400 workers employed either in Wabush or Sept-Iles. The surveyor working for Cliffs and a geographer employed by New Millennium also elucidated how they don’t rely on available satellite images nor on the Geo-Mapping for Energy and Minerals (GEM), the federal program promoted with great fanfare in August 2013 by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Surveys and mapping are completed in-house and on site. Other information contradicted more received opinions about mining companies practices: both ArcelorMittal and Tata Steel delegates explained how their companies found the fly-in fly-out modelfly-in fly-out model

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The netherworld of the Phantom Tollbooth Plaza. to indicate a more stable relationship with the mining company and the locals. Moreover, the senior director for government and stakeholder relations of Tata Steel Minerals Canada strongly underlined company investment in building fitting relationships with members of the First Nations inhabiting the reservations in and near Schefferville and Sept-Iles. The efforts to date included the restoration of the hockey arena in Schefferville and the commitment to train and employ 30 percent of aboriginals as part of the workforce engaged in the mining site near Schefferville and in the facilities of the harbor at Sept-Iles. What also emerged from these conversations were the tremendous difficulties of operating in extreme climatic conditions and remote sites. Challenges on humans, machines, and infrastructures were enhanced by the especially severe winter months of 2014: rigors and trials that we were soon going to experience ourselves during the fieldtrip that took place the first week of March.

The high cost of flying to the small and distant cluster of towns in the Labrador Trough, together with the desire to truly understand the scale of the territory and of the infrastructures servicing the mining industry, convinced us to charter a bus and cover with it more than 3,000 kilometers, most of them on icy and difficult roads. It was difficult to find a company and a driver willing to accompany us in what was considered by all a risky venture. The journey started in Montreal, and from Quebec City we followed the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River to the small port town of Baie-Comeau, an eleven-hour drive in the middle of a snowstorm. At Baie-Comeau begins the (in)famous Route 389, the only road linking the Labrador Trough mining region to the Saint Lawrence port towns. Construction began on the first part of the road in 1959 to serve the gigantic complex of dams and power plants of the Manicouagan–Outardes project culminating with the erection of the spectacular Manic-5, a concrete multiple-arch buttress dam. The rest of Route 389, still partially unpaved today, was completed much later. It now reaches Fermont and Labrador City, an eight-hour drive, and is used mainly by eighteen-wheelers servicing the towns and the mines. On the road there is no cellphone service, while emergency phone points are rare and far apart. Our driver assumed the responsibility for the trip under the condition of having a satellite phone. Luckily, he also knew the road, having driven years before a hockey team on a school bus to Fermont. In fact, our entrance in Fermont aboard a chartered bus astonished the inhabitants. Later, we learned that we were the first group of “tourists” to visit the town in three years. The perilous bus drive was nevertheless an intense and unforgettable way of experiencing the infinite, hypnotic landscape of the taiga intersected by a gigantic hydroelectric infrastructure and traversed by endless trains transporting heaps of iron or untreated ore to the far shores of the Saint Lawrence. It was watching the passage of these trains through the mud-spattered windows of our bus that we began to think of the region as the “land of the moving mountains.”

We spent four days visiting Fermont, Labrador City, and Wabush. Schefferville, farther north and reachable only by plane or by biweekly passenger train, remained inaccessible. The welcoming in Fermont was unexpected, and the same should be said for most of the towns we visited. Municipal officials and mining company personnel were surprised by our interest for their towns and mines and they opened offices and archives, organized seminars and talks with engineers and planners, and we even obtained permission to visit the Mont-Wright mining complex in winter, and miners’ accommodations in model semi-provisional prefabricated structures.

Given the working conditions and the costs, calculated in millions of dollars, of operating the mine day and night at temperatures that during our stay reached minus 52 Celsius (minus 61 Fahrenheit), it was definitely generous to slow production to accommodate our visit. A monster 400-ton truck (with engine running) ceased work for a couple of hours while two oversized pickup trucks flashing lights preceded and followed our bus to guide it amid fields of dynamites. As the public relations representative of the IOC/Rio Tinto in Labrador City succinctly put it, the mining process can be resumed with the sentence “We blow it up, we crush it, and we ship it.” She was possibly consciously echoing then Newfoundland and Labrador Premier J.R. Smallwood, who, in 1962, setting off the blast inaugurating the homonymous mine, famously said, “I have always wanted to move a mountain.” Dynamite, we learned to our surprise, represents the greatest expense in the running of an iron mine. And indeed the mining companies in the region are really in the business of moving mountains: from blasting mountains from top to bottom and beyond, to shipping the ore first to the ports on the Saint Lawrence and then to India and China, to building new mountains out of waste or displacing them according to necessity. The mayor of Fermont explained how ArcelorMittal complied with her request to remove a mound of residue encroaching on the city, while, at Labrador City, IOC is contemplating taking over the hill now serving as sky resort to open a new pit.

The visit to Mont-Wright’s mine and the “wall” of Fermont rightly represented the culmination of the field trip. Yet, the stop on the way back to look at the howling void that has taken the place of the disappeared city of Gagnon, still mourned on Facebook as a lost paradise by its ancient inhabitants, left a stark impression. It reminded us of the precarious and risky existence of the communities we just visited and of the troubling comment we heard in Labrador City about a plan to close down the town if mining was to cease. Labrador City, together with Wabush, has a population of about 10,000 inhabitants, their livelihood strictly dependent on one industry. The risks associated with the mono-economy dominating the region were clearly perceived in any of the towns, including Fermont, desperately trying to develop tourism, and Sept-Iles, which is also struggling to foster alternative solutions.

The trip produced an incredible wealth of photos, videos, sound recordings, cartographies, geotagged information, and images of historical documents and plans gathered in the national archives of Sept-Iles. Often collected in the most difficult conditions, with frigid temperatures interfering with the functioning of recording devices and human action, the documentation now composes an imposing database. More than 10,000 documents were assembled. Sorting and analyzing the collection is a challenge in itself. But even more testing are the memories of conversations heard in miner bars populated by strippers (themselves part of the fly-in fly-out system); or the image of a group of workers breakfasting very early in the morning already fully geared to cover, for recreation, the seven-hour snowmobile trek from Fermont to Schefferville at minus 38; or again the unbearable sadness of eating “Italian cuisine” served by Filipino waiters and of visiting the vaunted mall of Labrador City. All the things we cannot repeat or make use of and the overload of recorded and unrecorded information of the most incredible landscapes: the glaring lights at night and, during the day, the steam blowing out of the mines against mountains covered with snow and ice; the biting winds and frozen skies; and always, always, the cold burning and stinging, freezing engines, stopping machineries.

Cold, remote, isolated, a frozen solitude. Traveling to the Labrador Trough as reality testreality test

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reality test
. But who and what were tested? Subjects and objects of experimentation multiplied, became interchangeable: the stability of world markets, the resilience of the mining industry, of its personnel and infrastructure, the inhabitants and their policing, the researchers and their tools, actors human and nonhuman, urban planning and architecture’s agency or complicity. Have we been witnesses; should we produce the collected evidence for it to be tested; can the experiment be repeated; should its pressing ethical and political issues be addressed or reformulated?

Manic-5 hydroelectric dam, as seen through the bus windows. Credit: Catherine Alexandra Lacombe.

Perilous conditions of Route 389. Credit: Kassandra Bonneville.

Hypnotic quality of the taiga forest. Credit: Sébastien Carzunel.

Frostbitten eyelashes. Credit: Pierre Olivier Jacques.

Extreme weather conditions. Credit: Jérôme Descheneaux.

The chartered bus as observation deck. Credit: Kassandra Bonneville.

Mont-Wright mining facility and 400-ton truck halted. Credit: Jérôme Descheneaux.

vedere at the oldest working pit at Mont-Wright. Credit: Dale Byrns.

Blast area at Mont-Wright. Credit: Marc-André Laniel.

Drilling machinery. Credit: Kassandra Bonneville.

Shovel loading a 400-ton truck. Credit: Kassandra Bonneville.

Iron ore crusher in the processing plant at Mont-Wright. Credit: Dale Byrns.

Looking over the blueprints of the 1.3-km-long wall of Fermont. Credit: Olivier Jacques.

Residential area of Fermont. Credit: Stephan Kowal.

Panorama of residential area in Fermont. Credit: Jérôme Descheneaux.

Commercial center in Labrador City. Credit: Jérôme Descheneaux.

Night view on Fermont, taken from Mont-Daviault. Credit: Erick Soulière.

Site of the former town of Gagnon. Credit: Dale Byrns

uvenir of the visit to the Mont-Wright mine: three stages of iron ore processing.

“I survived the 389” bumper sticker and Fermont postcards. Private collection.

“Local Artist” rendering of Labrador City and Wabush. Private collection.

1. Ressources naturelles du Canada-Base de données ArcGIS, Geogratis, Météomédia, http://atlas.gc.ca/site/francais/maps/geology.html#roches,Un indice circumpolaire : Louis-Édmond Hamelin. 1968. Volume 77. Numéro 422. p.414-430, http://www.cen.ulaval.ca/, http://www2.ggl.ulaval.ca ^
2. Ministère des Ressources Naturelles | http://mrn.gouv.qc.ca/ Université de Sherbrooke – Service des bibliothèques et archives| http://www.usherbrooke.ca/biblio/trou- ver/donnees-geospatiales/donnees-geospatiales-en-images/ The Noun Project | http://thenounproject.com/ Ressources Naturelles Canada | http://www.geogratis.gc.ca/geogratis/Home?lang=en Étienne Berthold | ‘La Côte Nord’. Les Presses de l’Université Laval, Québec. 2010 Développement durable, Environnement, Faune et Parcs | http://www.mddefp.gouv.qc.ca/faune/inter.htm Les pourvoiries du Québec | http://www.pourvoiries.com/ Wikipédia | http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Accueil_principal ^
3. BOUCHARD, Serge . Traitement du minerai : flottation, méthodes physiques, Sainte-Foy, Éditions Le Griffon d’argile, 2001PONTAUT, Alain . La Grande aventure de fer, Ottawa : Leméac, 1970. VALLIÈRES, Marc. Des mines et des hommes. Histoire de l’industrie minérale québécoise. Des origines au début des années 1980, Québec, Les publications du Québec, 1988. http://www.mining.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Labrador-Trough-Infographic1.jpghttp://www.explorelesmines.com/images/Upload/Affiche_cycle_de_vie-2.pdfMicrosoft Corporation and Google Inc. (for maps) ^
4. Gouvernement du Québec, Ministère de la santé et des services sociaux du Québec, Ministère de l’éducation du Québec, Poste Canada, Ressources naturelles Canada, Industrie Canada (2014), Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications canadiennes (2014), Statistique Canada, Transport Canada, Newfoundland & Labrador statistic agency. Bell Canada 2014. Telus communication 2014. Koodo mobile 2014, Données Cartographiques 2014, Google. http://tlhwy.comSoftware: Esri ArcGIS 10.2, PBS Mapinfo 11.5, org2gui 0.6. Google Earth pro 7.1, Autodesk Autocad 2014, Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Illustrator CS6, Rhinoceros 5.5, Grasshope 1.0 ^
5. Michel CORBEIL, 10 décembre 2013, Le Soleil. Suzanne DANSEREAU, Les Affaires, 18 février 2012. Alain DENEAULT et William SACHER, L’industrie minière reine du Canada, Le Monde diplomatique, septembre 2013, p.13.Alain DENEAULT et William SACHER, Paradis sous terre : Comment le Canada est devenu la plaque tournante de l’industrie minière mondiale, Montréal : Les Éditions écosociété, 2012.Richard DESJARDINS et Robert MONDERIE. Trou Story, Office National du Film, 2011.Bruno LATOUR, «Entering a risky territory: space at the age of digital navigation», In Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, volume 28, 2010, pp.581-599.Groupe Desjardins, Études régionales, vol 8 : régions 9 et 10, www.desjardins.com/économie Gouvernement du Canada (a) Ressources Naturelles Canada : Fiscalité. http://www.rncan.gc.ca/minesmateriaux/fiscalite/8873 (b) Ressources Naturelles Canada : Rapport sur les activités minières au Québec-2012, Chapitre 8 ; Relations avec les autochtones, p.125 (c) Ressources Naturelles Canada : Ententes entre des sociétés minières et des collectivités autochtones ou des gouvernements. http://www.rncan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/mineralsmetals/files/pdf/abor-auto/aam-eac-f2013.pdf. http://www.metallos.org. http://www.usw.ca Conférence régionale des élus de la Côte-Nord : http://www.crecotenord.qc.ca/dossiers/plan-quinquennal-dedéveloppement-2014-2019 ^
6. ^

Alessandra Ponte, Full Professor at the School Architecture of the Université de Montréal, has recently completed a book on extreme North-American landscapes, The House of Light and Entropy (Architectural Association, London, 2014). Stephan Kowal, Ph.D. candidate at Université de Montréal, works on the relationship between architecture and new forms of cartography focusing on the creation of Canada Geographic Information System.

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