Urban Lab Global Cities (ULGC)

This video entitled Drift and Drive is part of The Petropolis of Tomorrow , a project designed by InfraNet Lab . For this project, the team is composed of principal architect  Neeraj Bhatia , with  Joanna Luo , Weijia Song and Alex Yuen .
I'm currently editing a very long interview with Neeraj Bhatia on The Petropolis of Tomorrow, and  Recon-Figure , a project he designed with his another firm  The Open Workshop . We also will be talking about other topics related to land-based urbanism, water-based urbanism, infrastructure, territorial operations, Bracket and of course InfraNet Lab  and The Open Workshop .
InfraNet Lab  is positioned as Lateral Office 's lab. It is defined as a research collective exploring the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics. I'm looking forward to knowing more about InfraNet Lab  as well as The Open Workshop , in brief, about Neeraj Bhatia , who regularly collaborates with Mason White and Lola Sheppard .
For the most impatient readers, I recommend a look at Petropia  the official website of The Petropolis of Tomorrow , or… more simply, the best is to wait patiently (let's say within two or three weeks).
Drift and Drive  is part of the first phase of The Petropolis of Tomorrow , entitled Floating Frontiers . I won't say more.
I will merely post this video of the project Drift & Drive  that explores a new method of building with water, also known as water-based urbanism adapted to resource extraction areas. The project is located in Macaé, Brazil, a shipping village-turned into a booming slick city.
As described in this video, one of The Petropolis of Tomorrow 's ambitions is to reconfigure the spatial organization of Macaé by establishing an archipelago city composed of a network of floating islands to facilitate the mobility of workers and storage materials as well as the worker's living condition on site.
I'll go back to the project with the interview very soon.
 Credits: courtesy of ©  InfraNet Lab . The video originally appeared on Petropia .

Zagreb-based Think Space announced last week the new curators for the 2013/14 cycle. Barcelona-based dpr-barcelona will be in charged of the curatorial development of this year. The publishing and curatorial platform has chosen  Money  as main topic to this new edition. What if our cities were able to evolve without money? How economic flows reflect in the configuration of cities? How would it look like a "right of the city" initiative in a tax haven state? Can we design new territories that operate outside the traditional economic guidelines? Which is the role of the architect within this scenario (if there's one)? are a few questions that the curators  will be exploring.
The whole presentation can be read on Think Space for further information.
Tonight will be the launch event and you are invited to participate in the discussion by submitting questions, or comment, to the curators, team, guests at 6:00 pm either at Think Space — if you are in Zagreb and nearby — or right in their Facebook page .
As usual, this edition is articulated around two parts: competition and call for papers. These call for submission will be examined by a jury composed of Keller Easterling , David Garcia and Pedro Gadanho .
Money 2013 Competition consists of three themes: Territories (curated by Map Architects ' founder David Garcia ), Culture and Society (not yet announced), and Environment (not yet announced).
Territories is the first competition to be launched earlier today. An open call for a design competition to discuss, address the economic and geopolitical future of the Arctic lands. As presented on Think Space — and I merely summarize the outline of this call for submission — Territories looks for a design proposal that tackles the present economic and territorial challenges in the present and future of the Arctic lands.
How can these seemingly antagonistic fields of action and clear political strategies be engaged via a clear design proposal? In communities where everything, except fish, has to be flown or shipped in, what alternatives can be devised to cur down on subsidy dependence? Is there a strategy that can circumnavigate natural resource exploitation, alternate sea routes to the economic advantage of each of the Arctic lands? In a land where 65% of the territory is protected, who owns the territory, polar bears, scientists or other future tenants?
About the competition general guidelines , I encourage the future participant to check out Think Space  where she will find the information she needs for her submission including fees. Registration will be opened October 1 to December 3, 2013.
Any questions should be sent before September 30. Then, submission deadline is by November 4. Finally results will be announced December 3.
If you are interested or have any questions to the curators, go to Think Space 's website. I will go back to this cycle in the near future, at least, when I'll have more information on the two other competitions.

San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters is a proposal by The Open Workshop  for the Fire Department Headquarters Competition , San Francisco.
The Open Workshop  is a multidisciplinary architecture firm that aims at exploring the concept of an open work, first coined by Umberto Ecco , through the intersection of architecture, urbanism and landscape design. I'm planning an email conversation with his founder Neeraj Bhatia , also founder of Petropia , member of InfraNet Lab (with Lateral Office 's Lola Sheppard ), author of the forthcoming book The Petropolis of Tomorrow  (co-edited by Mary Casper ), and co-editor (with Lola Sheppard ) of the second volume Bracket .
I am curious about Bhatia 's practice within these structures and his research on infrastructure, more specifically on social infrastructure, and related topics. As we will see,  Neeraj Bhatia  elaborates a new form of practice based on the integration of architecture, landscape, infrastructure and urbanism. In addition, he addresses the interrelations of the human system and the ecological system, the local and the global, the transformation of territories for industrial purposes. The conversation will be focusing on two projects among his growing projects within respectively Petropia  and The Open Workshop : Oil Endpires  and Recon-Figure .
Below The Open Workshop 's entry he just shared on archinect  for the San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters Competition :

Inflected Frontality
A fire station typically has two distinct zones — one that reaches outwards to the city and acts as a monumental symbol of protection, and one that contains the hidden inner workings of the station. In a large headquarters, with a diverse set of programs each with their own unique spatial requirements, such a strategy untenable. Instead this proposal divides select components of the fire station and arrays them onto the pier to activate two zones — a surface and a voided room. Seeking definition in an expansive site, the pier's rectangular depression, which was originally a slip, offers a formal and organizational axis around which all built form oscillates. These zones are separated by a manifold façade that inflects its form to establish an understanding of the site as always in the bound to the center, reaching both outwardly and inwardly, and challenging a clear understanding of a 'front' façade. Instead, our proposed façade inflects to reveal the inner workings of the fire station as well as its monumental civic image the create a multifaceted headquarters that involves the city's residents into the life of the station.

San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop
> Rendering of the Station from Embarcadero
Image initially appeared on archinect San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop
> Birdseye/ Wormseye Axonometric
Image initially appeared on archinect San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop
> Building Plan
Image initially appeared on archinect San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop
> Inflected Space vs. Form
Image initially appeared on archinect San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop
> Pier Plan
Image initially appeared on 

An exhibition among a long list of events for this fall: Airport Landscape: Urban Ecologies in the Aerial Age at Harvard University Graduate School of Design .
Below a few examples of research projects by the architects selected for this exhibition.
Health Hangars, Nunavut, Canada, 2010 | Courtesy of © Lateral Office
> Proposed new network of air travel and airports for medical care in these Nunavut communities with no roads and insufficient health clinics. Health Hangars, Nunavut, Canada, 2010 | Courtesy of © Lateral Office
> Axonometric showing relationship of roof to 'ice courtyards' as well as separation of airport and health clinic. Casablanca ANFA Airport, Casablanca, Morocco | Courtesy of © Agence Ter
Curated by Charles Waldheim and Sonja Dümpelman , the exhibition will be displaying research projects by Agence Ter , Gross. Max. , Hargreaves Associates , James Corner Field Operations , Lateral Office , LCLA , Mosbach Paysagistes , Office of Landscape Morphology , OpSys , Stoss Landscape Urbanism , Topotek 1 , West 8 , and Workshop: Ken Smith Landscape Architect :

Airport Landscape claims the airport as a site of and for landscape. Airports have never been more central to the life of cities, yet they remain peripheral in design discourse. In spite of this, landscape architects have recently reasserted their historic claims on the airfield as a site of design through a range of practices. Airport Landscape presents these practices through projects for the ecological enhancement of operating airfields and the conversion of abandoned airfields.

Quito 3Km Airport Park, Quito, Ecuador, 2008 | Courtesy of © LCLA
> Lake park international competition to transform Mariscal Sucre airport in a Metropolitan Park. Caracas Airport Park, Caracas, Colombia, 2012 | Courtesy of © LCLA
> Competition La Carlota. Transformation of an aerial platform into a metropolitan park

The second volume of Bracket entitled [Goes Soft] , a publication co-founded by InfraNet Lab , archinect and Actar Editorial , addresses the topic of Soft Systems , including the contribution of Benjamin Bratton , Geoff Manaugh , Neeraj Bhatia , Philippe Rahm , Jeffrey Inaba , and Lola Sheppard . The publication is organized into six sections: sensing/feedback, interfacing/enveloping, subverting/hijacking, formatting/distributing, contingency/resilience, and diffusing/generating. The common denominator of these essays and research projects resides in their speculative approach — the editors believe “in truth, not the truth, but an unexpected truth”. Bracket [Goes Soft] looks at a series of questions that ranges from obsolete infrastructure to forces that are re-shaping our society: ecological crisis, economic globalization, the digital revolution, climate change, natural resources shortage, population expansion, technological and scientific advances.
Bracket [Goes Soft], cover
The central idea of this volume lies in the notion of 'soft'. Soft means smooth, flexible, agile, malleable, shock absorbing, responsive, non-linear. Unlike hard, soft talks about indeterminacy, performance, contingency, uncertainty, proposition. The legacy of the 1960s, in particular, soft architecture strategies, is relevant in this second volume. Reyner Banham , for example, encouraged postwar architects to look at research including cybernetics, environmental studies, science, technological progress, and disciplines focused on human behavioral systems, as Chris Perry , co-principal of Pneumastudio , convincingly writes in his article Fast Company: Architecture and The Speed of Technology . Today, as illustrated in these projects, architects are engaged in elaborating a new language borrowing from science fiction, robotics, Internet, social networks, information technologies, ecology, specific technologies (neuro-technologies, synthetic biology, genetics, cybernetics).
Bracket [Goes Soft], spread
These projects and essays — including proposals of rvtr  ( Colin Ripley , Geoffrey Thün , Kathy Velikov ), Dan Handel , Bionic , m.ammoth ( Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes ), Tim Maly and Free Association Design ( Brett Milligan ), or Mariela de Felix , among many other fascinating proposals —  account for the interconnection of infrastructure, energy economy, politics, and ecology, that ecological system and engineered system are articulate , and that an articulated cohabitation of cultural, social, political, climatic, ecological, energy, economic, and landscape-architectural-urban is required to engage architecture in a society that will be facing a range of uncertainties.
Bracket [Goes Soft], spread Bruno Latour has convincingly posited a shift from a time of time to a time of space, in his discussion with New Geographies in 2009. The time of time, he said, consists of “you destroy the past and then you have something else” while the time of space implies that “cohabitation of all of things that were supposed to be past are now simultaneously present.”
Bracket [Goes Soft], spread
In this current era of time of space, the shift from site to territory, namely, from a specific field — architecture/ science/ politics/ ecology — to an articulated collective — transdisciplinarity — can be a possible means of problem-forming this avalanche of challenging contexts. Lola Sheppard , in her essay From Site to Territory , posits that “architecture can no longer define its parameters and responsiveness at the scale of its immediate site, but rather, must operate at the scale of the broader territory, a space expanded and thickened with environmental data, competing social and political claims, economic forces, systems of mobility, ecological systems, and urban metabolisms.”

I'm finishing the preparation of an interview on the questions of resource extraction infrastructure, geo-energy space, among others, that I hope for the two following weeks of September.
I was in search for articles for this interview and I found this call for papers: Operationalizing the geo-energy space . This call for papers is for the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers , 8-12 April 2014 , organized by  Stefan Bouzarovski of the University of Manchester and Narmiye Balta-Ozkan of the University of Westminster. Below is the details of this call for papers.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of efforts to provide novel
perspectives on the ways in which nature and society are interlinked via
multiple and vibrant materialities (Bennett 2010). The notion of the
‘geo-social’ has been used to explore some of the connections that can be
identified in this context, emphasizing the need for a new politics of
responsibility and justice. At the same time, the emergence of ‘energy
geographies’ as a distinct disciplinary field is helping foreground new
explanations of the hydrocarbon circulations and consumption practices
that underpin planetary challenges such as climate change and resource
scarcity.

In this session, we hope to connect these two distinct developments inorder to scrutinize the materially contingent nature of contemporarycirculations and assemblages in the energy domain. Following on from MañéEstrada (2006) we use the notion of ‘geo-energy space’ to interrogate thespatial and territorial embeddedness of energy flows. While Mañé Estrada’soriginal conceptualization primarily refers to large-scale geopoliticalrelations, this session aims to extend the idea to a wider range ofspatial scales and material sites, so as to highlight the diverse ways inwhich anthropogenic energy flows are both predicated by, and themselvesshape, the geophysical environment. Papers in the session can include, but are not limited to:

- Energy landscapes: using the framework to explain relations beyond itsconventional origins – in spaces such as the home, community ortrans-national organisations;- Low-carbon technologies: how do differences between, for example, urbanand rural locations, account for different social practices and patternsof energy use (both on the supply side – e.g. microgeneration and off-gridcommunities – and in terms of demand: heat pumps, electric vehicles etc.);- Energy infrastructure: what is the agency of non-human actors in shapingthe evolution of current patterns of energy delivery, as well as new developments such as unconventional oil and gas exploitation?  

The deadline is the 15th of October. For further information: here .
By the way, Energy Geographies Working Group is composed of Stefan Bouzarovski , Stewart Barr , Danielle Gent , Andres Luque and Gavin Bridge , one of the authors of New Geographies Landscapes of energy .

David Garcia , founder of MAP Architects and the excellent — at least according to me — little publication MAP , will be lecturing at Studio-X NYC . Beyond North is a short survey of Arctic engagements.
Check out MAP Architects ' website for detailed information on their projects in this extreme environment of the Arctic region: Polar Bear Alarm, Jossinghjord , Iceberg Living Station , Iceberg Living Station Animation , Mobile Arctic Unit , and Europan 10, Vardø, Norway .

In the imagination of the virtual visitor, both past and present, the Arctic often evokes romanticized scenarios on both sides of the utopian/dystopian discourse. In reality, the world's polar regions are sites of complex cultural, and ecological significance — particularly today, when their climate-changed landscapes are the subject of geopolitical and territorial conflicts, while at the same time posing new opportunities for transnational and intercultural cooperation.
In this presentation we will explore a series of exercises that aim to generate a palette of understandings of this often surreal landscape, based on expeditions and experiences in the Arctic. From Greenland to Iceland, via Svalbard, students and practitioners have created devices and shelters in an effort to chart, record, map, or otherwise engage with the realities of a context that on the surface seems almost beyond architecture.

I am very busy with the second part of the previous post  as well as interviews, two editorial projects including Uncertain Territories , and a post on a visit to a shale oil platform installed in Seine-et-Marne near Paris (Paris Basin) for a shale oil exploration Liassic drilling program in this region. More coming soon. Five announcements include four books that I will be discussing in the coming weeks, and a conference.
First, I finally received my copy of Pamphlet Architecture 33 Islands & Atolls guest-edited by Luis Callejas  and LCLA Office . I will come back to its review soon. This 33rd edition includes two interviews of Luis Callejas  with Mason White/Lateral Office  and Geoff Manaugh . In addition to these interviews, the very short book includes an essay written by Charles Waldheim .
At the top of my read-list, second, is Landscape Futures  finally on sale. The author, editor and curator Geoff Manaugh  announced its official launch several days ago. I am planning a review or better, why not, an interview with  Geoff Manaugh by late September (or early October).
Third, by September, if your research focuses on or includes the question of infrastructure, Neeraj Bhatia  founder of Petropia , will be launching The Petropolis of Tomorrow  with essays from Luis Callejas , Geoff Manaugh , Rania Ghosn , Maya Przybylski and Clare Lyster to Albert Pope , Mason White , Brian Davis , and Carola Hein . The book examines fast-growing offshore cities along Brazilian coast and in the ocean. Petropia  names these cities Petropolises   or Floating Frontier Towns  as they arise from resource extraction associated with land-based urbanism. Three major topics: island urbanism, harvesting urbanism and logistical urbanism. I am looking forward to reading this 576-page book. If you are familiar with  Lateral Office  and InfraNet Lab , you are likely to be familiar with Neeraj Bhatia 's research and work within  Petropia  and now The Open Workshop . Neeraj Bhatia brings interest in infrastructure, precisely social infrastructure. He also is the co-editor of the second volume of Bracket . I am planning to organize an email discussion with  Neeraj Bhatia  about his research, work and these spaces of collaboration mentioned above, and, of course,  Bracket Goes Soft  in the coming weeks (September if our schedule allows us a moment for that matter).
Fourth: by the way, the third volume of Bracket  is announced by fall (or winter). Bracket [at extremes] , this time, is edited by Lola Sheppard  and Maya Przybylski  and still published by Actar  with contributions of Alessandra Ponte , Keller Easterling , Michael Hensel , Julien de Smedt, François Roche , Hashim Sarkis , and Mark Wigley .
Fifth, if you live in New York and its areas,  you will probably save this date, September 21st in your calendar. LOG Journal of Architecture will be presenting a daylong conference  In Pursuit of Architecture. A Conference on Buildings and Ideas  at  MoMA . This conference will be featuring recent built work selected from an open, international call for submissions from France, Belgium, UAE, Israel and Germany, to Italy, the United States and Albania. If you are familiar with this little publication, some weeks ago,  LOG  launched a call for submissions and received proposals from international practitioners from FAT,   Reiser + Umemoto ,  MOS , to  Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen , and LAN Architectes .
Last important point: It's free.
What: In Pursuit of Architecture. A Conference on Building and Ideas
When: Saturday, September 21, 2013, 10am-5pm
Where: MoMA, New York
Please contact the journal for further detail about reservations (strongly recommended), programme.

"I am an imposter. They told me so… finally… it's out… What am I to do now with the life of agreeable fakery that binds me, in claimed feebleness, to things and to people, to suspect humanity. We could wonder about this…, and wander… together… as if it were some new territory to discover… a blank map, some terra incognita… a Moby Dick on the move with Gregory Peck clutching at the ropes of the Harpoon, dead yet still alive at the same time… Step right up, Boys, Girls, and Androgynes, you'll get your money's worth… Log  is so cheap… let yourself by what you're not, too, slip into a shizophrenic zone, a thick soup of contradictory desires emerging from the clay like the hydrocephalic Golem-Golum… that way you, too, can naively elude our unpredictable and irreducible conflicts, which are part and parcel of domination and slavery, destruction and the new, fusions of ugliness and beauty, obstacles and possibilities, garbage and fresh blooms, threats and various forms of protection, technicist prowess and forces of nature… Here everything comes together and interlocks…" writes LOG 's guest-editor François Roche for the 25th issue Reclaim Resi[lience]stance //… R2 .
(Science) fiction, or speculation — I will continue using both these terms — as tool for writing stories, or, say, architectural conjectures, to open architecture into time and… as a means of interrogating future. Last week I read a very interesting post in m.ammoth  about futurism and architecture. m.ammoth 's text reminded me this long editorial that  François Roche wrote for the 25th issue of LOG Journal of architecture . The text is too long to be posted here, so if you have a chance, read it.
In this article,  m.ammoth wonders whether or not the landscape-architect-urbanist is a  very bad futurist . m.ammoth reacts to Studio-X blog 's recent post about an article published in this new science magazine  Nautilus (it is also an enjoyable occasion to discover this blog). In this article How to tell the Future(s) , Adam Frank discussed what the integration of scenario planning as tool can bring to urban ecological research. He opens his article quoting this book The Limit to Growth , written in 1972 by Donella H. Meadows , Dennis L. Meadows , Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III . I haven't had yet the chance to read the book. I will merely depict this book in one sentence: The Limit to Growth develops a set of predictions to explore how exponential growth interact finite resources. This could be a great opportunity to read this scenarios-based research dealing with how human system adapts to finite resources.
As Adam Frank notes, this is the long-term-future that is at play. Indeed, in an era of climate change and natural resource shortage, to limit to these two challenges, the landscape-architecture-urbanism badly needs an upgraded approach to city-making: "For the boots-on-the-ground folks — urban planners must start planning and building now — something very different is needed", he writes. What this statement unfolds is that adaptation, envisaged as vital strategy, to these shifting conditions, as have been said at length, requires a new business model that takes into account this set of concepts, say, uncertainty, speculation, indeterminacy and contingency — notions that talk about fiction and speculation. A new, or at least another, approach that envisions differently contingent character of future.  Frank  and m.ammoth 's respective articles raise a series of questions that can be summarized into speculative practice or scenarios-based practice. Both will lead on to territories that convoke a set of questions not very far from their articles.
Can the landscape-architect-urbanist predict future? Given the complexities of future, the question should be how to cope with an unpredictable future. Firstly, prediction can be defined as: "human mind can determine what will happen beforehand qualitatively and quantitatively." Prediction talks about determinism. Determinism talks about prediction. Classical science talks about determinism. Determinism talks about classical science. Without this capacity of predicting future based on past events, how humans would have adapted to cyclic or contingent events over centuries? Obviously, genetics offers us many responses. But not only: we would not have been able to build the world we live now. Put it simply, what happened in the past — cyclic changes, and so on — can happen in the future — even far-future. Indeed, as written in Arc 1.4 Forever Alone Drone , "we have accumulated a vast repository of imagined futures past." This vast repository of imagined futures past helps us to adapt to existing but weird, more and more uncontrollable situations. This is why humans, as dominant life-form on this planet, have been developing specific adaptive capacities to monitor ever-changing cycles and cataclysmic events ranging from diseases, wars, climatological and environmental transformation, population expansion, urbanization, cultural, economic and social evolution, to technology, and politics. Remember that "history is the means by which we wake up", Bruce Sterling states in Shaping Thing .
We learn from the past. We are not born just storysteller, we are ingenious, intelligent, self-aware, as geologist Jan Zalasiewicz and journalist Annalee Newitz  state in their respective book. The landscape-architecture-urbanism owes the capacity to problem-form, dissect, assimilate past events and transformation that have been animating human race over centuries; how, we, humans respond to shifting conditions and situations, man-made disequilibrium, and contingently natural disequilibrium to build the modern world. In face of 21st century perspectives , say, population expansion, energy and water shortage, global warming and resource exhaustion, to limit to these examples, we, however, are aware of the fact that we are no more capable of problem-solving. If that's the case, why not abandon future? We could merely do with existing conditions, with the instant. We however must admit that what we solve today generates future (or even far-future) problems — some may object that this idea of every action has consequences is not fair if not contestable. A solved problem creates a set of new but more intricate problems, as problems usually feed themselves from data collected from preceding problems. Thus, for example: designing cities with green spaces, cycling paths, eco-buildings, limited car-access to cities (or fabrication of electric cars) might have impact in the short term but won't make urban and non-urban areas more  resilient  since global warming and resource exhaustion are too complex, too unstable to be entirely forecasted. This explains why a large number of observers in the field of science now admit that we can merely predict things we do not understand, or better or worse, it all depends, we will never understand. Otherwise, we do not have the required tools for solving future issues. Global warming, sea-level rising, ice-melting are previsible but what about their magnitude, their impact on humans and non-humans? Too dauntingly complex

Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrows Thoughts Today / Unknown Field Division and also Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2013 / Close Closer 's curator, that I have already spoke about, is leading a workshop in the framework of Close Closer (listen to this conversation I had with Close Closer's curatorial team four months ago) from 29 July to 09 August . Image originally appeared on Quaderns