Berkeley: NO FISSION

As the semester is finally over, I've graded my last paper, and am working on packing up my belongings for a cross-country move, it seems an appropriate time for a professional announcement: I've recently accepted admission to the PhD program in City and Regional Planning at University of California, Berkeley. I'll be starting the program this fall and very much look forward to exploring the intellectual (and physical) landscapes at Berkeley. It is a strong place, and I anticipate an incredibly rewarding time working with my advisors Ananya Roy and Teresa Caldeira, my cohort at DCRP, and the abundance of fantastic scholars across the university. 

I'll be spending the next two years taking courses and formulating my dissertation project, with an as-yet-to-be-decided topic. I plan on documenting some of that movement here alongside the usual landscape interpretation. For the past three years I’ve been thinking and writing about a host of different things (particulate matter, the anthropocene, urban land tenure, landscape politics, scale, materiality, inclusion); there is no shortage of directions. If there is any downside, Berkeley will render my nuclear infrastructure spotting cards from Smudge Studios utterly useless:

good kid, m.A.A.d city

Kendrick Lamar. Compton, U.S.A. Screenshot from Backseat Freestyle.

There is nowhere to listen to Kendrick Lamar.

But since good kid, m.A.A.d City, K-dot has been with me everywhere: washing dishes in the kitchen sink; writing articles in my office; speeding through Philadelphia in a rented Audi (nearly crashed it); waiting for the white lights of a walk sign at the corner next to my apartment. The album is inescapable, unsettling, moves you (on your feet, down on your knees to pray), and no place allows a comfortable listen from start to finish.

A handful of hits—the radio-edited tracks you hear from every cracked car window in Philadelphia—made this album a popular success (Poetic Justice and Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe). Awkwardly, the singles that stand alone as bare-bones dance tracks (Backseat Freestyle) get play for what they are. Or, really, for what they are recollections of, as Kendrick’s braggadocio is written in this album as a failed relief from the everyday heat in Compton (Swimming Pools). He will get you running high just to snatch it from you, then get you high again. 

good kid is a surprisingly delicate story, where the flat-out aggression and self-confidence of youth are coupled with the intense anxieties of a tender soul in a violent city. The succession of songs tears you in all directions but tethers you to the same place: Compton.

gunpowder cities

Everything in Delaware is named after DuPont. Or, at least, traveling through the state leaves you with the impression that the DuPont family single-handedly funded every road, bridge, town, educational center, and pit stop in the region. Just north of Wilmington, the Hagley Museum and Archive is dedicated, in part, to preserving the storied development of a planetary chemical industry by managing the minutiae of the family's paper trail (deeds, death certificates, receipts, etc.) and staging incredibly entertaining re-enactments of late 19th century chemical production machinery. The place is a landscape as archive: it is the meticulously preserved site of the first gunpowder mill established by the DuPont family and is carefully cultivated to pay homage to the chemical entrepreneurialism this place spawned. It is also, though, the preservation of the broader, more tactile birth of chemical production as urban infrastructure. 

conjuring loisaida

A strangely unkempt abandoned lot (or public park?) is tucked neatly behind a large condominium building on the southwest corner of 8th Street and Loisaida in lower Manhattan. The lot is a sliver of vacancy in an otherwise crowded neighborhood, flanked on all sides by pedestrians, brownstones, neighborhood gardens, bus stops, restaurants, and all the regular detritus of life in New York. Easy to miss as you walk past, it is hidden behind the thin black metal fence so common in the city's public spaces and private gardens. So easy to miss, in fact, that my two-hour canvass through alphabet city  in search of the place landed me half a block from where I started (this is embarrassing for an urban geographer, I think).

In late 2010, the Space-Time Research Collective--a collection of graduate students who share an interest in critical geography and who organize events accordingly--held their second regional workshop at the Brooklyn Free School, followed by a Sunday morning tour of the Lower East Side guided by Neil Smith.  This was the first time of many I would encounter Neil, who continually proved to be an incredibly charismatic and engaging speaker who warmly welcomed most everyone he met. He walked us through the neighborhood, noting the former squats, contested park spaces, devastatingly expensive housing developments, and vacant lots. He slowly reconstructed the always contentious history of this neighborhood's revanchist development strategies, reasserting the ability of global capital to appropriate and redirect New York's cultural movements to churn out more profit and, of course, new forms of urban space.

Neil died unexpectedly last September, and it could go without saying that we are left without an important and prolific thinker who had--and could have continued to have--influence on innumerable academics and activists [1]. The series of encounters I had with Neil, both in persona and through his writing, have certainly had an impact on me. Most memorable, though, is this small, unkempt lot in lower Manhattan that Neil took us through on his tour of the lower east side. Though Manhattan today is scrambling to find creative ways to aggressively congest itself, it was once rife with the abandonment, $1 buildings, and regular landlord arson perhaps more akin to contemporary Philadelphia, Detroit, or Baltimore than anywhere else in New York today. In the the midst of  the frenzy of massive redevelopment that took the city from bombed-out to world-class in two decades flat, a small, persistently unattended parcel feels particularly out of place.

kraftwerk: recalling Franco's wet dream

This hydro-electric powerplant stretches across the Rhine, physically and politically connecting Switzerland and Germany. It provides electricity to Rheinfelden and beyond.

Last month I attended (via livestreaming in the Spatial Analytics Lab at Temple) the annual Clark University Wallace T. Atwood lecture presented by Erik Swyngedouw. In his lecture, titled "Contested Hydro-Modernities: From Manufacturing Rivers to Desalting the Seas", Swyngedouw told a story about the changing relationship between drinking water infrastructures and national identity in Spain, between a fragmented nation and a winding patchwork of drinkable water.

To distill this (ha) into a pithy description of Swyngedouw's upcoming book I'll pull from the provocative title of a previous article published on the same topic:this is the story of the scalar politics of Franco's wet dream, of how to use water infrastructure to bring the masculine fantasy of fascist national identity to fruition in a political landscape of regional fragmentation. Empire fails in the face of heterogeneity and Franco was no exception. Building a landscape of clean accessible drinking water for the Spanish nation required pulling water from the disparate network of rivers strung throughout the region. This required a level of regional coordination--of nation building--that Franco's wet dream was never quite able to achieve.

the sarcophagus and the dry leaves

Brown foliage blanketing the forest floor interrupted by a winding rock bed. Streams such as this is the Weldon Springs lowlands only fill with the Missouri river overflows. 

Accompanied by my Missouri-based research partner, I recently took a brief field excursion to Weldon Springs, Missouri with the intent of taking in some of the area’s natural landscapes. To us, the county wasn’t much more than a good place to get out of the city, walk through some dirt, and try out some new field recording equipment. But, in line with my ongoing interest in places always also being the places they are not or are no longer, I’ll record here a selection of stories on the production of the Weldon Springs landscape:

Weldon Springs sits on the northern edge of the Missouri river about an hour drive from St. Louis proper. Adjacent to the city’s ex-urbs, Weldon Springs is a large conservation area in the river’s lowlands that is trafficked by a steady flow of week-end hikers and sight-seers. After a short hike up the bluffs, tourists to the area can take in some surprisingly dramatic vistas of the Missouri River, relatively free of the ubiquitous din of inter-state highway traffic. The area is a quiet respite from the congested spaces of the St. Louis highway system, with only the occasional passerby and the persistent, yet comforting drone of the mid-western cicada.

Across from the unassuming entrance to the Weldon Springs hiking path, and over the small, backroad highway that snakes through the conservation area is the the former site of both the Weldon Spring Ordinance Works and the Weldon Spring Chemical Plant. In its tenure as a chemical production and waste storage facility, the site produced TNT and Agent Orange, processed uranium, and housed four raffinate pits full of contaminated building material and on-site nuclear waste. The facility mined large rock quarries in the area, only to refill them with the nuclear waste produced on-site. Though the facility stopped producing chemicals in the late 60’s, completion of the site-remediation and clean-up wasn’t until the mid 90’s. 

Infrastructures of portrichmondAIR

Old yellow factory building to be torn down for Richmond Ave to be moved eastward. Making space for an expanded interstate 95. 

In my other life as project coordinator for Clean Air Council's community-based air monitoring project in Port Richmond, Philadelhphia, I've been working for about a year on measuring levels of particulate matter and black carbon. The project comes out a litany of problems with air quality in and around Philadelphia's international ports: Philadelphia's sparse ambient air monitoring sensor network provides only a limited representation of small-scale urban air data; goods and people travel through the inherited transportation infrastructures that often bisect urban neighborhoods; dredging in the Panama Canal will potentially re-work our maritime transportation infrastructures (albiet, with some uncertainty as to what it will actually do to them); and, of course, the energy used to power all this movement releases point-source emissions that are intensely harfmul to human health.

To track some of our work on this project we are starting to experiment with digital media and communication. You guessed it! We started a blog, portrichmondAIR. We needed a useful, clean, effective way to communicate with residents, our community researchers, and whoever else might be interested in infrastructure, air, health, planning, dredging, bio-physics, atmospheric chemistry, national labor disputes, cargo containers, public parks, or Port Richmond (remember, ANTs love lists). Here, I'm working on reading transportation infrastructures as having distinct effects on things. They are not simply the conduits through which we connect to eachother, producing stuff on either end of the tunnel, but that they also touch things, such as our cardiovascular systems, along the way. This is the same work as coping with globally relational phenomenon: an expansion of a canal in Central America can alter transportation patterns and reshuffle the North American spaces in which humans encounter the bio-physicality of air quality. How to cope with such infrastructural effects? How to know what situations they produce?

Good question.