atlas(t)

three gorges dam

speaking of Edward Burtynsky, a video on YouTube of a talk he gave that's on Manufactured Landscapes turned me on to the scale of change caused by the Three Gorges Dam in China.

Here's the clip:

Here's a good summary of the project:

Here's an animation showing the changes the dam has made to the landscape:

Here's a clip in Chinese with a lot of information about the dam, much of which is self explanatory, if you don't speak Chinese. There are some rah-rah shots of the dam, and some animations of how the dam was built:

What fascinates me the most is the underwater cities. Sure, the buildings were destroyed to as not to interfere with ships, but there must be some lower levels of high rises, and some one and two-story buildings they didn't bother smashing. It would be great if someone went down there in ten or twenty years to photograph what happened to the landscape down there.

In fact, I should find out if there are underwater villages in other areas that have been photographed many years later.

race map of britain

a few days ago I was hanging out with a friend, a South Asian immigrant who grew up mostly in England but has lived in the States for a decade. She made an offhand reference to how much she hated England ... something I had never heard from her before, although we've been friends for about seven years.

I pressed on the point and she--shocked that she's never ranted to me yet--explained that, although (especially since 9/11) there's a lot of anti-South Asian prejudice in the States, it's nowhere near the level of daily hatred and harrassment a South Asian in the UK faces. Last time she was home, it took only 18 hours for her to get her first racial slur hurled from a car.

In the course of her rant, she mentioned a map that had greeted her on the front page of The Independent during one trip home. This was a race map that didn't show percentages of racial groups in England, but rather the chance that random pedestrians on the street would bump into someone of a different ethnicity. (facepalm/) Naturally, this led to a much more dramatically "colored" map than a simple population percentage map would have been.

Of course, I went looking for the map and it wasn't up at The Independent's site, but urban cartography had it in the archives. Here 'tis, above. And here's the explanation of the "method" used to produce such a highly colorized map.

Experts devised a "diversity index" based on the probability that any two people chosen at random from a particular area would be from different ethnic groups, even if neither of them are white. A score of 0.5 means there is more than 50 per cent chance of this happening -- and the area is classed as highly ethnically diverse.

Think about this for a minute. They're not going by absolute numbers, which is to say, how many people, or what percentage of people are what ethnicity. They're going by probability: what is the chance that people on the street will bump into someone of a different ethnicity. Depending on how they choose to do this (and they don't identify the "experts" doing it) they could be seriously inflating the impression of diversity--or danger--in these areas.

Additionally, they're talking about people meeting on the street. Is there any controlling for ethnic factors like the women of one community not going out as often as the women of another community? Or for the fact that a lot of these communities are concentrated in ethnic enclaves, so you wouldn't actually meet them on the street unless you went into their enclaves?

What this is, is an incendiary map intended to stoke racial suspicion. It's about the daily experience and perception of otherness. Think about the wording: what are your chances of meeting an outsider on the street! They're everywhere! On your streets! Look at how much chance you have of meeting an outsider on the street all over England! England is stained! Publicly stained!

Basically, they're counting on their readership not understanding the math, and especially how math and perception work together in sociological issues such as these.

Just an example of how maps can obscure and obfuscate as much as they illuminate.

to sprawl or not to sprawl

here's an interesting broadcast from To the Best of Our Knowledge from a few months ago.

(Listen to it here or click through below for more info)

TO SPRAWL OR NOT TO SPRAWL

Subdivisions. Industrial Parks. Strip Malls. Gridlock. Sprawl is socially unequal, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Right? In this hour of To the Best Of Our Knowledge, we'll look at the costs and – YES – the benefits of suburban sprawl. Because maybe, just maybe, sprawl is a good thing.

SEGMENT 1: Joel Hirschhorn is the author of "Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs. Steal Your Time, Health and Money." He obviously thinks urban sprawl is a terrible idea and tells Steve Paulson all the reasons why.

 SEGMENT 2: Robert Bruegmann makes the case for the opposite point of view in his book "Sprawl: A History." He says societies have always grown and ours looks the way it does because suburbs represent the way Americans like to live. Also, urban sprawl is a staggering problem in China as a result of the on-going Chinese industrial revolution. Photographer Edward Burtynsky traveled to China to document its "Manufactured Landscapes," and film-maker Jennifer Baichwal documented his trip in her film of the same name. Baichwal talks with Steve Paulson about the scale of China's ecological problems and the beauty of Burtynsky's images.

SEGMENT 3: Novelist Tom Perrotta reads from "Little Children" and "The Abstinence Teacher," and talks with Anne Strainchamps about life in the suburbs, where everything is nice, and nobody wants a pedophile to move into the neighborhood.

I'll definitely need to check out some of those books.

girlicious contestants' geography knowledge

i have to admit, dumb as it was, I watched The Pussycat Dolls Present Girlicious religiously.

Why that's a painful admission should be immediately apparent in this video.

It's not just the ignorance of young people who are mostly just out of high school and therefore should have those geography lessons they clearly never got still fresh in their minds. What bugs me the most about this is: these girls are invited onto this show, and held up as paragons of sexy girlhood, and given the ultimate prize of fame and minor-goddess status if they win. But their apparent lack of intelligence and educational achievement are considered not only fair game, but not at all an impediment to their being minor goddesses.

We can laugh at their ignorance without it at all impinging on our enjoyment of their ... er ... talents.

But then, if Hillary Clinton's campaign didn't make our society's overwhelming sexism clear, then how is anyone going to be able to see through this pretty blatant example?

geography seasons

a little boring, but useful.

ghosts of the river

Performance photos jacked from ShadowLight's flickr stream.

on the border tip, if you think about stories white Americans would tell of the U.S.-Mexican border, you might think of anecdotes about illegal border crossers being caught, or the signs warning cars of families on the highway near Tijuana. Tall tales from Minutemen about a good or a bad day catching wetbacks. Thoughtful snippets of shoppers who kept mum when they saw someone stuffed into the trunk of a car, that sort of thing. Stories about people trying to get in from outside, told from the point of view of inside, stories that take into consideration only the land to the immediate "front" and "back" of the border, and not the volumes of land beyond it on either side.

But if you think about the stories Mexicans and Mexican Americans would tell, it's no longer a bilateral in/out kind of a narrative, with the penetration of the border being the climax. Because the reasons for leaving Mexico--and the reasons for entering the U.S.--are legion, and the paths that lead to the border are many, even if the paths that lead away from the border are few. The border stories, then, are not all about whether one gets through it or not, or even whether or not one survives the experience.

I had the enormous privilege a few weeks ago of attending a workshop production (i.e. a presentation of a part of a performance that isn't finished yet) of a new piece by the Balinese-style shadow puppetry company ShadowLight Productions.

Ghosts of the River is a collection of stories about the U.S.-Mexico border by Chicano playwright Octavio Solis, whose last play, June in a Box, I had some problems with but really enjoyed. The company only performed two of the stories, each unrelated except that they both took place on and in the Rio Bravo/Grande.

The other important detail about this project is that it is art-directed by Favianna Rodriguez, the community organizer, artist-entrepreneur powerhouse, who is just the kind of impeccably-credentialed community activist type whose art usually suffers for it. Favianna, on the other hand--who knows really how she does it--is also a fantastic artist ... fantastic in both senses of the word.

Put the three elements together into a dream-team and you could easily have mush. In this case, though, "dream team" is apt. As I said, the workshop only performed two stories, but both were terrific and the puppetry was wonderful.

The first story was about a Mexican woman murdered by her abusive husband, who haunts the river waiting for him to try to cross so she can drown him. The second (more moving because more realistic) story dramatizes the competitive friendship that develops between an American border guard, and a child "coyote" who makes money helping Mexicans cross illegally.

I loved Rodriguez's designs for the piece. Her characteristic organic/cubist faces and figures worked perfectly with the Balinese-style puppets, and details of her landscapes are perhaps more wonderful executed in light and shadow than in ink on paper. The photos here don't do the piece justice.

The team working together on this piece numbered about twenty, and the set-up was complex. I loved the whole thing. They'll be working on a full-length piece for Brava Theater in 2009 and I can't wait to see it. Definitely recommend keeping an eye out for it. I'll review it when it comes out.

more "squaw" renamings

we already knew this! It's in the title of the Monmonier book! Neverthelessons, here's a quote:

Moves to eliminate the term "squaw" from names of geographical sites are accelerating because of protests that the term is offensive.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names has renamed 16 valleys, creeks and other sites so far this year. Pending proposals mean 2008 should see more changes than any year in a decade, the board says.

...

Valerie Fast Horse, a council member with the Coeur d'Alene Tribe of Idaho, Montana and Washington, says the usual translation of "squaw" is a profane term for female genitalia. It's so offensive in her tribe, she says, that members refer to it as "the 'S' word."

"They should translate the names into English and see how fast they get changed," she says.

That's what I'm sayin'. Of course, there's always some clown who doesn't get it:

"It irritated me," says Cody McDonald, a Judith Basin County commissioner. "When these things were named a hundred years ago, they didn't mean to offend anybody. … And it's a waste of time. Everybody's still going to call it 'Squaw Coulee.' "

Which is to say, he and his buddies are still gonna call it "Squaw Coulee," even after no one knows what "Squaw Coulee" is, just like that old lady in Berlin who gets into taxicabs and orders the drivers to take her to Adolf-Hitler-Platz.

And yeah, I'm sure the good ol' boys who named the peak "Squaw Tit" didn't mean to offend anybody, either.

Via Racialicious.

 

jane jacobs on discrimination

the effective breaking down of residential discrimination outside a slum, and the less dramatic self-diversification within an unslumming slum, proceed concurrently. If America has now, in the case of Negroes, reached an effective halt in this process and in general entered a stage of arrested development -- a thought I find both highly improbable and quite intolerable -- then it may be that Negro slums cannot effectively unslum in the fashion demonstrated by slums formed by other ethnic populations and population mixtures. In this case, the damage to our cities might be the least of our worries; unslumming is a by-product of other kinds of vigor and other forms of economic and social change.

When an area has unslummed, it is easy to forget how bad it once was and how helpless both the area and its population were thought to be. ... As in the case of other slums, overcoming of discrimination outside the slum, and unslumming within the slum, must proceed concurrently. Neither can wait for the accomplishment of the other. Every relaxation of discrimination outside can help unslumming within. Progress in unslumming within helps outside. The two go together.

The inherent resources necessary for unslumming -- advancement and self-diversification in a population -- demonstrably exist among colored people, including the colored people who are in slums or who have passed through slums, as strikingly as these resources exist among white people. In a way the proved and obvious possession of these resources is more striking among the colored, because they emerge in spite of disproportionate obstacles against their emergence. Indeed, because of the very facts that colored populations advance, self-diversify, and have too much spirit to like ghettos, our inner cities have already lost far more of the Negro middle class than they can afford to lose.

I think inner cities will go on losing too much of the Negro middle class almost as fast as it forms until, in actual fact, the choice of remaining there no longer means, for a colored person, an implied acceptance of ghetto citizenship and status. In short, unslumming is at the very least directly -- as well as indirectly -- inhibited by discrimination.

        --- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

thoughts on jane jacobs four: east german cities

one of my favorite blogs, Pruned, also pointed me to this Economist article about former East German cities now being radically depopulated.

SOMETHING odd is happening to the cities of eastern Germany. Plattenbauten, the soulless prefabricated apartment blocks thrown up by the region's former communist rulers, are being knocked down. Occasionally one will be truncated, shorn of its upper storeys. Older streets are gap-toothed where wreckers have removed abandoned houses. Cityscapes are being pruned, removing dead and dying edifices in the hope of saving the rest.

City planners, normally keen to promote the building of homes, factories and roads, are responding to a double demographic crisis: the collapse of communist-era industry, which sent workers, especially young women, fleeing westwards; and a sharp decline in the birth rate.

Those who remain are fearing blight in the empty areas--some emptied by up to 20%. So they're removing housing units by the thousands ... and expensive infrastructure such as roads. Some cities are taking the problem as an opportunity (ogd, I sound like I should have my own DVD).

That may account for the spirit of zany experimentalism that prevails in cities such as Dessau and Köthen. Under the motto “city islands”, Dessau is nudging life and commerce towards “core areas”, which means making a verdant city (which is already three-quarters parkland) even greener.

Traces of Dessau's busier past—a disused tower for smoking sausages or a dairy's chimney now occupied by storks—are being preserved. Parts of the void are being parcelled into “claims” of 400 square metres, which citizens can use free of charge for projects such as growing biomass for fuel. “Where buildings fall, gardens rise,” a hopeful billboard claims.

Köthen, home of the father of homeopathy, is creating a homeopathy library and school, and even employing homeopaths to help cure the city. "On their advice, the municipality [conducted] painstaking interviews to find out how [residents] thought the newly-created space should be used. To provoke a sharper reaction, the city dimmed the street lights, highlighting only the buildings designated for sacrifice." And Stassfurt removed its entire city center, affected by subsidence because of mining, and replaced it with ... that's right: a lake.

Dessau is also preparing an international Bauaustellung or Building Exposition for 2010, a German tradition intended to bring the best architectural and planning minds to bear on new circumstances and changing trends. (You'd better bet I'm going to be there. That's only two years away!)

The article ends with: "From the death of cities, the hope is that new life will emerge," which brings us to the important question:

WWJJD? Dunno, what do you think? Is this situation unprecedented? (Can't be.)  What happens when cities regress back to large towns? Is that even possible?

nasa cyclone nargis flooding photos

nASA Earth Observatory images of Cyclone Nargis flooding Myanmar. Via Sepia Mutiny.