Toluu : Pruned

Pruned

On landscape architecture and related fields

Hydro-anarchyDecember 26 2008: (Map courtesy of BBC News.)

This simple enough map by the BBC News illustrates the spread of cholera in Zimbabwe and, by extension, the years of infrastructural neglect, failed land policies, and a world community too impotent to deal with humanitarian crisis. Confirming that no disease cares much for arbitrary lines drawn on pieces of (digital) paper, it also shows the epidemic crossing international borders into South Africa.

The abstraction is powerfully unnerving, for it belies the human tragedies on the ground: barren farms, shuttered schools, empty hospitals. In Harare, “manhole covers in the streets hemorrhage water because underground pipes have burst” only to be mirrored inside homes, during the night, by bodies draining of fluids.

As a review and a prediction, this is the year nearly finished and will be the year nearly here.

This is now and the future, everywhere.
Drowned RomeDecember 23 2008: (Flood markers on the exterior wall of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Photo by Kyle Williams. Source.)

While writing our earlier post on Rome, we remembered that the city is pockmarked with stone markers accurately recording the date and high water mark of historic flood events. Most are embedded on the sides of buildings, and their inscriptions read something like this:

ANNO DOMINI MCDXXII IN DIE SANCTI ANDREE CREVIT AQUA TIBERIS USQUE AD SUMITATEM ISTIUS LAPIDIS TEMPORE DOMINI MARTINI PAPE V ANNO VI.

Or:

In the year of the Lord 1422 on the day of Saint Andrew the water of the Tiber rose as far as to top of this stone, in the time of Pope Martin V, his sixth year.

In many markers, a finger, from which a swirl of lovely, frothy curlicues swooshes out, points instead to the upper limit of inundation.

According to Aquae Urbis Romae, “nearly one hundred flood markers still exist,” with the earliest dating to the 13th century. None from earlier eras are extant, but presumably there were many, a collective testamen
Minor Urban DisastersDecember 23 2008: (Rome's Trevi Fountain. Photo by David Iliff. Source.)

Something about the Tiber nearly breaching its banks and nearly submerging Rome in torrents and mud earlier this month reminded us of an antipode event last year. It's one our favorite stories that entire year.

As reported by Reuters, “water supplying Rome's world-famous Trevi Fountain was cut off when a builder across town damaged a 2,000-year-old pipe.” Luckily enough for the carabinieri who might have had a riotous mob of tired, sweat-drenched tourists on their hands, the fountain didn't dry out; it simply recycled the water already in its basin. Unfortunately, “many smaller Rome fountains spluttered to a halt.” Equally unfortunate, we didn't hear too much of pissed-off Germans and English hydro-hooligans ransacking museums and pillaging nearby archaeological sites.

But what could have caused these minor urban disasters?

A search using a waterborne video camera through t
On crowdsDecember 19 2008: (A Saudi policeman surveils the crowded landscape of Mecca and Mina during the annual Hajj. Photo by Hassan Ammar/AP Photo.)

Counting Crowds: it's all politics really.

The Parkless Park: the pageantry of mass psychology.

Crowd Dynamics Ltd.: services include crowd control modeling, evacuation planning, traffic management, pedestrian flow engineering, and queuing analysis.

Pedestrian Laboratory: subjecting human test subjects to urban nightmares in order to make public spaces more user-friendly.

Reconfiguring the Jamarat Bridge

The Kumbh Mela Array: people power, Part I.

The Second Great Leap Forward Pamphlet #14: Queuing: “It's civilised to queue, it's glorious to be polite.”
Mapping the InaugurationDecember 18 2008: (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.)

Today in Washington, D.C., at a meeting of the Armed Forces Inaugural Committee, a 40-by-40-foot map being used to plan out next month's presidential inauguration was revealed to the public.

One can't help but be utterly fascinated by the image of military personnel swarming around this map or looking on from above in the bleachers to play out scenarios of what will happen and what might happen in a sort of cartographic war game. They aren't scheming an invasion of some foreign shore but rather the invasion of the nation's capital by the populace.

Parade routes are highlighted, staging areas parceled out, and observation platforms and giant viewing screens placemarked. Critical to any large events, outflow zones are delineated, first aid stations positioned, and emergency evacuations modeled to determine the best way to control the incoming flood and counteract any disastrous perturbation. Equally important to these security measures, a mobile sewage infrastructure (i.e., porta-potties and pump trucks) to be grafted temporarily onto the grid is also being devised.