Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alexandria, Los Angeles, New York City, Non-Urban, Rotterdam, Urban
“Cities are like armies“
Port of Singapore
Nazi rally in Nuremberg
To me this comparison seems intuitive. Perhaps it is too obvious, but I could hardly find a single mentioning of it in the internet. A google search of “cities are like armies” only returned two sources. One was from Frederic Harrison’s 1918 “On Society” in which he references French philosopher Augustus Comte who believed that industrial cities were like army camps. The second was from Paul Glover, the founder of the Philly Orchard Project who speaks about how cities have grown too far from there resources. I agree with them both.
The comparison between cities and armies begins with logistics. The term logistics (one of the fundamental concerns of this urban blog) originates from the Roman”Logistikas”. The logistikas were responsible for supplying and managing the resources of the different Roman legions. Like cities today, the legions, constantly in motion, relied on well calculated logistics to manage water, food, dwelling, transportation, and tools to provide order so that the army could achieve its assigned goal. No matter where a legion needed to go to complete its task, these ‘essential life resources’ (ELR’s) had to be made available for the army to have any success. So too the city, often founded for reasons beyond ELR’s has to find ways of sustaining the daily lives of its inhabitants. In this sense logistics are seen as secondary. They are the routine things that are kept silent so the primary goal can be focused on and accomplished. Therefor the very notion of logistics is the history of human advancement. Our ability to increasingly sustain our existence more effortlessly is arguably the exact cause of out ‘post animal’ self realization. In this since logistics are vital.
The simile “cities are like armies” can even extend beyond logistics. Cities defined as fixed sites of communal human living presumably first began with the notion of protection/defense. If people amassed together and shared/traded resources they would have an advantage in reserving ELR’s and thus surviving. Although rarely threatened by invasion, protection and perseverance are still of upmost concern to the city. Albeit terrorism, global competition, class wars, or environment ‘disasters’ cities are in a constant state of growth and adaption in order to survive… A constant motion, a constant fight, a constant crisis. Every city is trying to win (whatever that means) but whatever the cause may be logistics are what sustain it.
As the human project continues to polarize human needs and human desires, the logistics of our cities become increasingly critical. As cities swell the logistics of sustaining them become increasingly complex, threatening cities and human civilization. In this climate of crisis if a city wants to persevere, evolving our metaglistical infrastructures will be critical. Water, food, dwelling, transportation, and tools, the essential life resources, form the foundation of our essential LIFE INFRASTRUCTURES. Through researching, redesigning, and rebuilding the metalogitical infrastructures of our urban planet, cities and their inhabitants can thrive. This is the concern of METALOGISTICAL URBANISM.
The first significant project of this blog will be defining the contents minimal scope.
Over the next couple of weeks I will begin by tentatively establishing the basic essential life resources of our cities.
1) Water
California Aqueduct Pumping Station
2) Food
Currently Under construction: MVRDV's Rotterdam Markethall
3) Dwelling
Independence Plaza in Tribeca
4) Transportation
Alameda Corridor running from the Port at Long Beach to the Inland Empire
5) Tools
Bibliotech Alexandria
For each broad resource category there will be a quick introduction and some associated provocations. Please, if moved to do so, challenge these 5 essential resources or suggest other categories.
Spend the next minute thinking about the work that went in to suppling the last water you drank, the last food you ate, the room you are currently in, what got you there, and the electronic device beneath your fingertips. These architectures make up the underworld of the city.
Needless to say when this cover caught my eye I had to take a look, a cellphone tower/palm tree, talk about multi-purpose. What sold me on this book though was the back cover:
“Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis,”
Wow right! Infrastructural Modern>Perpetual Crisis, quite a serious claim. Luckily the contents of the book matched the covers intellectual promise. First off, the table of contents, graphically establishing the order of the collection of articles this book contains. There are three primary sections:
LANDSCAPE:
Owens Lake
Los Angeles River Watershed
Oil
Gravel
FABRIC:
Traffic
Telecommunications
Landscape (principally palm trees)
Mobile Phones
OBJECTS:
Property
Distribution
Props
PICTURING LOS ANGELES: THE LINEAR CITY
The River
The Street
The Trench
While each articles is written by a different source, they are held tightly together, almost like a catalog of Los Angeles uniquely absurd infrastructural systems. I like the brilliance of its organization. Seeing the cityscape as a landscape (natural fabric), a fabric (man-made landscape), and objects (the things scattered across the landscape/fabric).
In a generalist sort of way the book can be summed up as follows:
Los Angeles as a city never should have existed, and certainly never should have grown (for lack of water alone). However, Los Angeles history is one of crisis, and subsequent infrastructural fixes. While this book is a history of those fixes, it is also projective in that it forecasts the exhausting of theses infrastructural fixes. How will the city respond to the next crisis and when will it have one fix to many?
More on some of the books grandest gems including to come:
1) The Alameda Corridor: express to the east. 2) The Los Angeles (River) 3) Gravel Pits of Irwindale: a city spread out across the country 4) Palm Trees: armature of oasis
Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, edited by Kazys Varnelis, is a publication of The Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University and The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Check the book out!
