CityReads | 12 Representations of Planetary Urbanization

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12 Representations of Planetary Urbanization

How can we map the urbanization of the planet?

URBAN THEORY LAB, Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization, HD Video, 8m:46s on 3x1.75m videowall, May 22-November 21, 2021, Exhibited at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale "How will we live together?", Giardini, Central Pavilion, VENICE, IT

Sources:

https://vimeo.com/555245282

https://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2021

One of the recent news attracts public attention. In Yunnan 15 wild Asian elephants left the deep forests of Pu'er or Xishuangbanna, went all the way north, across deep rivers and valleys. After three months, these 15 elephants walked through farmland (according to Yuxi news, when elephants went through Yuanjiang and Shiping County, they damaged 842 mu of crops, causing the direct economic losses of 6.8 million yuan), came into the city, on the highway with a constant flow of cars, only a hundred kilometers from Kunming.

Urban residents have rarely seen such scenes. We all have a question: Why do wild elephants come to the city, which is not suitable for them to live, where there is concrete and steel everywhere?

The reason is probably the search for food. An adult Asian elephant eats 150 kilograms of food per day, but the vast majority of the elephant's forest home has been replaced by farmland, leaving only 5% of the elephant's natural habitat. In order to find food, elephants have to take the road to the unknown.

The intrusion of elephants into human habitats is not rare. The documentary "The Year Earth Changed" follows the interaction and conflict between elephants and humans that took place in India. In Assam, Indian, with a population of 36 million, elephants often destroy crops in order to survive, so local farmers try to defend their fields, spending all night driving the elephants back into the forest. And the elephants come back, farmers have to drive them away again. Farmers often lose more than half of the rice harvest that they depend on for survival.  Not only is the farmland threatened, but the elephants also come to the village in search of food, Which have trampled people to death. About 400 people and 100 elephants are killed each year in these conflicts across India.

How do we find better ways to co-exist with elephants? One village in Assam, India, has tried a new approach to this problem. It's a project started by the Nature Conservancy Foundation to grow food for wild elephants. They set up a buffer zone along the edge of the forest and planted fast-growing wild rice and grass for the elephants to eat. More than 500 people from the entire village are involved. In just a few months, they transformed 1.6 square kilometers of land. Now, instead of driving the elephants away, the farmers hold ceremonies to welcome them.

But would the elephants eat the grass that was planted just for them? Or would they go into the farmers' fields?

One by one, the elephants emerged from the forest: mothers, calves, a large family of 26 hungry elephants, but how far would they go? The elephants stayed near the edge of the forest, where they only ate those plants planted specifically for them. As the harvest season unfolds, the elephants stop trespassing on farmers' fields and don't enter villages. By building a crop buffer zone, a long-term solution to a conflict that has existed for years between elephants and humans has been resolved.

The 15 wild elephants still on the road in Yunnan need more than just making way for them; they need humans to return their natural habitat to them. The creation of a crop buffer zone for elephants in Assam, India, is a good example to follow.

The temporary pause in human activity during the pandemic shows us how wildlife can quickly flourish and makes us think again: how do we live and thrive with each other and with nature?

This is also the theme of Biennale Architettura 2021, which runs from 22 May to 21 November 2021, curated by architect and scholar Hashim Sarkis. Hashim Sarkis has been Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 2015.

In the theme of "How will we live together?", we Is first person plural and thus inclusive of other peoples, of other species, appealing to a more empathetic understanding of architecture."We need a new spatial contract. In the context of widening political divides and growing economic inequalities, we call on architects to imagine spaces in which we can generously live together", Sarkis has commented.

The Urban Theory Lab presents Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization at the 17th International Architecture Venice Biennale. Based in the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and directed by Neil Brenner, the Urban Theory Lab is a research team concerned to rethink the basic categories, methods and cartographies through which urban questions are understood, represented and influenced. Project team include Grga Bašić, Neil Brenner, Mariano Gomez-Luque, Daniel Ibañez, Nikos Katsikis, Adam Vosburgh, with Clay Lin and Wenjia Zhang.

How can we map the urbanization of the planet? Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization explores this question through a series of experimental visualizations of the worldwide urban fabric. Twelve globes serve as "data-spheres" that depict the urban world on the basis of important indicators related to the spatial imprint of cities, the geographies of their supply zones and the logistics networks that connect cities to one another and to diverse regional hinterlands. Reversing the mainstream, city-centric metageography of urbanization, the data-spheres reveal the importance of operational landscapes beyond the city (zones of agriculture, extraction, forestry and fishing), as well as planetary logistical infrastructures, that directly support urban life.

From this point of view, the world of contemporary urbanization encompasses much of the planet, including apparently remote areas, wildlands and oceans. Cities are not only producers of value, but entropic black holes that consume surpluses produced elsewhere. Non-city spaces are, correspondingly, the metabolic bases of planetary urbanization.

How can we map the urbanization of the planet?

We explore this question through a series of speculative visualizations of the worldwide urban fabric.

These explorations take the form of 12 data-spheres. Each data-sphere converts a single geospatial dataset into a vision of the urbanized planet. The data-spheres reveal the metabolic impacts of cities as well as the myriad non-city infrastructures and landscapes that support urban life. We invite viewers to question their cognitive maps of urbanization, and to imagine new urban worlds.

These are 3 groups of data-spheres, based on key dimensions of urbanization: concentration; circulation; and production. The first 4 data-spheres focus on agglomerations. The subsequent 8 data-spheres direct our gaze beyond the city.

Concentration: one aspect of urbanization is the spatial clustering of population, infrastructure and investment.

Circulation: urbanization involves the intensification of worldwide connections. This entails the construction of a dense web of logistics infrastructure.

Production: urbanization also hinges upon myriad landscapes –fields, oceans, mines and forests – that are operationalized to support urban life within metropolitan centers.

1. Population

"Contemporary cities are entropic black holes sweeping up the productivity of a vastly larger and increasingly global resource hinterland and spewing an equivalent quantity of waste back into it."   –William E.Rees

2. Population density

"The concentration of population in large-scale metropolitan regions in the global North has hinged upon global ecological plunder."   –Max AJL

3. Urban built-up areas

"Concentrating human activities in high-energy cities means increasing the level of disorder, waste and pollution for the planet as a whole."   –Herbert Girardet

4. GDP

"Cities have lost all physical autonomy since becoming increasingly dependent on…external environments to obtain their supplies and for their emissions, as well as for the distribution of their products."   –Sabine Barles

5. Roads

The network of global roads articulates cities to one another, and to near and distant hinterlands.

"Immense logistical spaces are always carved out beyond, beneath or behind the flows of urban existence."   –Timothy Luke

6. Aviation

Air transport corridors rest upon large-scale infrastructural systems and produce massive ecological damage on a planetary scale.

"What happens if we consider the question of circulation less literally? And what it would mean to struggle not simply against material flows but against the social forms that channel them?"  –Alberto Toscano

7. Shipping

Worldwide shipping corridors facilitate the circulation of commodities among cities, territories and continents to support the metabolism of capital.

"More than 90% of the world’s cargo moves by sea…the sea remains the crucial space of globalization. Nowhere else is the disorientation, violence, and alienation of contemporary capitalism more manifest."   –Allan Sekula and Noel Burch

8. Railways

The matrix of global railways creates a transnational space of logistical connectivity for the operations of global capitalism.

"What is produced in these operations is not a 'thing' but rather a set of links or relations between things, which is to say the framework or skeleton of a world…"    –Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson

9. Cropland

Urbanization hinges upon zones of agricultural intensification. The city, the factory and the field are thoroughly intermeshed.

"The continuing process of international industrialization of world agriculture has caused the progressive blurring of the traditional distinction between urban and rural phenomena…"    – Farshad Araghi

10. Fishing

Under global capitalism, the oceans and the biosphere are increasingly appropriated and plundered to support urban development.

"The depletion of ocean fish stock disrupts metabolic relations within the oceanic ecosystem at multiple trophic and spatial scales."    – Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark

11. Mining

Planetary urbanization has amplified the volume, rate, and intensity of industrial extraction. The city and the mine are inextricably linked.

"The urban landscapes of capitalism might be the 'inverted mines' of its hinterland…Capitalist urbanization secretes the planetary mine—everyday, above-ground, scattered, diffuse, perpetual, and swelling."   –Mazen Labban

12. Forestry

Through commercial appropriation, resource extraction and environmental plunder, urbanization threatens the future of forests.

"Current investments in land and infrastructure are transforming global landscapes in complex ways that blur the rural-urban divide."   –Annelies Zoomers and collaborators

"Occupied and produced, the urban fabric invades the entirety of space."   –Henri Lefebvre

The theory of planetary urbanization reminds us that global urbanization cannot develop without the support of non-city spaces, and that planetary urbanization plunders non-city spaces with resources and causes environmental damage. The departure of wild elephants from forests into cities is a signal sent to humans.

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