Susan Dieterlen
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Unraveling Urban Life and Space

The Vanishing Infrastructural Wild, Updated

10/2/2018

 
Picture
Photo by author
News broke last week about NantEnergy's installations of rechargeable zinc-air batteries (aka energy storage) at communications towers, including one in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The NYT article features this eye-catching sentence:

"
As a result, 13 acres of land in the Great Smoky Mountains that was used for power lines is being turned over to the National Park Service."

That caught my eye because vacating electricity transmission corridors has great potential for wildlife, for other ecological purposes, and for transportation, like bikes or rail. Why? Because they are corridors, and in part, because they tend to be wild spaces we are used to not noticing. I had some thoughts about the potential of these under-valued, under-maintained spaces back in 2015. Now that reality is catching up, that post merits another look. So here it is: The Vanishing Infrastructural Wild, an encore presentation:  
What's the cost to wildness of updating infrastructure?

“Urban wild” immediately brings to mind corridors, the linear routes of infrastructure like interstates and power lines.  Paul Gobster lists such corridors as one type in his typology of wildscapes, so I’m not alone in this observation. 

Let’s think about these corridors as spaces. These are perfect examples of forgotten spaces that we train ourselves not to see, yet they are large swathes of the city. Utility corridors and freight rail corridors tend to run along the backs of properties - or better said, the properties around them align along the corridors - so it’s easy to miss them in everyday life. These corridors are negative space framing the positive space of the lots around them. The more overgrown (wild) they are, the more they disappear. Interstate corridors are really a contradiction, because we drive through them constantly. Yet what forgotten invisible spaces they are. Here in Syracuse and back in Ann Arbor, and surely a host of other places, interstate corridors are popular spots for homeless camps, which is the best proof you could have that most residents don’t see these spaces. They also collect trash - lots of trash- and are frequent sites for graffiti, both suggesting that these are seen as spaces no one owns. Invisible, yet right in front of you.

Why are these spaces wild? Sometimes they aren’t. In Indiana my husband and I own a rental property in a subdivision that’s bisected by high voltage lines. The space under these lines is kept mowed, if not manicured, and includes some businesses, restaurants and offices. Within the subdivision, the space under the lines contains a retention pond that the houses look out on. Elsewhere in my home state, the interstate right-of-way used to be (maybe still is) kept mowed. You probably know other stretches of highway that were mowed like this. Although interstates are federal, of course, the mow/don’t mow decision varies by state: Indiana mows; Michigan doesn’t. The interstate right-of-way is suddenly wilder as you go north. 

It’s more popular now to not mow. We know why that is. It might be habitat or carbon reduction or some other ecological rationale, but primary or secondary rationale is always money. Mowing cost seems negligible, but…it’s all the time, over and over, year in, year out. Someone pays for it, and why is that, again? Why mow all of it, or any of it? Over the past few decades it’s become more popular to plant wildflower mixes (sometimes natives, sometimes not) in interstate margins like this and stop mowing. The same belt-tightening reflected in the maintenance (or not) of transportation ROWs is surely in play with utility ROWs as well; even less reason to mow land no one sees. Possibly there is advantage in having utility corridors and substations and other assorted bits and pieces of the equipment that keeps the lights on be unnoticed by the general public. You don’t vandalize what you don’t see, and neither do you pay too much attention to what’s going on there or fuss over trees topped to stay clear of lines or whatever. It’s the power company’s business what happens in their little wilderness, and maybe they’d prefer that no one else go there.

Except…people do go there - see above re: homeless camps and graffiti. See all previous discussion about transgressive spaces and cues to care and loose space. Wild spaces are loose spaces, the international waters of urban life, where anything can happen. And if a utility corridor is a wild space, well, it’s loose, too. 

So infrastructure corridors are wild spaces, socially and naturally, but why “vanishing?” At the risk of mixing a metaphor between “invisible” spaces and “vanishing” spaces, follow this logic: 

Energy and transportation are on the cusp of a sea change (to add another metaphor into the mix). Use of fossil fuels faces questions about supply and peak oil, political instability, and the increasingly serious need to address climate change. There are great gains to be made in efficiency, including the landscape-scale issue of where we live in relationship to where we work, and how we get around. Much of our transportation infrastructure in the US dates from the years following World War II, when the interstate highway system was constructed, giving rise to a million suburbs on the public dime. We know this story: the suburbs boom, the cities bust, and we all drive - a lot, alone, in Detroit steel, then massive SUVs. Denser development is more sustainable development. Denser development requires less transportation, is better suited to mass transportation, and at the very least, is more feasibly served by a diffuse grid of surface roads than by limited access highways.  This isn’t the end of interstates, but they’ll be less emphasized in the future, and probably share the space of their roomy corridors with other uses and transportation modes. And yes, perhaps some will be dismantled or converted to other uses or downsized. Exit one type of infrastructural wild.

What could make a much bigger difference is a switch to more distributed energy production. Distributed production means energy produced near its point of use, at many locations, in contrast to one large generator, like a power plant. Distributed production is inherently more resilient, because it’s many instead of one, and in many locations instead of one - the eggs are separately arrayed over a large space instead of being all in one coal-fired basket. Distributed production dovetails nicely with clean energy generation, and with smaller-scale energy systems (microgrids) that can remain functional with or without the larger grid in operation. So distributed energy production seems to be the way of the future for several reasons. 

If you think about it, and most of us don’t, the current electrical system requires a lot of moving power from place to place, to speak in a decidedly non-technical way. Electricity is generated at large power plants, then travels along a series of increasing smaller lines until it reaches the outlet in your wall. It’s a lot of ground to cover, to say nothing of transporting the fuel to the power plant to begin with. As electricity travels, some of it dissipates, so distributed production means less of that loss; a benefit maximized by placing generation next to use. It seems inevitable that this will mean vacating some of the existing system of lines and structures that currently move electricity from power plant to use. 

High voltage corridors are large. Look at an aerial photo, and they stand out, x-ing across miles. That they are corridors is in itself valuable, because corridors are difficult, impossible, really, to assemble through land that’s already owned by many different entities and developed into different uses and buildings. A vacated corridor is an intact corridor, and it could be intact for something else, even if it’s merely a right-of-way or easement and not owned outright by the electric company. Corridors preserve protected routes for wildlife movement, helping counteract habitat fragmentation. This aspect of utility corridors is even more important in urban areas, where the surroundings may be entirely built out and thus inhospitable to most wildlife.

It’s worth thinking about and assessing what they do for us in their current state, these infrastructural urban wilds. They do all the things vegetation and permeable surfaces and wildlife do for you anywhere - all those ecosystem services, cognitive and health benefits, views out your back door. We take them for granted, because we don’t see them, remember? But should they vanish, we’d notice the effects. We’d feel the loss. Better to notice and value what they do for us before that time comes.

Single-Track Saves the City

8/22/2017

 
Also posted on Medium.

​Call it biking the urban wild. Portland, Oregon, is developing a citywide off-road trail network, called the Portland Off-road Cycling Master Plan. Conventional planning processes will produce a network of single-track trails through natural areas, instead of the much more common paved bike/pedestrian trails. Portland is reported to be inspired in this effort by the broad popularity of mountain biking within the area, but the advantages of “wild” urban trails over conventional multi-use paths are worth considering anywhere. A network of single-track through the city is a network of urban wilds, with a built-in community of people to use them. 

What are these advantages? First, there’s the array of benefits to physical and mental health that come with exposure to everyday nature, particularly vegetation. Key to this list are lower perceived stress, greater time spent exercising, and improved mental focus. These three benefits lead to a host of secondary effects, from lower blood pressure to better mood and social relationships. Research on this nature-health connection generally finds that benefits are significant, but small, meaning that the ideal way to benefit from them is through activities done on an everyday basis. Thus, the trail through the natural area across the street is potentially much better for your health than the trail at the state park twenty miles away. It’s the everyday that makes the difference. 

Key to the the mental health benefits is mindfulness, or the necessity of being present and focused on the moment. The more rugged surface of unpaved trails promotes this, as does the narrowness of single-track. The limited views through trees and shrubs promote the feeling of being away from the city, even in locations well within city limits. This feeling of being away, or “extent,” is also key to achieving health benefits from nature, as is the feeling that a landscape can’t be understood completely at a glance, that it contains scope for exploration. 

Biking or running on a trail is obviously good for the trail user’s health, but it’s also good for everyone else’s health, in terms of the climate change mitigation benefits of urban wilds. The abundant vegetation of natural areas in cities sequesters carbon, which aids in offsetting climate change. These same natural areas also help cities adapt to the impacts of a warmer, more volatile climate, through lowering the temperature of adjacent areas and creating more area for rainwater from storms to infiltrate.  

Urban trail networks of any kind fight climate change by promoting human-powered transportation over cars, but an urban off-road network in an outdoorsy town like Portland goes further. If many people - Portland found 12% of county residents - are already doing single-track recreation, they are likely driving to those trails. Trails in the city eliminate at least some of those trips. This is not to say that trail users will never drive out of town, but as with everything having to do with lowering our impact on climate change, it is what you do routinely that matters, not the special occasion. It's the Tuesday night ride, not what you do one Saturday each summer.

An urban wild network promises major advantages to local wildlife and its ability to withstand the disruption of climate change. A substantial challenge for wildlife of warming temperatures and changing precipitation levels is the ability to move fast enough to keep pace with a livable climate. For some creatures, this means moving up in elevation or farther north to stay with cooler temperatures, while for others it means moving to stay with adequate moisture levels. Cities and many suburbs are obstacles to this movement, because they interrupt the habitat necessary to allow wildlife to travel. This fragmentation of habitat is offset by urban wilds, especially those that occur in a connected network, because the wild areas provide wildlife corridors, a kind of safe route for creatures to move through the city. Even manicured lawn, like in the top photo, is inhospitable to many organisms. Even though it’s green, it lacks sufficient shelter and may well lack adequate food and water sources as well. 

There are more benefits - reduced maintenance, improved views from adjacent properties - but this short list illustrates the advantages of a wild trail network like this in an urban area, that are not available with a more conventional trail network. Intriguingly, a wild trail network may be much less expensive, and therefore far more feasible, to build in urban areas that already have ample amounts of vacant lots, brownfields, and other urban wild spaces. Traditional trails are surprisingly expensive to build, so the cost difference between simply adding single-track to existing wild areas and clearing those areas,  establishing lawn, and constructing an asphalt trail, could be quite substantial. Since urban wild spaces are usually seen as waste space, using these spaces more or less as they are to get a desirable recreation and health benefit is well worth considering, for many places other than Portland. Maybe your town needs some killer in-town single-track, too.
Picture
Single-track trail traversing a "wild" urban area; in this case, a former quarry.
Picture
Conventional pathway in a manicured park setting.

Crows in the City

1/13/2017

 
Picturewww.helenair.com/
It’s that time of year again - time for crows to congregate in the most unfortunate of city parks, streets, and yards. Sinister seems invented to describe the atmosphere of hundreds of crows roosting in the darkness above you, rustling and softly calling to each other, unseen yet…sinister, a scene out of Poe appropriate to this season. And, as an author in the Michigan Daily noted during my time in grad school, “the crow sh*t falls like rain.”

Places like the University of Michigan’s campus and Forman Park and Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse struggle with how to pull the crow welcome mat back in. Screeching recorded bird calls seem to be a favorite tactic of campuses. Other places try fireworks or gunshots. Really, not much seems to work reliably. Of interest here is that crows are recognized as being remarkably intelligent birds, with recently published research even reporting their use of tools.  A memorable 2010 episode of PBS' Nature showed how crows remember the appearance of people who hassle them, and react when the same person returns. This same intelligence and responsiveness to their environment must be the key to persuading crows to roost in places we deem acceptable. 

In the winter months I often see flocks of crows flying overhead, high enough and dispersed enough that you don’t notice them at first glance. As you watch, though, you realize that crows continue to pass overhead, on and on, because there are a very large number in the flock. They are all going somewhere, and I speculate that when I see these flocks in the late afternoon, they are heading for roosting spots in town (an attempted murder! Sorry. There had to be at least one “murder” pun). If they are flying from out here, 15 miles away, to spots in town, the choice of those roosting spots must be intentional, because it’s obviously not proximity or convenience at play. What makes a good spot for a murder? What dictates the landscape preference of crows?

I don’t know. Crows aren’t my thing. But revealing the physical environment as a key factor in life in cities is, and so I say: there are environmental characteristics that must matter here, and if we identify them, we can manipulate them, and make the crows decide to sleep somewhere else. There’s got to be somewhere else, though - like every “undesirable” in the city, crows have to be somewhere, so banishing them from one place means their arrival somewhere else. The task of research-based urban crow management might then be to eliminate those characteristics from places where we don’t want crows, and add those characteristics to places where we do want them. For a bonus point, we could draw crows to places where their abundant droppings (falling like rain!) could add needed fertility to the soil. You probably don’t want that to be any place you’re growing food for human consumption, but a degraded brownfield could be the ideal site.

So what do crows like? If I list sites where I’ve personally witnessed mass roosting of crows, I list the north edge of Syracuse’s Oakwood Cemetery, Syracuse’s Forman Park, and the University of Michigan’s Diag (a central campus quad). Far from an exhaustive list, but even with just these three sites, we can compile a short list of possible crow-attracting environmental characteristics. First, most obviously: mature deciduous canopy trees. In these three sites, those canopy trees have open understory beneath them, with either lawn or low-growing perennials and shrubs. Perhaps the crows feel more secure with open space beneath the canopy and less cover for predators. All three sites also have substantial masonry buildings adjacent to them, and at least some paving - perhaps the thermal mass raises the nighttime temperature? It’s interesting that all three sites have a fair amount of human activity, including both cars and pedestrians. These aren’t isolated natural areas. The cemetery edge abuts the edge of campus, specifically a back drive serving faculty parking, a busy place at dusk in the fall and winter. Given the demonstrated attention of crows not just to human activity, but to specific humans, it seems implausible that this is a coincidence. Perhaps the crows want to be near us because we scare off more dangerous wildlife. Perhaps they know we generate tasty trash and roadkill. Perhaps they like the heat from our buildings and cars. Maybe we’re just entertaining.

To you and me, a tree might just be a tree (well, really, to me a tree hasn’t just been a tree since 1992, when I took my first plant identification class), but to a crow, I very much doubt trees are all the same. Might the species matter? Is an elm better than a maple, but not as good as an oak?

Crows don’t mind noise, artificial light, and urban air quality. Do these environmental characteristics actually attract roosting crows? The question here is whether crows really prefer urban sites to rural ones for winter roosting, or whether we humans only notice them in urban sites. If a murder roosts in a forest and no one is there to complain, would we know about it? Urban heat islands would seem to be a likely explanation, but surely these intelligent birds have their reasons for selecting between the many possible roosting areas available in the warm city. We have to look at the wild city through crow’s eyes to see those reasons. 

The Vanishing Infrastructural Wild

12/11/2015

 
Picture
I-81 in Syracuse, from below. (Photo by Ely Margolis)
What's the cost to wildness of updating infrastructure?

“Urban wild” immediately brings to mind corridors, the linear routes of infrastructure like interstates an
d power lines.  Paul Gobster lists such corridors as one type in his typology of wildscapes, so I’m not alone in this observation. 

Let’s think about these corridors as spaces. These are perfect examples of forgotten spaces that we train ourselves not to see, yet they are large swathes of the city. Utility corridors and freight rail corridors tend to run along the backs of properties - or better said, the properties around them align along the corridors - so it’s easy to miss them in everyday life. These corridors are negative space framing the positive space of the lots around them. The more overgrown (wild) they are, the more they disappear. Interstate corridors are really a contradiction, because we drive through them constantly. Yet what forgotten invisible spaces they are. Here in Syracuse and back in Ann Arbor, and surely a host of other places, interstate corridors are popular spots for homeless camps, which is the best proof you could have that most residents don’t see these spaces. They also collect trash - lots of trash- and are frequent sites for graffiti, both suggesting that these are seen as spaces no one owns. Invisible, yet right in front of you.

Why are these spaces wild? Sometimes they aren’t. In Indiana my husband and I own a rental property in a subdivision that’s bisected by high voltage lines. The space under these lines is kept mowed, if not manicured, and includes some businesses, restaurants and offices. Within the subdivision, the space under the lines contains a retention pond that the houses look out on. Elsewhere in my home state, the interstate right-of-way used to be (maybe still is) kept mowed. You probably know other stretches of highway that were mowed like this. Although interstates are federal, of course, the mow/don’t mow decision varies by state: Indiana mows; Michigan doesn’t. The interstate right-of-way is suddenly wilder as you go north. 

It’s more popular now to not mow. We know why that is. It might be habitat or carbon reduction or some other ecological rationale, but primary or secondary rationale is always money. Mowing cost seems negligible, but…it’s all the time, over and over, year in, year out. Someone pays for it, and why is that, again? Why mow all of it, or any of it? Over the past few decades it’s become more popular to plant wildflower mixes (sometimes natives, sometimes not) in interstate margins like this and stop mowing. The same belt-tightening reflected in the maintenance (or not) of transportation ROWs is surely in play with utility ROWs as well; even less reason to mow land no one sees. Possibly there is advantage in having utility corridors and substations and other assorted bits and pieces of the equipment that keeps the lights on be unnoticed by the general public. You don’t vandalize what you don’t see, and neither do you pay too much attention to what’s going on there or fuss over trees topped to stay clear of lines or whatever. It’s the power company’s business what happens in their little wilderness, and maybe they’d prefer that no one else go there.

Except…people do go there - see above re: homeless camps and graffiti. See all previous discussion about transgressive spaces and cues to care and loose space. Wild spaces are loose spaces, the international waters of urban life, where anything can happen. And if a utility corridor is a wild space, well, it’s loose, too. 

So infrastructure corridors are wild spaces, socially and naturally, but why “vanishing?” At the risk of mixing a metaphor between “invisible” spaces and “vanishing” spaces, follow this logic: 

Energy and transportation are on the cusp of a sea change (to add another metaphor into the mix). Use of fossil fuels faces questions about supply and peak oil, political instability, and the increasingly serious need to address climate change. There are great gains to be made in efficiency, including the landscape-scale issue of where we live in relationship to where we work, and how we get around. Much of our transportation infrastructure in the US dates from the years following World War II, when the interstate highway system was constructed, giving rise to a million suburbs on the public dime. We know this story: the suburbs boom, the cities bust, and we all drive - a lot, alone, in Detroit steel, then massive SUVs. Denser development is more sustainable development. Denser development requires less transportation, is better suited to mass transportation, and at the very least, is more feasibly served by a diffuse grid of surface roads than by limited access highways.  This isn’t the end of interstates, but they’ll be less emphasized in the future, and probably share the space of their roomy corridors with other uses and transportation modes. And yes, perhaps some will be dismantled or converted to other uses or downsized. Exit one type of infrastructural wild.

What could make a much bigger difference is a switch to more distributed energy production. Distributed production means energy produced near its point of use, at many locations, in contrast to one large generator, like a power plant. Distributed production is inherently more resilient, because it’s many instead of one, and in many locations instead of one - the eggs are separately arrayed over a large space instead of being all in one coal-fired basket. Distributed production dovetails nicely with clean energy generation, and with smaller-scale energy systems (microgrids) that can remain functional with or without the larger grid in operation. So distributed energy production seems to be the way of the future for several reasons. 

If you think about it, and most of us don’t, the current electrical system requires a lot of moving power from place to place, to speak in a decidedly non-technical way. Electricity is generated at large power plants, then travels along a series of increasing smaller lines until it reaches the outlet in your wall. It’s a lot of ground to cover, to say nothing of transporting the fuel to the power plant to begin with. As electricity travels, some of it dissipates, so distributed production means less of that loss; a benefit maximized by placing generation next to use. It seems inevitable that this will mean vacating some of the existing system of lines and structures that currently move electricity from power plant to use. 

High voltage corridors are large. Look at an aerial photo, and they stand out, x-ing across miles. That they are corridors is in itself valuable, because corridors are difficult, impossible, really, to assemble through land that’s already owned by many different entities and developed into different uses and buildings. A vacated corridor is an intact corridor, and it could be intact for something else, even if it’s merely a right-of-way or easement and not owned outright by the electric company. Corridors preserve protected routes for wildlife movement, helping counteract habitat fragmentation. This aspect of utility corridors is even more important in urban areas, where the surroundings may be entirely built out and thus inhospitable to most wildlife.

It’s worth thinking about and assessing what they do for us in their current state, these infrastructural urban wilds. They do all the things vegetation and permeable surfaces and wildlife do for you anywhere - all those ecosystem services, cognitive and health benefits, views out your back door. We take them for granted, because we don’t see them, remember? But should they vanish, we’d notice the effects. We’d feel the loss. Better to notice and value what they do for us before that time comes.

A Zoo for Street Art

9/14/2015

 
Picture
www.boredpanda.com
When Banksy opens a theme park, I expect my inbox to fill up. And indeed, two versions of coverage of “Dismaland” have come my way (so far; thanks, Ely and Tim!): The NY Times' "Banksy's 'Dismaland' in England: It's a Strange World, After All," and Bored Panda's "Banksy's Dismaland: Take a First Look Inside Nightmare Version of Disneyland." This is some crazy stuff. 

To begin with, let me say that I am completely in love with the ruined Cinderella’s castle. I would love to visit this place. The pure subversive grandeur must be overwhelming. And the wit is very appealing, though dark, of course. And what could be a more appealing target for satire than those “other” theme parks, the ones with the mouse? Banksy’s signature rat sure ain’t Mickey.

But: in a way it tames Banksy’s work and that of other guerrilla street artists to corral it into a designated space like this, even one with the self-conscious wit and irony of a dystopian theme park. Part of the power of street art is its unexpectedness, the combination of raw edge and delight that comes from the discovery of artwork in the ragged fringes of our environment. The setting is very much part of the art, whether that’s on a very small site scale, like A Common Name's Urban Geodes sculptures in cracks and gaps (see earlier post), or in terms of larger context, like Banksy’s "I remember when all this was trees" mural at the old Packard Plant in Detroit. The controversy surrounding the removal of that work to a local gallery to protect (preserve? control? neutralize?) it illustrates just how valuable the context is. 

I also wonder about the impact of the lack of contrast between individual pieces and the whole of Dismaland. Much of street art’s marvelous subversiveness comes from its placement where we think no art should be, and that contrast and transgressive nature sets off the artwork. Because it breaks the rules, we notice it. We see it more clearly because of the contrast, like positive and negative space. Is this sense numbed after the fifth or tenth or fiftieth installation you pass at Dismaland? Tigers in the wild hold your attention (that's involuntary attention/fascination, people!), to say the least. Tigers at the zoo can be just part of the background. When everything is subversive, perhaps nothing is.

Final notes: Dismaland is a limited-time exhibition, so if you want to see it in person, hurry. Promotional material underscores the presence of a gift shop - the mentions are ironic, yes, but I'm sure the sales are real. I'll be best friends forever with anyone who sends me a Dismaland tee shirt.

Nature in an abandoned home

6/4/2015

 
From Tim

‘Flower House’, An Abandoned Detroit-Area Home Filled Top to Bottom With Fresh Flowers


Full story with lots of photos

Street art in tiny leftover spaces

4/26/2015

 
Picture
That's folded paper and spray paint or cast resin, materials fans! The craft involved in this is amazing. I really want to stumble upon one of these.

URBAN GEODE STREET ART
by a common name

Website and photo gallery

Homelessness and cardboard

3/31/2015

 
Picture
Two stories about an architecture student's design for a pop-up cardboard shelter for homeless people. If you really like this, you can help fund the effort through zip.kiva.org

Cardborigami fuses cardboard and origami to shelter the homeless
By Adam Williams at Gizmag, February 28, 2013
Full story

Cardborigami: Designed to Help the Homeless
Archinect
Full story


Banksy's back...on Instagram

2/27/2015

 
Picture
From Mike
Banksy Unveils New Street Art in Gaza and Films a Travel Commercial for the War-Ravaged Region
BY CAMERON WOLF, ANDREW LASANE
 



Full story with links

Loose space in the (virtual) city

1/26/2015

 
Picture
From Ely

Is 'SimCity' Homelessness a Bug or a Feature?

Written by EMANUEL MAIBERG
January 13, 2015 // 12:16 PM EST

Full story
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