Stories About Appropriate Technology

Straw house. http://www.villageearth.org/pages/Appropriate_Technology/images/straw_bale_house.jpg

Let us briefly describe first what appropriate technology (AT) is. It is technology that has been designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social and economical aspects of the community it is intended for. Typically, it required fewer resources, is easier to maintain, has a lower overall cost and less of an impact on the environment, compared to industrialized practices (from Wikipedia.org). This definition implies the design of experts in research departments, but some people, -mostly in the Third World- can invent, create and contribute to this technological concept much more than experts do. That is because they understand their needs, they deal with them everyday and know exactly how to prioritize them, at least in the small scale at the local level.

When I was reading Robert C. Wicklein’s conference about Appropriate Technologies (see reference below) I remembered a conversation that I had with my friend and colleague architect Rodolfo Rotondaro, a couple of years ago.

Wicklein makes a list of criteria to judge appropriate technology. Item 2 is “Image of Modernity”, he refers to the citizens of many developing and industrialized countries who, in his criteria, want to perceive themselves as modern and progressive. And he follows “There is an innate desire within most of humankind to feel important and be perceived as worthwhile. It follows, therefore, that an image of being modern is important to the success of any technology”. It looks to me that he mentions item 2 as a sinequanon condition for AT.

Coming back to my conversation with Rodolfo, who is an expert in earthen architecture, he told me that he has seen a very interesting case in the North of Argentina, of a wino living alone (he said “borrachin”) whose main technology in the solitude of the arid North was his own bottles. He had developed a kind of structural system of connection between the walls (I believe they were mud walls) and the wood roof rafters in his shack dwelling using the bottles in a horizontal position, one next to the other. Architect researchers proved that his solution was great, specially for thermal insulation. Then, he explained to me that in some cases, the government provide houses “chalet” style to the indigenous people in the North, what he saw as very inappropriate, people felt uncomfortable in the new dwellings, they kept on living in their old impoverished dwellings and rented the “chalets” to other neighbors. As we can see, the image of “modernity” is not an universal condition.

The technology and cultural critic Neil Postman stated that new technology tends to favor some groups of people and harms other groups, statement that I find applicable to Rodolfo’s story about “chalets”: the government gained in politic propaganda, but people were not really helped in their needs.

“Tire building is an alternative construction technique that uses discarded tires and dirt as building materials. The tires are filled with dirt found on the property and then stacked to form walls” from longwayhomeinc.org/.../rammedearthhouse.php

Tire house. longwayhomeinc.org/.../rammedearthhouse.php

Cultural attributes play a substantial role in providing human satisfaction of needs. The appropriate technology has to be also adequate for people’s culture, knowledge, and most important, they have to accept it!.

I have another culture related story, this time coming from architect Victor Pelli (Cesar’s brother) in a course at Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism of Buenos Aires. He was showing slides to a large public of architects, of interesting wooden structures for domes that his group had thought would be the appropriate technology for roofs in some houses in El Chaco, Argentina. He told us his group built one as a test, there was no technical issue, and (as far as I remember), they prepared more domes structures and left the inhabitants to continue. The inhabitants not only despised the domes, but also dismanteled the ones ready to be located on the houses. When a perplexed Victor asked the reason of this behavior, local inhabitants said they thought these domes had the shape of “feminine breasts” (Well, maybe they did not use these literal words…). The story was terribly funny for us, the listeners, but it was an excellent lesson and I will never forget the moral.

“The first idea is that all technological change is a trade-off. I like to call it a Faustian bargain. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. This means that for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost.” (Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change)

Floating classroom in Entre Rios, North of Argentina. Designed for flooded areas, to attend the necessities of children that could not go to school due to floods. Isn't it a case of appropriate technology, though they are not trying to be modern? Web download

REFERENCES

Clifford, Michael J. Appropriate Technology: The Poetry of Science. In Science and Christian Belief, Vol 17, No1. 2005

http://www.scienceandchristianbelief.org/articles/Clifford%20Article%20171.pdf

Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology, New York: Vintage Books (1993).

Wicklein, Robert C. Design Criteria for Sustainable Development in Appropriate Technology: Technology as if People Matter. The University of Georgia, USA.

http://www.iteaconnect.org/Conference/PATT/PATT14/Wicklein.pdf

Neil Postman online articles

http://www.neilpostman.org/#articles

Mexican Gardens in California: a Cultural Manifestation

Mexican front yard in Arcadia. The tall native species are covering the front window. Personal archives

Gardens could be compared to architectural designs. They contain ideas, they are expressive creations, they show man’s reflections. The difference between architecture and garden has ambiguous connotations. If the garden is not created for a human necessity, the garden is what the developer/designer proposed, it is closer to Art. But some gardens have an anthropological dimension, -though many authors defend the aesthetics-, they are expressions of culture. In this sense, the garden satisfies necessities; then, it would be closer to architecture.

Man accesses to this relationship between environment and culture by means of perception. This process involves comprehension and utilization of the information given in different responses to landscape; in this situation, man launches two kinds of mental activities: description of properties, which objective is to understand the situation focusing on the determination of properties and landscape components; predictive activity of experiences in which man could evaluate the degree in which landscape satisfies his necessities, in consequence he could plan his decisions about it. (Corraliza, 1993).

Some characteristics in landscape perception are shared with the social group. That is why criteria in perception could be different between users of this landscape and whoever plans and designs it. Designers should take into account which components have psychological attraction, or are embedded of symbolism and historicity.

An elaborated Mexican landscape design in the front yard. Personal archives.

This example is what anybody would call a “Mexican garden design”. I took the picture in Los Angeles county, but the neighborhood was far from being a Mexican one. Here, the designer is representing the Mexican culture, but this nice garden in itself is not an expression but a mimic of Mexican culture.

The real Mexican garden I have seen in California differs from this one. The term in Spanish is “jardín¨, but Chicanos and Mexicans call it ¨yarda¨, that is a modification of the original English term ¨yard¨. The yardas are full of religiosity and memories, they express the high sensibility that emerges unconsciously from the family´s beliefs. Religious practices are integrated into daily life, because the rural nature of many Mexican communities experienced that often the priest was absent, so folk religious practices were developed inside the houses.

The Virgin Mary in the front yard, Los Angeles. Personal archives.

Backyard with folk Mexican art. Personal archives.

A shrine of the Virgin Mary in Her acception as Virgen de Guadalupe could be displayed in a corner or somewhere against the perimetral walls. Sometimes, the shrine is covered by garlands and vines with beautiful flowers. Folk art participates in the garden, usually in pots that are like ¨misplaced objects¨ reinforcing the family´s memories: painted cans, kitchen pots, tires, etc.

Another religious manifestation is the Altar del Día de los Muertos built in November; this type of altar has ancestral Aztec roots and is built in commemoration of the family´s dead. The grass in the back yard will not be the typical American houses´ lawn, instead of the tiny grass or ground cover, it is the cut lot´s wild grass or hard packed dirt without weeds; the soccer games and family parties are the priority, followed by the hanging of clothes. The front yard is always an exception, as any neighbour could denunciate to the City Hall that the landscape is messy and not consistent with the rest of the neighbourhood front yards. Chicanos tend to block the windows, in their preference for tall native species surrounding the house. Sometimes the species spread too much, covering the yard. This recurrent arrangement is the same one as the interior décor.

The hanging clothes is a recurrent habit in many Mexican backyards. In my country, our cultural habit -at least in the cities- is to hang the clothes but hidden as much as possible, preferably in a terrace with no view to the street. Personal archives.

The species selected are mainly native species, and the chili plant is never absent. Emphasis is on visual perception, but in the Mexican garden the five senses intervene. Looking at a plant of chili, a Mexican man told me ¨I see it and it makes my mouth water¨ (¨la veo y se me hace agua la boca¨), expression that sounded very interesting to me, the simple plant was awakening senses. Another plants are selected on the basis of healing primitive principles. When the Spanish conquistadores came to Mexico in the XVI century, they destroyed the Aztec gardens and the priests´ investigations, as the Catholic Church considered them blasphemous. Although the written knowledge was destroyed, the plant wisdom was kept in the collective memory.

All landscapes, natural or artificial create an aesthetic impression which gives us a reflection of the manmade in a certain period. Though conceptual categories for some researchers may not include the word “garden” for some remaining spaces, the Chicano gardens are created for social interaction and in most of cases, given its religiosity, for myth-making. They are a cultural transition between architecture and landscape.

As the United States increasing number of immigrants grow, the study of vernacular gardens as cultural manifestations where humans interact, should be deepened and classified, since changes in the society are thought to produce changes in the landscape and urban manifestations.

FURTHER READINGS

Castro, Rafaela. Chicano folklore: a guide to the folktales, traditions, rituals, and religious practices of Mexican Americans. Oxford University Press.2000

Drexler, Dora. Landscape Perceptions – The Symbolic Meaning of Landscape and its Role in Mental Wellbeing

http://www.openspace.eca.ac.uk/conference/proceedings/PDF/Drexler.pdf

Muñoz-Pedreros, Andrés; Moncada Herrera, Juan; Larrain, Alberto. Variación de la percepción del recurso paisaje en el sur de Chile (Variation of the perception of the landscape resource in Southern Chile). Revista chilena de historia natural. Santiago, 2000

Nazarea, Virginia D. A Map of her Own: Accessing the Imagined, Imagining the Unaccessed.

http://www.future-agricultures.org/farmerfirst/files/T1c_Nazarea.pdf

Palmer, James. Research Agenda for Landscape Perception

http://masterla.de/conf/pdf/conf2003/52palmer.pdf

Settlements Extinction and Identity: the case of Greenland Norse

Greenland lake. http://airportshotelsandparking.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/greenland-lake.jpg

Hvalsey church ruins. By Lars Reimer

As I said in my post about Cellular Automata, my concern is the data input, because the conditions given for life or death in the software are originally based on animals population, and it is a good analogy, but sometimes there are unexpected situations, related to feelings, psychology, memory, identity, and I understand that interdisciplinary help is needed to achieve urban simulations results as accurate as possible. This concern of mine began when I read chapters 7 and 8 of the book “Collapse” written by professor Jared Diamond. Some critics say that he is apocalyptic and his book is supported by the old “non consistent with reality” Malthus’ theory of overpopulation with its consequence of famine, disease and widespread mortality. I think Diamond is right in many aspects of how societies choose to fail or succeed. Both chapters have archaeological sources, and what was really interesting for me –after all, many towns and settlements were abandoned and cultures disappeared- is the fact that the Vikings inhabitants of Greenland were Europe-centrics above all, and this social identity conducted them to extinction.

It is the exception to the rule, because identity reinforces the social group ties and the feeling of belonging to a cultural group, helps in finding solution to emergent problems. Norse case is an example of auto-organized criticality: the system evolves without external intervention and without control parameters and this amplification of a small internal fluctuation can precipitate this critical state and provoke a chain reaction leading to a catastrophe. When appropriately perturbing a chaotic system, it is forced to take one of the many possible behaviors. But without sincronism, and under different environmental conditions, two virtually identical chaotic systems, will evolve toward different final states.

Barns ruins. By Dale Mackenzie Brown

What follows below is a compilation, slightly adapted from chapter 7 and 8 of “Collapse” and the article on line “The Fate of Greenland’s Vikings”, by Dale Mackenzie Brown. The Inuit’s description and their houses was taken from www.greenland.com. Further references are below for whoever is interested in more specific details, all of them very interesting.

Of the first 24 boatloads of land-hungry settlers who set out from Iceland in the summer of 986 to colonize new territory explored several years earlier by the vagabond and outlaw, Erik the Red, only 14 made it, the others were forced back to port or lost at sea. Yet more people, drawn by the promise of a better life, soon followed. Under the leadership of the red-faced, red-bearded Erik (who had given the island its name), the colonists developed a little Europe of their own just a few hundred miles from North America, a full 500 years before Columbus set foot on the continent. These Vikings shared the land with the Inuit (Eskimos). The Vikings disappeared but the Inuit survived, proving that human survival in Greenland was not impossible.

The Norse (Vikings) prospered by trading with Norway; the population may have risen to a peak of about 5,000 inhabitants. Their subsistence was based on a combination of pastoralism (growing domestic livestock) and hunting wild animals for meat; an odd behavior if reason says that fishing and whale hunt would be priority; but hunt must have brought great prestige to the individual hunters, and it maintained for the whole society the psychologically contact with Europe. They established dairy and sheep farms throughout the unglaciated areas of the south and built churches, a monastery, a nunnery, and a cathedral. Norse settlers started out with a mix of livestock following the European rank: lots of cows and pigs, fewer sheep and still fewer goats, plus some horses, ducks and geese. It quickly turned out that this ideal mix was not well suited to Greenland’s colder conditions: ducks and geese dropped out immediately, pigs proved terribly destructive and unprofitable in the lightly wooded environment; cows required far more effort than sheep and goats in Greenland’s climate, as only during the three snow free summer months grass is found. But cows were too prized as a status symbol to be eliminated. Sheep and goats were more suitable for the climate conditions, but the European habits were based on the opposite sequence.

Christian hierarchy also played an important role in Norse’s extinction. When Erik and his supporters arrived in Greenland, the old Norse gods were still worshiped. But Thjodhilde (Erik’s wife) converted to Christianity. In time, he granted her a small church, with room for 20 to 30 worshipers.

Although the presence of the Church had originally uplifted the Greenlanders, it then became their burden. By the middle of the fourteenth century, Church owned two-thirds of the island's finest pastures, and some of the proceeds went directly to the support of the Crusades and even to fight heretics in Italy.

The number of Norwegian merchant vessels arriving in their ports, though only one or two a year in the best of times, dropped until none came at all. This meant that the islanders were also cut off from the major source of iron and tools needed for the smooth running of their farms and the construction and maintenance of their boats. The dangerous ocean crossing would have put merchants at too much risk for too little gain, especially when African elephant ivory, once difficult to obtain, could be gotten easily and replaced walrus ivory.

As the Greenlanders' isolation from Europe grew, they found themselves victims of a steadily deteriorating environment. Their farmland, exploited to the full, had lost fertility. Dairy products alone were not enough to feed Norse inhabitants. At first, they consumed 20% of seafood (mostly seals), then the percentage rose up to 80% in the later years of their survival. Though it is incredible for archaeologists that Greenland Norse did not eat fish, the percentage for fish was less than 1%. Professor Diamond suggests that maybe they developed a taboo against eating fish. It seems that they never took advantage of the ample fish resources in the streams and fjords, even in times of famine.

Greenland's climate began to change as well; the summers grew shorter and progressively cooler, limiting the time cattle could be kept outdoors and increasing the need for winter fodder. This situation produced a change in the barns patterns. Originally conceived as single-roomed structures, they were divided into smaller spaces for warmth, and then into warrens of interconnected chambers, with the cows kept close by so the owners might benefit from the animals' body heat.

Farm beneath the sand. After three years of excavation, the Farm Beneath the Sand site began to take shape as rooms and passageways were revealed. It became clear that the front of the farm (to the right) had been eroded by the river; fortunately the river sands that covered the site had sealed it from the air and caused permafrost to preserve everything. http://www.mnh.si.edu/vikings/voyage/subset/greenland/archeo.html

Inuit-Norse relations seem to have been fairly friendly at times, hostile at others. Canadian archaeologist Robert McGhee has pointed out, there is no physical evidence of massacres, the destruction of Norse property, or the takeover and reuse of Norse shelters by the Inuit. Besides, studies on Inuits’ mitochondrial DNA (inherited from mothers only) show no European admixture. What suggests that contact between the two people was limited to minor encounters.

In their effort to preserve the European identity, Norse’s clothes reflected the French and Dutch fashions, of course they never had to be confused with the “savage” Inuits. In their reluctance to see themselves as anything but Europeans, the Greenlanders failed to adopt the kind of apparel that the Inuit employed as protection against the cold and damp or to borrow any of the Eskimo hunting gear. They ignored the toggle harpoon, which would have allowed them to catch seals through holes in the ice in winter when food was scarce, and they seem not even to have bothered with fishhooks, which they could have fashioned easily from bone, as did the Inuit. Instead, the Norsemen remained wedded to their farms and to the raising of sheep, goats, and cattle in the face of ever worsening conditions. To Norse, concerned with their social survival as much as with their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate Inuit’s survival tactics or intermarry with them.

Greenlanders became desperate. During a freezing winter, the farmers killed and ate their livestock, their dogs, birds, rats….Thomas McGovern of New York's Hunter College, who has participated in excavations in Greenland, has proposed that the Norsemen lost the ability to adapt to changing conditions. On the contrary, since the first wave of immigration via Thule around 4-5000 years ago, the Inuits in Greenland have been dependent on nature’s resources in the form of fish, birds, land mammals and marine mammals. Hunting and fishing have therefore always been a question of survival in a country in which the summer is short and the climate unsuitable for effective farming. The Inuits have had to utilize their ancestors’ skills, their own imagination and the materials that were available in the landscape around them to make the tools that could mean the difference between life and death. Throughout the generations, the Inuit cultures managed to create and refine unique products such as the kayak, the soapstone lamp and harpoons, bird spears and high quality clothing made of animal hide and fur. The fact that even compacted snow could be used to build a temporary shelter in the form of the igloo (shelter made of snow) bears witness to an extraordinary ability to utilize nature’s own materials.

Turf Hut by Filippo Barbanera

Model of igloo. Picture by Lars Reimer.

The turf hut was the most common type of dwelling, as they were so robust and well insulated that they could be lived in more or less permanently. A typical turf hut was low, square and its walls were made of large stones and turf and the roof was supported by wooden beams made of driftwood. The dwellings were always situated close to the sea so that the hunters could easily get to their kayaks when hunting for seals. An igloo is constructed of large blocks of snow that are cut out in different sizes with a special snow knife. The blocks are placed on top of each other in a spiral and form an effective dome-shaped shelter.

Instead of looking out for these type of solutions, the Norse carried with them their cultural values and preferred lifestyle based on their experience for generations in Norway and Iceland. Values that they defended under inappropriate conditions, till they suffered from starvation and met death.

REFERENCES

http://www.greenland.com/content/english/tourist

Dale Mackenzie Brown The Fate of Greenland's Vikings. February 28, 2000
http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/
Diamond, Jared. Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.Penguin Books, U.S.A. 2005
http://www.mnh.si.edu/vikings/voyage/subset/greenland/archeo.html
http://larsdatter.com/wordpress/?p=52

What is Cellular Automata?

Two simulations of growing towns-cities in CA. See both centers as "downtowns". Each color is a representation of land use. Personal archives.

Cellular Automata (CA) was originally designed by Ulam and Von Neumann in the decade of the 40’s to provide an investigation model for complex systems behavior. Originally it was based on the inherent limitations of machines for their auto-reproduction. A CA system consists of a regular grid of cells, where each one of them could be in a number k of states, upgraded in synchronicity in lapses of time under interaction rules among the previous states of the neighboring cells. For example, the “Game of Life” of John Conway (1970) was based on a set of simple rules to study population's space dynamics, where the cell had two states: alive (1) or dead (0) and three transition rules: survival, death and birth. With this simple system, extremely complex models are achieved; they grow - or they disappear - through a simulation. The rule (function) of growth or transition is contained in each cell in finite state that is translated in configurations of states of the "neighborhood." (The cells, for established reasons die in some moment and/or they reproduce in contact with others).

The “neighborhood” consists of cells located around and adjacent of one given. For the models of one dimension the cells are connected with their neighboring r by each side; r is a parameter referred to the connection radius and it is expressed as 2r+1, including the cell itself.

CA shows the ability of a system to grow and then to alter its rhythm of growth, and possibly to revert it and die, what makes it essential in the simulation of biological populations' behavior in a certain lapse of time.

In 1970, the first approaches to computarized models were applied to problems that demanded little information and, consequently little computer effort. Then, computers made possible the use of more information and the possibility to pass from models of big scale to microsimulation. The new techniques with the application of cellular Automata were introduced by Tobler (1979) to model geographical phenomena (Norte Pinto, Pais Antunes, 2007) based on the use of land. It is still discussed if the urban CA are evolutions of classic CA systems or if they are only models based on cells.

Since 1960 to middle '80s, the interest was upon regional models. Then it became evident the necessity to understand the urban problems in small scale.

There are three classes of urban CA models, with different purposes (Norte Pinto, Pais Antunes, 2007):

a) models designated to explore the space complexity

b) models to investigate economic, sociological topics and of spatial complexity.

c) Models to produce operational tools of planning.

By middle '80s, Helen Couclelis continues the investigation of CA applied to urban modelization, being this way two investigation lines established: the first related with complex systems and the second the possible uses in urban planning.

The transition rules among the "Game of Life" and the urban phenomena, are the following ones:

The “alive” cells are interpreted as urban areas - they could be clusters, blocks or isolated constructions - with a certain function. The cell continues alive if two or three neighboring cells have carried out their function, - birth, growth -.

The “dead” cells are those that have lost their urban function because four or more neighboring cells have carried out their function, - birth, growth - and they would suffocate the first one or, on the contrary, if only one neighboring cell is left over, the original one would die for its isolation.

The rebirth of the cell, takes place when there are three cells that comply exactly with their urban function. (A purpose to live). If none of the precedent conditions are met, the original cell stays dead.

Let us take into account some analogies:

The “death” of a town could be produced by these reasons among others:

Finalization of the main economic activity that gave it life.

Close of railroad stations.

Isolation caused by the layout of paved routes far from the old earth roads.

Lack of investment in improvement of existent routes.

Decrease in human population of each one of the involved communities, reflected in each census.

Weakness in their infrastructure of services due to town decreasing problem.

Lack of public transportations that allow the existent population's transfer.

Lack of investment from the State in formal and informal education.

Lack of work sources.

Impossibility of information access and the opportunities in general.

Civil battles, wars.

Plague.

Kelso, California. Kelso originated as small collection of buildings along the Union Pacific Railroad in the Mojave desert. When the Second World War ended, the mine was closed and Kelso began to decline. As diesel engines replaced steam locomotives, trains no longer stopped for Kelso's water. The station was closed in 1985 and in 1992, the Bureau of Land Management took over the property.http://www.ghosttown.info/ca/kelso/index.html

Kelso, California. http://www.ghosttown.info/ca/kelso/index.html

Another possible analogy is to take groups of different zonings (and in strict order) residential-industrial-commercial (White and Engelen, 1997). A cell in vacant state can change to the superior state, but the inverse action is not possible. We consider this not a very feasible situation; in Los Angeles and Orange County, for example, there are many similar situations of change of use but no area takes a "superior” state obligatorily. The changes will always be restricted by a general regulator plan in a master plan that includes all the areas of the city.

In the '90s the non restriction concept is taken (unconstrained cells), where the characteristics of the cells are exclusively related with their state values, without interest in their location inside the grid; they are not restricted cells, for what the application of transition rules responds to the current configuration of cells. (White and Engelen, 1997).

In the years 2000 it is taken the concept of use of the land, that will depend on three factors:

The inherent qualities of land

The effects of the use of neighboring land

The aggregated level of demand for each use of land.

Finally, the innovation is the consideration of the fractal Dimension to verify the model behavior and the results of the urban simulation. Then, the fractal Dimensions are calculated for theoretical cities and compared with known fractal Dimension results of real cities.

I would advice in the output and input data. I took my time for my first exercise of CA in converting an urban block from La Boca, Buenos Aires, in a synthesis of cells. When I ran CA, with some selected conditions based on my experience on the real neighborhood, the resultant morphological pattern was completely different, but, to my surprise, the fractal dimension was pretty close to the one I got for the real pattern. So, the input was correct but the output did not reflect the urban situation. A couple of years after, using DUEM software, I designed two neighboring systems, I selected the conditions, including mixed use (residential, commercial and industrial) and I saw my two settlements growing until they conformed only one, after many iterations, both original “centers” (downtowns) were almost disappearing in the new pattern. This result was satisfactory for me, until I read the book “Collapse” by Jared Diamond and realized that some primary conditions for the extinction of a town or social group are highly difficult to represent in the softwares. This will be part of another post. My conclusion, CA simulations need a good group of interdisciplinary professionals analyzing the input and output data, it is not a game any more, it has to be based on real life situations.

Simulation in La Boca neighborhood, Buenos Aires. Personal archives.

The two towns-cities are growing, they are only one now, the two original centers are melting in the urban pattern. Personal archives.

REFERENCES

Couclelis, Helen : Geographic Illusion Systems: Towards a (Very Partial) Research Agenda for GIS in the Information Age

http://www.geo.wvu.edu/i19/papers/couclelis.html

Norte Pinto, Nuno. Pais Antunes, Antonio. Cellular Autómata and Urban Studies: a Literary Survey. In Architecture, City and Environment. 2007

http://upcommons.upc.edu/revistes/bitstream/2099/2494/1/28_nuno_NORTE.pdf

Norte Pinto, Nuno. Pais Antunes, Antonio. Modeling and Urban Studies: an Introduction. In Architecture, City and Environment. 2007

http://upcommons.upc.edu/revistes/bitstream/2099/3137/1/1-nuno.pdf

White R, Engelen G, "Cellular automata and fractal urban form: a cellular modelling approach to the evolution of urban land-use patterns" Environment and Planning A 25(8) 1175 – 1199. 1993

White, R., and G. Engelen. Cellular automata as the basis of integrated dynamic regional modelling. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 24, no. 2: 235-46. 1997.

"Ghost Lots" and Negative Space in California

Le Chateau des Pyrenee, by R. Magritte. Web download

My term “ghost lots” has nothing to do with the current Halloween wholesales. And it does not mean a lot where ghots live, not even a ghost town.

In my previous post about negative space, I explained that an open space, that was designed as part of an urban project, is positive space. But sometimes the circumstances indicate that this open space is not positive space any more, it has become negative, it is the “left over”. Or, in extreme cases, it does not exist any more, at least legally speaking.

I found some interesting cases on line, this one is an auction of lots originated in a huge building, in Madrid, Spain. The problem, the building does not exist.

http://www.rankia.com/blog/subastas-judiciales/2009/09/subasta-de-edificio-fantasma.html

Next case belongs to Phillipines, the A P78 million road right of way claim by a realty firm owned by Sen. Manuel Villar could possibly be for a non-existent lot, the Senate committee is investigating an ethics complaint against the senator; in the original plan prepared in 2002, GHMI property was not included. (Malaya News. October 2, 2009. Phillipines. http://www.malaya.com.ph/oct02/news7.htm)

There is also a denunciation of fraudulent sales on line “A seller and perhaps his surrogates have been promoting and selling lots located just outside the Puerto Viejo area near Margarita - Sixaola……Despite many victims that fly down to locate their investment once they have made the final payment - none have ever found the lots. Topographers have been hired - neighbors have been harassed - some even sued - and yet no buyer has ever ended up with what they purchased”.

http://www.livingcostarica.com/index.php?topic=1162.0

The list of cases continues everywhere, but I’d like to focus on Southern California and the meaning of “ghost lots” in the planners’ jargon. Since the last two years or perhaps more, many lots have been sold in short sales, or foreclosures. Usually, the lots have a big taxes debt. What the potential buyers did not know, is that some of those lots were affected by Zoning Code changes, and the investment plans they had in mind, had no feasibility at all. In simple words, for a retail that belonged to a commercial zoning, when the Zoning is changed to residential, the new owner has only six months to rent it as commercial, if not, the lot is only for residential purposes and there is no way to submit a variance asking to avoid the two cars garage, just to begin with. So, no house could be built, the lot – retail remains empty. Or, a lot is sold in between two other lots, it has a legal grant deed, but there is no way to access with a car, or the set backs and lot coverage required make it impossible to build a house with the required garage. If the City Council is really helpful, maybe there is a solution. Or, it will be in lawyers’ hands.

Theory says that positive space is the one conceived as a void, then wrapped in a built shell erected to define and contain it. But in architectural theory, this space inside must have a purpose, it has to be for humans use. If not, it is a mere (artistic or not) installation, a construction. When the building has no purpose, it is kept empty, it would be like Rachel Whiteread’s house in London. Only the memories are still there, and the space that was conceived as positive becomes definitely negative.

Contribution on Aesthetics of Ruins

Hiroshima, WWII. Photocollage by Myriam Mahiques. What was left over...

Memories of the Russian Politburó. Photocollage by Myriam Mahiques

Domestic ruins by Myriam Mahiques

Earthquake in China, 2008, photocollage by Myriam Mahiques

Ruins of colonial church in South America, by Myriam Mahiques

Concepts on Negative Space

A survivor of an earthquake in China, may 2008, creates an informal tent and creats positive space around him. Web download.

Positive space is the one conceived as a void, then wrapped in a built shell erected to define and contain it. Negative space is created by hollowing out a solid that already exists. Hollowed out caves in primitive times would be the first example. In urban space we find the same classification: negative space would be the open space left over after a construction, what is remaining. Positive space would be then the spatial shapes that have been deliberately designed under a preconceived plan.

Vincent Scully states that during the Middle Ages, space was seen as negative, it was the interval between two objects (buildings) or the hollow within them (Piazzas and streets).

The use of negative space is a key element of artistic composition. In negative space drawing, instead of drawing the shape of the object, only the space around is drawn, with or without any pattern detail. Though the object is like a silhouette, it cannot be outlined, if so, it would not be a correct negative space drawing.

In landscape, Japanese use the term “ma” (empty space between two structural parts) for garden design, and in Arts they use the term “notan” to explain the relationship between negative and positive. It is based on the principle of light-dark, the popular example is to cut out a square, adding a white backing paper, then identical shapes are cut out on each side. The Dutch artist, Escher made positive and negative forms interact, so both of them have the same level of importance. In minimalistic visual arts and architecture, the concept of negative space also refers to the empty space that surrounds the object and it never affects its signification, but rather reinforces the theme. Same happens with photography, negative space is acquired by placing one object in an uniform background (a plant in a desert, a rock in the water, a dancer in the dark…). The observer is then concentrated on the object, the effect is like the application of a zoom, and the dead space transmits a feeling of solitude, isolation or calm.

Horses by M. C. Escher.http://www.geocities.com/wenjin92014/escher/Horses.jpg

Not all spaces could be so easily classified. There are some cases where space has to be deconstructed to understand it from humans actions and manipulations of this space.

This negative and positive space has direct parallels to theatre space. William F. Condee suggests that the design of the formal Italianate theatre, that employs perspective scenery on the stage, shapes a negative –empty- space around the auditorium, which becomes in turn wholly positive because “every cubic inch is charged as it floats between spectator and performer”. From my point of view, I prefer a comparison between the formal theater and the modern performances of underground or psycho-geographical groups to establish the difference. In formal theatre the building shape is absolutely needed, specially for acoustics issues, the space has to be positive, and what he calls “floats” loses importance if the public is static. On the contrary, when people interact with actors, the stage and the buildings are not containers any more, the relevance is on the act of performing in itself, the show and public participation, the space becomes negative.

In literature and movies we find empty space when the context raise the feeling of placelessness and indefiniteness; some authors are more explicit, and leave empty spaces in between a poem or a few seconds of black out scene; music is more obvious in the use of abrupt silences.

Sometimes the absent object becomes the object of attention, if so, the object is not a material thing that could be touched or an action is directed. It is a conceptual object of perception where the imaginary and real collide. In Eric Grohe’s murals, the real is a wall, but the observer’s imagination constitute a space, positive if we think about the architectural painting, but negative indeed, there is no space at all –in the sense I propose here-.

Mural at Miller Brewing Co. By Eric Grohe. This is a mural painting, it is not architectural space. http://www.ericgrohemurals.com/projects/miller.html

It is a mural, not a cross street. By Eric Grohe. http://www.ericgrohemurals.com/projects/crossroad/crossroad3.jpg

The best example I could find in sculpture, that involves architecture too, is the work of British leading contemporary artist, Rachel Whiteread. She is best known for her negative-space casts of rooms and houses. In her interior spaces, viewers discover the void-made-into-object. But they cannot see through the building, so interior scenarios are imagined and emotional value is added. She has also made casts of particular parts of rooms and furniture, as the area underneath a chair. Critics have often regarded this type of work to be reminders of death and absence because they seem to emphasize the fact that the objects these sculptures represent are not themselves there. Negative space is a manifestation of the hidden, most of the times referred to the memory of objects and spaces.

“You leave space for the body, imagining the other part even though it isn't there”. (Henry Moore)

House in London. By Rachel Whiteread, 1993. (Demolished) http://www.damonart.com/myth_uncanny.html

http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/recent_acquisitions/2000/co_rec_eur_whiteread_1999.asp

http://photodoto.com/negative-space-can-have-a-positive-effect/

Condee, William F. Filling the Empty Space:Inclusion and Exclusion in Theatre Architecture. In Scenography International. Issue 2. Architecture and Practice.

http://www.scenography-international.com/journal/issue2/emptyspace.pdf

Proposed Fractal Urban Analysis for Uros' Islands

Uros and Arts. http://indian-cultures.com/Cultures/uros.html

Uros' island. http://indian-cultures.com/Cultures/uros.html

Basic urban morphology analysis is commonly applied to aerial pictures of cities or settlements anywhere on urban or suburban areas; for rural areas, the focus is on land use. But, little attention is paid to the analysis of settlements as part of islands. Apart from the well known methodology to measure an island’s coastline with the application of fractals theory, islands represent a difficulty at the time of measuring certain parameters accurately. The Uros’ islands, in Peru, are an example of this issue, given that an urban analysis based on Euclidian geometry would be unappropriate.

The Uros Indians of Peru and Bolivia are actually a mix of Uros, Ayamaras and Incas. They live in the Andes region on more than forty floating islands on Lake Titicaca. It is during the rainy season, from November to February, when the islands float on the surface of the lake.

Totora plant. truxillodailyphoto.blogspot.com/.../totoras.html

A totora sculpture and houses.http://www.tiuli-peru.com/4/IMG_5517_Small.JPG

These islands have the particularity of being made of totora (Schoenoplectus californicus) reeds which grow naturally on the banks of the lake. The reeds are used to make the dwellings, boats, furniture, containers, clothing, strings, and the islands themselves; reeds are matted as a fabric-ground and added to approximately every three months as they disintegrate at the bottom. The dense roots that the plants develop and interweave from a natural layer called Khili (about one to two meters thick) support the islands. They are anchored with ropes attached to sticks sunken into the bottom of the lake. Each step on an island sinks about 2-4” depending on the density of the ground below. As the reeds dry, they break up more and more as people walk on them. In consequence, moisture gets to them, they rot and a new layer has to be added to the “ground”. (Adaptation from Wikipedia.org).

Totora reed has played a cultural role. It has also been noted that it has been used as both food for humans and livestock. The value of totora to local residents justified the efforts spent in maintaining adequate supplies of this plant. Increases in population, politics, and yearly variation in climate patterns have created a reduction in available totora and contributed to an increase in management practices. (Banack, Sandra A., Rondon Xanic J., Diaz Huamanchumo, Wilfredo. 2004)

Because of their own materiality, when using a satellite photograph for fractal analysis, we are tempted to “read” the islands with the dwellings as clusters; but the filled areas are not easy to separate from the landscape. These islands boundaries are interpreted by ambiguous pixels, not only for the reed that is an amalgam with the water, besides, the islands change in size and more are created as needed; they also have movements, what in concept generates a dynamic edge with infinite shapes. In case we decide to find out the fractal dimension of the edge, it will be only valid for the specific instant when the aerial picture was taken.

Since these islands are an agglomerate, the “buildings” cannot be separated in parts, not even from the island that gives them support, because everything is part of the same totora fabric. That is, these islands cannot be considered as flat projections, they have a 3 Dimension that includes the dwellings and public construction (school).

Binary file of a sector of Uros' island. Personal archives.

Rugosity fractal analysis. Personal archives.

Plot of sector of island's elevation. Personal archives.

Then, a more complete fractal urban analysis cannot be met only by measuring the area of the fractal dimension of edges; the topography, becomes so important that the texture (rugosity), the elevations, and of course the island in itself, have to be included in the study. The following pictures are part of a more extensive study on the Uros’ islands. The selected .jpg file had to be transformed into a binary file in order to use the corresponding softwares of images analysis.

References

Banack, Sandra Anne; Rondon Xanic J. and Diaz Huamanchumo Wilfredo. Indigenous Cultivation and Conservation of Totora (Schoenoplectus Californicus) in Peru. In Economic Botany 58(1) pp.11-20. The New York Botanical Garden Press. 2004

http://indian-cultures.com/Cultures/uros.html