Of men and water
Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG is nothing short of wondrous. With Nicola Twilley, Geoff also wrote a great little article “On Flexible Urbanism” for the journal’s special issue on New Orleans. I’m currently reading Graham Swift’s Waterland, and have been thinking about the metaphorical potential of using processes of siltation and reclamation in social and cultural theory. Alex Trevi’s blog, Pruned, is no less amazing and he recently posted some photos of the US Army Corps of Engineers’ work in the Mississippi delta that beautifully manifest the desire for control behind these rather grand spatial and technological works. He quotes from John McPhee’s The Control of Nature,
“[E]very atom that moves onward in the river, from the moment it leaves its home among the crystal springs or mountain snows, throughout the fifteen hundred leagues of its devious pathway, until it is finally lost in the vast waters of the Gulf, is controlled by laws as fixed and certain as those which direct the majestic march of the heavenly spheres. Every phenomenon and apparent eccentricity of the river—its scouring and depositing action, its caving banks, the formation of the bars at its mouth, the effect of the waves and tides of the sea upon its currents and deposits–is controlled by law as immutable as the Creator, and the engineer need only to be insured that he does not ignore the existence of any of these laws, to feel positively certain of the results he aims at.”
But before we assume what kind of laws these are, he also brings up this great quote from BLDGBLOG, that appears slightly revised in the journal paper:
“[I]t is worth remembering that New Orleans—in fact the near totality of the lower Mississippi delta—is a man-made landscape. Through its interaction with the corps, the lower Mississippi has become, over the past century at least, something of a military artifact. To say, therefore, that New Orleans, in the aftermath of Katrina, was a city placed under martial law is rather redundant: The city’s landscape has never been under anything but martial law. The lower Mississippi delta is literally nothing other than landscape design by army hydrologists.”
Engineered landscapes. Military urbanism. Water cities. Land reclamation. Again from the article:
“Such an approach has been tried before, of course: Atlantis, Platonic island-city of dikes and levees, fortified metropolis of canals and inland seas, of symmetrical, watersmart,concentric hydrological planning; it too was swallowed by the oceans and destroyed. In China Miéville’s (2003) novel The Scar, he proposes a kind of counter-Atlantis, called Armada, ‘the ship-city.’ Armada is a city of flux and flexibility, made from the hulls of captured ships, lashed together into one floating metropolitan unit: ‘Tangled in ropes and moving wooden walkways, hundreds of vessels facing all directions rode the swells’. The city is not locked into its topography; it responds, buoyant and supple.”
(via)