There is no doubt that most Canadian Arctic settlements will be affected because they are predominantly in exposed locations on the shoreline. Iqaluit, a quickly sprawling capital of Nunavut with a population of about 7500 is the focus of my research on Inuit urbanization and Arctic cultural capitals. Iqaluit is mostly under 10m above high tide, rising to a ridge about 30m above sea level. The most dramatic case is Tuktoyaktuk, at the mouth of the the Mackenzie Delta on the Beaufort Sea where many parts of the town have been undermined by tidal action. However other settlements such as Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island, have already suffered from major storms; flooding washed out a key bridge.

Yesterday, Forum on the Future released its report ‘Megacities on the Move‘ that argues for planning to ensure more sustainable access to goods and services in cities.  They present four scenarios as videos – one solution, ‘Planopolis’ is here. But urban access to goods such as food depends on long supply chains back to rural locations.  We need solutions for the far corners of the world as well as cities.

- Rob

Survivall at MAM Salvador by A. Lemos, M. Fiorelli and R. Shields (Photo copyright A. Lemos and M. Fiorelli)

An update to our previous post on “locative art” using Google Maps and our collective article in Wi – Journal of Mobile Media (Hexagram Institute) – where Andre Lemos recently discussed locative media in Brazil.  Survivall is a locative art piece online here and there.

-Rob

The High Line was originally constructed in the 1930s, to lift dangerous freight trains off Manhattan’s streets. Section 1 of the High Line is open as a public park, owned by the City of New York and operated under the jurisdiction of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Friends of the High Line is the conservancy charged with raising private funds for the park and overseeing its maintenance and operations, pursuant to an agreement with the Parks Department.

When all sections are complete, the High Line will be a mile-and-a-half-long elevated park, running through the West Side neighborhoods of the Meatpacking District, West Chelsea and Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen. It features an integrated landscape, designed by landscape architects James Corner Field Operations, with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, combining meandering concrete pathways with naturalistic plantings. Fixed and movable seating, lighting, and special features are also included in the park.

Access points from street level will be located every two to three blocks. Many of these access points will include elevators, and all will include stairs.

View the High Line Design.

Datamasher maps US state-level statistics from the US census and other sources.  An example is their map of fast-food restaurants versus obesity rates (above).  Sometimes these are revealing, sometimes not, and sometimes their statistical reliability may not be good due to sample sizes.  Makes a nice map, however.

Rhizalabs’ FluTracker also does a global mapping of H1N1 influenza using Google:

NY Times: Data Center Overload

“Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network … But where is ‘there,’ and what does it look like? ‘There’ is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers. These centers run enormously scaled software applications with millions of users … Small wonder that this vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric — and vaporous — metaphor: the cloud … [T]he electricity on a low-end server will now exceed the server cost itself in less than four years — which is why the geography of the cloud has migrated to lower-rate areas…”

Photos: NY Times: Search Me

These enormous scrapers, seen through a storm of dust and a late spring snow shower, are moving earth to establish a new oil sands mine.

-Andriko and Rob

Subprime by Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann

via

- Anne

National Recessions and Regional Depression

Last year, we asked about the geography of what we called “The Depression of 2009”. This year, in February, The Economist provided a brief article pointing out the differences in regional economies in the US – Montana still growing at over 4% versus Michigan’s economy, contracting at over 7%. Now in March the New York Times provides a map by county of the rate of change in the official unemployment rate compared to March 2008, noting, “Job losses have been most severe in the areas that experienced a big boom in housing, those that depend on manufacturing and those that already had the highest unemployment rates.”

Referring to “The Great Recession of 2008” it notes that layoffs affect men more than women construction workers, hotel workers, retail workers and others without a four-year degree, homeowners and investors more than renters or those on Social Security and Latinos more than other ethnic groups.  It is no satisfaction to see that Depression terminology entering the discourse of the media:

If the Great Recession, as some have called it, has a capital city, it is El Centro, Calif., due east of San Diego, in the desert of California’s Inland Valley. El Centro has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, a depression like 22.6 percent. …hit by the brutal combination of a drought, a housing bust and a falling peso, which cuts into the buying power of Mexicans who cross the border to shop.

Locatable Assets and Non-Geography
There is a more fundamental geography of the economy. This is a geophysics of property and specifiable, locatable assets. On this material basis avatars and representations for these objects can be constructed and through this, trust can be maintained at a distance. As a system of signs grounded in valued locations and valued assets, the economy is not those assets per se but the signs of those assets.

In an interview with Don Cato for the Vancouver Sun, Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist of the global poor points out that economic havoc ensues when the system of signs and locatable assets breaks down:

The way we document property rights and record every change of hands — not just our land titles, but cars and equipment and stocks and bonds — is the basis of the trust on which strangers can do business. Only documented assets give strangers the confidence to give us credit cards and lines to credit, mortgages to start new businesses, cellphone contracts and apartment leases. Without the trusted record-keeping that enables due diligence, both individuals and businesses would be limited — as is most of the world — to cash transactions, or paltry credit from family or usurious loan sharks.

This is the situation that has bedeviled the most impoverished countries. Without stable institutions of property, trust is at risk.

And the reason we trust each other is paper. It tells each other what we own. It gives us credit records. We can track people down. We can infer from the information on paper, if we trust it, what’s going on. From the land, to the house, to your car, to boats, to your ships, to your investments, to your rights over intellectual property and patents — is recorded. There’s only one asset you Northerners haven’t recorded. Derivatives. Worse, investments with known risks have been bundled with those whose future value is anybody’s guess, and sold to people who don’t know how much they hold of what. … You don’t know who has them. And, when you don’t know who has them, you don’t know who you can lend to. That’s what’s causing the credit contraction. … The root of the problem is that the money was available to lend [to people with no assets but over-valued homes] because it was derived from paper that has no location. You can’t find it. You can’t evaluate it. … But it’s not only money that can be debased, it’s also paper. And far more credit is based on paper than on cash. … If you talk about cash in the world — all the Canadian dollars, U.S. dollars, Euros, Renminbi — there’s probably something in the order of $13 trillion. But if you talk about derivatives, there’s $600 trillion. According to some, it’s closer to one quadrillion…”

The key point is the lack of location. What is completely immaterial or virtual has no physical substance and so has no spatiality or locatedness in place, on in time, like a memory of a great party that once was. Some derivatives, such as futures, operate exactly in this manner: they are a contract to buy at a present price at a given time (ie. later). That is, at a future time, they will be converted into specific material assets. The mistake of non-asset backed paper derivatives is to leave open the maturation date, allowing them to be traded infinitely and also to become difficult to re-associate with the material aspects they originally stood in for, acting virtually, as if they were those things. Futures do not have this ‘as if’ quality in themselves until new instruments were created which could then stand in for the futures instead. Syndicated risks in the insurance market are also different – they are fundamentally probabilities – but once one creates a second order of instruments which are presented ‘as if’ they were insurance policies, then one is again dealing in virtualities, a place-less, non-geographic set of entities.

- Rob

Entangled Territories, an event organized by Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry (in this case, Adrian Blackwell, Greig de Peuter, Christine Shaw, and Marcelo Vieta) as Act 16 of the Public Acts project, was held within Adrian Blackwell’s installation “carpool” on Sunday, August 6^th, 2006.* In an effort to shift the place of dialogue outside Toronto’s downtown, the event unfolded in North Toronto near Downsview Park, in the parking lot of Idomo Furniture. At the end of a subway line, yet in the middle of the city; amidst the inner suburbs; lodged between an army base, big box stores, and warehouses; and at the confluence of a highway, a subway line, and an airport strip—this site is entangled. It became a temporary commons, animated by bodies in conversation, disagreement, and creative acts in and against the neo-liberal urban agenda.

Arriving on foot, by bike, via subway, or car, and passing over a grassy expanse, a group of activists, artists, and theorists gathered at Entangled Territories to talk about the neo-liberal transformation of Toronto and about how it might be contested. Three independent conversations were opened by these questions: How is capital enclosing urban territories? What possibilities exist for the state to protect existing public spaces, or initiate new ones, when its role has increasingly become that of the policing of space? What capacities do ‘we’ have for resisting the enclosures in the name of constructing new urban commons? In a second round of conversations, the groups’ participants were remixed so we could explore how each question is entangled with the others.

The concept of the commons ran through each conversation, evoking a memory of a space of production and a source of livelihood to which access is conditional on neither private property nor waged-labour. Present or past, urban or rural, capital entails a massive private appropriation of the common: co-operation, land, habit, knowledge…. Enumerating the resources of the common, in public, extends the multitude’s self-awareness of its own power. Moving from description to action, intentional commons strive to desert the rule of capital. These are oriented towards non-commodified creation, unforced co-operation, and non-hierarchical organization. That means that commons cannot be conceived strictly in spatial terms: “There are no commons without incessant activities of commoning” (De Angelis in The Commoner, 2006). This grammatical move puts activity, ethics, and agency at the forefront.

The potential of commoning in the city is, however, stagnated, cut off, and punctured by the practical and affective neo-liberal power it is up against. In Toronto, for example, the downtown is gentrifying rapidly, displacing low-income residents. Land is rezoned to optimize profit rather than livability. New immigrants—those most affected by labour precarity—are warehoused in high-density projects in the city’s mature suburbs, giving residents living downtown the mistaken impression that economic inequality is diminishing. The costs of using public transit rise while the streets are polluted by increasing automobile congestion. Squeezed by new economic ‘realities’ (created through political choices and policies), the municipal government embraces the ‘Creative City’ model, cynically mobilizing creativity as first and foremost a mechanism of economic growth and its producers as exemplars of entrepreneurship in an age of intensified competition amongst global cities.

Neo-liberalism involves a process of ‘rolling back’ social programs while in turn ‘rolling out’ systems of control to police those adversely affected by the former. In the process, the fiction that the power of the state has been reduced unravels: witness not only the securitization of the city, but also how this is bound up with the geo-politics of permanent war. This in turn amplifies the fears that tend to foster consent for a strong state. There are two sides of the new society of risk: insecurity for those who have very little, and intensified protection for those who profit from it. Spaces, times, bodies, affect, desire, and incorporeal matter are seized, regulated, and controlled through increasingly flexible means.

In this environment, commoning sets out from a desire to disentangle a territory from the techniques of capture and the effects of enclosure. Such commoning is stirred by demands and desires for affordable places to live, sources of healthy food, a secure income, breathing spaces, pleasurable forms of life…. Never fully outside state and capital, existing common spaces nonetheless still can be found in our city. On its corners, in its parks and streets, and within its buildings, homes, conversations, intersections, and its geographies, the city expresses and stimulates emergent commoning activities. They dot our city’s territory: earthly commons (air), state commons (city services), socialist micro-commons (housing co-ops), and autonomous micro-commons (free schools).

As we talked, issues, urgencies, tactics, and tensions emerged. We documented them on the paper tablecloths that we gathered around. For us, these conversations confirmed the need to map Toronto’s existing commons, an initiative that would help us to both continue the discussion and further the practice of commoning.

We ate, talked, and listened to the sounds of the political punk project Republic of Safety, who rocked carpool with portable amps. We then left our appropriated site, and dispersed, moving again….

References

De Angelis, M. (2006) Introduction to “Re(in)fusing the Commons,” The Commoner 11. Retrieved December 1, 2006, from http://www.commoner.org.uk/#intro11.

* Editor’s note:  This has taken us a long time to get posted up and we apologize to all concerned for the delay.

-Rob

In its 11th hour, the Bush Administration has authorized a new US Arctic Policy (National Security Presidential Directive 66), which will serve as a continuing, broad policy guideline to government agencies until replaced. That is, it has effect until the next Arctic policy (which can take years to produce). It governs seven broad areas of the American approach to the Arctic: national security and homeland security, international governance, extended continental shelf and boundary issues, promotion of international scientific cooperation, maritime transportation, economic issues, including energy resources, and environmental protection and conservation of natural resources.

Although there is sceptical acceptance of ‘the effects of climate change and increasing human activity in the Arctic region’ the main focus is access to oil and gas reserves on the extended continental shelf, beyond current territorial waters north of Alaska. These reserves are technically recoverable and would be easier to control.

One intended audience is the US Senate, where as the Guardian summarizes: ‘One of the main obstacles to staking a [American] claim on the Arctic seafloor [ie. the extended continental shelf] has been opposition in the Senate to ratification of the United Nations’ 1982 Law of the Sea Convention’

In concert with this policy, US News and World Report mentions that in one ‘midnight regulation‘ by which the outgoing President is attempting to tie the hands of incoming US President Barack Obama,, the Administration recently eliminated an important provision in the US Endangered Species Act requiring “independent scientific reviews” before construction or drilling can occur in an endangered species’ habitat – such as polar bears.

Another major focus is on the right to over-fly and also to freely navigate the Arctic – which will be contested by Canada should the Northwest Passage routes across its Arctic Archipelago become ice-free enough to transit. China’s Xinghua News Agency quotes Bush saying:

Preserving the rights and duties relating to navigation and over flight in the Arctic region supports our ability to exercise these rights throughout the world, including through strategic straits.

The document ignores the signing of the Ilulisat Declaration by all Arctic coastal states, claiming ‘aggressive moves by other countries’. This raises fear without providing facts, as Gunnar Sander notes in a comment to a Wall Street Journal article. Although commentators do not appreciate it, one key audience of this policy is likely to be China, which plans its own voyage to the pole in 2010 and anticipates that a shortcut route over the pole to Europe will become its main shipping route for goods if the polar cap melts.

Ironically, anticipating that melting ice will make access to hydrocarbon and other resources easier is rather ghoulish: give the extra absorption of solar energy by dark-coloured ocean compared to the white ice (the albedo effect) this implies that the planet will have been heating up at a faster than anticipated rate with sea-level rise affecting major capitals: New York, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Mumbai, all of Bangladesh, the Yucatan, the San Francisco Bay Area and so on. Perhaps the extra fuel will be needed for the lifeboats or for constructing dikes.

(Followup: Google this)

-Rob