Workshop Brief Armando Oliver Suinaga & Jose Parral Architectural Association Visiting School Mexico City “Atlas of Mexico City”, July 20-31 2015
1 / 12
"Alles ist Wechselwirkung" Abstract: Alexander von Humboldt criticism and research of the endorheic basin drainage system in Mexico City while traveling through the Americas, is maybe a perception that led him to eventually lay the basis to understanding social and economical dynamics within ecological environments. Humboldt’s research Influenced Darwin´s exploration which eventually coalesced into research of evolution by natural selection. Both ideas: ecological systems and evolutionary processes have not been incorporated into urban design or architecture as exemplified by the dichotomizing idea of architecture's autonomy or the incapacity to accommodate urban infrastructures. The effects of rapid development through the 20th century and environmental awareness has led to superficially designed “ecological” projects that sustain this dichotomy. We argue for the modeling of cities as sensitive ecologies subject to evolutionary processes. We will approach this idea through the research of the territorial space between Chalco-Xochimilco as a sedimentation of diverse ecologies inverting Georges Perec´s idea of species of spaces into a space of species. Humboldt´s critique of the drainage procedures are actualized through unintentional effects of infrastructures recovering lacustrine landscapes and ecologies in Chalco´s new lake. By understanding the hydrological conditions of Mexico City´s endorheic basin and uncertain future scenarios, the projects should lead to new proposals that are able to adapt and accommodate uncertainty. Following Daniel Dennett´s idea of “design space” we propose to develop urban components which are subject to evolutionary processes advancing from simplicity to complexity. We take as an example of robustness and resilience the “chinampa” as a component of an agricultural system which has emerged in a particular landscape coevolving with the environment and persisting in time. Urban organisations are problems of organized complexity which need to be approached with new tools of design as an investigation. Dennett´s algorithmically designed complexity and John H Holland´s investigation into complex adaptive systems offer solutions to construct models which exhibit emergence as an aggregate entity that is more complex than its constituting elements and not easily deducible from its simple interactions, hence the need to build models. Capillarity is a condition “discovered” by biological systems allowing for the construction of structures that enhance and exploit it as a phenomenological process of emergent complexities as exemplified through evapotranspiration in a forest ecosystem. The workshop incorporates these ideas to build a model, game or simulation where digitally constructed and 3d printed components operate according to certain rules that allow for an interconnected structure exhibiting emergent behavior.
2 / 12
"Alles ist Wechselwirkung"1 Alexander Von Humboldt wrote the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain after visiting Mexico City in 1803 during his exploration voyage lasting 5 years across South America, Central America, México and the US. In the essay, besides describing the systems of lakes that formed the Mexican basin, he illustrates thoroughly the extraordinary efforts constructed to protect the city from periodic flooding occurring since the Aztec period. Humboldt narrates with admiration the works being executed in Huehuetoca and Tajo de Nochistongo, already two centuries old. Even though he recognizes them necessary, he criticizes the infrastructure works for their lack of understanding of the hydrological potentials that form the valley. 2 The works will extend up to the Porfiriato era in the 20th century and certainly form the thinking underneath politically executed works of infrastructure which prevail currently, in the drenaje profundo (deep sewage) strategy. Humboldt confronts two forms of relationship with the hydraulic systems of the closed basin. In his essay he is extraordinarily critical of the idea of the continuous drainage procedures and its edification process based on contingent political decisions, plagued with mistakes, accidents and modification projects. Simultaneously he describes the freshwater lakes of Chalco and Xochimilco where the chinampas allow for growth of vegetation, in a fertile agricultural system, providing series of products to supply the city through a system of water canals connecting both areas .3 Alternatively he proposes to utilize the drainage channels for internal navigation and irrigation, recognizing the existence of a different way of inhabiting the Mexican Basin through a better relationship with the existing environment.4 Humboldt´s essay is not only relevant because of its specific description of Mexico City but also because of its vast research of different geographical areas of the Americas, allowing him to form certain ideas of his thinking towards the idea of interconnectedness. Influenced by the experience of George Forster in the exploration voyages of Cook, between idealism and romanticism, Humboldt embarks his voyage in order to synthesize and relate different disciplines. 5 Fluctuating between an aesthetic vision of nature and a detailed analysis of its conditions.6 he is the first to describe a systematic relationship between geography, meteorology and botanics. Aspiring to find a single vision that relates different knowledges through his general physics he prefigures the modern idea of landscape and ecological systems. 7 In some moment in his trip through Mexico he writes in his diary Everything is interconnected (Alles ist Wechselwirkung8). Many years afterwards Charles Darwin embarked on his own exploration voyage with a copy of Humboldt´s books on The Beagle. On his trip, in many ways parallel to Humboldt's journey, as a member of a cartographic expedition, he investigates the coasts of South America and the islands of the Pacific. During the voyage he makes numerous terrestrial incursions finding different ecosystems as for example in the Brazilian jungle, the Argentinian pampas and Tierra del Fuego. He witnesses the effects of a devastating earthquake and tsunami in the south coast of Chile, crosses the Andes and visits the Galapagos, Australia and the Islands of the Pacific. Darwin gives a detailed description of landscapes, geography and organisms utilizing Humboldt´s methodology. Recognizing his admiration and influence, Humboldt is one of the first to receive a copy of The Voyages of the Beagle by Darwin. Humboldt is one of the first to recognize the magnitude of Darwin's discoveries even though he publishes The Origin of Species 23 years afterwards. Their investigations are complementary, correspondence and later publications denote influence and mutual recognition.9 Some of Humboldt’s texts describe the environmental, geographical and botanical conditions that define the American continent while in others, like The Essay describe the social and economical conditions of the territory of New Spain. Humboldt was advancing the study of human conditions and the social and economical relationships to the environment. Darwin was investigating the morphological differences of local organisms and their relationship to the environment, establishing the foundation to understanding this specific interconnection between spatial form and the organisms that occupy it. While Humboldt catalogs and clarifies the correlation between the different elements of an ecological system, Darwin defines the origin of those relationships and the form how they modify in time through evolutionary processes. Humboldt describes the geographical and topographical conditions that allow for certain species to be distributed in space, while Darwin defines those distributions in time. Ultimately, it is Humboldt describing the physical conditions of the americas, and Darwin is describing the effects on living organisms. Humboldt utilized the term paysage10 when he was referring to a series of relationships that occurred in a geographical space with different scales of conditions, meaning ecologies. In the same way Darwin defined 3 / 12
natural selection as the series of forces that determined the way certain organisms are distributed in time, explaining the functional and morphological differences as adaptations to those conditions. Both were trying to explain that interconnected whole, that affects the living conditions of the its inhabitants and feeds back as a manipulation of the environment. With Humboldt´s and Darwin´s synthesized knowledge and presentation of interconnectedness, we can establish a contemporary understanding of processes occurring in space and time that form the natural environment, therefore, it is our argument, fundamental to understand the artificial environment. Constructions like language, technology, culture, history, architecture are subject to the same evolutionary processes within the same geographical spaces interacting and conforming ecologies. Ecology and evolution are two concepts assimilated in biological sciences and incorporated, in general terms, into contemporary culture. However, in certain disciplines, the implications of these concepts have not been totally integrated. Charles Percy Snow in The Two Cultures 11 criticized both scientists on one side and humanist/artists on the other because of the lack of knowledge transfer, as if they pertained to two different and totally separated cultures. “It is bizarre how very little of twentieth-century science has been assimilated into twentieth-century art.”12 Architecture and Urbanism do not avoid Snow´s critique. As architects, we tend to think that our ideas generate spaces. Academically, the architectural discipline teaches us to invent concepts that construct urban space in successive and unconnected acts of creation. This is a current train of thought exemplified by Pier Vittorio Aureli, through the Archaeology of Modern Architecture ,13 he proposes for a nonfigurative architecture as background for an urban life to happen. Again Aureli, “It is possible to argue that, by denying formal redundancy, the latent project of nonfigurative architecture ran parallel to the reduction of inhabitable space to the common forms of the generic city”. Further on, his discussion of Mies van der Rohe plinths in numerous buildings(p19) which establish a limit and separation to the urban condition conforming “architectural states of exception ” in contrast to an idea we would like to pursue: rather the opportunity of creating sensitive, interconnected relationships between architecture and the urban and natural environments they occupy. Through this dualist vision exemplified by the idea that architecture is somehow autonomous, and cultural innovations are an abstract entity distinct from the material world from which they emerge, we end up thinking ideas precede mater. To exemplify this dichotomy we can analyze the impact of science through technologies in urban space and how the city has been constructed within the last 150 years. In the 19th Century, open spaces at the edge of cities, liberated by the agricultural systems, ceded great territorial extensions to the processes of the industrial revolution, fragmenting the landscape through new supply lines of extraction, accumulation, production and consumption centers. In a short time the city incorporated new and diverse structures, establishing new relationships over great distances. 14 Pierre Belanger describes the development and impact of various infrastructures in the urban and territorial landscapes starting in the 19th century but consolidating in the first half of the 20th century where railroads, sewer and electricity lines, highways and eventually airports have been incorporated in the city generating typologies of a scale escaping the traditional notions of urban space.15 Urban planning has not always found relationships to flows of these engineering structures, traditional ways of imagining urban space have been rendered obsolete some time ago. It’s enough to think of the combined effect of the container and supermarket model having effects of global flows, consumption patterns and localization of activities within the city, totally unpredictable by the urban manifestos of the 20th century. The scientific advance of this same period, implemented through technological progress, has not only resulted in a physically modified city through the new infrastructures, but also incremented population dynamics of migration and exponential growth, surpassing the ability to plan the city. This incapacity to design the city in relationship to new infrastructures and its negative effects of fast development have generated a disenchantment and generalized unconformity of the contemporary city. Undoubtedly the processes of industrialization has had deep effects on environmental deterioration, physically palpable on cities since the beginning of the industrial revolution, but every day more symptomatic of global systems, where global warming menaces with unpredictable change of the current landscape. From this disenchantment and awareness on the environment, new projects have emerged with approximation to
4 / 12
nature. However the majority of these proposals continue to approach the relationship of the city and the environment from a dichotomy that separates architecture and urbanism from the material processes from which it emerges. In these projects, nature is perceived as a condition to conserve intact, or as an idyllic historical image to be recovered, as if our contemporary condition was undesirable. In other cases environment parameters are partially incorporated, as hostile conditions we need to protect from in order to achieve a sustainable equilibrium through green camouflage. Achieving this without questioning processes or the outcome of the structures. Architectures and projects typically assigned to the ecological or sustainable label are ultimately metaphors of an intention devoid of content.16 Designing the landscape as an infrastructure, even though it recognizes the capacity of integrating systems, continues tied to a dualist conception attempting to apply mechanistic ideas to understand complex systems that are evidently convoluted. It is no longer possible to to design the landscape as another infrastructure, rather it is imperative, we argue, to model the city, its architecture and infrastructures as sensitive ecologies subject to evolutionary processes. It is precisely this two concepts of ecological systems and evolutionary processes we would like to approach through the capillarity workshop. We propose to explore the rapidly fluctuating margins of Mexico City where various urban scales coexist within agricultural conditions related to water systems. Understanding the geographical space of Chalco-Xochimilco as Humboldt perceived, as different ecologies within diverse degrees of interconnection, we should understand the material processes that generate existing and new forms of intervention in the landscape. Through this understanding of ecologies, the workshop will construct novel organisations that maintain and enhance existing conditions, presenting alternatives to the current depredatory urbanization occurring in these areas. In his essay Species of Spaces Georges Perec, in a progression of scales, describes the physical qualities of different spaces from a subjective experience.17 Perec defines a neighborhood through its inhabitants and trades, at the same time that he questions why a city generates areas of commercial specialization. Trying to define a town or city, Perec talks about pre existing structures and processes that modify the notion of what constitutes a city through time in the same way as it is defined in different scales. We propose to explore this subjective perception of what constitutes a neighborhood as social, economic and cultural ecologies. We would like to understand the processes that define the city and particularly the morphology of the lacustrine zones through the interaction of these ecologies. The workgroup f ollowing Georges Perec essay will explore two kind of spaces; The material space through the specific scale where the project will be located, trying to define what constitutes a neighborhood, or town, in the rapidly changing borders between Chalco, Tlaltenco, Xochimilco and Mixquic. We will investigate the different urban conditions and agricultural systems that have emerged, and learn how they work and function, aspiring to generate diverse fields of information. The second space which will be virtual will constitute a parallel investigation through the concept of design space in evolutionary thought, as defined by Daniel Dennett. First we will tackle some ideas about the site as material space, later on, we will look into ideas about actions in that parallel virtual space. The geographical space of Chalco-Xochimilco is formed by material accumulations through historical processes, not only physical but also economic, biological or linguistic as Manuel de Landa proposes in A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History .18 We will explore this sedimentations as fields of information that condition a series of ecologies so we can dissect and understand the forces that generate natural and human structures that conform this territorial space. To understand the potentials of interaction between ecologies and constructed infrastructures we can analyze the case that Elena Burns19 describes where the New Lake of Chalco has been unintentionally recovered in the area where it was desiccated at the beginning of the 20th century through the construction of the Canal de la Compa単ia. The reason is water is being extracted from the subsoil aquifer, provoking in recent times soil subsidence of up to 40 cm annually as the area contains the deepest layers of clay in the valley and as such most subject to compression. The result of this unintentional subsidence replicates the technique Nabor Carrillo 20 utilized in Texcoco to construct the artificial lake that now bears his name. In Chalco the effects of this infrastructure are constructing a new lacustrine surface of up to 4 km2, recovering ecosystems and previous conditions. Unfortunately the subsidence also generates negative slopes in the sewer networks, in such a way
5 / 12
that pumping stations have been installed in the Canal. Even confronting this issues annually, the city continues to build drainage and extraction systems that could go through the same obsolescence processes because of a lack of understanding of the geographical and hydrological systems that have the potential to guide urban organisations in this areas. The endorheic basin that forms Mexico City Valley has gone through diverse moments of higher or lower humidity in which the lakes fluctuated in depth, surface and structure acquiring higher or lower salinity. 21 Since the pre-hispanic era the city has been subject to periodic flooding and it is probable that global warming will increase the frequency and intensity of these cycles in the future. For example during the 20th century annual 22 precipitation has increased in Mexico City from 600 mm to 900 mm as well as intense precipitation events. Under this scenarios, while authorities continue constructing infrastructure works to drain the valley, it is more necessary than ever to think in alternative systems of urb an organisations that allow for adaptability to uncertain future conditions. 23 We propose to handle critically previous proposals around different ideas for lake recovery in Mexico City. However our objective will be to present alternative projects in which urban ecologies are proposed that incorporate flexible systems with capacity for adaptation and resilience. The projects should avoid the dichotomy with which the previous proposals have been constructed where urban and natural environments are presented as two opposed conditions, even though they appear in coexistence.
We plan to explore the construction of these systems through a second virtual space through the concept of design space in evolutionary thought, as defined by Daniel Dennett. In Darwin´s Dangerous Idea 24Dennett proposes that evolutionary mechanisms are algorithmical processes that progress from simplicity to complexity following rules that eventually, through adaptation to the environment, construct complex behavior leading even to conscience and culture. For Dennett design space is not designed and progression is without an aim, design space is somehow a virtual landscape where the organism navigates through a series of instructions that the genetic code allows in order to adapt to external conditions, resulting in lateral variations of peaks or valleys that confer evolutionary advantages. In this parallel investigation, we will attempt to understand that our cultural constructions, like architecture and urban structures, behave as complex organisations with adaptation capacities, in the same way that biological structures are subject to evolutionary processes. In this sense we will explore urban organisations that are able to adapt through the concepts of population variation, replication, combination, cooperation and competition. As a specific example we could take the idea chinampa and argument it is subject to evolutionary pressures in the same way an organism evolves under certain ecological conditions. The chinampa as an agricultural organization emerged from previous adaptations to the lacustrine landscape. It has been modified through time, incorporating cultural innovations, generating variations and larger scale structures through self-organization. It is interesting to think of the chinampas system from an evolutionary perspective because it behaves as a complex organization that has maintained its consistency as a social, economic and urban system persisting in time despite different structural changes in its context. Avoiding the romantic rhetoric or the nationalistic discourse about the chinampas 25 we can understand it as a model that persists even faced with reorganization pressures from later agricultural systems like the encomienda, the haciendas or mechanization. We can think of other pre-hispanic cultural elements that during the same time have been abandoned, substituted or have extinguished as ideas, as in other meso-american geographical spaces that had the same agricultural systems based on chinampas.26 The original lacustrine ecology has been modified by human organisations that have occupied the landscape and transformed it into a new ecology, where not only the natural processes intervene the form of its landscape but social and economical structures combined to conform new territorial structures. In this sense the previous ecology is in a coevolution with the new organization. This processes are not dissimilar to the form in which certain animal populations evolve along certain ecologies or geographical spaces, for example, the coevolution of grasses and large herbivores that consume them has generated in a specific moment new ecologies like the savannah, the pampas or the american prairies. 27 The lacustrine ecosystem, and particularly the chinampas exemplify, the potential of co-evolution between environment and urban organisations, or how interconnections and mutual influences generate emergent systems and have shown to be robust and consistent organisations.
6 / 12
28 Warren Weaver identified the difficulties of tackling these issues. In his 1948 text “Science and Complexity" Weaver proposes three different problems science is confronted with: problems of simplicity, problems of unorganized complexity and problems of organized complexity. For Weaver problems of simplicity are those with few variables, solved by simple equations, as in physics prior to the 20th century. Biological sciences in the 19th century, through Humboldt and Darwin, approached and composed problems of complexity, although only started to catalog, collect and describe the phenomena, as the first steps of a scientific method to understand complexity. For Weaver the second problem of unorganized complexity involved an infinitude of variables but ultimately approachable through statistics and probability. The third is that of organized complexity which generates structures that persist in time and operate between few and infinite variables. Weaver recognizes that the future of science will consist in the research of organized complexity through computation and multidisciplinary approach.
Even though certain urban relationships can be analyzed quantitatively through statistical tools, It is our perception that urban structures pertain to the last kind of problems and should be understood as organized complexities that persist in time, as the chinampas that we have described. Both ecological systems and evolutionary processes, are complexity problems we need to incorporate if we want to design urban structures that integrate seamlessly with the environment or even better transform into new and enhanced symbionts. We would like to go beyond sustainability, which does not question the state of relationships, or even worse aspires to some sort of homeostatic/holistic condition which is erroneously perceived to have existed in the past. 29 We believe urban structures are capable of transforming and enhancing the environmental conditions into far more complex systems. We recognize the difficulty of the task since urban design is in many ways approached as architecturally defined public space and landscape design is in many ways approached as a poetic and picturesque art rather than a modern science and all our tools are in effect obsolete. We need new tools to research urban organizations through landscape urbanism that exhibit consistency and robustness through design as an investigation.30 In a very interesting experiment researchers in Japan have recreated the Tokyo bay railroad structure utilizing slime mold, usually a unicellular organism which behaves as a multicellular entity when confronted with scarcity.31 In a surface that replicates Tokyo Bay placing food where cities are located, slime mold grows evenly until it begins to establish certain networks that become persistent. At the end of the experiment the slime mold replicated in far less time the decisions of multiple engineers constructing the railroad lines through decades of development. So is the slime mold rationalizing decisions in the same way that people building infrastructures do? Is it performing computations in order to achieve certain structures to procure its feeding? Daniel Dennett argues in Darwin´s Dangerous Idea 32 that algorithmical processes performed in living organisms give them these capacities for adaptation both internally and collectively as a behavior. So in a certain way railroad engineers have replicated the same algorithmic mechanisms as the slime mold while thinking their decisions are another order of thinking. Or else have we both, slime mold and engineers, found through adaptation, some sort of organization that is efficient under certain environmental circumstances? Or are we both just mechanisms processing energy, matter and information in continuous feedback loops, exhibiting fancy organisations in the process? This algorithmically derived design or organized complexity is what Dennett defines as the good moves in design space. The good moves allow the organism to solve certain adaptive co nditions, so eventually those mechanisms exhibit some level of recurrence and reinforcement, even between different species. Echolocation is a good move which in certain environments can have evolutionary advantages. Bats and cetaceans, through convergent evolution, have arrived to the same solution following different genealogical paths. What is interesting is that this process affects the same set of genes, even in this two different species, finding in a way the same algorithmic solutions to the same evolutionary challenges.33 In order to understand how very simple rules at lower scales of organization are able to generate complex behavior in larger hierarchies we can look into John H Holland research of complex adaptive systems. For Holland different phenomena like the immune system, ant colonies or economical decisions in share-markets can be understood by modeling the components and feedback mechanisms between an organism or agent and its environment. In his book Hidden Order, How Adaptation Builds Complexity 34 identifies four properties; aggregation, nonlinearity, flows and diversity and three mechanisms; labeling, internal models, and building
7 / 12
blocks by which we can build complex systems. In a second book Emergence, From Chaos to Order 35 Holland defines further how this mechanisms construct what we understand for emergence where the resulting organizations are more complex that the individual entities that compose them. His argument is that the construction of models or simulations, even though they are a necessary reduction of the real phenomena, are essential to understand behavior between different systems since the emergent complexity is not easily deducible from the simple rules of the components. He argues for rule generated models that can be applied across disciplines to understand the diverse phenomena we have mentioned, trying to understand what is essential, and what is contextual, to the feedback process so we can define the applicability of a model. Holland ends his book asking: “How can the interactions of agents produce an aggregate entity that is more flexible and adaptive that its component agents?” 36 This is a question we would like to address through the capillarity workshop. Capillarity37 is a physical phenomenon exploited by biological organisations, capillary structures are generated by the good moves Dennett has described and by the processes Holland theorizes. In plants and trees, branching and evaporation enhance capillarity action, rising water along the tree structure so it can reach every part of the organism. So it is logical, in a sense, that evolution by natural selection upon finding the possibilities of this phenomena evolved xylem cells 38 allowing trees to grow upwards in competition. A physical force and simple adaptation mechanisms allows for the emergence of more complex organisations that are not only adapting to the environment but becoming the environment, we can think how the aggregated processes of evapotranspiration in a forest and how they become an atmospheric condition to be dealt with, building ecosystems. Better described by Simon Levin: “Ecosystems and the biosphere are complex adaptive systems, in which pattern emerges from, and feeds back to affect, the actions of adaptive individual agents, and in which cooperation and multicellularity can develop and provide the regulation of local environments, and indeed impose regularity at higher levels. The history of the biosphere is a history of coevolution between organisms and their environments, across multiple scales of space, time, and complexity.”39 As a methodology, the capillarity workshop will present a common work formed by different urban proposals for the lacustrine area of Chalco-Xochimilco. The individual proposals should be based on a strong understanding of the geographical space, studying the structures we have previously mentioned from a perspective of ecological systems. T he result of these investigations will be presented through a physical model of the area that represents the diverse fields of information. Understanding the limitations of a short workshop our aim as a team will be to build a map, a game, a virtual model or an experiment by which we can investigate the ideas we have presented, not dissimilar to the slime mold investigation we have described. Students will be introduced to this ideas building simple components progressing into rule derived systems in order to achieve complexity in higher levels of organization. We will achieve this through a parallel investigation, the students will present alternative urban systems that are capable of conforming emergent organisations with a capacity to adapt and establish relationships, or interconnections if you will, in the same way as we have described the chinampa as an urban system. These components will be developed as 3d printed formal organisations that operate on the cartographic model. In addition, supplemental drawings will explain how fields and components inform and develop the projects. The objective of the capillarity workshop will be to present a series of proposals that explore ecological systems and evolutionary processes and present alternatives that are able to accommodate adaptation and resilience to understand culture and urban systems as another emergent phenomena of evolution.
8 / 12
WORKSHOP BIBLIOGRAPHY Burns, Elena (Coord), 2011. “Plan Hídrico para las Subcuencas Amecameca, La Compañia y Tlahuac Xico”. México D.F.: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Coen, Enrico, 2012. Cells to Civilizations, The Principles of Change that Shape Life. New Jersey: Princeton University Press De Landa, Manuel, 1997. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. NY: Zone Books De Landa, Manuel, 2011. Philosophy and Simulation, the Emergence of Synthetic Reason, NY: Continuum Intl. Pub. Group Dennett, Daniel, 1995. Darwin´s Dangerous Idea, Evolution and the Meanings of Life, London: Penguin Glez de Leon, Teodoro & Kalach, Alberto, et. Alt. 1998. La Ciudad y sus Lagos, México City: Editorial Clio Holland, John H, 2004. El Orden Oculto, De Como la Adaptación crea la Complejidad, México City: FCE Holland, John H, 1998. Emergence, From Chaos to Order. Ny: Basic Books / Perseus Books Group Humboldt, Alexander Von, 1882. Ensayo Político sobre el reino de la Nueva-España, 1822, Tomo primero, Libro Tercero, cap. VIII
Trad.: Don Vicente Gonzalez Arnao
Mostafavi, Mohsen & Najle, Ciro, 2002. Landscape Urbanism, A Manual for the Machinic Landscape. London: Architectural Association Publications Mostafavi, Mohsen & Doherty, Gareth, (Ed) 2010. Publishers.
Ecological Urbanism. Cambridge: Harvard University, GSD, Lars Müller
Noble, Denis, 2006. The Music of Life, Biology Beyond Genes. Oxford: Oxford University Press Perec, George, 1974. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin Reed, Chris & Lister, Nina Marie (Ed), 2014. Projective Ecologies. NY: Harvard University, GSD, Actar Publishers Snow, Charles Percy, 1959. "The two cultures and the scientific revolution", NY: Cambridge University Press Weaver, Warren, 1948. "Science and Complexity". NY: Rockefeller Foundation, American Scientist, 36: 536 Waldheim, Charles (Ed), 2006. The Landscape Urbanism Reader. NY: Princeton Architectural Press West, Geoffrey “Scaling: The surprising mathematics of life and civilization” http://www.citymetric.com/horizons/geoffrey-west-theoretical-physicist-grand-unified-theory-cities-387 https://medium.com/sfi-30-foundations-frontiers/scaling-the-surprising-mathematics-of-life-and-civilization-49ee18640a8 Yu, Kongjian, 2010. “Five Traditions for Landscape Urbanism Thinking”, Topos,2010(71):58-63 Compilation 1998 “Vuelta a la Ciudad Lacustre”, Memorias del Congreso, Instituto De Cultura de la Ciudad de México http://www.avhumboldt.net http://darwin-online.org.uk
9 / 12
1 Humboldt, Alexander Von, 1803. Reisetagebuch 1.-5. August 1803, Tal von Mexiko “Alles ist Wechselwirkung” is traduced as “everything is interconnected” although the word could also imply that everything has an effect on everything else. Cited in Baron, Frank and Doherr, Detlev. 2006, Exploring the Americas in a Humboldt Digital Library: Problems and Solutions. Geographical Review 96 (2006): 439–50. 2 Humboldt, Alexander Von, 1822. Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. Translated by: John Black 1822, Vol Ii, London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, And Brown, http://www.avhumboldt.net/humboldt/publications/books/did/26/title/Political-Essay-on-the-Kingdom-of-New-Spain Pp128 “ In all the hydraulical (Sic) operations of the valley of Mexico, water has been always regarded as an enemy, against which it was necessary to be defended either by dikes or drains. We have already proved that this mode of proceeding, especially the European method of artificial desiccation, has destroyed the germ of fertility in a great part of the plain of Tenochtitlan.” 3 Humboldt, Alexander Von, 1822 op. cit. Pp 75 “In proportion as the fresh-water lake has become more distant from the salt-water lake, the moveable chinampas (Most likely a myth, see Crossley note 24) have become fixed. We see this last class all along the canal de la Viga, in the marshy ground between the lake of Chalco and the lake of Tezcuco(Sic). Every chinampa forms a parallelogram of 100 metres in length, and from five to six metres in breadth. Narrow ditches, communicating symmetrically between them separate these squares. The mould fit for cultivation, purified from salt by frequent irrigations, rises nearly a metre above the surface of the surrounding water.” 4 Humboldt, Alexander Von, 1822 op. cit. Pp 441 “It would have been easy, however, to profit by the natural advantages of the ground, in applying the same canals for the drawing of water from the lakes for watering of the arid plains, and for interior navigation. Large basins of water ranged as it were in stages above one another facilitate the execution of canals of irrigation.” 5 Humboldt, Alexander Von & Bonpland, Aimé, 1807. Essay on the Geography of Plants. 2009,The University of Chicago Press, Edited and Introduction by Stephen T. Jackson, traduced by Sylvye Romanowski “Here I bring together all the physical phenomena that one can observe both on the surface of the earth and in the surrounding atmosphere.” http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo6040531.html 6 Corbera Millán, Manuel, 2014. Ciencia, Naturaleza y Paisaje En Alexander Von Humboldt Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles N.º 64 - 2014, 7 Jackson, Stephen T., 1807. Introduction Essay on the Geography of Plants, op. Cit. “The central ecological and geographical ideas in Humboldt’s Essay are not original, in the same sense that little of scientific progress is truly original—to paraphrase Newton, we see further by standing on the shoulders of giants. Botanical, biogeographical, and geographic ideas in the work derive in large part from Humboldt’s friends, Karl Willdenow and George Forster. Humboldt’s accomplishments were in synthesizing these ideas, portraying them graphically using the concrete example of Chimborazo, and integrating them into a broader vision of science—a vision encompassing space, time, the physical and biotic elements of the earth, and human culture and perception.”
8 Humboldt, Alexander Von, 1803. Reisetagebuch 1.-5. August 1803, Tal von Mexiko 9 Baron, Frank, “ From Humboldt to Darwin: Influence and Evolution” http://www.avhumboldt.net/_publications/DarwinHumboldt.pdf 10 Chunglin Kwa in “Alexander von Humboldt's Invention of the Natural Landscape” speaks about the influence of landscape painting of the 17th and 18th centuries had on the perception of Humboldt. Even the specific influence that the paintings by William Hodges (who travelled with Forster and Cook) which encourage him to make his exploration voyages, (which other way could he imagine unknown lands). In the same way it highlights the artistic or infographic value of the “Tableau physique des Andes et pays voisin” in the “Essay on the Geography of Plants” that synthesises divers information in an artistic fashion, calling it a first approximation but aspiring to a “painting of Nature” (Naturgemälde). The final argument o Kwa is that Humboldt re-defines the term landscape (landshaft) as an abstract whole that tried to define his idea of interconnection-. This will eventually influence the romantic landscape paintings as a representation of that abstraction. Kwa, Chunglin 2005. Alexander von Humboldt's Invention of the Natural Landscape (published in European Legacy, Vol. 10 (2005), 149-162) https://www.academia.edu/6543290/Alexander_von_Humboldts_invention_of_the_natural_landscape
11 Snow, Charles Percy,1956. The Two Cultures. NY: The New Stateman, 6 October 1956 Original text from which the 1959 lecture is derived. 12 Snow, Charles Percy, 1959. The two cultures and the scientific revolution. NY: Cambridge University Press http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/snow_1959.pdf “That total incomprehension gives, much more pervasively than we realise, living in it, an unscientific flavour to the whole 'traditional' culture, and that unscientific flavour is often, much more than we admit, on the point of turning anti-scientific.” “They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of 'culture', as though the natural order didn't exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man.” 13 Aureli, Pier Vittorio, 2009. More and More About Less and Less. NY: Log Spring/Summer 2009, page 7, Any Corporation 14 See Pierre Belanger essays about the U.S. infrastructure Bélanger, Pierre, 2006. “Synthetic Surfaces”. Included in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Edit. Charles Waldheim, 2006. NY: Princeton Architectural Press 15 Bélanger, Pierre, 2010. “Redefining Infrastructure” en Ecological Urbanism. Edición de Mohsen Mostafavi & Gareth Doherty, 2010. NY: Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, Lars Müller Publishers 16 Kwinter, Sanford, 2010. “Notes on the The Third Ecology” in: Ecological Urbanism. Mohsen Mostafavi & Gareth Doherty, 2010. NY: Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, Lars Müller Publishers Sanford Kwinter makes a very appropiate critique of how the idea of “sustainability” is not necessarily complementary to the idea of ecology. “There can be no “ecological thinking” that does not place human social destiny at the heart of our posture toward our environment context. We may well learn over the next years that cities, even megacities, actually represent dramatically efficient ecological solutions, but this fact alone does not make them sustainable, especially if the forces of social invention remain trapped in tyrannies that only ecological thinking in an ecumenical scale can free us from. For ecological thinking too has its counterfeit and debased forms, and many “sustainability” discourses remain more oppressive than liberatory, more stifling than inventive, and it would be at great peril if we were to continue to assume that this two areas of approach, and especially their methods and presuppositions, are necessarily complementary.” 17 Perec, George, 1974. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin 18 De Landa, Manuel, 1997. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. NY: Zone Books 19 Burns, Elena (Coord), 2011. “Plan Hídrico para las Subcuencas Amecameca, La Compañia y Tlahuac Xico”. México D.F.: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana 20 Nabor Carrillo built, in the former lake of Texcoco a series of pumps that extracted water from the subsoil, fast and intensively, producing a subsidence which allowed to recover a 10´000 hectares lake which now has his name. 21De la Lanza Espino, Guadalupe & García Calderon, José Luis, 1995. Lagos y Presas de México. México D.F.:Centro de Ecología y Desarrollo 100´000 years ago the lake had approximately a depth of 30 to 35 meters, with alternating periods in which it became a shallow swamp. 22 Ibarrarán, María Eugenia “Climate’s Long-term Impacts on Mexico’s City Urban Infrastructure” Case study prepared for Cities and Climate Change: Global Report on Human Settlements 2011 http://www.unhabitat.org/grhs/2011 23 Ver: Glez de Leon, Teodoro & Kalach, Alberto, et. Alt. 1998. La Ciudad y sus Lagos. México D.F.: Editorial Clio “Vuelta a la Ciudad Lacustre”, Memorias del Congreso, Instituto De Cultura de la Ciudad de México, 1998 We will analyse different proposals, from the project by Alberto T Arai in 1952, the 1960´s proposals of Dr Nabor Carrillo, the proposal by Alberto Kalach for the Chalco Lake in the Solidaridad contest of the 1990, the “Retorno a la Ciudad Lacustre” in which I participated with Alberto Kalach in 1998 and 2002. See also Burns, Elena (Coord) “Repenter la Cuenca, La gestión de Ciclos del Agua en el Valle de México”, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2009 24 Dennett, Daniel, 1995. Darwin´s Dangerous Idea, Evolution and the Meanings of Life, London: Penguin
25 Crossley, Philip L, 2004. “Just Beyond the Eye: Floating Gardens in Aztec Mexico” Historical Geography Vol. 32: 111-35. Crossley describes how the idea of a floating garden has been utilised and from his point of view unfounded. The idea of floating gardens has constructed a romantic perception about the innovations of the pre-hispanic groups that continue through a nationalistic discourse that perpetuates in some sense a degree of discrimination by deviating the central theme which should be the agricultural efficiency of the chinampa and from our point of view its persistence in time. 26 Rojas Rabiela, Teresa, “Las Chinampas”, 1998. en “Vuelta a la Ciudad Lacustre”, Memorias del Congreso, México D.F.: Instituto De Cultura de la Ciudad De México, Ciudad de México 1998 27 Stebbins1 G. Ledyard “Coevolution Of Grasses And Herbivores” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, Vol. 68, No. 1 (1981), pp. 75-86 28 Weaver, Warren, 1948. "Science and Complexity". NY: Rockefeller Foundation, American Scientist, 36: 536 http://people.physics.anu.edu.au/~tas110/Teaching/Lectures/L1/Material/WEAVER1947.pdf 29 See Slavoj Žižek interesting arguments in “Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red” http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2007-ecology-against-mother-nature-slavoj-zizek-on-molecular-red 30 Yu, Kongjian, 2010. “Five Traditions for Landscape Urbanism Thinking”, Topos,2010(71):58-63 http://www.turenscape.com/english/news/view.php?id=219 31 Metcalfe, John, 2012. “Mapping Tokyo's Train System in Slime Mold” Web article in citylab.com, july 23 2012 http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/07/mapping-tokyos-train-system-slime-mold/2679/ 32 Dennett, Daniel 1995 “Darwin´s Dangerous Idea, op.cit. 33 Parker, Joe, Rossiter Stephen et alt., 2013. "Genome-wide signatures of convergent evolution in echolocating mammals” Nature 502, 228–231 (10 October 2013) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7470/full/nature12511.html 34 Holland, John H1995. Hidden Order, How Adaptation Builds Complexity. NY: Basic Books / Perseus Books Group Spanish translation: El Orden Oculto, De Como la Adaptación crea la Complejidad, México City: FCE 35 Holland, John H, 1998. Emergence, From Chaos to Order. Ny: Basic Books / Perseus Books Group 36 Holland, John H 1998. Op. Cit. 37 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capillary_action Capillarity is a physical phenomena where liquids ascend in narrow tubes due to cohesion within the liquid and adhesion to the surfaces of a tube allowing for liquids to rise further in narrower tubes even against gravity. 38 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylem 39 Levin, Simon, 2005. “Self-organization and the Emergence of Complexity in Ecological Systems” BioScience • December 2005 / Vol. 55 No. 12