6
FOREWORD By Brent D. Ryan
City making is a timeless, universal, and costly process. Substantial urban tissues of stone, pavement, steel, and glass reflect tremendous investments in material, capital, labor, and time. Thus historic and contemporary cities mirror each other in their accumulation of wealth and materials, in their occupation of terrains, in their consumption of aggregates as economic growth necessitates it. Cities locate in areas of strategic socio-economic value, as Jacobs (1968) noted long ago, cities are located near water, at the interface between resource (land) and market (water, or those across the water). A paradox of the human condition: the interface between land and water is that single point most necessary for city economies to occur, and it is also one of nature’s most malleable boundaries - forever in flux, shifting back and forth across seasons, storms, epochs. Cities fix in place a system in flux. The act of urbanism, construction and design of cities, need harden, make useful, this land-water edge. Or, in time, to shift it outward or to keep it in place. Landmaking occurs not because the city respects natural processes, but because human desires for trade, food, or money require that those processes be overcome. Like cities themselves, landmaking also reflects technology, energy, and power. Early landmaking, like early cities, was incremental, as gradual as the needs and growth of cities and urban regions were. Holland and Venice, perhaps the West’s most well-known landmaking centers even made land on a seasonal basis, according to labor, weather, and material availability. Dense, crowded cities crept outward into the water, with capillary canals remaining as the water’s mark on land. Today, landmaking, like other forms of environmental alteration and exploitation, has exploded in scale. Antarctica, gradually calving into the ocean, is the only continent not expanding through the now well-established process of dredging, spraying, packing, and building sand onto a harbor floor or former marshlands. And in another form of consonance between citymaking and landmaking, the glassy skyscraper, avatar of modernity and of global visibility for countries seeking their place, has been joined by the iconic landmade islands. Dubai and Lagos have even fused the two, constructing iconic skyscrapers atop such islands. Such “iconic” islands represent the fusion of digital and physical culture, feeding the global need for image consumption and a city’s need for tourism, trade, or tax-sheltering elites. City making and landmaking are inexorable, but they are also an arc that reflects a society’s economic growth rate, as well as its tolerance of environmental degradation and violation. San Francisco Bay is mostly filled, but one can also see the end of the line, the precise point where bulldozers stopped in 1972 when the Clean Water Act forbade the
