New Geographies is the biannual journal of Design, Agency, Territory, founded and produced by doctoral candidates at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.
Landscapes of Energy
Barry Varnelis Bélanger Velikov Benachenhou Zardini Bridge CLUI Ghosn ISBN Hein 978-1-934510-25-4 del Hierro www.gsd.harvard.edu/ newgeographies Illich Jazairy Kaika Leggett Manaugh May Melosi Robert Sumrell Thün
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Landscapes of Energy
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John May is Visiting Lecturer in the department of geography and design faculty in the department of architecture and urban design at the University of California, Los Angeles. His essays and reviews have appeared in journals including Perspecta, Thresholds, Political Geography, and Verb: Crisis. He holds a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University and a PhD in geography from UCLA.
The BecomingEnergetic of Landscape
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FIG 1 Isothermal map of minimum temperature zones in London on June 3, 1959. From T.J. Chandler, The Climate of London (1965), 143. Image Courtesy of Wiley and Sons.
FIG 2 False-color ASTER thermal infrared image of Atlanta, Georgia (June 27, 1998). Image Courtesy NASA.
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Consider two visualizations of a single concept within the geographic subfield of climatology: the urban heat island effect (FIGS 1, 2).1 The first, a map dated June 11, 1959, employs isotherm lines to indicate the distribution of temperature zones throughout London and demarcate the gradual cooling of that city as it diffuses into its less-developed surroundings. The second is a false-color thermal infrared image of Atlanta, Georgia, obtained using a space-borne thermal sensor on June 27, 1998.
century. Ultimately, the emergence of this platform, which has constituted a remarkably rapid becomingenergetic of the landscape, is quite inseparable from a series of transformations within geographic perception itself – inseparable, that is, from fundamental transformations within the very act of perceiving the surface of the earth at the scale of territories and populations.
Disregarding for a moment the thirty-nine years between the making of these two images, and ignoring for now the exact details of their respective methods of production, it is impossible not to recognize some differences. For instance, it is difficult to escape the impression that something synthetic and foreign, a layer of intentionality perhaps, has been added to the first figure. The isolines themselves—however facile and correct their deployment, however helpful in demonstrating some set of relations, however truthful their content—are so obviously not really existing things but rather a kind of appliqué. The second figure is given to a different collection of impressions. Here it appears as though the field has been made intelligible, each individual element announcing itself vibrantly, simultaneously displaying both its own unique character—its own unique signature—and its belonging within some class of similarly designated objects. The figure seems to depict not only the positive materiality but also the residual, unbounded emptiness lingering invisibly in-between; both presence and absence, perfectly delimited, cascading upward as information, as data, disclosing itself en masse to our eyes and thus to our knowing. A once-invisible sensation has been made visible, divided off from a raw and undifferentiated sensory experience: sweat on a brow; bodies packed onto a hot bus. In the first figure, we—through our methods of analysis and representation—are undoubtedly speaking for the world, however slowly and crudely. In the second, it seems that the world has been made to speak for itself. The idea that landscape is comprehensible as a kind of energetic object—that the innumerable relations contained with a specific field are reducible to a shared and quantifiable energetic basis; that the “mass of things and creatures in the external world”2 necessarily entertain visible, calculable associations—is of course neither a purely “natural” fact nor merely a social or technical construct. It is instead a remarkably diverse and inclusive ontological platform, whose recent historical coalescing has entailed the reorganization of geographic and environmental thought around a vast discourse of energy made available during the nineteenth
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, geographic inquiry was still governed by the possibilities and limitations of ocular perception. The visual domain of the observing human subject was materialized and made calculable by a vast array of techniques and optical instruments, ranging from panoramic, terrestrial, and topographic cameras to perspectographs and stereoplotters. Through these instruments were produced both photographic and cartographic reproductions of the earth’s surface, through their use whole territories were drawn up into the sphere of metrology. Over the past four decades, however, the mode of visualization within the discipline has experienced a reorganization, in which the long history of optical geographic instrumentation has been rather suddenly subsumed within the folds of diversely constructed, territorially deployed assemblages of instrumentation. These assemblages have expanded the perceptual field of geographic inquiry to include entire domains of mass phenomena previously unavailable to visual analysis, simultaneously unifying and differentiating the world of lived experience within a space of cognition beyond the reach of the unaided human sensory apparatus. I have outlined the features of this extensive perceptual event elsewhere and so will not rehearse them again here in detail.3 Instead my aim is to provide some limited description of the emergence of the energetic landscape, of its general appearance as both a scientific object and, perhaps now, as a space for design, by briefly retracing the historical formation of the concept of the urban heat island. Despite its focus on the heat island concept, it should in no way be inferred that the subfield of climatology was somehow more central to the formation of a new disciplinary mode of perception than work done in other geographic subfields. Rather, it welled up nearly simultaneously during the 1960s and 1970s, at numerous points spread across multiple subfields, including biogeography, geomorphology, and hydrology, as well as in practices such as urban planning and landscape ecology. It is through these fields that the classical elementary sciences—physics, chemistry, and biology—are today being asked to become territorial.
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When we say the name of a concept, the word or phrase that we have uttered is a placeholder, a necessary but false unity, beneath which is an alwayschanging ensemble of processes, nested and overlapping, each composing a specific episode within the history of “a problem meandering through the historical space of science.”4 Under the twin aegis of teleology and conceptual unity, the procession of instrumentation stands as a storyline of technical progress in the service of discovery, benign perturbations in the construction of an orderly entablature of knowledge. Techniques and devices may assist in the unpacking of concrete reality, but the objects of cognition and inquiry, it is assumed, remain fixed regardless of the technical means at our disposal.
Each episode is delimited not by a constant formulation of the heat island concept but rather by a relatively stable relationship between the rules of conceptual formation and the body of observational data on which the concept operates.7 Conversely, at the thresholds between each period, the concept must rather suddenly cope with change and rapidly orient itself to the possibilities of a different mode of observation, and a different mode of analysis. Beneath all these episodic distributions, however, a single grand divide, situated around the decade of the 1970s, stands out from all other disturbances. Only in the final episode do we find the appearance of a landscape commensurate with the conceptual repertoire of energy, when our perception of our world ceased to be dominantly mechanical, geometrical, and photochemical, and became instead rather suddenly topological, statistical, and electrical.
Yet when evacuated from the confines of this evolutionist historicism, and removed instead to an archival field composed of the possibilities availed by specific resonances between epistemology, instrumentation, and visualization, the historical unity of conceptual objects disintegrates, diffuses. It becomes instead a history of projects toward situating generalized phenomena within certain schemas of inquiry. In what follows, the phenomenon of anthropogenic climate modification through urbanization finds itself cast in three such episodes, playing a somewhat different part in each: [1]
The first is an initial period in which inquiry into urban temperature regimes was governed by a rather amorphous general meteorology of climate, which began just prior to the publication of Luke Howard’s The Climate of London, Deduced from Meteorological Observations Made in the Metropolis and at Various Places Around It” in 1818,5 and continued until the next major wave of research appeared around 1930.
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With that wave of research came the introduction of a series of new methods and theoretical parameters that ushered in a period of microclimatology. This approach spanned World War II and absorbed a host of instrumental transformations, until it ultimately collapsed, rather suddenly, in the late 1960s.
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Finally, the formalization of the subfield of urban climatology following the first World Meteorological Organization “Symposium on Urban Climates” in 1968.6
FIG 3 Control diagram of a common module imaging spectral radiometer. From T. T. Acord, R. E. Callender, L. C. Doyle, W. J. Lightel, “Common module imaging spectral radiometer,” Imaging Spectroscopy, Proc. SPIE 268 (1981): 84-91, 84. Image Courtesy of SPIE.
“Thus under the varying circumstances of different Sites, different Instruments, and different Positions of the latter, we find London always warmer than the country, the average excess of its temperature being 1˚579.”8 (FIG 3) Despite the diversity of its literature over the past half-century, historical accounts of the development of urban climatology unfailingly trace the field’s roots to the essay from which this passage was taken, Howard’s The Climate of London, where, in a stroke, a long allegory of metropolitan existence –of its “enclosed pestilential vapor and soot”; of “such a Cloud of Sulphure as the Sun itself, which gives day to all the World besides, is hardly able to penetrate and impart it here”– is drawn up into the brevity of a number.9
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During Howard’s time, the primary unit of analysis was air temperature, which, when properly recorded and averaged across a long time span, would define an area’s climate. In this task, Howard and his contemporaries were assisted by a relatively new instrument known as “Six’s self-registering thermometer,” which was capable of mechanically registering temperature points over a given time period, though only twice (once at each extreme), after which it required resetting.10 In Howard’s method, then, a deep mutuality obtained between the design of Six’s thermometer and the prevailing conception of climate at that time – a fundamental sympathy between an instrument meant to record the daily temperature extremes and a concept predicated on the long averaging of exactly those two quantities.
It is difficult for us today to see the richness once conveyed by a figure (FIG 4) from T. J. Chandler’s 1965 work, The Climate of London; it appears now to our eyes somewhat crude.12 Accurate in its own, outdated way – perhaps sufficient as a kind of bland diagram– it lacks in that species of detail we now expect. But these impressions are not consonant with those given at the time of the figure’s production, when it was remarked by one reviewer: “I should like first of all to say a word of appreciation for the resolution that Mr. Chandler has shown in covering so systematically what must be some 7000-8000 square miles of territory, and for adding to the corpus of urban studies the large and special case that London represents.”13
Absent from Howard’s work, however, is any coherent visual articulation of the essentially territorial character of his research. The notion of climate as composed of distributed phenomena, as processes splayed out across the surface of the earth—these aspects are left more or less untreated within the space of representation. And although there is some discussion of the “proportion of warmth” of London’s center that might be “induced in a city by the Population,” Howard in fact makes no attempt to explain this warming effect according to the discourse of energy –radiation, exchange, conservation and entropy, absorption and emission, consumption, efficiency, etc.– most likely because this discourse had not, by 1818, achieved the modern reconceptualizations it would soon receive in the work of Young, Rankine, Kelvin, and others. The first noticeable cracks in this “general meteorological” schema emerged between World Wars I and II, when several projects began to carry out and represent urban temperature studies using two radically new methods.11 The first of these was the mobile instrumentation assembly. Until this time, researchers had relied on a loosely connected network of monitoring stations, but after 1930, as climatologists began to conduct temperature traverses using automobiles, we see the introduction of the “moving sensor.” Second, it was also at this time that we find the importation of isothermal cartography into urban temperature research. Taken together, these two transformations have initiated a new period of “microclimatology,” which held sway over urban research until nearly the end of the 1960s. The zenith of that episode came during the middle of the 1960s, when a series of experiments in urban landscape analysis began to tax the technical limitations of the mobile assembly approach.
FIG 4 The full line presents the monthly mean of London as given in the table, the dotted line that of the country. From Howard, Climate of London (1833), 15.
Chandler counted among the “Sources of Climatological Records” used in his study “a series of mobile surveys using vehicles equipped with electrical resistance thermometers.”14 Unlike, the liquid-inglass thermometers used throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in meteorological and climatological research (such as Howard’s thermometer of Six), an electrical-resistance thermometer does not directly measure air temperature but rather electrical resistance in a metal wire, whose resistance changes as temperature changes. Work carried out with the electrical-resistance thermometers produced a set of representations that seemed consistent with, if perhaps more detailed than, work from thirty years earlier –but with some crucial differences. Since the time of the first mobile experiments in the 1930s, data had been manually recorded along the length of each route. Thus the speed and amount of data collection was a variable of the technical limitations of human-based recorder assemblies. By 1958, researchers had been able to continuously shorten the time required to record successive station points. But “the results of sector
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traverses made it increasingly necessary to sample the whole of London rather than merely a sector.” The solution to this problem was to introduce a new family of self-recording sensitive devices into his assembly, and in fact during the latter half of his eight-year study, Chandler affixed the resistance thermometers to a “Dynamaster recorder unit,” which received variable electrical signals from the resistance thermometer. Those signals were then “converted by the instrument into a record”–a drum-mounted graph chart– at a speed “which was normally 24in per hr.” (FIG 5) Using this new, self-recording assembly, Chandler conducted repeated traverses across London, during which “new readings” were “added to the existing records at a remarkable rate.”15
graphic methods. In other words, the self-recorded projects exposed a fundamental weakness within urban climate work: namely, a severe disjunction between a methodology of self-recording assemblages aligned with digital processing and the available techniques of visualization –techniques that seem hopelessly unable to cope with the radical change in the rates at which the observational record was being acquired; unable to capture the sudden metastasis of the body of temperature data.
FIG 6 Climate transcript recorded during Chandler’s London transects. From T.J. Chandler, “London’s Urban Climate,” The Geographical Journal (1962): 279-298, 281. Image Courtesy of Blackwell.
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Chandler, The Climate of London (1965).
Chandler’s study was soon joined by others throughout the 1960s, employing similar assemblies. A 1968 study by Stanford researchers over the course of two years, filled nearly 40,000 punchcards with urban climate data collected from three U.S. cities –data that would have been useless were it not for the recent incorporation of digital computation machines into geographic research.16 What kind of object was this now densely quantified urban landscape? In the first place it was a space defined by the sudden appearance of numerous thresholds between “micro-scale variations” in temperature and humidity (“microclimates”), the intensity and location of which were previously only approximately perceptible. It was also a landscape whose precise spatial representation was essentially beyond the technical capabilities of existing carto-
It is perhaps for this disjunction between automated observation and human representation that we can point to the brief appearance of a visual methos that aimed to transcend the limitations of traditional isothermal cartography. This technique –for which the phrase isothermal photocollage seems the only appropriate label– amounted to a kind of regression within the domain of scientific representation, where the precision of the background renders the analytic lines unconvincing in their placement and highlights the limits of the cartographic representation of climatic phenomena by human means. (FIG 6) At precisely the same moment that Chandler was conducting his research, a third division was rapidly, but also rather silently, opening up within urban climatologic practice. We find the sentiment, grown forceful by 1970, that the field had in fact been training its instrumentation on the wrong phenomenal object. A 1968 paper declared in its conclusion that “air temperatures showed little relation to the ongoing energy regime.” Rather than continue to focus on air temperature, as many were at the time, “research should deal with the question: what are the ‘coupling factors between surface interface and atmosphere?’” It followed from this declaration that the inclusion of radiation instruments into the
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mobile survey method allowed the field to begin to work from within the “unifying framework and concepts of energy balance climatology” where it would be possible to “build a theoretical-causal structure.”17
the extensive camouflaging methods that had been developed to elude aerial reconnaissance. Yet despite these advantages the infrared photograph was, according to the engineers in Division 16 of the National Defense Research Committee, “slow and awkward to telemeter and process for analysis.”18
Alongside this discursive shift –which is to say, alongside a shift away from the conceptual parameters of air temperature research and toward a quantified definition of the radiant properties of “the diverse urban surface”– a new family of geographic technologies entered urban climatologic research. Since the time of John Herschel’s pioneering work in the early nineteenth century, practitioners in the fields of spectroscopy and radiometry had been concentrating their efforts on developing instrumentation capable of graphically measuring the intensity of energy in regions of the spectrum beyond the visible. The century between this work and World War II witnessed the introduction of new family of “bolometric” devices, which converted the energy falling upon a sensitive material into electrical charges. Those charges could then be used to move a needle or pen to produce precise visual recordings of radiation, such as seen in Samuel Langley’s “bolograph,” produced in 1891. (FIG 7)
FIG 7 A microclimatological attempt to reconcile aerial photography and isothermal cartography. From Helmut Landsberg, “Atmospheric Changes in a Growing Community,” Urban Ecology (1978): 53-81, 56. Image Courtesy of Rightslink.
During the war these bolometric techniques were submitted to the demands of telemetry, and to the dream of electronically transmitting entire scenes across great distances. Infrared photography –which involves the use of infrared-sensitive emulsions in an otherwise standard photographic manner– had proven its usefulness in revealing enemy locations, not only at a great distance but also through
FIG 8 Langley’s self-recorded bolograph, c. 1891. From S.P. Langley, Annals of the Astrophysical Observatory (Washington: Gov. Printing Office, 1900), plate XX.
The period of intense wartime experimentation resulted in the development of various devices aimed toward visually recording the surface of the earth in a manner inherently amenable to rapid transmission –or, in other words, the birth of “electronic imaging” within a class of instruments that may be referred to as aerial infrared scanners, whose operation and products differed radically from those of the traditional camera and aerial photograph (FIG 8): “in comparison with photographic cameras of comparable resolution, aerial infrared scanners are complex instruments; however, they have advantages: imagery can be obtained outside the photographic region; the output signal, being in electrical form, can be readily transmitted, recorded, analyzed, or processed as needed or desired; the scanner may be calibrated, and the resulting data can yield quantitative radiometric data.”19 As scanners slowly became available for civilian use, geographers and earth scientists began in the 1970s to apply them to terrestrial processes, and several fundamental assumptions of microclimatology were overturned. Following this happy coalescing –between the new concepts and new instrumentation of radiation– and in a nearly complete and sudden substitution, the climatology’s primary object of inquiry changed; the field ceased to define itself according to the “long averaging” of temperature regimes, and instead began to concern itself primarily with the “urban energy balance,” and (consequently) with surface emissivity –“the most fundamental difficulty” of which being the “definition of the ‘surface’ itself.” Whereas before, the phenomena of excess warmth resided everywhere and nowhere, in an undifferentiated mass of turbulent air, it could now be fixed within “the built
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landscape”– that is, in the biophysical properties of urban materiality: the concrete and asphalt, cement and tar, as well as the manicured and maintained “green” and living, all of it particular and unique, but also reducible to a general territorial physics, immediately measurable and visible as “information concerning the cascades of energy and mass through the system.”20
“image data” was useful as both image and data, a fact evidenced by the appearance, immediately thereafter, of numerous related studies employing similar techniques. Here then, seemingly within the passage of an instant, was what the Stanford project from just nine years earlier had dreamed of, but failed to realize: a comprehensive investigation into the climatologic effects of urbanization on the American landscape, simultaneously visualized and quantified through a set of spatial-analytical representations and radiation values.
FIG 10 “0146 GMT 28 July 1977.” From Michael Matson et al., “Satellite Detection of Urban Heat Islands,” Monthly Weather Review (1977): 1725-1734, 1728. Image Courtesy of American Meteorological Society.
FIG 9 A landscape scene divided into pixels, with each unit assigned a specific brightness value corresponding to the received energy. From TM Lillesand, Remote Sensing and Image Interpretation (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1987), 23. Image Courtesy of Wiley and Sons.
The field of inquiry concerned with the phenomena of excessive urban warming signaled its full arrival within an entirely new type of perception, whose historical structure composes a genealogy bearing little resemblance to that along which climatology, and geography more generally, had unfolded since their beginnings. (FIG 9) Published by NOAA researchers in late 1978, in an essay on the “Satellite Detection of Urban Heat Islands,” the image was acquired on 28 July 1977, when “through computer enhancement and enlargement of the satellite imagery,” a single acquisition depicted “the urban heat islands of St. Louis, Washington, DC, and Baltimore” (FIG 10).21 Its significance was to demonstrate not only that “image data” was capable of providing “information on several physical characteristics of the urban heat island,” including its “extent and shape” and “thermal structure,” but also that
FIG 11 Enhanced infrared digital image of the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD nocturnal heat islands with graphical overlay. From Robert N. Colwell, et al., Manual of Remote Sensing, Second Edition (Falls Church, VA: ASPRS, 1983), 1364. Image Courtesy of ASPRS.
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It is in fact a very small step from the 1978 NOAA image to the kinds of imagery used to depict and analyze landscape today, because our present conception of landscape –of the relations between the tremendous exchanges of energy that characterize modern life, and the mode of spatial organization those exchanges constitute– belongs to the perceptual schema that emerged in association with postwar geographic imaging technologies. That schema makes the energetic landscape. It is an ontological platform that continually brings a specific conception of our habitat into being, with a richness and detail sufficient for our contemporary sensibilities, and thus lends to our surroundings that certain “objective” visibility we have always required as a denominator in our calculations.
landscape as their principal object of inquiry. How are the facts of this conceptual object established, its truthfulness made evident? What discourses and instruments do we surround it with? How do we represent it, how do we visualize it? And, perhaps most mysteriously, what happens when the very possibilities and limitations of ocular experience, long the foundation of human curiosity and thought, are rather suddenly evacuated from the first order of rational inquiry and replaced by a different kind of sight? It is a way of perceiving the world that we ourselves have fabricated, but which, despite our tremendous technical acumen, we scarcely comprehend.
In other words, “landscape” is not a primary or mutable datum upon which energy is organized; it does not exist beyond or prior to the geometrical organization of territories, or the residue of material life; it does not “contain” the detritus of social processes, nor is it a “construct” of those processes. Rather, landscape is for us today a particular way in which our energetic perceptual order divides up the earth’s surface. It is a mode of thought inseparable from a specific kind of vision, a “seeing-as-calculating”–imaging– in which the terrain of lived experience, always-already reduced to discrete electrical signals, appears immediately complicit with our “statistical view of nature.”22 It is a technique of “mathematization” in which “mathematical analysis and natural phenomena do not so much correspond as they merge indistinguishably” within the frame of a scene: image-data.23
1 Defined broadly in the climatologic literature as an artificial warming induced by urbanization, the heat island effect was as recently as 2004 referred to in the climatologic literature as “the most well documented example of anthropogenic climate change.” And while secondary to global climate change research today, it remains important in our ideas about human’s capacity to modify the biophysical parameters of their habitat. See John A. Arnfield, “Two Decades of Urban Climate Research: A Review of Turbulence, Exchanges of Energy and Water, and the Urban Heat Island,” International Journal of Climatology (2003): 1-26. 2 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 5. 3 See, for example, John May “Preliminary Notes on the Emergence of Statistical-Mechanical Geography,” Perspecta 40: Monster (2008): 42-53; John May, “...Such as that Elegant Blend of Philosophy and Hardware; Preface to a History of Geographical Autonomy,” Thresholds: The MIT Journal of Art, Architecture, and Visual Culture (2005): 8-15; and Irene Hwang and Mario Ballesteros, eds. “Technology, Ecology, and Urbanism: An Interview with John May,” in Verb: Crisis (Barcelona: Actar, 2008), 98-111. 4 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, “Reassessing The Historical Epistemology of Georges Canguilhem,” Continental Philosophy of Science, edited by Gary Gutting (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 193. 5 Luke Howard, Climate of London Deduced from Meterological Observations, in Three Volumes (London: Harvey & Darton, 1833). 6 WMO. Urban Climates: WMO Technical Note No. 108 (Geneva, 1970). 7 Though we find reference to the “greater warmth of cities” as far back as the Romans, the phrase “urban heat island” first appeared in the English-language literature in a paper by Gordon Manley, published in 1958 in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meterological Society. 8 Howard, Climate of London, 4. 9 cf. Helmut Landsberg, The Urban Climate (New York: Academic Press, 1981); T. J. Chandler, The Climate of London (London: Hutchinson, 1965); Oke et al., “Simulation of Surface Urban Heat Islands Under ‘Ideal’ Conditions at Night,” Boundary-Layer Meteorology (1991): 339-358; Grady Dixon and Tomas Mote, “Patterns and Causes of Atlanta’s Urban Heat Island,” Journal of Applied Meteorology 42 (2003): 1273-1284; Ian Douglas Stewart, “Landscape Representation and the Urban-Rural Dichotomy in Empirical Urban Heat Island Literature, 1950-2006,” Acta Climatologica et Chronologica (2007): 111-121. 10 Howard, Climate of London, xii. 11 See Whilhelm Schmidt, “Die Verteilung der Minimumtemperaturen in der Fronstnacht des 12.5.1927 Gemeindegebiet von Wien,” Fortschr. Landwirtsch (1927): 681-686; Schmidt, “Kleinklimatische Aufnahmen durch Messfahrten,” Meteorol. Z. 47 (1930): 92-106; A. Peppler, “Das Auto als Hilfsmittel der meteorologischen Forschung,” Das Wetter 46 (1929): 305-308; Budel and Wolf,
The events described here occurred during an historical period during which, as Michel Serres has written, “the ‘we’ acquired weight”24 –a period when there emerged a certain recognition that we as humans are in fact collectively capable of altering our habitat not only at a global scale but also, and perhaps more disturbingly, at the level of being, within the very delicate and fibrous logic of ontology. We moderns attend to our concerns through far-reaching, post-atomic techniques, spanning from inquiry to intervention, from instruments to infrastructures. Thus today, in our time of global climate change, our time of astonishing biodiversity loss and resource extraction, the plans we make toward our habitat, the methods and techniques applied to its correction, the diagnoses and the remedies, whole languages of alleviation and repair –all of this belongs principally to our energetic conception of landscape. We must for this reason develop some understanding of the technologies and practices that treat the
NG 02 “Munchener stadtklimatische Studien,” Das Wetter (1933): 4-10. 12 Chandler, The Climate of London. 13 Gordon Manley, et al., “London’s Urban Climate: Discussion,” The Geographical Journal 128, no. 3 (1962): 298-302. 14 Chandler, The Climate of London, 31. 15 Ibid., 32. 16 F. L. Ludwig, Stanford Research Institute Urban Climatological Studies. Interim Report No. 1 (Springfield, VA: Clearinghouse for Federal Scientific and Technical Information, 1967). 17 Werner H. Terjung, “The Energy Balance Climatology of a City-Man System,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol.60.3 (1960): 466-492, 466, 468, 489. 18 Michael R. Hord, Digital Image Processing of Remotely Sensed Data (New York: Academic Press, 1982), 1. 19 American Society of Photogrammetry, Manual of Photogrammetry (Falls Church, VA: American Society of Photogrammetry, 1966), 375. 20 WMO, Review of Urban Climatology, 1968-1973. Technical Note No. 134 (Geneva: World Meterological Organization, 1974), 3. 21 Michael E. Matson, et al., “Satellite Detection of Urban Heat Islands,” Monthly Weather Review (1978): 1725-1734, 17251727. 22 Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (London: Bradford and Dickens, 1954). 23 Michael Lynch, “The Externalized Retina: Selection and Mathematization in the Visual Documentation of Objects in the Life Sciences,” Human Studies (1988): 201-234. 24 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1995), 16-20.
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