Cultivating Ecologies - Lanzhou New Area, Algae and the Process of Growing Cultures

Cultivating Ecologies Lanzhou New Area, Algae and the process of growing cultures

KADK Institute of Architecture & Technology Architecture and Extreme Environments Otis Sloan Brittain Student No. 150131

Fig 1.

Lanzhou New Area

Lanzhou City

Fig 1. Aerial View of Lanzhou City and Lanzhou New Area (Image from Google Earth. 2016)

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Contents Abstract

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Introduction

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Why Cultivate?

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Starting your culture

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Futures

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Critical Thinking

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Fig 2.

Fig 3.

Fig 2. Interview with Mr and Mrs Chen in their home in Lanzhou New Area, two months before it will be torn down and they are relocated to new housing down the road.

Fig 3. Portable algae filled facade attached to local shop front in Lanzhou.

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Abstract In November 2016, I undertook a month long field trip to the Lanzhou, China, as part of the Architecture and Extreme Environments masters program. I was there in part, to test a device that investigated whether algaes could be integrated within facade systems to absorb pollutants from the air. Over the course of the field trip I cultivated a collection of algae from water sources in across Lanzhou and Lanzhou New Area. Alongside this I mapped Lanzhou and New Lanzhou Area and carried out a series of interviews with locals. The following essay is a reflection on this process, my findings and the ecological thinking texts studied throughout the semester.

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Fig 4.

Fig 5.

Fig 4. October 26th 2012 - Hundreds of trucks and bulldozers line the mountains surrounding the Gansu’s Loess Plateau, marking the ground breaking ceremony of the Lanzhou New Area project. (Imaginechina/Corbis for Huffington Post, 2014) Fig 5. November 24th 2016 - Device algae cultivation begins as I take my first water samples from the Yellow River, Lanzhou.

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Introduction

cultivate

verb: 1. prepare and use land 2. grow or maintain living cells or tissue in culture.

In 2012 the China Pacific Construction Group began flattening 700 mountains in Gansu’s Loess Plateau, 30km north of Lanzhou, to clear space for a new city of one million inhabitants dubbed the Lanzhou New Area (LNA).

Since the 1990s China has undertaken an extensive process of land cultivation, generating new urban ecologies. New cities like LNA are being constructed throughout the country and are often referred to as China’s ‘ghosts cities’. This is part of a national effort to relocate millions of Chinese citizens from rural to urban areas; the latter have seen an increase of 500 million people over the last 30 years and are set to increase by a further 300 million by 2030 (Miller 2012, 7). These new urban areas fuel the country’s economy through the sale of land to developers and their strategic placement create new trade routes like Eurasia’s ‘New Silk Road Economic Belt’, linking China and Europe, along which China has helped fund the building of multiple new cities.

Learning of LNA and China’s efforts to cultivate urban land coincided with my own efforts to cultivate algae cultures for use in my ‘device’, a facade system that uses algae to clean air. In the process of trying to cultivate this species, for a personal environmental agenda, I have begun to see parallels between my undertakings and those the Chinese government have taken in the creation of these ‘new cities’. In essence we are both artificially cultivating environments to increase specific yields, merely on vastly different scales. China’s new cities fall under the first definition of ‘cultivation’, where land is prepared for both inhabitation and profit through vast terra-forming, change of use, new development and the artificial injection of ‘culture’ (see LNA’s Sphinx and Parthenon). My own work falls under the second definition, maintaining and growing algae within a culture. If these two projects are both forms of cultivation, might my efforts in cultivation provide an ecological standpoint with which to critically examine China’s?

I will begin by exploring in further detail the reasons behind China’s land cultivation, focusing on LNA, and go on to discuss the political and economic tools used to implement such radical urban creations. Based on research and my own fieldwork in LNA, I will make comparisons between China’s methods of urban cultivation and algae cultivation. I will go on to speculate on the future of LNA, based on my experiences and socio-economic predictions. I will conclude by reflecting on this process of culture cultivation, both algae and urban, and how China might move towards a more ecological urbanisation.

In this essay I avoid the term ‘Ghost City’ to describe China’s new urban developments. The term is misleading and is broadly adopted by the Western media to describe China’s new urban developments, implying they are already ‘dead’ and economically defunct when, in reality, they are often still in the process of construction, in the process of being occupied or are actually broadly inhabited*. LNA is not a ghost city yet: it is a new city in the process of construction and inhabitation. *(Zhengdong, a new city of 2.5 million inhabitants as well as Changzhou, a new city with 2,500 years of history and around 600,000 inhabitants, are amongst the cities dubbed as ghost cities in 60 minutes, Business Insider, Global Times, and China Youth Daily,)

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Why Cultivate?

Algae are cultivated by extracting a source culture from a lake, pond or stream and adding it to a new medium. The algae then multiplies through autotrophic growth, using light, water and carbon dioxide in combination with other simple substances in the medium such as nitrates and phosphates, to produce complex compounds. Algae are cultivated for numerous reasons, including as food and biofuel; however, my attempts at algae cultivation were for a specific environmental agenda: to capitalise on algaes’ ability to absorb pollutants to help improve indoor air quality. There is also a clear agenda behind China’s land cultivation and the creation of LNA, one implemented by China’s National and Municipal government and driven by market forces.

China is currently in the process of the largest human migration in history. By 2030, it is projected that China will have one billion urbanites and one in eight people on earth will live in a Chinese city (Miller, 2012). This is part of China’s larger aim to eradicate poverty* by 2020 (Xinhua, 2015). Given that between 1981-2010 China lifted 680m people out of poverty, three-quarters of the world’s total, this is highly possible (The Economist, 2013). The LNA project falls under China’s strategy to develop the vast but poor Western Regions, known as the ‘Go West’ campaign. The strategy is to develop existing cities and create new ones through huge infrastructural projects; however, it is unclear whether this is an effort to bridge the huge economic disparity between east and west China (one might assume more basic facilities such as schools, local roads and health facilities if this were the case) or to exploit the resource-rich region, attract more investment from developers and develop China’s new silk road program.

‘One Belt, One Road’ is China’s modern version of the historic silk road trade routes, combining the New Silk Road Economic Belt, an overland trade route linking the east of China and Europe with the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, a naval trade route through the western Pacific and Indian Ocean (Wang 2016). The aim of the project is to create new trade opportunities beyond China’s borders and has manifest itself physically in thousands of miles of pipes, roads, tracks and new urban ecologies – including LNA. New cities are springing up along this new trade route from China through to Kazahkstan, Georgia, Poland and Sri Lanka. In a report for Forbes, titled ‘A Look at 7 New Cities Rising Along the New Silk Road’, author of Ghost Cities Wade Sheppard recounts his visits to these new cities, recalling the same statement he heard repeatedly from those who lived there: ‘X years ago there was nothing here’.

The swiftness and scale of the Chinese government’s urban endeavours is so vast that comparatively the individuals to whom it concerns become microscopic. This is true too of the algae cultivist. In one 500ml of culture, one cannot possibly fathom the millions of individual algae at different stages of development or the thousands of other microscopic organisms that could also be vying for the limited amount of nutrients on offer. The microscope reveals a snapshot of what lies beyond the scope of the naked eye, yet this is just a speck of what is really happening across the entire culture.

The more one magnifies, the greater the complexity within the culture is revealed and the more incomprehensible and yet magnificent that 500ml appears. This is a crossroads in ecological thought surrounding cultivation. One path is straight and clear and takes the cultivist down a more anthroprocentric direction whereby, in an effort to simplify the complexity of what is happening within that 500ml, one puts down the microscope and just focuses on doing whatever it takes to turn that liquid green. The direction of the other, post-humanist path is less clear and the objective not so obvious; however, one trusts that it will lead somewhere. Here the cultivist aims to support life within the culture to the best of their ability whilst also seeing their role as an actor within that culture, not the master of it. In this the cultivist is not relinquishing control entirely and is still trying to persuade the culture towards a certain direction, but they also can enjoy the unexpected ecologies that might emerge within. This is one of the great pleasures of the cultivating algae, to peer into the fluid and witness some microscopic intruder dart across the view finder.

One can assume that China’s urban planners have already set foot on the first path or even widened it into a six lane highway in order to meet its socio-political targets. On paper, LNA and many other of China’s new cities have all the hallmarks of a modern city, yet on the ground it feels as though there is little platform for citizens to take ownership of their city and for these unexpected ecologies that make cities rich and dynamic to emerge. In his essay titled Turbulent Prospects: Sustaining Urbanism on a Dynamic Planet, human geographer Nigel Clark embraces these unscripted encounters as characteristic of metropolitan life and that urban planners must admit the unprogrammable into the program (Clark, 2003, 192). *poverty level defined as those living on $1.25 or less per day

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“All the land belongs to the government. The government has the right to clear the land. Take it over, and then to either build stuff on it themselves, sell it to a developer or use it as collateral for loans. They do all three, and they’ve made a killing doing it.” - Anne Stevenson-Yang (Schmitz, 2013).

Under Chinese property law, all land is owned by the government and is classed under two categories, rural and urban land. Those who want to build upon the land can buy leases from the government granting them usage rights for selected periods of time. Those who own property in China own the building but not the land that it sits on. This way of leaseholding property is a relatively new phenomenon in China, emerging in the late 1980’s. Prior to that, there was no private property under the Communist party (1945-1978). This kind of long term leaseholding with clearly established methods of renewal is commonplace in many countries. However, in the case of China, the modes of renewal are still to be clearly defined. Mentally this results in a general sense of anxiety regarding ownership and a lack of security for the future and physically in an unwillingness to invest in quality, long term architecture. This is evident in the average lifespan of buildings in China, typically lasting between 21 and 35 years. This is approximately three times less than in the USA and six times less than the UK (Wade, 2015).

Local governments are forced to sell land for development by the central government’s current fiscal system.

‘Municipalities in China must fund 80 percent of their expenses while only receiving 40 percent of the country’s tax revenue’ (Wade, 2015, p.32). In order to fill this deficit, municipal governments buy the leases for rural land at a low price from rural inhabitants, then reclassify the land as urban and sell it to developers at a profit. The sale of land is extremely profitable and makes up 40 percent of the money made by municipal government. A survey of over 1700 farmers across 17 Provinces in China, carried out by Landesa in 2011, found that local government could sell land at up to 40 times more per acre than it was bought for and on average paid $17,850 per acre and then resold for $740,000 per acre. (Landesa) To the naked eye of the cultivist, environment, organism and their by-products are indistinguishable in the mix of the culture and a sustainable culture is one where all off these are in balance. This is a fascinating starting point from which to plan a city, challenging the Cartesian separation where human and non-human, produce, waste and environment are so mixed up together into this monistic universe where they cannot be separated. As Timothy Morton states in ‘That Thing Over There’, be it environment, resources or waste is That Thing That Surrounds and Sustains Us (Morton, 2007, p1). I would go further to suggest that these factors also blur into the physical and mental well-being of organisms that exist within these cultures and in turn that affects how these organisms treat their environment. This maybe not be the concern of the algae cultivist but it should be the concern of those designing and buildings cities. I fear China’s current urban cultivation prioritises market forces above the overall mix of the culture, evident in the poor quality of the built environment emerging in its new cities and the psychological effects this lack of security for the future has on its citizens.

Situated in a valley, sandwiched between two mountain ranges, Lanzhou city has reached the limits of its development.

Since the Lanzhou Municipal Government realised this, drastic attempts have been made to cultivate more sellable land from the surrounding mountainous wasteland. In 1997, government officials and developers began the Daqingshan Project, which involved the removal of a 1,689m high peak. The project was marketed to the public as a means to improve air quality within the basin city through creating a clearance for fresh air to enter. After half the mountain was removed, the project went bankrupt. Further attempts have been made to manufacture land in Lanzhou, including levelling another 41 square kilometres of mountains and filling in tributaries of the Yellow River, which as a result turned their drinking water saline, necessitating the removal of the infill.

Finally, in 2012, Lanzhou began cultivating the 800 square kilometres of Lanzhou New Area, in the Loess Plateau 30 kilometres north of the existing Lanzhou city, at a cost of $3.65 billion. In order to level this area over 700 mountains were removed, thousands of tonnes of millennia old deposition and erosion were loaded into trucks and in a remarkably pragmatic move, deposited in valleys to create even more development land. This kind of terra-forming is unprecedented and the long term environmental ramifications are unknown; however, this seems like a distinctly Copernican action, asserting human mastery over nature and environment. There is an old Chinese fable whose title translated is ‘The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains’, in which the ‘foolish old man Yu Gong’ attempts to remove two mountains that obstruct his house. His sheer persistence and belief that his family will continue his work after he is dead is rewarded by the gods, who split the mountains for him. This fable occurs in speeches by Chairman Mao and is one of the stories in Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ and was memorized by school children during the Cultural Revolution. The lessons taught regarding the virtues of willpower seems to have trickled down into the mindset of the Chinese people and their construction industry which, faced with the seemingly impossible task of moving mountains, have done just that through uncompromising perseverance. There are merits to this kind of unwavering determinism, namely, it gets stuff done; however, I also believe can also lead to blinkered decision-making in which multiple perspectives are disregarded in order to reach a master vision. When walking LNA one starts to see parallels between the environment one cultivates for algae and this new city. There is a sterile artificiality formed by the removal of all natural landscape within the city akin to the inside of a beaker. There are all the ‘nutrients’ for urban life like housing, shops and restaurants but they feel strange and out of place and scale and there is not yet enough life to make use of them. Inhabitants are waiting for the city to filled but are dependent on actions from the government for this to happen.

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Fig 6.

Fig 7.

Fig 6. A construction worker drives through LNA’s new 109 building university campus which will one day house the majority of institutions currently in Lanzhou as part of the government’s plan to implant life into the city.

Fig 7. Algae growth accelerated by supplying the cultures with additional air, nutrients, light and heat.

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Starting Your Culture

In biology the first phase of cultivation is known as the ‘lag phase’ in which the algae must become accustomed to its new conditions before it can multiply. The next ‘log phase’, is characterised by cell doubling where the number of new bacteria appearing per unit time is proportional to the present population. It is the task of the cultivist to control these conditions to reach the ‘log phase’. LNA is in a lag phase of its own known as the new city paradox: few people want to move to a city with no established commercial enterprises whilst few commercial enterprises want to establish themselves in a city with no people. However, unlike many other countries, China has the power to move both its people and its enterprises to vitalize its new developments.

Lanzhou municipal government have already implemented a series of methods to propagate life in its new city. The first was the relocation of the existing residents of the Loess Plateau. Prior to the creation of LNA, thirty thousand people lived in the area, including in the village of Chenjialiang. Demolition and relocation of rural towns by the government is common throughout China. A survey conducted by Landesa found ‘43% of villages across China have had land taken from them within the past decade and upwards of 4 million rural Chinese were being relocated each year. Of the relocated, only 20 per cent received an urban hukou (Wade, 2015). Hukou is a governmental registration system required by law in China, where citizens are given a status depending on where they live. Citizens with urban hukou are entitled to greater privileges than those with rural hukou and this classification is often criticised as a form of caste system that widens the gap between social strata.

The Chinese government use urban hukou as an incentive to relocate rural citizens. In the case of Chenjialiang village, inhabitants were given urban hukou and promised a new home within LNA. In a series of interviews for the Telegraph

by Tom Phillips, there were mixed feelings from the villagers of Chenjialiang who had had their homes demolished and been relocated. Some welcomed the new landscape and improvements to infrastructure, whilst others criticised the heavy handed approach of the government.

In order to draw more people into LNA, the government is not only manufacturing land and buildings, but also an economy. The most notable agent is the creation of the Free Trade Zone (FTZ) within LNA’s proposed Free Trade Park, allowing significant tax breaks on the import and export of goods and fiscal incentives to businesses located in that area. Last year, on a field trip to Manaus, I witnessed first hand the power of the FTZ to artificially sustain one of Brazil’s major manufacturing cities within the middle of the Amazon jungle. It appears now that the same tool is being used as the seed to grow economies within China’s new urban ecologies, including LNA, Horgos, Tianjin, Nanhui New City, among others (Zhu Ningzhu, 2014).

In addition to this, China has huge government subsidies at its disposal to commercial entities that are looking to take root in their new developments. In Kangbashi, a new city by Ordos, restaurants were given commercial space free of charge to draw new residents to the city, including McDonalds (Wade, 2015). As many businesses in China are also state owned, a key strategy is to simply relocate these entities to the new areas, including government offices, schools hospitals. In LNA construction is underway of a campus of 109 buildings, which the government plans to move all of Lanzhou’s current universities to. Developers and government use this mobile consumer base to create economies and from this attract other speculative residents.

The quantity of physical parameters China can manipulate to start its new cultures is worryingly impressive. One observation I made regarding algae cultivation and control is that greater control is needed to produce high yielding monocultures and the more ‘mono’ the culture the more predictable it is. On the other hand, less control results it more biodiverse cultures that can still be very high yielding but are much less predictable. Arguably the hardest culture to artificially cultivate is a balanced biodiverse one, where one species does not eventually become dominant. My concern is the extent to which China controls the development of its new cities will lead to a form of urban monoculture. Mies and Shiva argue that an attitude of mastery and conquest of nature is an expression of capitalist patriarchy and is in direct opposition of diversity of living things and cultures (Mies and Shiva, 1993). This is true too of our urban ecologies.

Is this kind of new city urban cultivation without mastery possible? If China is to continue to create new cities from scratch then what might a more post-humanist approach to urban cultivation look like? In The Posthuman, philospher Rosi Braidotti puts forward a ‘critical posthumanism’ that promotes critically creative solutions to the complexity of our times. One that sees both the inter-mixing of modern culture and advancement in science and technology as sources for alternative solutions that challenge sedimented habits, leftover hangovers of Humanism (Braidotti, 2013, p54).

Instead of collaging pseudo Euro-American ideas of urban planning, might China see the unique challenge of creating ‘new cities’ as a chance to become global trail blazers of an ecological and posthumanist approach to urbanism.

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Futures Most algae grows exponentially through the process of cell division and it is in the early stages of cultivation that the culture is most at risk of collapse as the algae must adapt to its new conditions before it can divide and multiple. In biology this is known as the lag phase. LNA is not a ghost city yet but does appear in its own kind of lag phase. This high initial risk of failure has led to broad lampooning of LNA by the western media as a ‘ghost city’. This concern is justified, as China’s current economic model of land selling promotes excessive over development suggesting that China is facing a housing oversupply crisis, with urban vacancy estimated at 22 per cent by Credit Suisse. This over-abundance of housing could leave large stretches of LNA empty for years to come. In addition, there is also the risk the China’s that property bubble is about to burst, bankrupting developers and halting construction. On the other hand, there is a small chance that LNA becomes such a financial success that is will be less of a vibrant city and more a means to hold cash in empty properties. There is also the question of patronage: with government officials in China often changing in fiveyear cycles; will LNA be considered the pet project of the previous government and lose interest to those now in power?

At the risk of sounding like an unsatisfying end to a film, only time will tell.

There are, however, a few promising signs for LNA. The first being that a large quantity of people already live there, estimated at around 150,000 with 40,000 construction workers. This is far from Lanzhou municipality’s 2020 estimate of 600,000 people but it is certainly not empty. In addition to this, construction is underway of a metro line linking LNA with Lanzhou City. Urbanites tend to conceptualise their city around its metro system, where it is hard to tell whether areas are named after their closest station or vice versa (a kind of urban chicken and egg scenario), and those places without metro stations become fragments orbiting the ‘proper’ city. My prediction is that the Chinese government will take the approach of the fabled Yu Gong and through sheer will power and perseverance, force LNA into a kind of artificially healthy urban ecology.

Another interesting question regarding the future of LNA and, in fact, the whole of China, is whether its economy will be able to sustain itself without cultivating new urban land. By 2060 will China have amassed such a large amount of urban land that it can sustain itself on expiring leaseholds rather than making new landscapes? Will China’s other emergent economies be enough to support the country? Until then China needs to re-examine how it is cultivating urban land as it runs the risk of covering the country in white elephants when it could be creating modern, ecological cities for its new urbanites.

I believe LNA’s future lies in the hands of its inhabitants. In her book, vibrant matter, ecologist Jane Bennett discusses how tiny actants, such as worms, or electricity, or fats or indeed algae create what Darwin calls ‘’small agencies’, that when in the right confederation with physical and physiological bodies, can make big things happen’ (p94, Bennet, 2010). Algae and cyanobacteria for example, are largely single celled organisms that collectively produce 70 to 80 percent of the oxygen in our atmosphere (Walker, 1980). Algae have no locus, no masterplan or general objectives yet through what Darwin would describe as their ‘accumulated effect’ they unconsciously support all life on earth.

Algae demonstrate the power of the collective. The difference between the ‘small agency’ of algae and agency of China’s new urban inhabitants, according to Jacques Rancierce, is the distinctly human realm of the public and political action. I believe the Chinese government sees ‘accumulated effect’ as a threat their control and are cultivating urban environments that deter the collective agency of their inhabitants, such as public squares so big they prevent public interactions and internet restrictions that block virtual gathering, Nevertheless, I believe that those most used to such restrictions are the best at circumventing them and am hopeful that the current and future inhabitants of LNA have the power to collectively vitalise it.

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Conclusion When cultivating algae and other organisms, these exist with a culture, a complex mix of nutrients, fluids and others. As Morton puts it, there is no ‘away’, no ‘here’ and ‘there’ in the culture; the waste of the organisms floats in the same fluid as the nutrients (Morton, 2010, p31). Once mixed, the organisms, their by-products, landscape and culture become indistinguishable to the naked eye. In growing the algae one is not cultivating the algae but the whole culture within the container. The boundaries between the organism, environment and resources within the culture cease to exist, creating only one homogeneous fluid. In her book the Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway deploys the cyborg, a being without conventional frame of reference, to argue that the blurring of these rigid boundaries would lead to fairer and more cooperative societies. The microscope allows a shift of perspective and reveals the infinitely complex and fluid ecology that lives within.

This also provides a lens to examine urban ecologies. Cities are not just accumulations of buildings, spaces and forms: they are unfathomably rich and diverse mixtures in which environment, citizen (human and non-human), resources, waste, are all bound together in fluid dialogue. The mix is beautiful but one must also traverse multiple scales of perception in order to support and enjoy the unexpected surprises great cities propagate within. Therefore, perhaps the master cultivist is no master at all, but simply supports a culture that can cultivate itself.

China’s current model of urban cultivation, fuelled by the market economy, has been implemented from a kind of drone’s eye view, as a means to maintain a grasp on these new cities. The result, a copy-paste urbanisation that was spread across China, where natural landscapes are erased and replaced by new cities that are indistinguishable from each other, inhabited by humans and sinanthropes that are lost in the scale of these new developments.

Rosi Braidotti emphasises how we are fortunate to live in a time where science and technology allows both a multiplexity of perspectives to develop an analytic, post-human understanding of the web of relationships we are part of, but also to test and create agents that can further sustain and enhance it. If China has the resources to flatten entire mountainscapes in the name of urbanisation, then it also has the resources to develop means of ecological, post-human urban cultivation, designed from heterogeneous perspectives at different scales. Morten, describes this standpoint as ‘impossible’ but essential to ecological thought and to reach it ‘involves an act of rational self-reflection independent of graven images’. Whether LNA will process into a ‘log phase’ of its own is unknown. However, what is certain is that new urban land will continue to be cultivated in order for China’s economy to sustain itself. I urge China reconsider its role as cultivist. Rather than continuing the delete-copy-paste approach to urbanism, they should seize the opportunity to create new cities that facilitate the collective agency of their inhabitants so that when viewed under the microscope these new cities reveal an diverse, unpredictable and fluid ecology within.

Fig 8.

Fig 9.

Fig 8. Spirulina Algae Culture. (Photograph by Otis Sloan Brittain) Fig 9. Spirulina Algae Culture magnified by 40x (Photograph by Otis Sloan Brittain)

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Xinhua. “China To Lift 10 Mln Rural People Out Of Poverty In 2016 - Global Times”. 2016. Globaltimes.Cn. http://www. globaltimes.cn/content/960463.shtml.

Image Bibliography

Cover Image Sabrié, G. In Lanzhou New Area, recently completed apartment buildings await residents. 2016. Washington Post.

Washingdon. www.washingtonpost.com Cover Image E.R. Degginger, Alamy. A colony of Volvox, magnified 50 times. 2014. National Geographic. www.nationalgeographic.com Fig 1. Aerial photo of Lanzhou and Lanzhou New Area. Source: ‘Lanzhou. 36.0611° N, 103.8343° E. 2016. Google Earth.

Fig 4. Imaginechina/Corbis. Construction machines are lined up on a mountain during the ground-breaking ceremony for the Lanzhou New Area project in Lanzhou city, northwest China’ Gansu province. 2012. Huffington Post. www.huffingtonpost. com All other images by author. 2016.

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