- Lawrence Abu Hamdan
- Babak Afrassiabi
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- Memo Akten
- Jamie Allen
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- Sammy Baloji
- Subhankar Banerjee
- On Barak
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- Etienne Benson
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- Zachary Caple
- Ele Carpenter
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- Amy Cimini
- Claire Colebrook
- Flavio D'Abramo
- Ana Dana Beroš
- Pietro Daniel Omodeo
- Rana Dasgupta
- Filip De Boeck
- Seth Denizen
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- Design Earth
- Keller Easterling
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- Technosphere Editorial
- Sasha Engelmann
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- Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann
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Resilience as Infrastructure
In the current design of large-scale infrastructural projects, the planetary future hinges on a new norm: perpetual prototyping and demoing. Media historian and social scientist Orit Halpern uses three case studies focused on urban development and extraction infrastructures to demonstrate how the logic of resilience operates against solution building and toward a precarious tolerance designed to retain normalcy through disaster.
What does posing questions about planetary futures and technology in terms of infrastructural discourses produce?
To begin thinking this question, I want to contemplate a number of scenes that set the stage, so to speak, for thinking about infrastructural futures and imaginaries.
The first set of images is the site of mass extraction of boulders and sand from the riverbeds at the base of the Himalayas in Siliguri in West Bengal. In March‒April 2016, I visited there ‒ the Haldia Port and Kolkata ‒ with a team as part of the Logistical Worlds research group. Siliguri is located on the borders between Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and China. The Asian Development Bank has invested large sums in the area developing a new “silk” road, part of a broader Asian Highway plan to increase and improve the road infrastructure throughout South and Southeast Asia, which will bridge and link West Bengal and Tibet. While the economic goals of such an endeavor are unclear, the political objective of China holding Tibet is an unspoken but largely accepted truth. The road, however, demands massive financing and, of course, like all roads ‒ concrete.
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Concrete demands sand particles that are clean, smooth, hard, and without clay or chemical coatings or contamination for the mixture. Sand that has been worn by water, usually dredged from a river or seabed. The most striking element of this environment, for me, was witnessing the intense forms of environmental and human devastation wrought through the endless efforts to get sand from riverbeds. In order to fuel the purported construction boom within the locality. The boom is being created by the new Asian Highway projects that will tie these regions of India to Chinese-held Tibet, Bangladesh, Nepal, and more broadly the wide-scale real-estate speculation currently happening throughout India. The extraction of sand and boulders from riverbeds in the interest of real-estate speculation amounts to a massive geo-engineering project, whose scale is yet to be recognized even. The result of this speculative extraction is that the rivers are sinking into the earth and drying up, thus effectively destroying a major source of water for much of India. The full ecological and human consequences are playing themselves out in what is a large-scale experiment in destruction, with no clear endpoint. Phenomenologically, this situation manifests itself through a level of particulate dust that makes breathing difficult and the dust is omnipresent on one’s body and belongings at all times when in Siliguri.
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Some 600 kilometers to the south lies the great city of Kolkata. One of the largest and densest settlements on Earth, it has long been at the heart of global trade and commerce, and central in the development of capitalism.
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District 5, also called Rajarat, is one of the newer areas of the city. It was supposed to be designated a “smart” city by the government. It never achieved this designation, but it has been developed in the interest of producing a space for high-tech corporations and luxury housing for the envisioned workers of these industries. While the high-tech industry never moved to Kolkata, and most of the existing firms are largely secondary-service providers to the central operations located in Bangalore and elsewhere, the construction continues.
The space is crisscrossed by endless highway developments and flyovers; one of which actually collapsed during our visit in Kolkata on March 31, 2016, killing many. This is the result of overly rapid construction, corruption, and the velocity of speculation and derivation in the real-estate sector. The space feels monumental, and empty. In fact many of these developments are empty, some not even connected to the information and bandwidth infrastructures that is their purported raison d’être. Much of the housing, here as across India, has never been, and might never be, occupied, having been bought solely for speculation by foreign investors.
Reportedly, most such construction is also heavily leveraged: the debt and cost to both the state and the developers having long ago been credit‒debt swapped by large investment banks located in the global financial hubs, long before the ground was even broken for construction. While the function of these spaces in terms of life is unclear, the profit has long ago already been made in the financial centers of Mumbai and even more likely in New York, Frankfurt, and London. At the same time, as a result of the complex assembly of histories of caste, colonialism, and capitalism, these constructions have cost some 30,000 people their homes. Claimed through the right of eminent domain, the previous residents of these spaces are often dispossessed with little remuneration, since most of the lower caste inhabitants never owned the land, even if they had lived on and farmed it, over decades. As a result, these people end up occupying the ubiquitous shantytowns of Kolkata, and seeking transitory labor in locations such as the port, where often they supply labor usually carried out by automated machines in other regions, under enormous duress. Living in areas lacking any public health infrastructure ‒ without sanitation and often not connected to the electrical grid ‒ these individuals literally are being worked to death and living under severe conditions. The cost in morbidity and mortality is enormous: according to the union representatives to whom we spoke, dock workers, for example, retire by their late thirties, their bodies incapable of delivering at the speed necessary for unloading and loading the ships.
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Mirroring these scenes of graphic anthropocenic violence, there is another series of scenes that I wish to hold together also and to consider this in relation to my opening scene. These are images of other marketing and technological logistical endeavors that share in the positive speculation on precariousness and environmental destruction. For example, one of the more astounding recent demonstrations of hopeful speculation made upon New York City’s future devastation. The 2011 Rising Currents exhibition at MOMA, ironically occurred moments before the real Hurricane Sandy hit. The most popular exhibition is one that is now funded to the tune of 60 million dollars off Staten Island: the growing of oysters as living barriers or reefs, life itself recruited for infrastructure. The very recruitment of life itself, our and other organisms’ bodies for and as infrastructure, poses historically situated questions about the relationship between this new form of managing in the interest of making “resilient” Manhattan through the use of “living” infrastructures. The irony of this scene is that the oysters are slowly dying off, the result of being used under such polluted and inhospitable environments, and the rising acidity and temperature of the water. They are dying due to their use. A state perhaps that goes beyond extraction and even subsumption. This death, however, is beautifully rendered in a way that embraces this terminal destruction pleasurable for us, and which recruits into this embrace the destruction, basically, of New York City.
A second project for surviving tidal surges repeats this theme of pleasurable destruction.Video "New Aqueous City" by nARCHITECS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7folAgxX-g).
As the waters rise in the renderings of the prototype buildings, this terrestrial change offers both new real-estate and agricultural opportunities. When finally the big storm hits, as we see in the video, individuals calmly gather up on the roof of what appears to be a fancy condominium complex, prepared for evacuation by helicopter. As the helicopter swoops down, all is beautiful, the light is rosy, there is no wind or rain. It looks pleasant. The reality of evacuation in the aftermath of events such as Hurricane Katrina, and the latest disaster of Hurricane Matthew in Haiti, of course, are a far cry from these sleek and sanitary animations. These images resemble nothing like those of other devastated environments. But one cannot help but wonder who is being left behind, and who is not being saved by this very expensive mode of rescue.NArchitects (http://narchitects.com/work/moma-rising-currents/), (accessed January 13, 2017).
And such logistical and infrastructural “nightmares” to cite Ned Rossiter, propagate. There are many examples, such as the shiny glean of Norman Foster’s latest large-scale development in the Middle East in Masdar, Abu Dhabi. Initially conceived as a Zero-Carbon Growth Development, it has largely failed as a large residential community, but succeeded in becoming an engineering school linked to MIT, and a venture capital fund for investment in energy technologies. Let’s take another example: the “super trees” in Singapore’s Gardens By the Bay ‒ globally displayed in the Systems, applications and products (SAP) advertising that populates airports globally. These “trees” are designed to photosynthesize energy for a garden that at least in theory is a repository for biodiversity. But as anthropologist, Natasha Myers notes, in reality, most of the plants hoarded in Singapore cannot even live within that environment.Natasha Myers, “Edenic Apocalypse Meets the Garden against Eden: Building and Breaking the Infrastructures of Garden Enclosures,” Infrastructure, Environment and Life in the Anthropocene, no. 31 (2015), papers delivered at the Research Hub at Concordia University, Montreal. Thus while these trees are providing energy, their other main function is actually venting heat given off from the massive cooling systems of the underground arboretums. These trees provide, however, a gleaming and luminescent way to sense technical progress and circulate risks (if we consider that SAP provides software for supply-chain management) in the face of environmental devastation. I could continue, since such examples of beautifully adorned negative futures proliferate.
All these architectures of pleasurable destruction are parametrically rendered to smooth away the capacity to encounter the impossibility of witnessing disaster and move us away from encounters with the radical difference of the Earth or the environment, and even more critically from encountering the other beings that are suffering to make this pleasant space of capital possible. I argue that these spaces are the doppelgangers of the logistical territories that shape life in West Bengal. They are the luxury exemplars of a world assumed to be unsustainable, and precarious to life, but still manageable and profitable through particular forms of high-technology, logistical management, in particular through computational mediums, which intervene and re-organize the very fabric of time and space that comprise our contemporary lived ecologies.
These scenes open up a series of questions as to how speculation and computation are joined together, how they operate under conditions of environmental and human catastrophe. I propose that these images are the traces of a new form of speculative hope, which is indoctrinated within an emergent paradigm of what I want to label “resilient hope.” Resilient hope links the high-technology computational infrastructures of ubiquitous computing and “smartness,” data centers, and finance, to the far more “concrete,” if we will, spaces of locations such as West Bengal.
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Resilience as Infrastructure
In that this is a short and speculative piece, I want to focus on how resilience and technology marry to create this form of preemptive infrastructural governance that naturalizes precariousness, sacrifice, and violence as necessary economic values rather than political options.
Resilience is a particular logic: it is not about a future that is better, but rather about an ecology that can absorb constant shocks while maintaining its functionality and organization. It is a state, following the work of Bruce Braun, of permanent management without ideas of progress, change, or improvement. The irony is that this hopeless situation is actually met with hopeful speculation, usually through new forms of temporal management in finance and technology. Thus, real-estate speculation can continue to occur on new silk roads, and on never-to-be-occupied “smart” or at least high-end developments, even as the Himalayan flood planes are destroyed because the end never arrives, but is simply delayed, or more appropriately derived.
Resilience is a complicated term, for it plays important, but differing, roles in multiple fields, such as in the engineering and material sciences (since the nineteenth century, the “modulus of resilience” has served as a measure of the capacity of materials such as woods and metals to return to their original shapes after an impact), as well as in ecology, psychology, sociology, geography, business literature, and public policymaking (in which fields resilience names ways in which ecosystems, individuals, communities, corporations, and states, respectively, respond to stress, adversity, and rapid change). The understanding of resilience most crucial to large-scale planning projects and contemporary discourse was first forged in the field of ecology in the 1970s, and especially in the work of Crawford Stanley Holling, who established a key distinction between “stability” and “resilience.”C. S. Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecological Systems, vol. 4 (1973), pp. 1‒23. Working from a systems perspective, and interested in the question of how humans could best manage elements of ecosystems that were of commercial interest (e.g. salmon, wood, etc.), Holling developed the concept of resilience in order to contest the premise that ecosystems were most healthy when they returned quickly to a state of equilibrium after being disturbed. Holling called the return to a state of equilibrium “stability,” but argued that stable systems were often unable to compensate for significant and swift environmental changes. As Holling put it, the “stability view [of ecosystem management] emphasizes the equilibrium, the maintenance of a predictable world, and the harvesting of nature’s excess production with as little fluctuation as possible,” yet this very approach that “assures a stable maximum sustained yield of a renewable resource might so change [the conditions of that system] […] that a chance and rare event that previously could be absorbed can trigger a sudden dramatic change and loss of structural integrity of the system.”Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” p. 21. Resilience, by contrast, denoted for Holling the capacity of a system to change in periods of intense external perturbation, and thus persist over long time periods. The concept of resilience thus enabled a management approach to ecosystems that “would emphasize the need to keep options open, the need to view events in a regional rather than a local context, and the need to emphasize heterogeneity.”Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” p. 21. Resilience is in this sense, linked conceptually to concepts of crisis and states of exception; that is, resilience is a virtue when the latter are assumed either to be quasi-constant or the most relevant states. Holling also underscored that the movement from valuing stability to valuing resilience depended upon an epistemological shift: “Flowing from this would be not the presumption of sufficient knowledge, but the recognition of our ignorance: not the assumption that future events are expected, but that they will be unexpected.”Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” p. 21.
Contemporary planning, finance, and design practice abstracts the concept of resilience from a systems approach to ecology and turns it into all-purpose epistemology and value, positing resilience as a more general strategy for managing uncertainty without endpoint, and encouraging the premise that our world is indeed so complex that unexpected events are the norm. Resilience also functions in the landscape of planning and management to collapse the distinction between emergence (which would simply denote something new) and emergency (which denotes something new that threatens), and does so in the interest of producing a world where any change can be technically managed and assimilated, while maintaining the ongoing survival of the system, rather than specifically the species.
Nowhere is this better exemplified then in the opening example of New York City, whose current slogan after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 is “Fix and Fortify.” A more clear statement about the stance of urban planners to trauma could, perhaps not be found. It is very clear that planning must simply assume and assimilate future, unknowable shocks, and that these shocks may come in any form ‒ security, economic, environmental. Furthermore, in this case, the destruction of New York City becomes an opportunity for innovation, design thinking, and real-estate speculation. The discourse is abundantly positive. As the catalogue to the show opens:
MoMA and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center joined forces to address one of the most urgent challenges facing the nation’s largest city: sea-level rise resulting from global climate change. Though the national debate on infrastructure is currently focused on “shovel-ready” projects that will stimulate the economy, we now have an important opportunity to foster new research and fresh thinking about the use of New York City’s harbor and coastline. As in past economic recessions, construction has slowed dramatically in New York, and much of the city’s remarkable pool of architectural talent is available to focus on innovation.
This rather stunning statement turns economic tragedy, the unemployment of most architects, and the imagined coming environmental apocalypse into an opportunity for speculation ‒ technically, aesthetically, and economically. A literal transformation of emergency into emergence; a model for managing perceived and real risks to the population and infrastructure of the territory, not through “solving” the problem, but through absorbing shocks, and modulating the way the environment is managed.
Such logics pervade the landscape of large logistical and computational environments. Let’s return to the initial example of the imagined, never-constructed, high-bandwidth “smart city” of Rajarat. The development of such so-called smart cities follows, on the one hand the logic of software development. That is, every present state of the smart city is understood as a demo or prototype of a future smart city; every operation in the smart city is understood in terms or testing and updating. As a consequence, there is never a finished product, but rather infinitely replicable, yet always preliminary versions of these cities around the globe. Engineers we interviewed at the site openly spoke of it as an “experiment” and as a “test,” admitting the system did not work, but could be improved in the next instantiation elsewhere in the world. This idea of the infrastructure as a “demo” avoids any actual questions as to whether there is an impact to this construction on the planet, or labor, or its inhabitants, and opens the door to assimilate any difficulty or challenge into the next version.
The concept of resilience, here, is married to a concept of a future that is always a version, perhaps a derivative replica, of another moment. This is a form of time where difference is not historical or progressive, but repetitive in practice (the same method is repeated again and again) while producing constantly differing territories. This is a self-referential difference, only measured or understood in relation to the many other versions of smart cities, all of which are built by the same corporate and national assemblages.
RESILIENCE AND DERIVATION
This design logic of repetitive demoing accompanied by the aestheticization of sacrifice facilitates the management and negotiation of risks through derivation (from an imagined origin) in a manner that avoids ever having to finally discover the impact of respective events ‒ whether weather, economic, or security ‒ on the world. Every version, demo, or prototype allows us to commence with failing to encounter the planet, or the violences of security, by labeling it “a never truly completed effort” from which the next version may be derived. What is true of design is mirrored in finance. As Melinda Cooper has noted in discussing weather futures, contemporary markets have now produced derivatives that are literally producing value from betting on adverse and unpredictable events in relation to one another not as discrete occurrences with lived impacts. As she notes:
As a futures methodology, scenario planning is designed to foster decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Its focus is not risk as such, but rather the radical uncertainty of unknowable contingencies –events for which it is impossible to assign a probability distribution on the basis of past frequencies […] In the process, it is the very relationship between the measurable ‘substance’ of the commodity – its stored value –and the event-related nature of price that is reworked: where traditional derivatives contracts traded in the future prices of commodities, financial derivatives trade in futures of futures, turning promise itself into the means and ends of accumulation.Melinda Cooper, “Turbulent Worlds: Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis,” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 27, nos 2‒3 (2010), pp. 167‒90; 173‒78.
Time, here, becomes not a relationship to the spatial circulation of goods, labor, and commodity, but a thing in itself, a non-historical, but also non-geological or environmental time. Time as a pure ecology of self-reference. Such understandings of time, of course, demand that we ask: What is the relationship between derivation and extraction? And provokes new practices most significantly around measurement, since no longer is time = money, but money derives from the time = time. The form of time, here, is speculative not predictive. This logic takes its built form in engineering and design through the production of the testbed, demo, or prototype, which is a form of speculation on a future, without prediction; a practice invoked in many places, as for example through the prototypes and design demos that plan and re-perform, seemingly without consequence, the destruction of New York City.
Another way to think about how resilience and prototyping or demoing is linked is through distinguishing between risk and uncertainty. If the Cold War was about nuclear testing and simulation as a means to avoid the unthinkable, but nonetheless predictable, nuclear war ‒ now the formula has now been changed.It is important to recognize that there are also alternative histories of temporality and control within computing coming from cybernetics. In the work on organizations and economics from figures such as Herbert Simon, and in the work on neural nets coming from the heritage of Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, ideas of “Fuzzy” problems and logic were prevalent, and preemption, not prediction, was a dominant theme. These influences went on to be very important and influential in engineering and financial culture, particularly through the figure of Nicholas Negroponte and through architectural collectives such as Archigram and the Metabolists. For more information see: Orit Halpern, “Cybernetic Rationality,” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, vol. 15, no. 2 (2014), pp. 1‒16; Judy L. Klein et al., How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013. This distinction is best summated in the separation between risk and uncertainty first laid out in the 1920s by the economist Frank Knight. According to Knight, uncertainty, unlike risk, has no clearly defined endpoints or values.Frank Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, Profit. Boston: Schaffner and Marx Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1921 (http://www.econlib.org/library/Knight/knRUP.html.web). It offers no clear-cut terminal events. In this case, the test no longer serves as a simulation of life. Rather, the test-bed makes human life itself an experiment for technological futures. This “uncertainty” embeds itself in our technologies ‒ of both architecture and finance. Thus, in financial markets, we continually “swap,” “derive,” and “leverage,” never fully accounting for risks in the hope that circulation will defer any need actually to represent risk, and in infrastructure, engineering, and computing, we do the same.
As future risk transforms into uncertainty, high-tech, particularly “smart” and “ubiquitous” computing infrastructures, become the language and the practice by which to imagine our future. Instead of looking for utopian answers to our questions regarding the future, we focus on quantitative and algorithmic methods, on logistics, on how to move things, and not where they end up or the measurement of the impacts of these actions. Resilience, now married to the infrastructures of ubiquitous computing and logistics, becomes the dominant method for engaging with possible urban (but also more sui generis infrastructures of transport, energy grids, financial systems. etc.) collapse. At the same time, terms like “smartness” become our new catchphrase for an emerging form of technical rationality whose major goal is management of an uncertain future, through a constant deferral of future results or evaluation, through a continuous mode of self-referential data collection without endpoint, and the construction of forms of financial instrumentation and accounting that no longer engage, or even need to engage with, alienate, or translate, extraction from history, geology, or life.
One of the key (and troubling) consequences of these two operations that now shape and form many logistical territories ‒ the practice of demoing, prototyping, and versioning and the imaginary and discourse of resilience ‒ is to obscure differences in kinds of catastrophes. While every crisis event ‒ for example, the 2008 subprime mortgage collapse or the Tohoku earthquake of 2011 ‒ different, within the demo-logic that underwrites the production of smart and resilient cities, supply chains, and infrastructures, these differences can be subsumed under the general concept of ongoing crisis without clear event structure. That is, whether threatened by terrorism, subprime mortgages, energy shortages, or hurricanes, smartness always responds in essentially the same way (and this because the demo is a form of temporal management that through its very practices and discourses evacuates any historical and contextual specificity of the catastrophe). It is precisely this evacuation of differences, temporalities, and societal structures that most concerns me in confronting the extraordinary rise of ubiquitous computing and high-tech infrastructures as solutions to political, social, environmental, and historical problems confronting urban design and planning, and engines for producing new forms of territory and governance. This logic also prompts us to ask about the possible alternatives.
Our challenge, then, is fundamentally to transform the current resilient hopes of deferring negative futures through the practices of demoing, which mirrors the models of software development, to another mode. This demands that we begin to examine the social movements, construction projects, and many efforts in art, design, the humanities science, and politics, which have challenged the positive embrace of end times, and fought to reintroduce other forms of time, and life, into space. When concrete first emerged as an ideal material in architecture and in art, it was in the interest of producing another world, one that was not yet here. Today, we face another challenge ‒ one of imagining another world while recognizing the tragedy that already has, and is still, occurring to most of life on Earth. This demands a change of tense for design and politics. We cannot dream of creative destruction, since we have indeed already destroyed the world, but nor can we continue to embrace a world without futures.
Unless otherwise indicated, all videos and photographs can be attributed to Orit Halpern.