Bracket 3 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate the potentials when situations extend beyond norms – into the extremities. We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. Indeed the history of modern urbanism, architecture and building science has been predicated on an anti-entropic notion of programmatic and social order. But are there scenarios in which a state of extremity or imbalance is productive?

Ulrick Beck, in “Risk Society’s Cosmopolitan Moment” suggests that being at risk is the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While risk produces inequality and destabilization, he argues, it can be the catalyst for the construction of new institutions. The term extreme is defined as outermost, utmost, farthest, last or frontier. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks to understand what new spatial orders emerge in this liminal space. How might it be leveraged as an opportunity for invention? What are the limits of wilderness and control, of the natural and artificial, the real and the virtual? What new landscapes, networks, and urban models might emerge in the wake of destabilized economic, social and environmental conditions?

Bracket [at Extremes] will examine architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states. In such conditions, the status quo is no longer possible; systems must extend performance and accommodate unpredictability. As new protocols emerge, new opportunities present themselves. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks innovative contributions interrogating extreme processes (technologies, operations) and extreme contexts (cultural, climatic). What is the breaking point of architecture at extremes?

Guest Editorial Board: Keller Easterling, Michael Hensel, Alessandra Ponte, François Roche, Hashim Sarkis, Julien De Smedt, Mark Wigley

Deadline for submissions: February 20th, 2012

For more information on Bracket and submission requirements visit: www.brkt.org

The 2011 Phyllis Lambert Seminar, organized by Alessandra Ponte, is centered on the theme of the North. It is titled “New Northern Cartographies” and we are honored to be among the architects, artists, film-makers, geographers, and climatologists included in what will be a fascinating two days. Ponte positioned the North relative to geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin who identified that there are “many Norths in this North.” She goes on to describe the context of the seminar to acknowledge an intensity of interest today in the North that parallels that of the 1960s and 1970s. Ponte writes: “During the last two decades, the end of the Cold War and subsequent realignment of the balance of powers, together with massive climate changes, have in fact redefined, once again, the map of the Arctic region and rekindled a passionate interest in the North.”

Should you be in or near Montreal this weekend, here is the schedule:

Friday, February 25, 2011
Opening Remarks: Anne Cormier, Directrice, École d’architecture, Université de Montréal Introduction: Alessandra Ponte
First Session, 10:20 – 13:00
Respondents: Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec, Université de Montréal
Peter Fianu, architecte, atelier braq, Montréal
Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab (Lola Sheppard, Mason White, Toronto, Prix de Rome 2010): Next North: Infrastructures for a Shifting Landscape. [10:20 – 11:00]
Caroline Desbiens (Chaire de recherche du Canada en géographie historique du Nord, Université Laval, Québec): Nordicité et culture de l’hydroélectricité au Québec: science, paysage, tourisme. [11:00 – 11:40]
Marie-Hélène Cousineau (cinéaste, isuma.tv, Montréal): Montre-moi sur la carte : cartographie virtuelle sur isuma.tv, portails des réalités autochtones contemporaines. [11:40 – 12:20]

Second Session, 14:30 – 17:00
Respondents: Denis Bilodeau, Université de Montréal
Kelly Crossman, Carleton University, Ottawa
Arctic Perspective Initiative (Matthew Biederman, Montréal): An Open Sourced North. [10:00 – 10:40]
Territorial Agency (John Palmesino, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, Architectural Association School of Architecture, London): North: Escalation. [15:10 – 15:50]
70°N arkitektur (Gisle Løkken / Magdalena Haggärde, Tromsø, Norway): Impacts of Global Pressure on Vulnerable Landscapes and Societies: Planning for Unknown Futures in Maniitsoq, Greenland. [15:50 – 16:30]

Saturday February 26, 2011
Third Session, 10:00 – 12:40
Respondents: Patrick Evans, UQAM, Montréal
Stephan Kowal, Université de Montréal
Charles Stankievech (artist, Yukon School of Visual Arts, Dawson City): Under The Rainbow: Outpost Architecture + Electromagnetic Infrastructure in the Arctic. [14:30 – 15:10]
Future Cities Lab (Jason Kelly Johnson, San Francisco): The Aurora Project and other Dynamic Cartographies. [10:40 – 11:20]
Kelly Nelson Doran (regionalArchitects, Toronto, Prix de Rome 2009): Repositioning the Remote. [11:20 – 12:00]

Thanks to those that came out to Storefront for Art and Architecture on a chilly Friday in late January to celebrate the publication of Pamphlet Architecture #30: COUPLING and to hear provocative / entertaining manifestos as delivered by some of the brightest minds we know. This was part of the series called MANIFESTO and the theme was Infrastructural Opportunism, which came out of Pamphlet subtitle. Through collaboration with Storefront, we asked each participant to include 10 images and 10 (concise) manifesto points on the challenges and opportunities facing infrastructure in the 21st century. This led to a 100-point collective  manifesto. Our dream team list included:

MIMI ZEIGER on manifestos  // INTERBORO on exclusion  //  DIANA BALMORI on realignments  //  PLANETARY ONE on stripping down  //  LYDIA KALLIPOLITI on remedies  //  ANDREW BLUM on tubes  //  JOYCE HWANG on interventions  //  MAMMOTH on expanding fields  //  JANETTE KIM on highjacking  // and we put our money where our mouth is too … INFRANET LAB on contingency

[Joyce Hwang on interventions, with images of work by Sergio López-Piñeiro.]

[mammoth on expanding fields, gave a fictional account of an infrastructural meta-narrative.]

Mimi has already published her Infra-Opp manifesto, so we thought we would follow suit with ours. After all, what is an un-disseminated manifesto?

1. Know That There is a System of Systems

Arthur Jensen, played by Ned Beatty, in the 1976 film Network said: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal — that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!, Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!

2. Architects as Expert Generalists

Buckminster Fuller, labeled a dilettante and a dabbler in his age, was instead the forerunner of a new breed of designer / thinker that we like to call the expert generalist. Long live the new expert generalists!

3. Be Alert to What Has Just Happened; Be Entrepreneurial.

[photo by Shiho Fukada for The New York Times.]

After a multi-day traffic jam in Hetaocun, China, Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times wrote: Stranded drivers chain-smoked, stomped their feet against the chill and cursed the government for failing to come to their rescue. As the night wore on, fuel lines froze and cellphone batteries died. The residents of Hetaocun, however, saw the unmoving necklace of taillights from their mountain village and got entrepreneurial. They roused children from their beds, loaded boxes of instant noodles into baskets and began hawking their staples to a captive clientele. The 500 percent markup did not appear to dent sales.

4. There is Always Missing Information, Use it.

Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous 2002 speech yielded a term that now has its own Wikipedia entry: unknown unknowns. He said: [T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

5. Agile Maneuverability Rewrites Protocols

[from There Will be Blood!]

Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the 2007 film There Will be Blood says: Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy. Drained dry. I’m so sorry. Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that’s a straw, you see? You watching?. And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room, and starts to drink your milkshake… I… drink… your… milkshake!

6. Software Can be Big and Physical, Like Hardware

The Medusa Bag was conceived in 1988 to meet the anticipated requirement for large scale water imports to California as well as to Israel, Jordan and Palestine. Others at the time were looking into tanker conversions and pipelines, but no practical economic embodiment of these ideas was found. The bags size and shape have been optimized and the first prototype bag will be built using industrial polyester fabric and special straps. A bag containing 0.5 gigaliters of water would be 465 meters long and 110 meters wide, while a 1.5 gigaliter bag would be 670 meters long and 160 meters wide.

7. Be Resourceful

Thilafushi Island in the Maldives has grown at the rate of a square metre a day, as more and more rubbish is dumped here. Mountains of rubbish – plastic, metal tins and rusty oil barrels – extend as far as the eye can see. Unlike the adjacent resort islands, the only visitors here are the Bangladeshi workers who wade through the sludge and brave the stench to burn the tonnes of refuse that arrive at the island every day. Spotting the potential to generate revenue from the mushrooming island, the government decided to lease part of it for industrial purposes. Additional terrain was created using white sand and now giant cement cones, oil drums and the skeletons of future boats can be seen dotted around. Metal compactors compress junk into blocks for sale to India. Each tonne sells for US$175. The island has grown to such proportions that it now has a café, a restaurant, two mosques, a barbershop, a clinic, a police station and rather unexpectedly, a makeshift zoo.

8. Measurements Can be Misleading, But Oh So Fruitful

[Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, published in 2000.]

Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a book about a book about a movie about a house. A series of surveying measurements initially reveal that the house is larger on the inside than on the outside. The discrepancy is less than an inch, but is a sign of things to come. One day a small, closet-sized room appears in the home, although the outside dimensions remain unchanged.

9. Scalar Indifference

A thermokarst lake, also called a thaw lake, refers to a body of freshwater, usually shallow, that is formed in a depression by meltwater from thawing permafrost. This landscape operates by scalar indifference as pools appear and disappear under freeze and thaw.

10. Live By Strategy, Play by Tactic

The Russian chessplayer Savielly Tartakower said: Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do, strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.

We are excited to be launching the second almanac of bracket with our fantastic team of Actar, Archinect and graphic designers, Thumb.  We are also thankful of the generous support from the Graham Foundation.

Bracket 2 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate physical and virtual soft systems, as they pertain to infrastructure, ecologies, landscapes, environments, and networks. In an era of declared crises—economic, ecological and climatic amongst others– the notion of soft systems has gained increasing traction as a counterpoint to permanent, static and hard systems.

[soft and mobile skins]

[temporary/ relief/ soft shelters]

Bracket 2 seeks to critically position and define soft systems, in order to expand the scope and potential for new spatial networks, and new formats of architecture, urbanization and nature. From soft politics, soft power and soft spaces to fluid territories, software and soft programming, Bracket 2 questions the use and role of responsive, indeterminate, flexible, and immaterial systems in design. Bracket 2 invites designers, architects, theorists, ecologists, scientists, and landscape architects to position and leverage the role of soft systems and recuperate the development of the soft project.

[soft systems on the tarmac]

The editorial board and jury for Bracket 2 includes Benjamin Bratton, Julia Czerniak, Jeffrey Inaba, Geoff Manaugh, Philippe Rahm, Charles Renfro, as well as co-editors Lola Sheppard and Neeraj Bhatia.

[the mobile hospital]

Deadline for Submissions: December 10, 2010

Please visit www.brkt.org for more info.

It has been a very exciting and busy summer at InfraNet Lab. We are delighted to announce a few recent projects–some completed, some on-going, and some only just starting. We have had a phenomenal team of InfraNetters this summer including: Fionn Byrne, Andria Fong, Cecilia Hui, Matthew Spremulli, Fei-Ling Tseng, Ceara Watters, and Shannon Wiley.

[Bracket 1: On Farming in the recent Actar 2010 catalogue.]

1) First, we are happy to announce that the launch issue of Bracket, our collaboration with Archinect, is officially at the printers. Through the stunning graphics and coordination of Thumb, and the editorial work of Maya and Mason, we expect to see copies of Bracket: On Farming on shelves this October. The fine folks at Actar will be publishing and distributing the issue. We will have information forthcoming about launch events in various locations: Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, and Houston. And we are only a few weeks away from announcing a call for issue #2, which has a fantastic jury lined up (including Benjamin Bratton, Julia Czerniak, Jeffrey Inaba, Geoff Manaugh, Philippe Rahm, among others) and a theme that we think is timely and potent. Neeraj and Lola will be editing the second volume with generous support from the Graham Foundation. More on that soon.

[Working mock-ups of Pamphlet Architecture #30, aka Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, by InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office, forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press.]

2) We are also delighted to announce that Pamphlet Architecture #30, co-authored with Lateral Office, is almost at the printers. We are in the home stretch in working with Princeton Architectural Press toward a tight complete representation of our work. We cannot write too much but we have 6 projects and texts from 3 guest authors whose thinking and writing have percolated through ours (via the work). The issue, titled Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism is available Dec 1, 2010.

3) Neeraj has recently been selected as a Wortham Fellow at Rice School of Architecture, so we will be consoling ourselves over his departure from Toronto (for now!), and scheming on the next phase of our international cross-climate collaborations with him down there in the city of no zoning. Neeraj was also awarded the prestigious L B Anderson award from MIT for research he will be conducting on housing in the Arctic, related to the on-going Next North project.

[Next North is a research project on the current and speculative infrastructures that maintain and operate in the unique context of the Canadian Arctic. The work will be published and part of a traveling exhibtion in 2011. Let us know if you are aware of an interested venue.]

4) Lola and Mason (Lateral Office) were recently awarded the Professional Prix de Rome from the Canada Council for the Arts. The award recognizes a portfolio of work and a research travel proposal titled Emergent North. They will be traveling in 2 or 3 individual trips to the Canadian Far North during 2010-11.

It has been a busy few months, so we apologize for the infrequent blog postings. We hope to be back on to a more regular schedule in September. In the meantime, thanks for visiting, reading, and commenting.

[WeatherField by Lateral Office + Paisajes Emergentes. Diagrams of Public Experience types and Weather Events.]

We were excited to catch word a while back now that the fine folks that cooked up Foodprint NYC – Nicola Twillley and Sarah Rich – were exploring future locales to extend the foodprint series. Thankfully, Toronto has proven productive enough territory in which to host the second edition. And even better is that it is now less than 48 hours upon us – starting promptly at 12:30pm on Saturday, July 31.

Foodprint Toronto is hosted at the Wychwood Artscape Barns (601 Christie Street, Toronto). For background, there are two great interviews of the organizers and their intentions over at Pruned and another at Azure.

The foodprinters continue their themes cultivated at the first edition including: zoning diet; culinary cartography; edible archaeology; feast, famine, and other scenarios. Though of course now it is applied to the Toronto / Canadian agro-context and food climate. So many possible discussions and conversations: How does the most multicultural city in the world respond to the challenges of food and diversity? How do food imports compare to other North American cities? With Ontario as the bread-basket of Canada, how does food movement infrastructure operate? What policies are in place to support the scope of that movement? Simply to understand a comparative geo-food pulse between NYC and TO would be fantastic.

Lola Sheppard will be on a panel, as well as several good friends and colleagues: Robert Wright (Associate Professor of Landscape, University of Toronto), Chris Hardwicke (urbanism.org), John Knechtel (Alphabet City), Shawn Micallef (Spacing / murmur)… in any case, here is the fantastic lineup of panels and speakers.

Below are some teaser images from a studio at University of Waterloo on the Toronto Greenbelt, called Productive Territories: Grey, White, Green Belts. The studio brief states:

In 2005, Ontario passed its Greenbelt Act, which protected 1.8 million acres of farmland and green space, with the intention of limiting sprawl, the destruction of green space and prime agricultural land. In the same year, the Places to Grow Act was passed, which identified 25 urban regions which must to achieve certain densification targets. In the context of the Places to Grow Act, one might read within the Greenbelt Act a somewhat nostalgic vision of the relationship of city and nature, the former threatens the latter. Nature is seen as something to be preserved, while the city evolves.

[Agriculture / Livestock locative and quantitative map from University of Waterloo, Greenbelt studio.]

There is no doubt that the Greenbelt Act was crucial, and that it has indeed been identified as one of the most successful Greenbelts in the world, both because of its scope and the because of the quality of lands it protects. And, there can be little doubt that Toronto’s suburban sprawl indeed continues to threaten our open landscapes, and in this regard is socially, economically, and infrastructurally unsustainable. The question arises, however, is any development in, or at the margins of the greenbelt, conceivable? Most significantly, many of the cities targeted in the Places to Grow Act contain what is known as the White-belt, rural lands within each community’s jurisdictional boundaries, that are not protected. Most of the cities have slated these lands for development, with the exception of a few such as Markham, which have declared the desire to protect a large percentage of these lands to maintain a food-belt. The studio’s investigations will position themselves precisely at these boundaries, between urban and rural, between domesticated landscape and one less so – between the grey, white and green-belts. The studio attributes new roles to the architect – not simply problem solver, but cultural, environmental and spatial detective, bringing to light the forces (economic, cultural and environmental) at work within a given geography, and the physical networks at the service of these forces.

[Hydrology of the Greenbelt, from University of Waterloo, Greenbelt studio.]

[Soils and soil transfers, from University of Waterloo, Greenbelt studio.]

[Other Greenbelt characters: Quarries and Gravel pits, from University of Waterloo, Greenbelt studio.]

And here is a great map made by Ingmar Mak in a 2007 studio we ran (click for larger size):

[Subway map replacing stops with primary food items in that area, by Ingmar Mak.]

We are hosting a topic session at the 99th ACSA Annual Conference next March in Montreal. Our topic is titled Architecture’s Expanded Territories. If you are interested to submit a paper for the session (or any of the other great topics) read below for more. Here is how to submit. (Submissions are due September 15, 2010.)

Architecture’s Expanded Territories
Topic chairs: Lola Sheppard, University of Waterloo / Mason White, University of Toronto

In Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” (PDF) Krauss observed that the practice of sculpture had been obscured and could only qualify itself in opposition to architecture and landscape. Krauss identifies three additional practices of sculpture that sculpture had previously been burdened with and names them “site-construction,” marked sites,” and “axiomatic structures.” Taking up a similar cause in 2004, Anthony Vidler offered emergent practices for “Architectures Expanded Field,” (DOC) by arguing that “underlying the new architectural experimentation is a serious attempt to reconstrue the foundations of the discipline, not so much in singular terms, but in broader concepts that acknowledge an expanded field, while seeking to overcome the problematic dualisms that have plagued architecture for over a century: form and function, historicism and abstraction, utopia and reality, structure and enclosure.”

Vidler’s potent proclamation and offer to architecture to evolve with its time has incubated for more than 6 years. Where are we now in this (still) expanding field? This session will table the messy and contentious territory between architecture, landscape, ecology, and urban design. A territory whose foundation was cultivated by Benton MacKaye, planned by Constantinos Doxiadis, designed by Cedric Price, with recent developments chronicled by Keller Easterling, among others. In short, the session will look at where the XXL and the S meet, or a new architecture within our expanding territories.

It could be argued that the potential of an expanded territory is increasingly being hijacked by an agenda of “good practice,” in the name of sustainability, often reducing architecture to the operational concerns of construction efficiency and building performance on a particular site. This session asks what form, format, and programs might exist in the new territory afforded by a deeper understanding of site? Or, what is sustainable design without the burden of sustainability?

What defines these expanding territories? Architecture’s recent privileging of operational costs over capital costs is a paradigm shift in scale, program, and function. No longer relegated to façade design only, we are seeing ever-expanding ambiguities of architecture’s envelope. This session seeks to find these large territorial lines, interrogate them, design them, and expose them. What potential lies in the tools encouraging a widening envelope of design influence – environmental data, maps, politics, economies – upon a give site? Sometimes it might not even look like architecture.

The session calls for speculative design research proposals or critical papers to think big. How does design operate at the scale of the region or the globe? Forgoing utopian ambitions to design the region or the globe, how can design participate in the temporal space of emerging natural and artificial systems – energies, ecologies, mobilities, and, possibly most importantly, economies? What is the role and operation of the big project in our age of urgent environmental issues and crippled economy? Where do you stand in the expanding territory?

Editors Note: File under Feedback: Architecture’s New Territories, an InfraNet Lab seminar at Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design / University of Toronto. Guest post and images are by Matthew Spremulli. Matthew will be continuing this work in his MArch thesis, which will be blogged at the ever-expanding reField.

———–

Corn has unquestionably become the dominant crop farmed in the United States, which on average as a country produces in excess of 12.1 billion bushels/year. However, the story behind corn’s abundance at the large scale is actually a story of abundance on the extra small scale of the kernel itself, and that of a very specific corn-kernel type: Yellow Dent. Yellow Dent represents 99% of all Corn grown in the USA, grown principally for its amazing ability to yield a high amount of starch, yet none of which is able to be eaten directly off the cob by neither man nor animal! Thus, all of this “potentially” abundant food enters a long and varied chain of transportation and processing, to turn the inedible grain into something useful. Another way of looking at the story of corn is recognizing the vast amount of separate processing infrastructures.

[The Corn Belt accounts for more than half of the corn grown in the US.]

Most of this corn (approx 50%) is being grown in a very specific area in the US, called the Corn Belt (Iowa, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana), thanks to the very specific climate and soil types that exist there the Yellow Dent crop (originally from Southern Mexico) flourishes. The Corn Belt is also where most of the processing occurs.

US Corn has five major consumption uses:
1. Feed for livestock
2. Ethanol production
3. Exports
4. Food additives
5. Food products.

[Corn Input-Output.]

[Corn processing plant. From the Iowa-based Pine Lake Corn Processors LLC.]

However, one of the more interesting threads through this story of abundant starch is that of the energy inputs/outputs in the transformation processes and how that can be traced. The production of corn both exhausts a large amount of energy and imported material and leaves behind a massive amount of wastes and by-products. One of the first things to consider in re-wiring the system would be to tie together the outputs from one process and potentially use them for an input of another. After examining the energy input/output process of making ethanol (as found in PDF The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol), which represents one of the most energy intensive processes and also the most amount of useful by-products, there was potential to tie together points in the system and create closed-loop circuits. Another point to consider is how consumers never really get to experience any of these transformative corn-processes before it becomes an array of products on their store shelves.

[Existing corn embodied energy: production, processing + inputs/outputs.]

Thus, a proposed intervention is to exploit the existing main mode of transportation for corn, the train, and turn it into a system of a traveling processing plant, corn product store, waste recycler, and industrial museum. The train breathes in the outputs from corn sub-systems, such as the waste run-off from cattle farming and then turn it into a fermented fertilizer by the time it reaches the corn crops of the Corn Belt. The train mechanics would need to be redesigned in order to double as the large mechanical processing gears and drums found in the Dry and Wet Milling processing plants. The train would travel along a dedicated loop that would sync the cities that create the food demand and the landscapes capable of producing the abundance. City folk would have the chance to see the processing of the corn as it passes through its line, and each train car would be designed to both perform its part of the processing while becoming an interface for the consumers and users.

[Rail network synchronized to corn belt prodcution.]

[Proposed re-wiring of corn embodied energy: production, processing + inputs/outputs.]

Also from the Feedback seminar:
Re-Link: The Physical Network of Data, Ali Fard
Border Economies: the Maquiladora Export Landscape, Juan Robles
Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer, Fei-Ling Tseng

Editors Note: File under Feedback: Architecture’s New Territories, an InfraNet Lab seminar at Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design / University of Toronto. Guest post and images are by Juan Robles.

———–

The ongoing processes of trade and communication that now integrate the 21st century regional economies have created numerous territories of abundance. Among these spaces the maquiladora landscape, in the northern border of Mexico, has seen the greatest change in the last 50 years. From a manufacturing sun-belt territory limited to an area 20 kilometers south of the U.S.-Mexico border and saturated by U.S. investment; to an industry gaining strength across the Mexican country from Asian and European investment and reorganization.

[Even though the biggest concentrations of maquiladoras are found at the border, these territories of assembly are found all around Mexico.]

[Of the top 100 maquiladoras in Mexico; 66 are owned by companies from the U.S., 7 from Japan, 2 from the Netherlands, 1 from Germany, 3 from Canada, 1 from Singapore, 4 from Korea, 1 from China, 1 from Sweden, 1 from Sweden, 2 from France, 1 from Australia, 1 from Taiwan, 1 from Finland, and 5 from Mexico.]

With maquiladoras mainly producing electronic equipment, clothing, plastics, furniture, appliances, and auto parts the industry has grown from under 2,000 factories in the early 1990s to over 3,000 maquiladoras concentrated along the major border cities of Tijuana, Nogales, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, and Matamoros.

[The growth of the maquiladora industry along the U.S. - Mexico border and the increase in export goods and labor across the main border towns has created a unique interdependent but unequal economic sister-city relationship between the paired metropolises.]

These plants began as part of a Mexican Border Industrialization Program in 1965 to solve the problem of rising unemployment along border cities caused by the end of the Bracero Program in 1964 when close to 180,000 Mexican farm workers were left without work. At its peak it employed over 445,000 braceros while the current maquiladora industry employs over 1.3 million Mexican workers. The intention of the maquiladora program was to clean up the border, attract more tourists, and create more jobs, not knowing that the new manufacturing landscape would bring numerous socio-political, economic and environmental problems to the region.

[Since the maquiladora industry offers thousands of low-skill jobs, the border has been a magnet to Mexican workers seeking economic opportunity for decades. The opportunist nature of this industry creates an industrial ecology of trade, supported by and supporting millions of migrant workers living in shanty towns around the industrial parks while industry logistics are controlled on the U.S. side.]

Unlike the typical manufacturing industries in the U.S., maquiladoras are labor-intensive assembly operations that import materials and equipment on a duty-free and tariff-free basis for assembly under the condition that the assembled product is exported out of the host country. These plants are mostly owned by European, Asian and U.S. corporations who take advantage of more lenient industrial development regulations and exploit cheap labor in close proximity to the U.S. market.

Located 2.5 hour from the Long Beach Shipping Port, Tijuana had full advantage to become the biggest manufacturer of electronics in North America, especially the production of color televisions.]

Maquiladoras export 90 percent of the assembled products to the U.S. with the electronics industry having the largest share of exports concentrated in Tijuana. The previous organization of these industries had parts shipped in from the country of origin, assembled in Tijuana, and exported to the U.S.

[In the late 1990s Tijuana became the Television Capital of the world producing over 14 million televisions and monitors per year. While Mexico’s share of world television production grew from 1.7 million in 1987 to 25 million in 1998 and continued to grow to a peak of almost 35 million TVs in 2003.]

In response to the recent economic crisis, especially seen in electronics, the industry has created new clustered maquiladora parks in the primary NAFTA distribution-based border cities. This was a strategy to make the assembly industry more efficient in order to compete with strong competition from China’s Special Economic Zones. At the turn of the century, Mexico saw close to 500 plants close and move to Asian competitor countries but has recently seen an increase in investment due to the rise in shipping costs.

[The reorganization of maquiladora industrial parks creates a new system of sub and main maquiladoras which bring the parts manufacturers and assembly plants close together while following the rules of the maquiladora program.]

The use of a cluster system started attracting part suppliers to be closer to the assembly factory. The parts that would originally be shipped from overseas have begun to be manufactured by overseas-owned companies either in Tijuana or San Diego. Each plant is an independent company that works closely with the other plants to support new just-in-time production strategies in order to increase efficiency and reduce costs. The new strategies have made the border industry more efficient but have failed to respond to the socio-economic, political, and environmental conditions that continue to surround it.

Could a new type of industry cluster provide more efficient, social, or productive trade ecologies? Would larger more integrated versions of this cluster system redefine development trends along the U.S.-Mexico border? Could the clustering of different industries along a larger territory linked by a rail system create a more efficient industrial ecology that responds to the poverty in these cities?

[Using the maquiladora cluster concept, the new border bundles whole industries into separate special economic zones between the U.S. and Mexico where one industries outputs can be used as inputs for another. The desert environment along the border is exploited to create new solar farms that would generate the energy needed in these zones.]

Also from the Feedback seminar:

Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer, Fei-Ling Tseng

Editors Note: File under Feedback: Architecture’s New Territories, an InfraNet Lab seminar at Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design / University of Toronto. Guest post and images are by Fei-Ling Tseng.

———–

The Flower Trade is a highly sophisticated market with an infrastructure optimally tuned to the preferences of both the supply and demand side. The world knows three North-South flower markets: America, Europe/Middle-East/Africa and Asia.

[World Flower Markets.]

These markets interact little with each other due to the logistic constraints of cut flowers. As opposed to many markets that utilize multiple middle men to get a product from its supply to its end destination, the flower market has reduced number of middle men (and therefore also costs) by making sure that most trade happens as directly as possible: between growers and wholesale buyers/exporters by means of Dutch auctioning.

[Screenshot: kweker > veiling > verkoper.]

In the Netherlands, flower auctions are run by co-operatives formed by the growers. Auctions require membership from both the supply and demand side of trade, which in turn ensures optimal coordination during all stages of the transaction process. The fact that a Dutch auction clock counts down the price instead of up, ensures the best price for farmers, and the best quality produce for what buyers are willing to pay.

The result of this system is that the first buyer sets the rough market price by bidding. Subsequential buyers often purchase within the range of the first bidder. Quite often the first bidder gets the best price because, as product availability decreases, the risk of missing out increases, and so does the price. [via flowerauction]

[The Flower Market embraces the logic of an auction clock in which the price counts down instead of up.]

FloraHolland is the largest flower auction co-operative in the Netherlands–and likely the world. Specifically for the cut flower sector, it is responsible for the trade of 97% of all flowers within the Netherlands and 60% of worldwide trade. (via USDA PDF)

[Import / Export flows through Aalsmeet Auction.]

Though FloraHolland has six auction locations in the Netherlands, their Aalsmeer location (called Vereniging van de Bloemenveiling in Aalsmeer prior to the merger in 2008) deals primarily with the auctioning of cut flowers for export. Located strategically close to Schiphol Airport and many major highways, flowers arrive both globally and locally within 12 hours before the auctions starts at 6:00AM. They are stored in cooling rooms with varying temperatures–each type of flower having their own ideal temperature to be kept in stasis. Around 4:30AM, the auction trolleys (Dutch: stapelwagens) that fit 27 buckets (Dutch: fust) of flowers per trolley, are neatly lined up and hooked to a complex internal rail system.

[The unique tools of he flower auction: the auction trolleys and flower buckets, or stapelwagens and fust.]

Everyday, this rail system guides 21 million flowers and plants through any one of the five auction rooms (four for cut flowers, one for potted plants). These flowers and plants are traded between grower and buyer typically within 4 hours (6:00AM to 10:00AM), through 55,000 individual transactions on average. In other words, on each of the 13 auction clocks that Aalsmeer Bloemenveiling possesses, a new transaction is made every five seconds or less.

[The Aalsmeer auction hall opens at 6:00am and closes four hours later.]

After the transaction has been made and the flowers roll out of the auction halls, they enter a distribution hall where employers of the auction buzz around on electric trucks (Dutch: electrotrekker), grabbing one auction trolley at the time and distributing the individual buckets of flowers to empty auction trolleys that belong to their new owners.

[Electrotrekkers!]

[Distribution hall.]

As all the morning trolleys have been emptied onto the new trolleys, the flowers are re-packaged by their new owners for transport to their end destination. This takes about two hours, at which point–around noon–the flowers would be on the road again headed towards their new destination. Flowers usually hit the storefront the next day following the auction. All in all, it takes about 36-42 hours for flowers to get cut until they reach their storefront end destination.

For more information about flower auctions:

There is a video that describes the internal workings of auction halls, but it only exists in Dutch.

A bit off-topic but still infinitely fascinating is how technology has transformed productivity in greenhouses. Here is a video of the walking-plant-system.

Watch as the auction trolleys move like zombies across the distribution halls to their end stations where they are individually fetched and redistributed by the electric trucks.

The New York Times wrote a nice piece about Aalsmeer back in 1993 that is available online here.