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.

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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.

On January 21, Thomas L. Viola was charged with the theft of some 135 tons of road salt in Aurora, Illinois. Viola had (intentionally) sold the road salt, which did not belong to him, on October 1 at the bargain price of $9000 (US). He was caught and the salt was recovered / found in a warehouse. Now while the headline "Man Charged With Theft Of 135 Tons Of Road Salt" is certainly more eye-catching than the reality of selling goods that are not your own as thieving, we were struck more with the commodity worthy of such a heist. About 50% of industrialized salt production is used in cold-climate regions for de-icing. Along with that massive seasonally dependent harvest, is the need to store salt (or sand) in a distributed fashion and at a municipal level. Like little salt banks or mail drop-off boxes, salt facilities dot the highway landscape. These often conical containers are perfectly formed to the angle of repose of salt mounds. In a strange twist, the containers are protecting the salt from the weather, while the salt, once dispersed, protects us from the weather.

[Smithfield Salt/Sand storage facility constructed by the Rhode Island Department of Public Works.]

[Salt Lake City salt storage house.]

Toronto, for example, uses about 130,000 – 150,000 tonnes of salt annually with 200 salting trucks to address 130cm of annual snowfall. And Montreal spends about $135 million annually to address its 217cm snowfall. Industrial salt production is a massive enterprise of which less than 10% is for use in de-icing.

The US and China produce about 40% of total world salt production, which globally was about 250 million tons in 2006.

Following a heavy winter last year, many municipalities stocked up on road salt early this year. This drove prices up, and it has created the need for more innovative thinking in terms of ice-melting. One case in point is geomelt, which Chicago is considering. But other options have included garlic salt.

[Houffs 20,000-ton salt storage facility in Weyers Cave, Virginia.]

[International Shipping Trade Routes] via UNEP/GRID-Arendal

Sky-rocketing global transport costs have effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades. The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.

While this is certainly not the end of globalization, economists speculate that it may signal a return to more regional manufacturing and economies. Companies are increasingly seeking to limit global shipping costs. Instead of seeking supplies wherever they can be bought most cheaply, regardless of location, and outsourcing the assembly of products all over the world, manufacturers would instead concentrate on performing those activities as close to home as possible, in what is termed the “neighborhood effect”.

Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism points out that “the Wal-Mart model is fuel-intensive at every stage, and at every one of those stages we are now seeing an inflation of the costs for boats, trucks, cars. That is leading to a rethinking of this emissions-intensive model, in terms of growing foods locally, producing locally or shopping locally.

All this suggests new patterns of international trade, and new regional economic, production and transportation hubs. Thomas Friedman’s world may well be unflattening. However, the recent economic crisis affecting the US and world markets suggests that for now, the world still contains a few bumps.