Dr. Benjamin Richardson conceived of a city of health called Hygeia in 1876. Dr Richardson is an M.D., and he calculated a death rate for Hygeia of 8 per 1,000 in the first generation and 5 per 1,000 in the second generation. The current rate at the time was approximately 20 in 1,000. Hygeia anticipated a population of 100,000 in 20,000 houses on 4,000 acres, or about 25persons/acre. Hygeia was of considerable influence to Ebeneezer Howards Garden City (whose trajectory can easily be traced through to modern planning and urban design).

Here is Dr. Richardsons description of Hygeia in terms of food, water, animals, and the dead:

Our model city is of course well furnished with baths, swimming baths, Turkish baths, playgrounds, gymnasia, libraries, board schools, fine-art schools, lecture halls, and places of instructive amusement. In every board-school drill forms part of the programme. I need not dwell on these subjects, but must pass to the sanitary officers and offices.

There is in the city one principal sanitary officer, a duly qualified medical man elected by the Municipal Council, whose sole duty it is to watch over the sanitary welfare of the place. Under him, as sanitary officers, are all the medical men who form the poor law medical staff. To him these make their reports on vaccination and every matter of health pertaining to their respective districts; to him every registrar of births and deaths forwards copies of his registration returns; and to his office are sent, by the medical men generally, registered returns of the cases of sickness prevailing in the district. His inspectors likewise make careful returns of all the known prevailing diseases of the lower animals and of plants. To his office are forwarded, for examination and analysis, specimens of foods and drinks suspected to be adulterated, impure, or otherwise unfitted for use. For the conduction of these researches the sanitary superintendent is allowed a competent chemical staff. Thus, under this central supervision, every death, every disease of the living world in the district, and every assumable cause of disease, comes to light and is subjected, if need be, to inquiry.

At a distance from the town are the sanitary works, the sewage pumping works, the water and gas works, the slaughter-houses and the public laboratories. The sewage, which is brought from the town partly by its own flow and partly by pumping apparatus, is conveyed away to well-drained sewage farms belonging to, but at a distance from, the city where it is utilised.

The water supply, derived from a river which flows to the south-west of the city, is unpolluted by sewage or other refuse, is carefully filtered, is tested twice daily, and if found unsatisfactory is supplied through a reserve tank, after it has been made to undergo further purification. It is carried through the city everywhere by iron pipes. Leaden pipes are forbidden. In the sanitary establishment are disinfecting rooms, a mortuary, and ambulances for the conveyance of persons suffering from contagious disease. These are at all times open to the use of the public, subject to the few and simple rules of the management.

The gas, like the water, is submitted to regular analysis by the staff of the sanitary officer, and any fault which may be detected, and which indicates a departure from the standard of purity framed by the Municipal Council, is immediately remedied, both gas and water being exclusively under the control of the local authority.

The inspectors of the sanitary officer have under them a body of scavengers. These, each day, in the early morning, pass through the various districts allotted to them, and remove all refuse in closed vans. Every portion of manure from stables, streets, and yards is in this way removed daily, and transported to the city farms for utilisation.

Two additional conveniences are supplied by the scientific work of the sanitary establishment. From steam-works steam is condensed, and a large supply of distilled water is obtained and preserved in a separate tank. This distilled water is conveyed by a small main into the city, and is supplied at a moderate cost for those domestic purposes for which hard water is objectionable.

The second sanitary convenience is a large ozone generator. By this apparatus ozone is produced in any required quantity, and is made to play many useful purposes. It is passed through the drinking water in the reserve reservoir whenever the water shows excess of organic impurity, and it is conveyed into the city for diffusion into private houses, for purposes of disinfection.

The slaughter-houses of the city are all public, and are separated by a distance of a quarter of a mile from the city. They are easily removable edifices, and are under the supervision of the sanitary staff. The Jewish system of inspecting every carcase that is killed is rigorously carried out, with this improvement, that the inspector is a man of scientific knowledge.

All animals used for food,–cattle, fowls, swine, rabbits,–are subjected to examination in the slaughter-house, or in the market, if they be brought into the city from other depots. The slaughter-houses are so constructed that the animals killed are relieved from the pain of death. They pass through a narcotic chamber, and are brought to the slaughterer oblivious of their fate. The slaughter-houses drain into the sewers of the city, and their complete purification daily, from all offal and refuse, is rigidly enforced.

The buildings, sheds, and styes for domestic food-producing animals are removed a short distance from the city, and are also under the supervision of the sanitary officer; the food and water supplied for these animals comes equally, with human food, under proper inspection.

One other subject only remains to be noticed in connection with the arrangements of our model city, and that is the mode of the disposal of the dead. The question of cremation and of burial in the earth has been considered, and there are some who advocate cremation. For various reasons the process of burial is still retained. Firstly, because the cremation process is open to serious medico-legal objections; secondly, because, by the complete resolution of the body into its elementary and inodorous gases in the cremation furnace, that intervening chemical link between the organic and inorganic worlds, the ammonia, is destroyed, and the economy of nature is thereby dangerously disturbed; thirdly, because the natural tendencies of the people lead them still to the earth, as the most fitting resting-place into which, when lifeless, they should be drawn.

Thus the cemetery holds its place in our city, but in a form much modified from the ordinary cemetery. The burial ground is artificially made of a fine carboniferous earth. Vegetation of rapid growth is cultivated over it. The dead are placed in the earth from the bier, either in basket work or simply in the shroud; and the monumental slab, instead of being set over or at the head or foot of a raised grave, is placed in a spacious covered hall or temple, and records simply the fact that the person commemorated was recommitted to earth in those grounds. In a few months, indeed, no monument would indicate the remains of any dead. In that rapidly-resolving soil the transformation of dust into dust is too perfect to leave a trace of residuum. The natural circle of transmutation is harmlessly completed, and the economy of nature conserved.

31 October – 6 November
ALPHABET CITY FESTIVAL 2009 : WATER
presents
HYDROCity

HYDROCity explores the relationship between cities and water, presenting visionary leaders and design projects from around the world. Water shortages are changing patterns of urbanization and requiring increasingly elaborate infrastructures by which to source and transport water to urban centers, which in turn need to be redesigned and retrofitted to conserve, collect, repurify, and recirculate water resources. HYDROCity asks: What forms of urbanism and landscape systems will emerge, and what design potentials exist, in this expanding liquid infrastructure?

All of the HYDROCity events are free and open to the public. HYDROCity was made possible through the generous support of the Mondriaan Foundation and The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Ottawa, and was developed in partnership with InfraNet Lab.

Monday 2 November
5:30 pm
HYDROCity Panel : Water, Cities, Disaster
Arbour Room, Hart House, University of Toronto, 7 Hart House Circle
First 25 to arrive receive a free copy of Alphabet City’s Water anthology
Panel sponsored by The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company
Panelists George L. Cooke (President and CEO, The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Co.), Prof. Robert Kirkbride (Parsons The New School for Design, NYC), Paul Kovacs (Executive Director, Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction), and Tracy Metz (Dutch Delta Commission on Water Safety; visiting fellow, Harvard Graduate School of Design) discuss a future in which global warming drives catastrophic changes in hydrology even as cities face massive infrastructure investment deficits.

Tuesday 3 November
1:00 pm
The Building of “Waterpleinen/Watersquare”: Jeroen Bodewits
John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto
Room 106, 230 College Street
Created for the City of Rotterdam, Watersquare responds to the increasingly violent rainstorms that will be driven by global warming by seeking to catch rain and thereby create playful public features while preserving the water quality in the canals. Watersquare was designed by Marco Vermeulen and Florian Boer and constructed by Jeroen Bodewits. Model on exhibition at Daniels through 13 November.

Thursday 5 November
6:00 pm
HYDROCity Exhibition Opening
Toronto Free Gallery, 1277 Bloor Street West (at Lansdowne)
Curated by Anneke Abhelakh, Chris Hardwicke, Ghazal Jafari, Sara Kamalvand, John Knechtel, Mason White
Exhibition runs to 5 January 2010
Exhibition presented, in part, through the support of RBC Blue Water Project™
Opening party sponsored by Netherlands Consulate General, Toronto

Friday 6 November
9:00 am – 1:00 pm & 2:00 – 6:00 pm
HYDROCity Symposium on Hydrology and Urbanism
John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto
Room 103, 230 College Street

Symposium presented, in part, through the generous support of Cities Centre, University of Toronto. Alphabet City gratefully acknowledges the partnership of University of Toronto's John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Participants: Anneke Abhelakh (independent curator), Alan Berger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Aziza Chaouni (University of Toronto), Jandirk Hoekstra (H+N+S Landscape Architects, Utrecht), Michael Hough (York University), Nina-Marie Lister (Ryerson University), Liat Margolis (University of Toronto), Koen Olthuis (Waterstudio.NL, Rotterdam), Katherine Rinne (California College of the Arts), Catherine Seavitt (Catherine Seavitt Studio, New York), Kelly Shannon (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Richard M. Sommer (University of Toronto), David Waggonner (Waggonner & Ball Architects, New Orleans), Mason White (University of Toronto), Jane Wolff (University of Toronto), Robert Wright (University of Toronto).

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WATER festival presented through the support of: Mondriaan Foundation; MIT Press; Canada Council for the Arts; Ontario Arts Council; Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Ottawa; Cities Centre, University of Toronto; RBC Blue Water Project™; Netherlands Consulate General, Toronto; Drake Hotel; Warren’s Waterless Printing; Cascades; CLARITY; Opera in Concert; The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company; The City of Rotterdam; Circuit Gallery; Toronto Free Gallery; TYPE Books; Hart House.

The output of MONU (Magazine on Urbanism) continues to impress, and with issue #11, Bernd Upmeyer and company raise the bar. This issue is dedicated to clean urbanism and a range of responses, mostly antagonizing or shoring up sustainability and its discontents, come pouring in. An initial browse reminds me of Dominique Laporte's oft overlooked theory/survey Histoire de la Merde (trans: History of Shit) in which he charts myriad devices, urban modifications, and codes that cleaned up the contemporary city. Laporte suggests that our very identity as modern societies is intimately wrapped up within the complex management of our own waste – from language to justice to urbanism.

[The Grass is Greener by TomorrowsThoughtsToday shows a series of postcard narratives of a group of Londoners willingly separated from the rest of city inadvertently serving as a carbon sink for the rest of the inhabitants.]

Also, appropriately enough, clean urbanism can be seen as being pleasantly complemented by dirty realism. It is the systematic marginalization of shit, literally, into the hidden pockets of the city, out of view, that maintain a clean front – from buried sewer mains to sex- and drug-trades, to offshoring. One could almost argue that our urban environments are not necessarily any cleaner just better managed and with more crap out of sight. If fact, it is likely that our cities are dirtier, if calculated in aggregate with waste that has been dispersed, traded, or sunk.

[Bio-Port: Free Energy City.]

Clean Urbanism swings across of the gamut of the recent preoccupation with eco-cities, efficiency, and landscapes of power.

Here are the complete contents:
Sci-fi Greenery …or just Responsibility? – Samo Pedersen
Clean Cities – Dirty People – Matteo Muggianu
Dirty Consumerism – Nikonus Pappas
Coming Clean – Randall Teal
Domes over Manhattan – Interview with Gerd Hauser by Bernd Upmeyer
Rendering the Clean – Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia (WAI)
The Mobile Library Unit – John Southern
Where the Grass Is Greener – Tomorrow’sThoughtsToday
Clean around the Edges – Lee Altman
Bio-Port – Greg Keeffe and Simon Swietochowski
Zeekracht – The North Sea Masterplan – OMA
Scarcity: Bipolar Urbanism in the Sonoran Desert – Felipe Correa
Regenerative Ecologies – Claudio Astudillo Barra
Clean Energy is Dirty Business – Aleksander Tokarz
Dystopic Verdure – Jacob Ross Boswell
How to Win Poetic Praise and Influence Architects – Amanda Webb
The Cooperative City – Rogier van den Berg
Mania – Bryan Norwood and the Jackson Community Design Center

[OMA, Zeekracht, and the North Sea's perfect storm.]

You may browse the entire issue here:

And you may purchase it as well as back issues here.

Quantifying the impact of human habitats on animal habitats is complex and ever-shifting. Only when a freak incident of a bear, or wolf, or deer wander into our developed environment – and a strange tussle between fumbling law enforcement officers and a primal instinct-driven beast ensues – are we reminded on our habitat overlaps. Urban wildlife (rats, pigeons, squirrels, etc.) is one version of adapted coexistence, though more frequently wildlife ends up inadvertently quarantined or cornered. Josh Keyes' paintings simultaneously acknowledge this conflict and propose terraced territories of frictionless micro-habitats.

[Josh Keyes, Interlock #1 (2006)]

As reportage continues on the GGADO, or Great Global Amphibian Die-Off, it is difficult to speculate on the outcome of such an extreme loss within one branch of species, such as amphibians. To put this in perspective, 12 percent of all bird species and 23 percent of mammal species are threatened with extinction compared to 35-50 percent of the world’s 6,300 amphibian species. About 100 amphibian species have disappeared since 1980. For comparison, a single species of amphibians would naturally go extinct after about 250 years.

This is primarily driven by the successful spread of the chytrid fungus, climate change, and environment disruption. In response, a proposal for an Amphibian Ark, similar to the Arctic seed vault, is gaining momentum. This would entail regional "biobanks" affiliated with the conservation departments within zoos and other related organizations. A kind of 21st century cabinet of curiosities  – in this case housing frog sperm.

[Josh Keyes, Hoop (2006)]

Our contrasting habitats are interlocked in a nebulous way, with the borders redrawn each morning; Animal habitats often in a perpetual defensive retreat, or just confused and surrounded by an overnight track development. The fringes of this contested border usually mediated by controlled programs such as reserves, zoos, and wildlife parks.

[Josh Keyes, Interlock #2 (2006)]

Josh Keyes discovered viaBryan Boyer's Reader

Related Post: Convergent Species

Picking up on the intermittent series of student projects, included is a project by University of Toronto M.Arch graduate Tomer Diamant titled Büroland(wirt)schaft. Tomer began his research on speculative development and the hyper-efficiency of (spec) office buildings. Looking closer at the siting of office parks at outlying urban areas, he recognized an opportunity to capitalize on a stop-gap program of seasonal greenhouse agriculture.

[Vacant land opportunities along Highway 407 in north Toronto. Yellow dots indicate significant office locations, and the box at center is his designated site for the Bürolandwirtschaft case study.]

He writes:

This project proposes a hybrid typology that combines office space with industrial greenhouse agriculture, revisiting the Buro Landschaft (office landscape) schemes proposed by the Quickborner Team in the 1960’s, filtered through the lens of current global concerns. Buro Landwirtschaft (office agriculture) could make use of the weakest terrains of contemporary urbanism, sites abutting utility corridors, regional infrastructure and light industry. Low land-values would allow for the financing of large footprint buildings composed of paddy-like cells that could be converted from office to agriculture and back, with the prevailing economic winds. The built-in sliding programme is intended to provide an economic damper in volatile market conditions, while affording a degree of spatial flexibility that is not available in normative spec buildings and leasing structures.

[Comparative inputs and outputs of greenhouse agro and typical office use.]

[Biomass v Datamass. The dirt on information...]

The basic scheme inverts a normative concrete slab so that its upturned beams form discrete drainage cells. The beams are designed to accommodate service chases for each respective use. When in agricultural production mode, the cell is filled with irrigated soil. When in office mode, the cell becomes a pressurized plenum built from off-the-shelf raised floor technology. The slab is elevated, so as the cells are converted between office and greenhouse use, parking below can give way for additional head house space required by agricultural production. Head house and parking requirements are inversely proportional, allowing the programmatic adaptability to play out on both levels. Since air is only delivered through the office plenum floors, it is possible to imagine that positive pressure could mitigate humidity infiltration from the greenhouse, allowing for ephemeral internal partitions.

[Where greenhouse meets desks.]

[Axonometric outlining program (with its homegrown cafe, of course) and circulation. The undulating hexagonal roof panels suggest courtyards and entries.]

In the final version, the project explores the layering of multiple structural and service geometries, with the ambition of creating internal spatial conditions that are not overburdened by the linear nature of a patent glass roof system. Parking is integrated into a diamond-shaped structural cell that is carried up to support a roof structure of vaulted hexagonal modules. Since the vaults are derived from toroidal geometry, the modules are planar and highly repetitive. Each full hexagon holds a pillow-like ETFE assembly, the opacity of which can be controlled using electro-chromatic technology. Along the vault ridges, half-panels provide computer-controlled operable ventilation. The structural dia-grid accommodates a secondary geometry of drainage cells within the elevated slab. The building is envisioned as a large-scale, elevated mat, in which the office programme is serviced through a central courtyard while the greenhouse is serviced from a perimeter ring. The office grows from the inside out and the greenhouse grows from the outside in. In this scheme, there are no corner offices and all outward views are filtered through the greenhouse spaces. Several smaller courtyards satisfy exit requirements while providing additional light below.

[Interior plan showing office plots. The plot pattern dovetails into a typical parking bay grid at grade.]

[Buroland(wirt)schaft at work.]

[View from access road.]

If you would like to contact Tomer about his research and project, you can reach him here.

Previous Student Works: Vivian Chin's Convergent Species

Just wanted to point out the excellent new issue (#9) of MONU is out now and has a contribution from Mason and Lola (aka Lateral aka Infranet Lab directors) on the Thawing Urbanism of the Arctic.

You can get a copy form the fine folks at BoARD and MONU for a paltry €10.

Here is the contents:
A City under the Influence by Vesta Nele Zareh
Cities of Girl by Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix/ Map Office
Thawing Urbanisms in the Arctic by Mason White and Lola Sheppard
Living Facades – Green Urbanism and the Politics of Urban Offsetting by Owen Hatherley
Flying Grass Carpet by Joop de Boer
The 'Great Comeback' of The Chinese to Katendrecht by Els Vervloesem
Urbanism of the permanent Tourist by Deane Simpson
Plastic Wrapped History by Hannah Epstein
Golf Courses and Cultural Conventions of Nature by Jacqueline Schlossman
The Sky is not near enough by Shumon Basar
Defining the Exotic when Identity is Lost by Yasmine El Rashidi
Nondescript Exotism inside the Urban Tissue by Anne Seghers
Pseudo-Democracies and Pseudo-Commissions – Interview with Reinier de Graaf/ OMA
Elite Commune by Lei Liu
Re-fun by Yaowalak Baltisberger
Urbanism in a Minor Key by Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza
The Exotic and the Local – From Superhero to Supercity by Yehuda Greenfield – Gilat

Vertical Farms get coverage in the New York Times science section, curiously enough. Not in the Architecture section, nor in the Food section. Apparently when architecture meets food (agriculture) it becomes science. Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University arguably claims authorship of farms in the sky, though that could be attributed to many others.

More here.

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New images and a video of the High Line in New York has prompted a ricochet of references of examples of biologically domesticated infrastructures.

08_07_03_railbanking01

There is the promenade plantée. Designed by Jacques Vergely (landscape architect) and Philippe Mathieux (architect), the promenade is a 2.8 mile elevated park in Paris’ 12^th arrondissement that extends from Opera Bastille to the eastern city limits. It reinhabits a 19^th century railway viaduct abandoned since 1969.

08_07_03_railbanking02

[Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago]

Which can be extended to regional sized versions of domesticating dormant infrastructure. Commonly called railbanking.

Railbanking (as defined by the National Trails System Act) is a voluntary agreement between a railroad company and a trail agency to use an out-of-service rail corridor as a trail until some railroad might need the corridor again for rail service. Because a railbanked corridor is not considered abandoned, it can be sold, leased or donated to a trail manager without reverting to adjacent landowners. The railbanking provisions of the National Trails System Act as adopted by Congress in 1983 have preserved 4,431 miles of rail corridors in 33 states that would otherwise have been abandoned.

After viewing the "Streets belong to all of us!" exhibition organized by the Paris-based IVM at the Faculty of Architecture at University of Toronto, I was mostly struck by a single image. Denis Darzacq's photographs feature agile figures in mid-leap, or mid-fall, or even mid-flight. The space between this figure and their urban context even more charged by the fact that they are not in contact with it in any way. Levitating above the hardscape, each figure remains poised for a graceful fall. The ground appears all the more hard with the suggestion of impact.

[An image from Denis Darzacq's La Chute series (2006).]

[Robert Longo, Men in the Cities]

In a similar manner but with context erased Robert Longo's Men in the Cities series documents well-dressed figures in a contorted elegiac position, caught mid-dance or mid-reflex of some kind, ties a-flailing.

[Bernard Tschumi]

The series reminds me of Bernard Tschumi's 1978 advertisement for Architecture, which featured a figure in mid-fall with architecture its background. This was the site of a murder. Architecture was its first witness. Tschumi writes that "Architecture is defined as much by the actions it witnesses as much as by the enclosure of its walls."

David Franz in the New Atlantis picks up on this critique citing the quick steady decline of the cubicle from its social utopian origins. Franz writes: “The cubicle, once a cutting edge statement of corporate identity, has become an embarrassment, even for its makers.” Maybe it was simply that utopia was not for those that worked in the cubicles but more for those that supervised those that worked in the cubicles. From the outside, it looked as though everyone had their piece of the office, yet the openness of it meant that they were unified. It is a human hive. Linked together yet each worker maintains some perceived privacy.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Headquarters (1936-39) presents a central space containing a sea of secretaries while administrators occupied the mezzanine level. Preceding the cubicle by about 15 years, the Johnson Wax space was called the “Great Workroom.” The furniture was manufactured by Steelcase Inc, who would later rise to be a major manufacturer alongside Hermann Miller of cubicles.

[Steelcase Inc\'s Topo workspace.]

[Steelcase Inc\'s Topo workspace.]

The cubicle today maintains a consistent place in interior urbanism. Manufacturers downplay its hermetic quality by asserting a more perforated enclosure.

[Tati\'s Playtime, where M Hulot confronts the labyrinth of cubiclopia.]

Jacques Tati’s Playtime riffed on the disorienting qualities of the modern workplace of the 1960s.