The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UC-SB is presenting a series of fantastic events this year on the theme Oil+Water. With this event they turn to their own backyard: the case of Southern California. Oil + Water commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Santa Barbara oil spill, and provides an opportunity to examine the impact of these two resources on the history, economy, and culture of California and the world. Interested parties should contact our program and events coordinator, Laura Devendorf (ldevendorf[at]ihc.ucsb.edu), for more information. Below is a schedule of events and activities for the conference.

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Oil + Water: The Case of Santa Barbara and Southern California
April 8 – 10, 2010
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
UC Santa Barbara / Santa Barbara, CA, USA

This conference will explore the ways in which oil and water have created and transformed the history and culture of Santa Barbara and Southern California. Topics will include the Santa Barbara oil spill; the impact of oil on Hollywood; agriculture and marine life; the Owens River Valley; the Salton Sea; cars and car culture; and environmental histories and their lessons.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Oil + Water series, the UC California Studies Consortium, and the Community Environmental Council.

Thursday, April 8
5:00 PM KEYNOTE: Oil Runs Through It: Power, Publics, and the Role of Place
Harvey Molotch (Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU)

Friday, April 9
9:00 AM Introduction
Ann Bermingham (Acting Director, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB)

9:15 AM PANEL: Oil, Water, and Activism: The Case of Santa Barbara
Teresa Sabol Spezio (History, UCD) / Most Congressmen Care Little: The Role of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill in Changing Federal Environmental Laws
Eric Smith (Political Science, UCSB) / What the California Public Thinks About Off Shore Oil Development
Linda Krop (Chief Council, Environmental Defense Center and Environmental Studies, UCSB) / The Environmental Politics of Off Shore Drilling

11:00 AM KEYNOTE: Whales, Noisemakers, and Noise
Jim Nollman

1:30 PM PANEL: Oil+Water: the Case of Southern California
David Maisel / The Lake Project
Mason White & Lola Sheppard / Farming the Salton Sea
Andrew Fitzpatrick / Ocotillo Wells: California Oil History Encapsulated
Kenneth Rogers, Caleb Waldrof and Bill Kelley, Jr. (Third Rail Group, UCSD) / Slow Activism, Dialogical Practice and Environmental Remediation at the Inglewood Oil Fields

3:00 PM KEYNOTE: After Oil!: Petroleum, Media, and the California Experiment
Stephanie LeMenager (English, UCSB)

4:00 PM PANEL: The Culture of Oil
Vanessa Osborne (English, USC) / Celluloid and Oil: Early Hollywood and the Oil Industry in Upton Sinclair’s Oil!
Jean-Paul deGuzman (History, UCLA) / At the Car Wash! Culture and Labor in the City of Angles
Desiree D’Alessandro and Diran Lyons (Art, UCSB) / World Water Shortage vs Golf Consumption and Jake Gyllenhaal Challenges the Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

Saturday, April 10
9:15 AM ROUNDTABLE: Oil and Water in the Santa Barbara County Agrifood System
David A. Cleveland (Environmental Studies, UCSB)
With: Ingrid R. Avison, Caitlin Brimm, Heidi Diaz, Sydney E. Hollingshead, Dominique C. Liuzzi, Nora M. Muller, Corie N. Radka, Tyler D. Watson, Hannah Wright.

10:45 AM KEYNOTE: Near Goleta But Closer: An Unnatural History
Harry Reese (Art, UCSB)

1:30 PM PANEL: Histories of an Unnatural History
Karen Piper (Comparative Literature, Carnegie Mellon University) / Owens Lake: California’s Albatross
Eliza Martin (History, UCSC) / Making Rain, Creating Floods: Expertise and the Manufacturing of Disaster in San Diego’s Flood of 1916
David Zetland, (Agriculture and Resource Economics, UCB) / Joseph Jensen and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California
Michael R. Adamson (History, CSU Sacramento) / Oil Booms and Boosterism: Local Elites, Outside Companies, and the Growth of Ventura California

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Hope to see some of you there.

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.

Prompted by an excellent text entitled "Three Doors to Other Worlds" by Andrew Crompton in the JAE from last November, we are following him down the rabbit hole. (Get the complete PDF here.) Crompton positions architecture within the cognitive sciences with a fancy for the grotesque / Baroque. In this particular text Crompton is seeking to chart and qualify architectures that elude description through drawing or photograph, instead requiring something more, err, cognitive. A tall order, and possibly one that were it actually taken to task would be a very short list in architecture, though maybe longer in art and media, and surprisingly engineering. One case in point in Crompton's search is the architectural equivalent of a black hole. It is a bellmouth spillway. In particular Crompton refers to the Ladybower bellmouth constructed in 1935 near Sheffield, UK.

[The spillway at the Monticello Dam, near San Francisco, CA.]

Unable to evaluate whether the bellmouth truly qualifies for its ineffable status having not seen them in person, it is easy to note in photograph the surreal nature by which the weighty mass of water at once appears as a single surface folding in on itself. Or as Crompton writes: It is easy to overlook its obvious purpose and see instead an object of sinister artistry. Simply speaking, the spillway is a massive drain for the reservoir. It prevents water from rising above a certain level and spilling over the dam or lake shoreline. The bellmouth at the Monticello Dam is the largest in the world at a diameter of 87 feet narrowing to 27 feet and can drain off 367,500 US Gallons per second. Gulp.

Spillways serve to regulate reservoir levels and maintain two states; (1) in use they disappear and are minimally obscured by flowing water, (2) not in use they are sculptural oddities hovering ambiguously above the water line. In use the spillway is pure negative space, a void; not in use, they are solid, positive space. Aside from Crompton's observations on the black hole condition, we would add the potential for contradictory phase change to its ineffability. The spillway swallows its own description as it imbibes water through Klein-bottle-like inversions.

[Section of the Morning Glory Spillway of the Val Noci Dam in Montoggio, Italy showing revisions made to the design for increased performance.]

The nomenclature behind the bellmouth spillways further its reading as a massive engineered earthen orifice. The mouth, the throat, the shaft. In refining the engineering behind the bellmouth for the Val Noci Dam in Montoggio, Italy a throttle and air supply was added to accelerate the spillways ability to process extreme flow and turn a 90 degree corner. In other words, to keep the bellmouth from choking on itself in grew a tongue.

[Studies of the flow for the Morning Glory spillway for Val Noci Dam.]

[The massive High Island Reservoir, created in 1978 near Hong Kong on the Sai Kung Peninsula, is serviced by this bellmouth.]

[The steeped edges of the Ladybower bellmouth prevent the surficial reading found in the smooth flow of the bellmouth at Monticello Dam.]

[Peering into the ineffable, the Ladybower bellmouth spillway.]

A recent thesis project at McGill University by Tania Delage takes Lebbeus Woods’ idea of the borderline and the ecological phenomena of the ecotone as an opportunity to cross-breed infrastructure, ecology and public amenities.

The borderline is the site where various systems collide, superimpose, or react to create a new condition. (Woods) These systems can vary greatly in scope; from social conditions to ecological and biological conditions. They may be tied to shifts in economic activity, technological advancements, obsolete or growing infrastructure, and environmental phenomena. Ecotones are the natural spaces where transformation and growth occur, typically at borderline site conditions. It is these sites of superimposed systems that provide the grounds for a new ‘mode of culture.’

[Points of infrastructure and ecology along St. Lawrence Seaway]

At an ecological scale, the site is the Great Lakes basin and Saint-Lawrence River, the largest freshwater system of the world. The watershed is home to many ecological systems and provides important migratory routes for fish that spawn in fresh water only to return to their salt water habitat. Ringed by areas of intense urbanization, the watershed represents a major transportation artery for commercial navigation and provides a source of hydro electric power to the surrounding areas. The waterway also serves as an open sewer to cities along its shore, as it simultaneously supplies their drinking water.

[View of finger-like aerobic filtration gardens, and ringed sedimentaion gardens, which together form natural filtration system for the river water]

The site of intervention is the overflow or deversoir of the Rivière-des-prairies hydro-electric dam, one of the first built in Québec, located between the north shore of Montreal and the south shore of Laval. The overflow is essentially a giant retaining wall that allows for the regulation of water levels. The overflow is adjacent to the nature park – l’Ile de la Visitation. In contrast to the bucolic nature of the area, housing developments upstream discharge the equivalent of one Olympic-sized pool of untreated waste every three days into the river, producing highly polluted sediment in the area.

[1 Aerobic filtration gardens, 2 Sedimentation gardens, 3 Fish ladders, 4 Visitor pathways]

The project reconfigures the dam to become an inhabited filtration system and a public ‘water’ park. Fingers into the river form aerobic filtration gardens, while the concrete rings in plan form sedimentation basins, and support natural habitats for amphibians and waterfowl and re-establish migratory routes of certain fish species.

[Hydro park negotiating variable water levels]

Hydro-electric generation can literally be turned on and off by shutting and opening the watergates, an endeavour lasting merely a few minutes. In times of low energy requirements, such as at night, the watergates are shut, thereby stopping the currents. The two water levels present in the site offer opportunities for a changing landscape, atune to the cyclical hydrological variations. Floating filtering gardens, located on the high water level sway back and forth with the currents produced by the dam to reminding visitors of the inner-workings of the facility itself. At the lower water level, an extension of the nature park is created, allowing visitors to experience the filter housing sequence.

[Visitors walk on pathways, alongside fish ladders which help reestablish migratory routes displaced during the original construction of the dam]

Elements of the landscape become submerged, no longer suitable for human inhabitation but become appropriate for different types of wildlife. Part infrastructure, part landscape, the park becomes a shifting exchange point between water systems, energy resources, human users and animal habitats.

[Inhabiting the Ecotone Hydro park]

Colleagues of ours, Aziza Chaouni and Liat Margolis, recently mounted a fantastic exhibition here at the Daniels Faulty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. The exhibition is titled Out of Water: Innovative Technologies in Arid Climates. It is a survey of technologies and proposals addressing water scarcity.

[OOW panel installation system. Have a seat and browse...]

Several projects within the exhibition are worth a more in-depth than I can do justice to here. Thankfully, rumor has it that there will be a publication forthcoming on the technologies and projects as well. More on that later. In the meantime, we will leave you with one technology and two projects as an introduction to Out of Water.

[Land imprinting at work in Arizona.]

[Land Imprinting Panel.]

Those connect the city with vast aquifers deep underground and provide transportation as well as agricultural irrigation. The caverns, cellular in form constitute a new neighborhood typology that mediates between the subterranean urban network and the surface level activities of water harvesting, energy generation, urban agriculture and aquaculture. Sietch is also a bunker-like fortress preparing for the inevitable wars over water in the region.

[Model of Sietch Waterbanking by MATSYS and Nenad Katic.]

Infrastructural Armature – Fletcher Studio
Los Angeles is a managed fantasy defined and sustained by its aging infrastructural legacy: freeways, channelized water networks, and power grids. These networks have grown horizontally, as vast sprawling enclaves are served by an incessant frenzy of individualized transportation and habitation. The forces of resource scarcity, global warming, and sea level rise will serve to radically alter future development. Los Angeles must assert its resiliency by radically altering its infrastructural investment. The city’s growth must re-organize, abandon its impervious terrains, and density along its matrices of transportation and hydrology. These networks of conveyance are incrementally inoculated with a metabolic landscape of wastewater reclamation, which in turn become catalysts for new forms of land uses. As sea levels rise, tidal energy is harnessed to operate desalination, as well as the distribution of reclaimed water.

[Fletcher Studio, Infrastructural Armature.]

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many freshly independent Central Asian countries such as Tajikistan, were dealt either a strong or poor hand with regard to land resources. Reading in the NYTimes on Sunday, Tajikistan hopes an abundance of water will leverage its lingering economic woes. The Tajiks were dealt few exploitable resources, i.e. oil / gas, but the productive combination of heavy winter precipitation and endless mountains, has produced a healthy abundance water. Throw in global warming, and you have a very full river. Along the Vakhsh River, Tajikistan, the Nurek Dam is an icon of 1960s Soviet infrastructure ingenuity. At 300 m (984 ft), the Nurek is the tallest Dam in the world. The massive reservoir fuels nine hydroelectric turbines producing 3.0 gigwatts, or 40% of Central Asia's power needs and 98% of Tajikistan's.

[Interior of Nurek Dam ... or central control.]

Just up-river from Nurek is another dam project, Rogun, that has been in the works – and then stalled – for over 30 years. Rogun, the Sagrada Familia of dams is expected to reach 335m (1099 ft) when completed. In fact, Tajikistan pins its entire future on its ability to export power to neighboring energy poor countries such as Kazakstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Most affected downstream, Uzbekistan is unhappy with the Rogun project as it will disrupt water flow and therefore considerably effect an already fragile agriculture cycle.

[Irrigation infrastructure in Shartuz, where the cotton fields dried up in the early 1990s. Photo by Carolyn Drake for The New York Times.]

[The complex politics of water control in Central Asia. Map by UNEP.]

To compensate for this, the Tajik's sought energy independence through hydropower, which worked well. So well in fact that it is leveraging the exportability of its hydropower success against neighboring water poor states. This has now come back full circle as Tajikistan seeks to have water (hydropower) recognized as a tradable commodity, like the oil and gas it has had to purchase from Uzbekistan.

[A closer look at the politics of damming, runoff, and irrigation in the Ferghana Valley. Map by UNEP.]

An interesting article in Science chronicles the ever rising numbers of dead zones. Dead zones are oxygenless waters as a result of activities such as riverine runoff of fertilizers and other algae-multiplying nutrients. As written by Diaz and Rosenberg, "Dead zones have now been reported from more than 400 systems, affecting a total area of more than 245,000 square kilometers (95,000 miles2), and are probably a key stressor on marine ecosystems." Their murky waters generate blackholes in the ocean – no fish, therefore no birds, no recreational or commercial fishing. And shift infrastructures – boat routes, port activity, a

Dead zones have been tracked sine the 1970s, but have increasingly expanded their locations, their reach, and are lingering after summer.

[Several visible sites with expanding dead zones. Mississippi Delta at the top, with Yangtze River in the bottom left and Pearl River in the bottom right. The dead zones are the tinted clouds swirling at the coastal edge. Image via the SeaWiFS of NASA.]

[The Gulf of Mexico dead zone.]

Clocking in at over 8000 square miles (21,000 km2) this year, probably the largest dead zone today stems from the Mississippi River delta in the Gulf of Mexico. This is a site at the confluence of significant farming in the midwest and significant fishing (and shrimping) in the Gulf area. The dead zone spans east to west along the Louisiana and Texas coasts. The hypoxic region expands during the summer, so shrimpers and fishermen are casting their lines and nets farther out in the Gulf.

For more see an article in today's Time magazine.

Resembling something out of the portfolios of Frei Otto or Cedric Price, the Kona Blue Sea Stations off the coast of Hawaii are open sea offshore 3,000-cubic-meter submersible fish pens.

Kona Blue’s premiere achievement is Kona Kampachi^®, a premium sushi-grade Hawaiian yellowtail species.

Currently, four open ocean aquaculture operations growing finfish, two operations in Hawaii, one in Puerto Rico and one in New Hampshire. All four operations grow species native to their area. All four use similar technology in their operations, including a set of submerged cages moored to the ocean bottom.

[The tent-like sea station fish pens.]

[Prepping the dewaterer.]

[Diagram of Sea Station.]

[The netting is made out of Dyneema, a material used in bulletproof vesting.]

[In Toshka farm,near Egypts border with Sudan, the Egyptian goverment hopes to grow 2 million acres of wheat, alongside fruits such as the grape fields as above.]

As recently chronicled in the NY Times, Global food shortages have placed the Middle East and North Africa in a dilemma: grow more crops to feed expanding population or preserve already limited supplies of water. For decades, nations in this region have drained aquifers, desalinated sea water and even diverted the Nile in order to transform the arid desert into lush, agricultural landscapes.

[A canal diverts Nile water for irrigation near Egypt's border with Sudan. As a piece of engineering, the canal cuts through the desert landscape.]

In the 1980s, Saudi Arabia made itself self-sufficient with regard to food, and even positioned itself as a global exporter. Egypt had its own struggling desert oasis with the Toshka farm, which represented 500,000 acres of potential farmland eked from the desert. Egypt’s president, Mubarak, puts the ambitions of cultivating this farmland on par with the ambitions of constructing the Pyramids.

However, as these agricultural oases became increasingly costly and water intensive, countries in the Middle East began importing their food, sometimes up to 90 percent or more of their staples. But with current global food shortages and rising costs, nations are turning anew to expensive schemes to maintain their food supply.

Population in this region has quadrupled since 1950, to 364 million and is predicted to reach 600 million by 2050. By then, already scare water resources will be cut in half.

[A global map shows food production needs are increasingly strained in areas where it is most difficult to farm.]

Oil-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia have begun looking for farmland in fertile but politically volatile nations such as Pakistan, with the goal of growing crops to be shipped home, in the form of agricultural surrogacy. For years there have been international discussions regarding international water sovereignty. It will be interesting to see if such discussions eventually extend to agricultural lands.

Meanwhile, economists suggest that rather than seeking food self-sufficiency, countries should grow crops for which they have a competitive advantage like produce or flowers, which do not require much water and can be exported for top dollar. Israel has been using drip irrigation for decades, for precise, engineered and water-efficient agricultural production.

[Grand Omar Mukhtar reservoir, part of the Great Man Made River project in Lybia.]

Supporting these ambitious projects to farm the desert requires an equally ambitious infrastructure of water delivery such as the Great Man-made River (GMR), a network of pipes that supplies water from the Sahara Desert in Libya from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System fossil aquifer. Some sources cite it as the largest engineering project ever undertaken. It may well be the largest underground network of pipes in the world. It consists of more than 1300 wells, the majority more than 500 m deep, and supplies 6,500,000 m³ of freshwater per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirt and elsewhere.

Or, Three States of Waste…

We have been following the Naples "trash crisis" for almost a year now. Unbeknownst to us, as of a few days ago, the problem has apparently been declared “resolved” by Berlusconi.

It began more than 14 years ago, but flared up last year when official dumps were declared full. The Campania region's dumps reached full capacity more than a decade ago, and since then a state of emergency has been declared every year. Campania is home to some six million people. Eight different commissioners have been appointed, but they have all failed to solve the problem. State of emergency means government money: €1.8 billion (more than $2.5 billion) in emergency funds have been devolved to deal with the problem. The local Camorra mafia has been involved in illegal industrial waste treatment since the dumps reached capacity.

[The journey of garbage in the swirling Pacific gyres.]

Another looming garbage heap is what is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or informally as “plastic soup,” a massive trash formation in the North Pacific. The swirling expanse of debris, made up of plastic junk including footballs, kayaks, Lego blocks and carrier bags, is kept together by the vortexian Gyre underwater currents. That is just the solid visible parts. Each plastic entity photdegrades into small plastic pellets mistaken for plankton. Plastic accounts for 90% of all debris floating in the oceans. In fact, it is estimated that plastic outweighs surface zooplankton 6 to 1.

Forming a thickening artificla continent, the floating garbage reef sits just below the surface and manages to elude satellite photography. The patch slowly bobs in an eddy of ocean in relative stasis.

[The drift patterns of trash in the Pacific. The diagrams show the position of drift after 183 days (top), three years (center), and ten years (bottom).]

Ocean Surface Current Simulator (OSCURS) model developed by W James Ingraham Jr. predicts the trajectory of drift originating along the coasts of the North Pacific rim. Drift from Japan is shown in red; drift from North America, in blue.

This could be a job for revamping the NYC TrashCats that prowled and trolled the NYC Rivers in the 1980s and 90s around Fresh Kills…

[UMI TrashCat™ skimming back bay wetland areas.]

Or maybe the possibility of enzymes from garbage… here.

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