When he was still running the Viridian Movement, Bruce Sterling introduced the idea of involuntary parks. Spaces in the world that have become so polluted or otherwise unusable by humans, that they’ve been left to nature (or, at least, savagery).

Involuntary Parks are very Viridian. They are not representatives of untouched nature, but of *vengeful* nature, of natural processes reasserting themselves in areas of political and technological collapse.

Bruce Sterling, Viridian Note 00023.

This is an idea that’s worth revisiting, I think.

1. The Korean DMZ

   Beginning with a canonical one: the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea is a 250km x 4km sea of mines, barbed wire and rare animals. It’s been left more or less untouched for over 50 years.

   
   photo credit: US Army Korea – IMCOM

   Bonus knowledge: Kijong-Dong is one of two villages still inside the DMZ. It’s on the North Korean-side, full of bright white and blue buildings which officially house a 200-family collective farm along with the world’s tallest flag pole. The buildings are empty shells, without interiors or even windows. It is suspected that a skeleton staff mans the village, keeping it clean and creating the illusion of activity.

2. Chernobyl

   Second canonical involuntary park: Chernobyl. Abandoned after the meltdown in 1986, Chernobyl’s creatures have had a little less time to reclaim, but they seem to be doing fine (despite a little extra mutation).

   
   photo credit: rusocer

   Bonus knowledge: If current demographic and migration trends hold, a lot more of Russia will be abandoned to savagery, due to the massive depopulation of the country.

3. Brittany

   A chance to see an involuntary park’s creation? Seaweed is growing so quickly on the beaches of Brittany in France, that it’s turning into toxic chemical minefields. People – including a civic employee paid to clean up the mess – are being put into comas.

   
   photo credit: capitphil

   Bonus Knowledge: Brittany (a.k.a. Aremorica) is where Asterix and Obelix are from. One of my favourite stories involves Caesar trying to finally assimilate/evict the village with a redevelopment project. It was an attempt to raze the swath of forest created by a ring of containment garrisons and Rome’s inability to put down the villager’s resistance.

4. Centralia

   It’s a coal mine that started burning in 1961. It’s predicted to last another 250 years. This is where things get interesting.

   The Viridian idea of involuntary parks is these savage nature sanctuaries. Environmental or political ruin-zones where humans fear to tread. But just as there’s a wide variety of usage scenarios in designated parks, there’s a sliding scale of inhospitability.

   Centralia’s evacuation was gradual. Congress didn’t even start funding the relocation of residents until 1984. People moved out slowly and there were still hold-outs in 2007. The result is feels very much like a recreational facility. Not so much a preserve as a place where people can fool around on their ATVs.

   Bonus knowledge: In 2002, Centralia’s ZIP code was revoked. As far as I can tell (please correct me!) it’s the only time that this has happened.

5. Turcot Interchange

   The Turcot Interchange is a sprawling knot of roadways, the bane of many a visitor to Montreal. The roads are soaring. They are massive concrete ribbons, built to allow ships to pass through the canal and proclaim Montreal’s 1960s status as a big player on the world stage.

   The network is ageing, and slabs of concrete have taken to falling off the overpasses. Debates are raging about how to redevelop or repair the system. Unexpected resistance came from the residents of nearby St Henri who – in addition to being unhappy with the idea of the highways coming down to ground level – were quietly using the spaces between the spires to walk their dogs, practice their golf, and generally recreate. The area also houses a rare species of brown snake.

   
   photo credit: Christian & Cie

   Bonus knowledge: Spacing Montreal has more (including aerial photos) on the history of the area.

6. Detroit

   Detroit’s status as an involuntary park is fragile. Unlike everything else on the list, Detroit’s neighbourhoods are being abandoned because of economy instead of environment. In theory, residents could return, were Detroit to pick back up as a place worth living. For now, it’s shrinking fast with an area the size of San Francisco totally abandoned. One proposed solution is to simply bulldoze huge sections of the city, concentrating the population in a smaller area.

   In the meantime, Detroit is practically becoming a tourist destination for all the ruin. People are doing art installations, photography (so much photography), and experimenting with architecture. This is a fine line between park and redevelopment. If things go too well, eco-gentrification is sure to follow.

   
   photo credit: joguldi

   Bonus Knowledge: You will not regret exploring these pictures (especially #10).

Here are 6 videos spanning 50 years of predictions about our glorious technological future at home. What I love about all of these are the incidental predictions that need to happen when the videos are put together. They want to make promises about future technology and materials but they can’t help but imply various thing about how society will evolve. For instance, the 1997 Microsoft video which features a kid researching for a project doesn’t see Wikipedia coming at all (neither did Microsoft).

1. 1957: Monsanto Plastics

   Oh visions of the future from the 1950s, why must you have so much back-handed sexism?

2. 1980: Xanadu

   I really want to know what was going through the minds of the committee that decided that the first robot you should meet should be the murderous HAL from 2001.

3. 1988: Ameritech

   There are a lot of predictions that seem accurate if you sort of squint a little. One that wasn’t was that Ameritech would still exist. (Via the excellent paleofuture.)

   
   The Electronic Home

4. 1997: Microsoft

   In the future, you will still be watching Oprah.

5. 2008: Samsung

   I am pleased that in the future, the lead-in feature of RFID involves organizing your recipes.

6. 2008: Adaptive Path and Mozilla Labs

   Adaptive Path decides to hitch their future horse to the New York Times, Yahoo, MapQuest, Amazon, and Google brands. I wonder how many of those will make it.

   Aurora (complete video without commentary) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Fun activity: Predict what predictions in the last two videos will seem hopelessly naive 10 years from now.

Part of a series: Cyborgs & Architects

photo credit: kirainet

This’ll be the last explicit post about Cyborgs and Architects for awhile (here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). Having set up and then blurred a division between adapting people for the environment and adapting the environment for people, I’d like to point out some examples along the sliding scale between these two attitudes.

1. Nadya Vessey, temporary mermaid.

   New Zealand’s WETA workshop built a mermaid suit for Vessey, a double leg amputee. I love everything about this story, especially the way it offers a glimpse of a future where enhancements are not merely restoring human capabilities but opportunities for creating whole new kinds of bodies, bringing aesthetics to cybernetics.

2. Steve Mann, pioneer in wearable computing.

   You can see the evolution of his setup here. He has also done a lot of interesting work and activism around ubiquitous surveillance.

   I remember in 1996 trying to convince a bunch of skeptical law students that wearable computing would change the way they practiced the law.

   Now they all have blackberries.

3. Kevin Warwick, cybernetic homesteader.

   In 1998, Dr Warwick had a chip implanted under his skin that let him control the building. The experiment brilliantly illustrates the blurring between architecture and cybernetics. Neither the smart building, nor the implant chip are worth anything on their own. But networked, the result is something special.

   His research continues.

4. Kisho Kurokawa, metabolist.

   In 1972, his capsule tower was built. A explicitly modifiable structure, the intention was that the capsules would be replaced and updated over time, creating a long lasting building through its very mutability and flexibility.

   Here was an environment that would grow and adapt to its users. Sadly, it seems like the maintenance part didn’t go as planned and now the whole structure faces demolition.

5. Minoru Yamasaki, modernist.

   Yamasaki is the architect of the destroyed WTC Towers, but I’m picking on him here for the disastrous Pruitt-Igoe public housing project. A lot of ink has been spilled about what went wrong, but in the end, the environment that had been constructed failed dramatically, becoming a symbol for the failure of the well-meaning but flawed modernist “machines for living” mentality.

   “I never thought people were that destructive,” lamented Yamasaki.

6. Albert Speer, Nazi.

   Perhaps one of the leading examples of the idea that architecture can control people, Speer designed the Zeppelinfeld, the enormous stadium featured in The Triumph of the Will. Nazi architecture was predicated on the idea that it should not only serve the people, but also influence their mood and behaviours.

   For a smaller scale (and more benevolent) take, see also police commissioner William J. Bratton and the fixing broken windows theory.

All of: Cyborgs & Architects

1. The Photography of Chris Jordan.

   Chris Jordan takes very, very big numbers and represents them in photographs. Here’s one that he made with folded prison uniforms standing in for Americans in prison. More on his official site.

2. The 30 Worst Atrocities of the 20th Century.

   I found this page by accident several years ago. I end up going back to it when discussions about who’s the worst mass murdered in history come up. The section at the end with the pattern in per-capita killings? Chilling.

3. The Slow Rise of the Oceans.

   Apparently, even if all of the polar ice were to melt today, it would take up to 50 years for that water circulate throughout the world. The planet is so big, and the ocean currents are so powerful, that the water will remain trapped in a kind of slowly dispersing bulge of fluid.

4. The Problem of Storing Nuclear Waste.

   This is something that I want to come back to in some detail as a design problem. For now, take a look at this proposed monument to warn people away from the waste site (wherever it ends up). The waste is going to be dangerous for at least 10,000 years. This is the approximate length of recorded human history. How do you communicate a warning forward to people who will be at least as different from us as we are from the Babylonians?

5. That We’re Currently in an Ice Age.

   This is an interglacial period, a time of relative warmth in the midst of an ice age which is 2-3 million years old. During the past 400,000 years, warm periods like ours have tended to last 10,000 to 30,000 years. The cold has tended to last much longer. Our current (geologically brief) warm period has been happening for about 11,000 years – again, roughly the length of human history.

6. This Video.

   Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.