Earlier this month, Cisco’s cannily constructed marketing phraseology ignited a fire in my corner of the Internet. Dozens of friends and loved ones linked to “Cisco wires ‘city in a box’ for fast-growing Asia.”

photo credit: ricardodiaz11

Everything about the marketing of New Songdo City feels like a crazy Paleo-Future-esque throwback to the 1950s with updated stock photography. Gale International’s Google search result tagline is, no joke, “Building Tomorrow’s Communities Today”.

The very idea of a city in a box seems to have been ported whole cloth from an era of TV dinners, robot helpers, inflatable furniture, and convenience at the touch of a button. It denies a need for contextual development, or responses to local conditions. This is the machines for living and the mass manufactured utopian nightmare that we are meant to have left behind.

The city itself is explicitly a generic anyplace.

Songdo IBD boasts the wide boulevards of Paris, a 100-acre Central Park reminiscent of New York City, a system of pocket parks similar to those in Savannah, a modern canal system inspired by Venice and convention center architecture redolent of the famed Sydney Opera House.

Songdo IBD A Master Plan Inspired by the World

It feels like the only place that isn’t mentioned is the country that the city will call home – South Korea.

It’s a project reminiscent of EA’s Spore, a game which culminates in you choosing a ‘civilization architecture’ and then then flying around the universe launching seed colonies that all grow up to look the same (local conditions are only respected in that if you build the city underwater or in a poisonous atmosphere, a dome covers the works).

It’s the architecture of glossy globalism, the glittering light side of Baudrillard’s patio. It’s the consistent dream of every major franchise and perfectly appropriate to the bland abstracted face of international business. It’s BLDGBLOG’s Thirteeth Room re-conceived on a massive scale.

You can picture a William Gibson or Douglas Coupland novel; the overstressed, underslept protagonist proceeds in a haze from city to city, complaining about how all airports and hotels look the same only to find themselves in an entire city that looks the same. Have they gone mad? They’ve never been here before, they’re certain of this. But they have been. They know every street corner, every by-way. They can direct the cab driver better than the GPS.

photo credit: lostmodern.net

What about a globe-hopping sci-fi detective novel? A case sends our hero across borders. He’s ostensibly on unfamiliar ground but he knows where the dive bar where someone very much like his regular contact will be. He can find the right chop shops and has a pretty good idea of where the dealers will be, which neighbourhood will have the right kind of corrupt cops.

The effect, useful at first, becomes maddening. Identity begins to shift and blur. He knows passwords for underworld watering holes he’s never been to. He can’t remember if the dame he’s seeing now is the same as one who hired him in the first place.

In an airport lobby, he meets someone very like himself who claims he’s investigating a crime with details that eerily match our hero’s. Is it the work of a serial killer? A copycat? They pool resources.

His GPS starts going on the fritz, and it keeps showing him in different countries. He gets into scrapes, he’s beaten to unconsciousness and when he wakes up he’s not sure what continent he’s on anymore. He stumbles through the tourist district asking if anyone can tell him. No one seems to know or care.

In a hotel he’s sure he’s been to before with staff who don’t recognize him, he confronts his partner. Who is he anyway? How does he know so much about the murders? A strange coincidence that they should just meet. His partner shows him a newspaper, another murder in another city, very much like theirs but ten years before. The first city, the pilot program. It was all hushed up.

Toronto’s G20 artificial lake brings cottage country ambiance to a media pavilion in a militarized security zone in Canada’s largest city.

Sorry, I shouldn’t call it a lake and certainly not the #fakelake. It’s a reflecting pool.

photo credit: joesflickr

The pool will be decked out with a dock, Ontario cottage country’s signature Muskoka chair, canoes, and the recorded sound of calling loons. In the background, a 10-meter screen will show a video loop of cottage fun. According to spokesperson for Muskoka tourism, Michael Lawley, the goal is “to recreate a dock experience” for the thousands of journalists who will be in town to cover the G8 and G20 event. “We’re trying to make a memorable impression,” he said. Indeed.

It’s difficult to read about the plans for the pavilion without asking a lot of impertinent questions about whether the loons will be audible over the press conferences, whether there will be enough chairs for everyone, and what, exactly, is Muskoka tourism’s idea of cottage fun. Will they play beer commercials? Canada’s opposition parties are having a grand old time attacking the project. How could they not? It’s such an obviously terrible idea that from the outside, it’s very difficult to understand how anyone could approve the thing.

There’s a kind of mad evolutionary logic at play. Canada is hosting the G20 and G8 summits back to back and the original plan had them both happening in the Industry Minister’s home riding in a town called Huntsville (pop. 18,000). This explains how Muskoka tourism got involved.

When it became clear that the town couldn’t actually handle the thousands of dignitaries, journalists, security, and protestors, the G20 got moved to Toronto. Only 200 of the thousands of journalists will be permitted to attend the G8. The rest will have to monitor it from afar. You can imagine the frustration, the angry phone calls, and then the master of compromise who suggests, “What if we bring the Muskokas to them?”

photo credit: isafrancesca

Meanwhile, the second insane evolutionary process plays out as the weekend of meetings is encased in a protective shell, the design of which has been refined and re-refined since the embarrassing 1999 Seattle protests.

True to the spirit of globalization, the system of fences, security, and protest is nearly indistinguishable from event to event and place to place. Subtopia talks about it as a travelling stage show but it’s much weirder than that.

In a travelling stage show, the same cast puts on a performance in different venues. But almost none of the players in these events are the same. Protestors and security forces are largely drawn from the local populace. Even the special guest-starring international cast of civil servants, world leaders, and journalists rotate constantly, subjected as they are to the ravages of promotion, demotion, cabinet shuffles, and failed re-election.

This isn’t a travelling show, this is theatre companies mounting the same production all over the globe. When it comes to the performance at the fence, the one thing that remains constant is the set decoration and costume design. The same 12′ steel sheet with concrete feet snaking around the city. The same black hoodies and face bandanas. The same riot shields and batons. The same tear gas and smoke and pepper spray.

Managers at Starbucks and McDonalds would kill for a global brand this consistently implemented.

photo credit: Ducklover Bonnie

Here’s City of Sound talking about the APEC fence in 2007.

I overhear people talking of going to actually see The Fence, as if it were a new temporary attraction, and when I visited on Wednesday, many Sydneysiders were just hanging out in the “sniper-ridden ring of steel”, watching the whole circus. News sites are full of it, and Sydney has been radically altered for a few days. There is plenty to see.

City of Sound The Anti-Fun Palace

Notice that only the name of the city distinguishes it from BlogTO heading out to gawk at our instantiation.

There’s been much made of the recent start of construction on the G20 security fence in Toronto. But, lacking a good conception of its size and breadth, I decided to mosey on down to the area around the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to see what I could find out about this thing. As it turns out, I got a pretty good idea for how intense the police and security presence will be.

BlogTO Toronto’s G20 fence in photos.

In fact you could (and should) read all of City of Sound’s fantastic post about the APEC 2007 fence and apply it to the one in Toronto. (Seriously, I cannot recommend the post highly enough.)

These are mimetic structures. Their design is transmitted all over the globe, reproduced via security conferences, marketing materials, anarchist forums, and planning committees. From the perspective of the city it’s a weird malignant parasite that arrives, takes over, completes its terrible purpose, and then neatly self-disassembles.

In the midst of all this, our main university is closed, our baseball team is playing its home games in another city, our streets are ringed with steel and police and snipers, our windows are boarded up, and our most recognizable landmark has been shut down. When the city is least like itself, conference organizers hope to showcase it to the world.

So they release bland stock footage for newscasters. They make models of our famous landmarks. And they build simulacra of the cottage country where the conference should have happened, if all had gone according to plan.

photo credit: shooteng

Project Proposal

A courtyard is equipped with plant beds, planters and all sorts of spaces for greenery. It is also wired with automated systems for maintaining and changing the environment and a variety of sensors that can detect both the health of the plants and the presence of people.

This is all tied together in a robotic gardening system that both tracks which plant beds people stop near and cares for them based on the attention given. The ugly plants are allowed to die, to then be replaced by other plants. Over time, a semi-darwinian process results in the most evenly pleasing garden.

These allows for an objective community-driven decision making system that ensures that everyone has a vote and that the stakeholders who use the garden most get the most say in the final layout. It also allows for a crowd-sourced tinkerer-approach to selecting the best plants for a landscape. Lastly, it allows for an garden that shifts contents as time shifts the tastes and character of the users of the space.

Prior Art

• Precision farming
• Robot gardeners
• Talking to your plants
• Natural deselection
• Botanicalls

A few months ago, I saw David Benjamin of The Living give a lecture.

One of the projects covered was Amphibious Architecture, an installation of buoys in the East River with environmental sensors and LEDs that communicated the data the sensors were receiving. (Water quality, etc.)

photo credit: somethingstartedcrazy

The coolest piece of the project was the motion sensors that detected fish as they swam by. As they passed through the matrix of buoys, their path was made visible above the surface by lights blinking out and back on. The public loved this element, Benjamin reported. Most people assumed that the river was so polluted that there weren’t any fish left at all. The visible indication of their presence changed residents’ attitudes toward the water.

In Toulouse, they also have a network of lights attached to sensors These are street lamps, erected as part of a trial for saving energy. By default, the streetlights are dimmed. Each one has a heat sensor which monitor the area. If it detects someone, the light brightens.

Imagine Toulose seen from above in real time, the path of its residents traced out by pulses of light. Some areas glow constantly, marking areas of vibrant nightlife. Other areas are calm, with the occasional single ripple of a lone traveller hurrying home down a darkened street. Imagine a map of Toulouse with corresponding LEDs, brightening and dimming in sync with their matching post.

Imagine the cinematic possibilities. A spy thriller in Toulouse. Our hero’s contact has been made and he is fleeing from the enemy. Everywhere he goes, his path is lit. Meanwhile, his assailants proceed methodically, their advance heralded by a glow that seems suffused with dread. Crane shots of the contact’s frantic path through a town square, the converging lights of the hit squad. Out of the darkness, our hero strikes. One by one the assailants are picked off without our hero’s path being lit. How? Dramatically, she opens her trenchcoat, revealing a skin-tight, black, heat suit.

Who says that Glacier Ice Storm has to end just because the week is over?

photo credit: gordontarpley

BLDGBLOG considers the strange tale of a pair of ships built to be trapped in polar ice, 112 years apart.

…what interests me here is the idea that you could build one thing—a ship—that only becomes what it’s really meant to be—a building—when the circumstances it’s surrounded by undergo a phase change (here, water turning into ice).

The Architecture of Polar Ice Floes on >BLDGBLOG

I’m thinking here of about the artificial island Geoff posted about that’s build from rocks and the husks of ships. I’m thinking about bridges and piers and other structures which are floated into place before being sunk and sealed in.

I’m thinking about floating restaurants and the gambling riverboats that never leave dock. Especially the floating casinos; they never wanted to be water-faring in the first place, were forced into mobility by laws, and are slowly reverting to their natural state.

Many of the floating palaces of fortune that cling to the Mississippi’s banks like mussels in the five states where they are legal still look like the elegant steamboats that plied the river in Twain’s time. The resemblance ends at the waterline, however, as many have no engines, and those that do rarely, if ever, fire them up and weigh anchor.

Others — the so-called “boats on moats” — don’t look anything like floating wedges of wedding cake, a description applied to the paddle-wheel steamboats of old. These “vessels” are large barges designed to float in pools adjacent to the river with casinos on their decks.

Mike Brunker Riverboat casinos going nowhere fast for MSNCB.com

I’m thinking about the concrete tents, where the phase change is in the material of the structure itself. “Add water to make this permanent.”

Lastly, I’m thinking about the many, many, many science fiction and fantasy scenarios where what was once thought to be an ancient temple turns out to be a fully operational starship/battle station/moving castle waiting for the right people to come along and bring it back to life.

Perhaps even the moon is waiting for launch codes.