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McArthur Universal Corrective Map of the World

On Sunday September 14, i had the great pleasure to host a panel on Cartography of Protest and Social Changes with 3 artists and activists i admire a lot: Brooke Singer, John Emerson and Lize Mogel. I usually avoid writing about the events i’m so closely involved in, either because i don’t have the opportunity to take notes or because there’s some video of it about to broadcast the ridiculousness of my accent on the world wide web.

It all started a few months ago when i found about, read and fell in love with a book: An Atlas of Radical Cartography. An Atlas is in fact a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration.

When Christina Ray, the director of Conflux, asked me if i’d like to host a panel i said i’d like to moderate one inspired by An Atlas. Lize Mogel is one of the editors of the book (together with Alexis Bhagat ), Brooke Singer and John Emerson contributed to the volume with maps. Just like the book, the panel was an attempt to demonstrate that maps have the potential to bring about social changes. I am not going to write down everything that was say, i’ll just share with you tiny bits from the presentations:

Lize’s presentation focused on the maps of An Atlas, you can find information about them online but her intro contained some fascinating facts. Here’s just one of them:

One of the world’s most famous maps can be seen on the flag of the United Nations.

The first version was drawn in 1946 by someone from the US department and had North America at the center of the emblem. The design was changed after some complains from other countries. But one question remained: how do you design a map of the world that has to be fair and display equality between the nations? There is always something on the top, something in the middle (and thus the center of the attention), even being on the left side is not innocent as our eyes are used to read from left to right, the right is also meaningful as advertisers have discovered that the eyes always seem to fall on that side of an image. The solution adopted represents an azimuthal equidistant projection centered on the North Pole. But that area which one would believe is blank and neutral is in fact a space for debate: the area is owned by Denmark, Canada, Russia, Norway and the US and it’s unclear how it should be divided up exactly.

Pedro Lasch, Guías de Ruta / Route Guides, 2003/2006,

An Atlas of Radical Cartography exhibition opens on September 23 at the Global Education Center, UNC campus. Upcoming venues for the exhibition include New Jersey (October), New York City, Utrecht (2009), etc.

John Emerson has a very impressive portfolio and a blog i’d recommend anyone to subscribe to. He often collaborates with grass-root, independent, non-profit associations dealing with human rights, from California Coalition for Women Prisoners, to the Office of The Tibetan Government in Exile, or Injection Drug Use, Syringe Exchange Programs and AIDS in California. His belief is that maps can be useful tools that visualize power and are able to create social change, influence opinions and alter relationships between powers. By making abstraction visible, maps help us navigate through complex concepts.

Trade and Control of Gold in Northeastern DRC

One of the projects he highlighted are the compelling and revealing maps of Gold Trade in the Democratic Republic of Congo he created for the Human Rights Watch report The Curse of Gold. The gold trade is fueling conflicts and atrocities for the last 20 years in northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The maps makes clearer the relationship between gold concessions, paramilitary groups in the country and gold companies from all over the world.

The art crowd will probably have heard about a project he developed together with Trevor Paglen.

CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006, Trevor Paglen & John Emerson on Wiltshire, LA

Paglen’s project ‘CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006′ explores the practice of extraordinary rendition. Emerson designed the map that visualizes the movements of aircraft owned or operated by known CIA front companies in order to reveal the relationships that have been forged between the United States and other countries in the name of the ‘war on terror.’

Back in 2006, Paglen and Emerson installed a huge billboard displaying the map of the rendition flights on 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles. The billboard, part of the The Clockshop Billboard Series. The reaction of the drivers passing by was not an unanimous feeling of revolt in front of the CIA activities, some felt proud and satisfied to see that the government was doing a good job.

Detail from the NYC Guide to War Profiteers

Another great project Emerson discussed is the NYC Guide to War Profiteers. First published in March 2003, the map located precisely government and military agencies, weapon makers, corporations, media benefiting from the war, etc. The map was available at progressive bookstores around town, and was distributed at organizing meetings for various protest events. It also listed a series of like-minded websites. You can find a scan of the hard copy online.

Brooke Singer discussed briefly her contribution to An Atlas: the Map of U.S. Oil Fix as well as her fantastic project Superfund365, a website that chronicles 365 of the worst Superfund sites where Americans live at risk of exposure to toxins.

Site entrance of Fried Industries manufacturing plant

In her introduction about map, Singer reminded the audience of a few relevant facts:

- mapping is more about representation than truthfulness,
- maps are often made by scientists and as such, are perceived as objectives. Artists don’t have the pretense to be objective, they do not assume that in the world of map making there is only objectivity going on.

Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion World Map-unfolded, 1946

She showed also two thought-provoking maps that illustrate this idea of maps as representation: McArthur Universal Corrective Map of the World, designed in the ’70s by an Australian man who was upset by the idea that he came from the “bottom of the world”. The second one is Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map, the first world projection to show the continents on a flat surface without visible distortion. The map highlights the fact that the earth is essentially one big island over one ocean.

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by Regine


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This article was written by Mara Hvistendahl in August 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

In 2005, green architect William McDonough and British engineering firm Arup separately announced plans to build ambitious eco-cities housing up to 500,000 inhabitants on the mainland. For a few months following these announcements, coverage was enthusiastic (we have written about these cities a number of times, with earlier articles here and here). Much of this coverage was deserved. Designers are, after all, devising solutions to what promises to be one of the largest rural-to-urban migrations in history.

But in recent months, journalists have begun to look at how these cities are shaping up. After publishing a glowing article on McDonough’s designs for sustainable Chinese cities in 2005, Newsweek ran an article this May that reads like a retraction. Its assessment of Huangbaiyu, the model village in McDonough’s program and the first in a series of seven planned eco-cities, is bleak:

The project appears to be a mess. Construction of the 400 houses is way behind schedule. The 42 that have been built still have no heat, electricity or running water. Walls are already cracking and moisture seeps through the ceilings. According to people who’ve worked on the project, many of the houses don’t adhere to the original specifications—meaning they could never achieve the energy savings they were meant to achieve. The biomass gasification facility meant to burn animal, human and agricultural waste, doesn’t work. Not surprisingly, no one in the village has volunteered to move into the new community.

Last month, Popular Science published a feature that casts similar doubts on the prospects for China’s eco-cities.

I saw Peter Head speak at April’s Holcim Forum, a gathering of sustainability-minded architects and engineers, in Shanghai. During his presentation, he showed a video that had been produced by the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation, the developer responsible for Dongtan, the city Arup designed for an island outside of Shanghai. The city presented in the video suggested the myriad gated communities that surround Shanghai: gaudy and dramatic, with very little of the restraint and economy that most would associate with sustainable design.

That is precisely the problem in China. People in developed countries have had a few decades to try out and reject excess. It isn’t just an awareness of environmental degradation that pushes us to go green; it’s a knowledge, gleaned from firsthand experience, that conventional living generates a level of waste that makes us uncomfortable. In urban China, however, bigger is still better. Most middle-class Chinese are still preoccupied with finding ways to display their wealth, not minimize its impact on the world.

Such attitudes — which are understandable, if not admirable — are behind the problems now surfacing in the transformation of urban China. To accomplish their goals, Western designers working in China might partner with local government officials, as McDonough has done. But such officials might be more concerned with project success than with enforcing land rights or securing public participation — also critical to creating healthy, enduring communities. On the other hand, another solution is to trust eco-city properties to the market, as Arup has done with Dongtan. Visitors to that project, which is now taking shape, decribe large single-family homes and suburban-style planning. Wired’s feature on Dongtan suggests that SIIC and Arup differed on what they wanted out of Dongtan early on:

Part of the problem was that SIIC wasn’t sure yet what it wanted. Its people talked about Dongtan as an eco-city, but they also talked about it as a quaint green suburb or as Shanghai’s Hamptons, a place for the city’s wealthy to flee for the weekend. They seemed to have good intentions but little direction.

The BBC alludes to similar problems in its recent article on Dongtan.

But the stream of Chinese eco-cities won’t stop. Last month, New York architect Kevin Kennon announced a green community for the resort island of Hainan. We should expect — and hope — to see more in years to come. Why? For people interested in seeing China go green (and, given its share of global emissions, we all should be), there isn’t any other option. The alternative to massive eco-cities is not slow, organic development but massive conventional cities, with all their attendant ills. Urbanization is simply occurring too rapidly in China to allow for anything else. The hope for China now is that is that its designers — Western architects and local politicians alike — will learn from their mistakes.

Image: Dongtan Marsh. Credit: flickr/laughterwyn

China Eco-Cities Update is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 2:05 PM)

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by WorldChanging Team


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on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

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This article was written by Sanjay Khanna in August 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Human cognition, formerly harnessed to understanding habitats and bioregions, has adapted ingeniously (and perilously) to the global consumer marketplace. People around the world, even children under the age of three, recognize numerous brand-name products. Yet many of us would be hard pressed to identify five edible native plants in our respective neighborhoods. We get brand attributes, but have trouble with plant attributes — in spite of the fact that knowledge of plants’ medicinal and nutritional properties was once essential to human survival on every one of Earthís continents.

But now the world’s population is more urban than rural.

Cut to the world of the nearly-ubiquitous mobile phones. Could these devices be harnessed as learning tools for urban naturalists and farmers? (According to research by Research and Markets , a Dublin, Ireland-based market research firm, 970 million mobile phones were manufactured in 2006 alone).

One idea, conceptualized by Worldchangingís Jeremy Faludi, is to
develop mobile applications and web-based services for identifying flora and
fauna. Learning about plant and animal identification in the urban context, for example, could boost interest in protecting biotopes, that is, neighborhood-level habitats. Additionally, it could have the salutary effect of nurturing a generation of environmental stewards who are comfortable relating to urban biological space.

To know what one doesn’t know, turn to “The Big Here

,” a blog post by
Kevin Kelly, originally covered by Worldchanging here and here. This quiz asks readers to respond to 30 questions about local flora, fauna, and climatic conditions. (If they answer at least 25 of the 30 questions correctly, Kelly then asks them to write in and explain how theyíd arrived at this knowledge.)

A thoughtful and innovative exploration of the quiz in the mobile context, “The Big Here Tricorder”, was blogged last summer by interaction designer Matt Jones. He describes how showing clusters of individuals taking the quiz in specific locales, and geo-tagging their physical locations, may “inspire some collaboration on getting to the ‘right’ answers about their collective bit of the big here.”

With questions about local ecosystems in mind, Jonesí idea could be extended to include the collaborative identification of local flora and fauna to assist with constructing a collective digital memory of biological place. All that would
be required would be mapping known flora and fauna to a database, visual or otherwise, and then using geo-location-based data to display the locations and identifying characteristics of nearby plants and animals.

Knowledge of urban plants may become increasingly important for food security. As urban densification increases, possessing first-hand knowledge of plant-based sources of nourishment may become necessary over the next decade as citizens search for ways to supplement diets through an “urban food commons.” A promising experiment is Garden of the Commons, “a web space for public domain edible plants,” which catalogs fruits, nuts, vegetables, herbs and legumes its users believe are on public property. In the not-too-distant future, initiatives such as Garden of the Commons may actually contribute to the sustenance of citizens who cannot access or afford supermarket produce.

Whether motivated by curiosity or hunger, a mobile device linked to a database-driven “digital memory of urban biological space” may help people learn what to eat — and foster a greater desire to protect the neighborhood food web.

Sanjay Khanna is a writer and foresight researcher based in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Contat Sanjay at sk AT khannaresearch DOT com

Image: Nasturtium. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Mobile Phones and an Urban Garden of the Commons is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 2:24 PM)

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by WorldChanging Team


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on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

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This article was written by Alex Steffen in July 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Here’s the reality: we in the U.S., Canada, Australia and (to a lesser extent) Europe need to move very quickly to make deep cuts in our climate emissions if we hope for any chance of making big enough global cuts to avoid generating catastrophic global warming. In other words, we need radical change if we want to avoid cooking the planet.

Here’s the political reality: those who benefit from, or depend upon, the status quo are going to fight dirty against any meaningful change. They will see radical change as a mortal threat. In practice, this means that the carbon industries (especially coal), wealthy suburbanites (whose lifestyles, jobs and investments are most likely to generate extremely large carbon footprints) and conservative extremists (whose market fundamentalism finds itself at odds with the reality-based community) will be in the future, as now, the sworn enemies of intelligent change (or, as they would have it, “skeptics”). We aren’t going to change that, for reasons that are deeply entrenched in our societies, and these are extremely powerful interests, with the ability to at least slow real national progress.

Thus we have a need (radical change) which is blocked by a political reality. In such a conflict, even the most fundamental of steps — a real international price on carbon — will be an extremely hard-fought victory at the national level in all our countries.

We need national action, but maybe it’s time to rethink the rest of the approach. After all, legislation and markets, while absolutely essential, represent only one instrument in the tool chest we need to fight climate catastrophe. We also need technical invention, widespread innovation diffusion, new models and new approaches. And these things are much more difficult for the carbon lobby to stymie, if done at the proper combination of local and regional levels.

Urbanites already represent the natural constituency for a climate change revolution. Not only is environmental commitment highest among urban populations, the distance from present reality to future necessity is shortest. Tight-knit, compact communities emit less carbon; traveling through them on transit, bikes and foot is easier; sharing goods and participating in closed-loop product systems is dramatically easier in dense environments — even smart grids make a lot more sense in a city than a sprawling suburb. In fact, if we end up with an electric car/ smart grid/ renewables combination (the dream of some of the smartest folks I know, where distributed home energy systems and a smart grid hooked to renewable power electric vehicles designed for urban environments), dense urban neighborhoods is where it will first take hold.

And the fact is, we’re just getting started. The Vancouver model, of massive land redevelopment, shows extraordinary promise, but we’re also learning how to use infill development, retrofits, urban planning and new technologies to reweave existing neighborhoods into a far more sustainable pattern.

What if our strategy was to take a single city and make it truly climate neutral? Existence, as they say, is the best proof of possibility, and we desperately need to prove that living a climate neutral, prosperous life is possible.

Cities committing to Kyoto is not enough. We need skies unsullied by CO2, not minor reductions, and that will take big changes in all the activities the citizens of a city undertake, including those which are not visibly obvious (which demands knowing the backstory of an entire city’s footprint).

Creating a carbon-neutral city is no small challenge. It will take tens of thousands of people deciding to rework the environmental contexts of the organizations and communities of which they are a part. To give a sense of scale, I think it will require at least as big a revolution in thinking to get from here to there as it took to get from Silent Spring to the current day… and it needs to happen fast.

Climate denialists will tell us that committing ourselves to climate neutrality will destroy our economy, leaving us with the standard of living of the more remote parts of Albania and contributing to the widespread sinful cohabitation of dogs and cats. They’re full of it.

Anyone who looks at the situation with clear eyes realizes that climate neutrality is our future, and cities which embrace the future thrive.

Normally, I’d find the gulf we face and the timeline we’re racing a depressing combination, but not here. For a city need not launch itself at climate neutrality out of moral kindness: a much stronger reason for taking action might be found in pure self-interest. In a world where proprietary control over needed innovations is wealth, and where prominence in collaborative efforts is influence, and competition for everything from investment to tourism to workforces is global, the first city to commit in a genuine way to climate neutrality is going to leap to the front of the pack.

An urban political and economic coalition bent on transforming its city into a climate neutral one could undertake a huge variety of actions. It could lobby for radical energy policy, government procurement, land use and transportation planning changes. It could creating financing instruments for new development, retrofitting and industrial modernizations. It could mandate fundamental consumer changes and educate citizens to slash their personal carbon footprints. It could train a whole generation of working citizens who get green building, green manufacturing and clean energy. It could launch recruitment programs for sustainable designers, architects, engineers and technologists. It could make itself a hotbed for not only new thinking, but a new culture.

All of these steps are easily within the power of a well-coordinated citizen’s coalition, and I’m sure even more innovative answers are possible if you add to that citizen’s coalition social entrepreneurship, new technologies and distributed collaboration. The fact that many of these enterprises and initiatives could thrive in the right regional setting even without national regulation just adds to their momentum should carbon taxation or trading actually take.

Here’s the biggest problem: no one yet has any idea what a climate-neutral city would look like or how it would operate. We can’t build what we can’t imagine, so one of the first orders of business is vision: visions of various ways in which cities could slash their emissions while increasing their prosperity and quality of life.

For generations, city dwellers have led social revolutions, going to the barricades to fight injustice and force change on the unwilling powerful. Cities are ungovernable from the barricades — one can’t live in a permanent revolution — but that does not mean the barricades have no use. And, today, we urbanites find ourselves in a situation where business as usual is unacceptable. Perhaps the time has come to raise over the barricades of sustainable design, innovation, policy and business a new black flag: urban climate neutrality.

Creative Commons Photo Credit

Creative Commons Photo Credit

The Climate-Neutral City: An Idea Whose Time has Come is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:31 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


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on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

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