Tim Sharp: Chain Reaction

Gunter’s chain: 66’, 1/10 furlong or 1/80 mile, divided into 100 links of 7.92”. Coincidentally, one of the main companies for producing the chains was situated not far from where I went to school in Birmingham, England. I found out that they also produced chains for convicts and fetters for slaves. Nowadays one of the company specialities is handcuffs for police forces.

a chain reaction

Historically, accurate surveying required precise measurement over long distances; incontestable borders require surveying on a large scale using triangulation. Starting from a known position, a line of sight measurement of angles is made to two other points – a mountain top, a rock, a tower, and repeated at those other points. One of the side of the triangle must be measured on the ground, in the past using some form of chain. The combination of all these measurements allows position and distance to be calculated. The survey is extended using one of the sides of the previously measured triangle as the baseline for the next in what becomes a tessellation of interconnected triangles, a triangulation network.

Early Canadian surveyors were often soldiers; in British Columbia it was a detachment of the Royal Engineers. Their main task was to survey and fix the 49th parallel which, according to the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, was the border between two empires, one declared, the other de facto.  Apart from spending time organising property deals, they also laid out New Westminster which was intended to be – and for a time was – the capital of British Columbia. They also built the road to the thriving settlement of Vancouver on the ice-free Burrard Inlet situated slightly to the north-west. But even civil surveyors were imperial foot soldiers with lack of long-term political clout (with notable exceptions which serve to underline the contemporary possibility of taking a more differentiated and sensitive position with regard to the original inhabitants of the country). Matthew Edney, acknowledging the active agency of surveyors and mapmakers in the imperialist scheme of things underway on the other side of the planet, involving the other Indians as it were, pointed out: “In short, triangulation-based surveys are rooted, like all other cartographic practice, in cultural conceptions of space and in the politics of manipulating spatial representations.”1

In India the issue was not about individual settlers acquiring title to plots of land, but rather about rationally defining and standardising land ownership in order to make tax assessments based on the estimated level of agricultural production, the administrative foundation for revenue extraction in its purest form. Many regions of India had a long-established, functional (and functioning) agricultural system which, prior to British annexation and the arrival of a ‘free market economy’, included communal grain storage as an emergency back-up for periods of drought, an institution Vattel explicitly approved of for European governments.2 One of the main differences between east and west was that the inhabitants of North America were hunters and gatherers and, when they engaged in cultivation, were not solely dependent on their produce. It was a difference with dire consequences.

replicating structures
It is tempting to leave the story here, just another story about a colonial elsewhere, distanced in space and time, a story that, as Herman Merivale of the Colonial Office in London saw clearly, consists of a series “of wretched details of ferocity and treachery”.3 However, since I remembered reading a quotation from Thomas Spence’s A Lecture read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle on Nov. 8th 1775, for the printing of which the Society did the Author the Honour to expel him, I wanted to find out if there were relevant patterns already present in the initiating colonial culture.

Landowners, says Spence, criticising the status quo:
…can, by laws of their own making, oblige every living creature to remove off his property (which to the great distress of mankind, is too often put in execution); so of consequence, were all the landholders to be of one mind, and determined to take their properties into their own hands, all the rest of mankind might go to heaven if they would, for there would be no place found for them here.4

Spence was not engaged in idle philosophical speculation. What he asserted was written in historical circumstances and conditions which continued into mid-nineteenth century England. He offered a way of considering the background of those colonisers who were so adamant about their racial superiority, fitness to inherit the earth and security of tenure – in other words those, whose instrumentalised racism was, as Hugh Brody puts it, ‘relentless and purposeful”.5 Spence’s concerns were directed to the commons in England, communal rights of use of land – the grazing, hunting, brick-making and firewood collecting which had been enjoyed by cottagers and villagers from time immemorial, and which were being systematically abrogated by privately-introduced parliamentary legislation — passed, in the main, by the beneficiaries themselves wearing different hats. At times the changes took place quietly and at others, as E P Thompson has shown, it needed all the force of draconic laws creating innumerable new capital offences (in at least two sense of the word) to establish the new regime. He points out, ‘The Hanoverian Whigs …were a hard lot of men. And they remind us that stability, no less than revolution, may have its own kind of terror’.6 With many traditional-use rights curtailed and a campaign of systematic enclosures of common land underway, many of those who lived on and from the land lost their independence and were forced into wage labour. For the beneficiaries, this made for more ‘rational’ land use while having the added ‘benefit’ of creating a tide of emigration to the cities to service the growing industries there. It also started a stream of emigration to the colonies that was to last into the twentieth century.

Scotland exhibits parallels: after the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 had been quashed, the military potential of the clan system was dismantled. Clansmen were disarmed, the kilt forbidden and clan chiefs were turned into the sole and absolute legal owners of clan estates. The potential increase in wealth represented by lucrative sheep farming and selling wool to the rapidly expanding and well-protected textile industry, proved too great for most clan chiefs leading to the Highland Clearances, the precondition for profitable business and the coercive motivation for many to leave their homeland in search of land and security elsewhere.

Looking at those events from the other side of the Atlantic, Lewis Hyde summarises: it was, he says,
the same war the American Indians had to fight with the Europeans, a war against the marketing of formerly inalienable properties. Whereas before a man could fish in any stream and hunt in any forest, now he found there were individuals who claimed to be owners of these commons. The basis of land tenure had shifted. 7
In short, the commodification of land and its concentration in a few hands was a qualitatively different way than before.

nstallation of Chain Reaction in the former Kartographisches Institut in Vienna. It was he headquarters where the survey information from all over the Habsburg Empire came together to be made into maps, military and civilian. The rectangle, marked by red chalk at its corners, is where one of the heavy printing presses stood.

1  Edney, Matthew H. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India 1765-1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999
2  Vattel, de Emmeric. The Law of Nations, Switzerland, 1758
3  Merivale, Herman.  Lectures on Colonisation and Colonies, 1841.
4  Spence, Thomas, William Ogilvie, Thomas Paine, M Beer.  The Pioneers of Land Reform, 1775.
5  Brody, Hugh. The Other Side of Eden: Hunter-gatherers, Farmers and the Shaping of the World. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntryre, 2001
6  Thompson, E P. Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act. London: Breviary Stuff Publications, 2013.
7   Hyde; Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (1979). New York: Vintage, 2007.
8  Bowering, George. Bowering’s B.C.: A Swashbuckling History. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 1997.

Tim Sharp, born in Scotland, lives and works in Vienna. Visual artist (video, photography, installation) and writer. Numerous exhibitions and film festivals in Austria and abroad. Recent public space installation for Vienna Festival: Ruprechtsstiege/Morzinplatz. www.timsharp.at

Troels Steenholdt Heiredal: the Aarhus Drawing

size: each rectangle is an A2 piece of paper 594 x 420 mm. The overall drawing (5.46 x 3.56 m) consists of 48 sheets of A2 paper (12m2)                             I walk
anywhere I get to - I walk
     wherever I am - I walk a lot
                            to feel the city
                            the urban landscape
                            allow for it to affect me
                            start a conversation with it
                                                   inside me

I sat at my drafting table in Copenhagen and started to draw a very large plan drawing of Aarhus, the city where I had lived and studied architecture for three years. The drawing was informed by the memory Aarhus had built within me.
It is three years since I did the Aarhus drawing. I wrote then:
I was late, as usual, on my bike heading towards Aarhus Central station. My sister called me, “Where are you? The train leaves in a few minutes, you know that right? Hurry up.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming; I’m biking as fast as I possibly can...”
As I was biking through the streets of Aarhus, a thought hit me – was I even biking the best route to the station? I feel I know my way in the city, I have a relationship with the city, but I have no idea how the city manifests itself within my mind. I have a strong feeling that this is the fastest way to get from the school to the station due to the basic layout of the streets as they appear in my mind, but I could be wrong. Has my mind reshaped the geography of Aarhus to fit with my habits and my conviction of what the city is like?
As we move through the city the city moves through us. We engage with it, we continuously develop our relationship with it. The city is both physical built structure and a mental construct; cities have personality, and within the city the different parts have different personalities. There are parts of the city I like, parts I frequent a lot, there are parts I only go to if I have business there. Some I only pass through to get from one part to another. Some parts I don’t like, and some parts I have to be in. My knowledge of Aarhus is arranged according to these relationships. We build our understanding of the city; our minds rearrange the spaces to build a personal geography within ourselves.
The relationship between the places we visit and the spaces between them, guides the construction of this inner geography we all carry with us. To investigate the relationship I have with the city, I shall draw the city as I remember it.

Three years on, I think more carefully about the role of walking through the city, through the landscape; sensing the environment. As we use inner speech to define ourselves, we have inner geographies – a space where we are able to take in the world, to deal with it, to build our understanding of it. As David Gersten says, we build space, as space builds us; we are interdependent. We move through the cities as the cities move through us; and in that exchange we construct each other.

The hippocampus is responsible for ttransforming short term memory into long term memory; it also converts two-dimensional map information into a physical walk – a path in three dimensions. Memory and space live side by side and interact – inner speech and inner geographies.  Our relationship to the world and the city can’t be objective, it can only be subjective: it’s a relationship. Explaining it will only diminish this relationship: one must accept that you do not understand, but still want to know. Only then will you find ineffable beauty, because you were not looking for an image you already knew. If you are truly engaged, you will come upon things you had no idea existed, things truly new, not something understood. 

My thesis investigated the organic parts of inner Paris where the city seems to spontaneously spring new connections, the rational structured grid of most of Manhattan, and the threshold between the massive and the petit of Moscow.

Does the more clear structure of Manhattan lead to more clear perception of oneself? Does the entangled structure of inner Paris cause you to run into dead ends, or even open ends where you get lost? Or will the mind always find a way to connect the dots, and build new linkages, just as the mind is able to distort the grid and transform the structure put in front of it, by looking at it very closely.

My drawing of Aarhus is so large because if it were any smaller, if I had an overview while drawing the drawing, I would just have drawn the image of Aarhus as I know it from maps. By making the scale the point where I needed to get into the streets in my mind, I drew the feeling of Aarhus; I sensed Aarhus as my inner geography.  

Troels Steenholdt Heiredal, flâneur, walks cities collecting photographs, films, drawings, writings and notes. These ideas and frgments are being re-configured and presented to the audience at www.troelsheiredal.com

Wang + Dunbar: Pruitt-Igoe Now

The more one learns about Pruitt-Igoe, the more one is struck by the ambiguity of the site. Layers of scattered history have shaped representation of the site into an ideological tool itself; a representation that serves any one of multiple narratives. From the trajectory of social engineering through design, the death of modernism, the failure of the American city, and the continued, unsuccessful attempts to alleviate inequity in cities, the representation and perception of Pruitt-Igoe itself almost overtakes the physical and material realities of the actual site. This neglect of the physical landscape has left us with a strange and accidental opportunity. Where Pruitt-Igoe, the idea and the building complex, once stood is now a spontaneous forest, a place where vegetation obscures and absorbs history.

When approaching the Pruitt-Igoe Now competition we were struck by this accidental forest and thought it needed to be preserved to serve as a memorial to Pruitt-Igoe’s history. What came to our attention with further research was the neglected state of Pruitt’s surrounding areas. Instead of being levelled, the demise of Pruitt-Igoe’s surrounding neighbourhoods took place over time, sometimes one house was left standing on a block where there had been twenty. The shock of Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition spread beyond its site.

As we worked on the competition, we felt strongly that our competition entry needed to connect with the larger discourse on shrinking cities, and how these places could be turned into economic generators without repeating the patterns of boom, bust and inequality that they had experienced before. We were far less interested in a pastoral reclamation of the land, instead we knew we could leverage St Louis’s history as an industrial powerhouse. Abandoned areas surrounding Pruitt-Igoe would serve as economic ecological assembly lines. We imagined nurseries and aquaculture at an industrial level. Abandoned land could be reactivated with the intention of serving the St Louis regional parks system through the growth and distribution of native flora and fauna. Economically stimulating Pruit-Igoe, not through shopping centres and condos but through productive ecological zones, meant embracing the larger relationships between ecology and economy present in Pruitt-Igoe’s history, while departing from the typical attempts for revival that only repeat the past. We proposed a radical response to match the history of Pruitt-Igoe.

Xiaowei R Wang is a product designer and independent researcher. Some of her works have been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian and BBC. She works at the Landscape Architecture Research Office (LARO).

Heather Dunbar received her Master’s in Landscape Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design. She practices at GLS Landscape Architecture in San Francisco.  cargocollective.com/Heather_Dunbar

Xiaoxuan Lu: Landscape noir, the unexploded terrain of Laos

I travelled to Laos while working on my thesis project in early 2012. Laos is the most bombed country on earth, a distinction it holds two full generations after the Vietnam War. At the time, American planes dropped 270 million bombs on the landlocked country bordering Vietnam, blanketing the Ho Chi Minh Trail but also indiscriminately unloading ordnance that had not been dropped elsewhere. Today life in Laos is still defined by this fact: nearly a third of those bombs never detonated. By a twist of fate, this same land also happens to contain the richest gold ore concentration in the world. And as outnumbered humanitarian groups continue to remediate places that were once trampled by war, the landscape now faces a new invasion, this time from international gold-mining companies.

My investigation of this long-scarred landscape was initially inspired by an odd legacy of the war in Laos. I came across an article by Thomas J. Campanella called ‘Bomb Crater Fish Ponds’.1 Campanella writes, ‘One of the great ironies of the Vietnam War is that the bomb craters left in the wake of American B-52s now provide sustenance to the Vietnamese people.’ American bombs displaced 500 million cubic yards of earth in nine years (UXO LAO). Over the last forty years, B-52 bomb craters have been transformed from hideous manifestations of war in which lives and livelihoods were destroyed, into part of the agrarian landscape. In Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos villagers use the bomb craters as ponds for cultivating fish. These relics of war and symbols of tragedy have been changed into a symbol of sustenance.

Untouched and unnatural, these ponds remain as under-discussed monuments from one of American history’s most controversial eras. This physical evidence of a history haunted me, and I resolved to discover more about this land in turmoil. I want to know more about the intelligence that the people living there have developed — it’s about the art of survival.  With that in mind, I travelled to Laos to further investigate its postwar landscape. My journey’s purpose was to reopen a dialogue with local villagers on this traumatic history and to document the scarred landscape in its current state. During my visit, I used infrared film: a type of military film which registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of crimson and hot pink. These infrared photographs of Laotian bomb sites show the difference between organic (pink) and non-organic (grey) material in the landscape.

One of my stops in Laos was at a de-mining site in Xieng Khouang province, where the international humanitarian group MAG operates.2  MAG mentioned that the bigger the bombs, the deeper they burrow. However, I noticed that they were only clearing the topsoil layer. While the largest are sometimes found 15 metres below ground, the regulations specify that if the land is for agricultural use, only the top 25 centimetres need to be cleared – just enough to permit above-ground farming since bomb clearance is extremely time- and cost-intensive. My site investigation also revealed the fact that, in the absence of agricultural production, many inhabitants of Laos have resorted to bomb harvesting as a means of survival. People hunt for unexploded bombs to harvest scrap metal: a highly dangerous activity, and the main cause of bomb casualties today.

I have never seen a society that was so impregnated with ordinance. It had been a war against the land, as much as against armies. Through on-site investigation, combined with further research carried out upon returning to the United States, I came to understand the inseparability of food production, resource extraction and a post-war metal recovery and recycling economy in Laos. Bomb craters that were once symbols of death have been transformed into something quite the opposite. Similarly, my thesis project, ‘Mining as Demining’, recasts minefields in a virtuous cycle that could sustain local communities while restoring the land. Resource mining provides the impetus for de-mining, as gold will help pay for it all, and mining companies can be exploited as landscape architects to ultimately turn mined land back over to productive use for local communities. 

1 Both the bomb casings and the craters themselves have been made to yield an alternative harvest in an ingenious replacement of the rice fields they otherwise disrupt. In Vietnam some craters have become fish farms. See Thomas J. Campanella, ‘Bomb Crater Fish Ponds’, Places, Vol. 9, No.3: 48. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995
2 Mines Advisory Group (MAG) is an international organisation that saves lives and builds futures through the destruction of land mines, unexploded ordnance (UXO) and other weapons remaining after conflict. Since 1989, MAG has worked in over 35 countries and was a co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

Xiaoxuan Lu, PhD Fellow at Harvard University. Her doctoral work examines the relationship between water and power in China’s militia stationed at the Northwestern Frontier and calls for an updated understanding of territorial borders, national sovereignty and national security.