Architecture's Ephemeral Practices
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REFLEXIVE URBANIZATION 227 Reflexive Urbanization PIERRE BELANGER University of Toronto “In the last century, capital [and power] have be- papermaking, brewing, cheesemaking and come more important than land.” vegetable canning. Those efforts in “The John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, Genuine American City” catalyzed the approval 1967. of the Clean Water Act three years later by Nineteen-sixty-seven was a year of landmarks. John F. Kennedy, boldly assuring that all lakes It was the year that marked the end of General and rivers nationwide would be rendered safe Motors’ two year long Futurama exhibition that by eventually eliminating all wastewater dis- attracted over 29 million people at the New charges to the nation’s waters by 1985. While York World’s Fair. For the largest employer in its statute has fallen short of its ambitious goal the US, 1967 also saw the introduction of three to end all pollution, the Clean Water Act did new models including the Cadillac Eldorado, succeed in ending a dark industrial age when the Chevrolet Camaro and the Pontiac Firebird. Americans could not swim in major rivers like While GM celebrated the production of its one the Mississippi, the Potomac and the Hudson, millionth U.S. made car that same year, it also an age epitomized by incidents in the Great faced a major labor backlash outside its head- Lakes like the fires on the oily surface of quarters in Detroit, amidst a year of civil rights Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, the declaration of rioting across the country in cities like Newark, Lake Erie as a dead zone, the over-fertilization Plainfield, Cleveland, Cambridge, Buffalo and of Lake Ontario from sewage and detergent Milwaukee. 1967 was also the year that the discharges and the mercury contaminations Outer Space Treaty banned the use of nuclear that closed fisheries on Lake Superior, Lake weapons in space while underground nuclear Michigan and Lake Huron. testing blindly continued in Nevada’s Yucca Flat. 1967 was the year that the Vietnam War Nineteen-sixty-seven therefore represents a reached its midway mark, just before San tipping point in the history of industrialization Francisco’s 1968 Summer of Love. It was also in America as a period that has “left a legacy of the year of Apollo 4, the first unmanned flight industrial production and pollutants on the con- 1 in earth’s orbit while TWA flight 128 became temporary landscape” where, according to a the 12th worst crash in the history of the US National Report on Brownfields Redevelopment plunging into a forest two miles before reach- in 2006 titled Recycling America’s Land, more ing the runway at Greater Cincinnati Airport. than 400,000 sites with real or perceived envi- ronmental hazards dot the American landscape More importantly, 1967 was the year that a today. As the 20th century recently came to a small staff of five at the Milwaukee Journal, close, a decisive transformation in industrial after successfully campaigning to stiffen the process, manufacturing technologies and envi- law against water pollution in Wisconsin and ronmental attitudes has occurred in fields of the Great Lakes, was awarded the Pulitzer practice ranging from business and economics Prize for Public Service. The award was a no- to real estate and land development. Height- table advance in the national effort for the ened by the pressures of globalization, this conservation of natural resources against the post-industrial shift has spawned a generation dangerous trends of downstream contamina- of practitioners ranging from Julie Bargmann to tion from Wisconsin's mainstay industries of James Corner - that have been focusing on the 228_______ FRESH AIR transformation of brownfields and the remedia- the result of accident and failure rather than by tion of urban ecologies to jumpstart the post- design or by planning, there are two sites in industrial economy of the 21st century. the Great Lakes that decisively illustrate the legacy of 20th century industry with two deci- Two main practices of intervention characterize sively different outcomes: the first involves a the project of post-industrial remediation. On chemical dumpsite in Niagara Falls, New York the one hand, there are practitioners of site- and the second involves an industrial dumpsite level remediation that rely on measures of spa- in Toronto, Ontario. tial beautification or surface concealment, who employ property plans and spatial renderings The Love Canal aimed at visualizing the immediate or short term benefits of design. The other, more in- In 1978, during the construction of the Lasalle formative practice lies with regional-scale ma- Expressway in southeastern Niagara Falls, over terials management strategies determined by 20,000 tons of toxic waste was discovered in logistical, environmental, social and financial what is now recognized as America’s most no- parameters, usually associated with a distribu- torious dumpsite. The 16 acre site - a one- tion of sites in varying sizes. Best viewed from mile long, fifteen foot wide and ten feet deep the air, these sites often involve design strate- trench that was originally built by William T. gies that integrate regional transportation in- Love as a hydroelectric and transportation pro- frastructures and watershed-based ecosys- ject between the upper and lower Niagara Riv- tems. Due to their higher degrees of complex- ers - was used as a chemical dump for more ity, these strategies must rely on incremental than 10 years between 1942 and 1953 by the and subtle transformation over relatively long Hooker Electrochemical Company6 and for- periods of time.2 merly as a weapons dump for the United States Army. Prior to its industrial use, the ca- This paper explores the potential effectiveness nal was bucolically used as a local swimming of this broader understanding of the processes hole during the summer and as a skating rink of urbanization3 and the bio-physical factors during the winter. Once filled and capped, the that pre-condition them in North America. site was then reluctantly sold to the City of Tracing a timeline through the patterns of land Niagara for a dollar, and with the baby-boom transformation over the past century, this pa- pressure after Word War II, the municipality per puts into question the decisive transitional built a school and a 100-home neighborhood. period of Western industrial society defined From the mid 1950s through the 1970s, a re- through conventional dictums such as Post- cord number of illnesses were reported as a Enlightenment, Post-Fordism, Post-Modernism result of chemical exposure, including rashes, or Post-Industrialism and instead, argues for a burns, miscarriages and birth defects and can- reflexive understanding of urbanization4, a cer.7 Eckardt C. Beck, a former EPA adminis- term that suggests a retroactive view of urban trator, recalls the explosive nature of the Love patterns. To accomplish this, a panoramic lens Canal incident in the Spring of 1978, after a is employed here to open a retrospective in- period of record rainfall: vestigation of shifts over the past 100 years evidenced by the presence of industrial sites in Corroding waste-disposal drums could be seen breaking up through the grounds of the Great Lakes, and ends with a projective backyards. Trees and gardens were turning outlook on current practice seen through black and dying. One entire swimming pool emerging streams of development in North had been had been popped up from its America. The underlying question raised here foundation, afloat now on a small sea of is how can a different, more contemporary un- chemicals. Puddles of noxious substances derstanding of the post-industrial landscape in were pointed out to me by the residents. North America structure the development of a Some of these puddles were in their yards, st some were in their basements, [and] others new economic and ecological order for the 21 5 yet were on the school grounds. Everywhere century? the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play with burns on their Failures & Accidents hands and faces.8 The reconsideration of the post-industrial pro- That same year, the school was closed, preg- ject begins by tracing the origins and the nant women and children were evacuated, and events that fueled the current body of work home-grown vegetables were banned. The emerging over the past two decades. Ironically state purchased and leveled 239 homes near REFLEXIVE URBANIZATION 229 the canal. Eventually, everyone in the Love Projecting southward from the shorelines of Canal area was evacuated and relocated with Downtown Toronto, the dumpsite is a linear money advanced by the state and federal gov- headland constructed with waste materials, ernments. 9 mostly concrete and rubble from urban opera- tion such as the excavation of urban sites, the Infamously known as Love Canal, it was the construction of subway tunnels, the demolition first contaminated site to gain national and of buildings form the city centre and the international attention due to the scale and dredging of the Toronto Harbour in the 1960s, magnitude of its consequences, a recognition 70s and 80s. Generically dubbed the Leslie that was ironically instigated by the unsolicited Street Spit, the headland was initiated by the research of Lois Marie Gibbs, a proactive Toronto Port Authority as a shoreline disposal mother who formed the Love Canal Homeown- program in proximity to the downtown area ers Association in the mid 1970s after discov- that would simultaneously function as a coastal ering the location of the dumpsite below her barrier for the city’s inner harbor. The silty son’s elementary school. From this toxic trag- clay substrate of the city’s pre-existing geology edy, the Love Canal spawned the development proved an ideal base material for the construc- of what would become one of the most impor- tion of the headland.