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"Cartographies of Disaster," Amy Johnson, re:form
Natural disasters are fundamentally experiences of place: The epicenter was here. It was this many miles from this other place. It affected here and here and here. Place is understood through position and relationship, through contact and distance.
Geography determines terrestrial points of contact. These change, but usually at a rate barely perceptible to the human eye. Politics and language anchor societal points of contact, through alliance, ideological similarity, and shared knowledge. These change more quickly than continents, but stay stable long enough to fill history textbooks. Communication technologies scaffold personal points of contact. These change quickly indeed.
Imagine a Tokyo resident on the morning of March 11, 2011, using her iPhone as she waits for the subway on the way to work. She navigates overlapping, intertwining spaces: the station of a specific rail line, a queue of passengers waiting to board, the language space of multilingual signs, the political space of a Tokyo ward, of Japan; plus the literal underground — but also spaces of the internet, of Twitter interactions, Mixi diaries, and SMS exchanges; of iOS and the network infrastructure of SoftBank. She probably isn’t making voice calls on her mobile because that’s considered a little rude in the communal space of the subway platform, but she could.
That evening, when she tries to return home, her places have been dramatically rearranged. Her subway station is closed. So are all of the others in easy walking distance. Though Tokyo is far enough from the earthquake’s epicenter that structural damage is relatively minimal, the world’s largest metropolitan rail system is out of commission. Her home in Chiba, normally a forty minute ride away, is now far, far away. Long queues of exhausted people wait for taxis and she doesn’t know how to walk home. ...
"Solving the Housing Crisis on Native American Lands," David Hill, Architect Magazine
It’s mid-afternoon on the rolling grasslands of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in the remote southwest corner of South Dakota. In a field just off Highway 27, as dark clouds are gathering to the west on this hot summer day, three students from the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU)—Evan Palmer, Aaron Wirth, and Seth Lopez—are applying a brownish stain to the wood roof overhang of a straw-bale house. It’s quiet but for the sound of chirping birds and the occasional truck rolling down the two-lane road.
The students are building the house—1,000-square-feet and net-zero energy—as part of the Native American Sustainable Housing Initiative, or NASHI. An interdisciplinary service-learning project launched in 2010 by Rob Pyatt, Assoc. AIA, a CU instructor and research associate, NASHI is dedicated to helping solve an intractable crisis on tribal lands: a lack of well-designed, affordable housing. At Pine Ridge, about 15 students in CU’s undergraduate program in environmental design have worked alongside construction-technology students at nearby Oglala Lakota College (OLC) to build the house. It's the first of four sustainable prototypes—designed by students with community input—for a future mixed-use development called Thunder Valley.
For Palmer, Wirth, and Lopez, all rising seniors at CU, this is their first visit to the reservation, home to an estimated 40,000 members of the Oglala Sioux (or Lakota) tribe. Back in the classroom at Boulder, they had spent some time researching Pine Ridge—its tragic history, its crushing poverty, its third-world housing conditions—but, as Palmer puts it, “Seeing it firsthand really gives you a whole different perspective.” He admits he was a little nervous when he arrived the day before with Pyatt and the other students, but the ice was broken when Lenny Lone Hill, a construction-technology instructor at OLC, invited them to participate in a traditional sweat lodge ceremony at his house.
"The Brain-Wiping Science of Pigeon Training," Elizabeth Flock, MOTHERBOARD
The man stands in front of a makeshift wood and wire cage structure, surrounded by pigeons. The birds circle and duck and dive around him, and occasionally they eat out of his hand. He whistles, and they come to him.
TC Ptomey started keeping pigeons when he was just a kid, but spent the last few decades without them because he had nowhere to keep them. Two years ago, he finally found a landlord willing to let him put a pigeon loft on his roof—a roof connected to my roof, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Now, if I walk up two flights of stairs, climb a ladder, slide over a wooden cover and pull my body up through a square hole, I emerge onto a roof that’s home to nearly a hundred pigeons.
On some days, the birds fly together, swarming in the air above the loft. On others, they climb so high they look like the tops of pins in the sky. Sometimes, they rest on or inside the loft, feathers down, so quietly that you wouldn’t even know they were there.
Ptomey keeps at least four different breeds of pigeon at any one time: “flying flights,” which fly in a pattern; “tipplers,” which have been bred to fly long distances; “tumblers,” which do backflips in the air; and “homers,” which are perhaps the most famous breed, for being able to fly far and find their way home.
When Ptomey, who is 52, was growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, pigeon keepers, or “fanciers,” were a common sight in the borough. Coops sat atop many roofs, and the (mostly) men who kept them would spend hours breeding, feeding, raising, and flying their birds. Some would even train them to race. A common pastime for kids in the neighborhood was to try to catch and steal other people’s birds for sport.
“We used to catch 10 birds a day and sell them to the pet store,” said Ptomey. “That’s how many people had birds.”
"A Walking Tour Through the Living Wreckage of Penn Station," Ryan Bradley, The Awl
Nearly everyone can agree that Penn Station, America's busiest transit hub, which routinely takes in and spits out some five thousand humans every minute, is terrible in nearly every conceivable way. On a Wednesday in late March, David Lewis, a professor of cocnstructed environments at Parsons, and a partner at the architecture firm LTL (he's one of the L's), agreed to walk with me through Penn Station during rush-hour to show me not just how broken it was, but how it had become that way.
I was standing by the entrance on Penn's southwest corner, at 31st Street and 8th Avenue, watching roadies haul equipment out of a semi-truck for a show that night, when Lewis walked up and introduced himself. "That's part of your problem right there," he said, pointing his finger at the semi, then up slightly toward at Madison Square Garden. "Getting as many people into a train station with a massive, twenty-thousand-seat multi-use performance space on top—it's insane."
In 1910, when the station first opened, there was a roof that soared fifteen stories above the tracks, and big, multi-story windows which let in oceans of sunlight. The roof and the windows came down in 1963, and now, five stories up from the tracks, which are three stories underground, there's Madison Square Garden, which opened in its current form in 1968. The compressed space and complete lack of natural light make it hard to sense time; this is crucial to understanding its dysfunction, said Lewis, because a station, "any station, but no station more than a train station, is like a clock." He corrected himself, "is a clock."
"The Last of the Arabbers," David Frey, Eater
As he leads a painted horse cart brimming with oranges and bananas and peaches past housing projects and boarded-up buildings, B.J. looks like the king of West Baltimore. Friends shout his name, grasp his hand, lean over to share hugs. He greets, chats, and moves on, calling out his wares in the grimmest part of town, through streets strewn with garbage and smelling of urine.
"Yeah, pretty red tomato, tomatoooo. Yeah, watermelon, watermelon, watermelon."
The syllables melt into a tune that, to the uninitiated, might sound like nonsense.
"Wat-oh, wat-oh, wat-oh, oh-oh…"
It sounds like a voice from the past as it echoes off brick and formstone walls, and many Baltimoreans fear that it will be. B.J. may be the end of a nearly 150-year-old lineage. The last of the arabbers.
Not long ago, dozens—maybe hundreds—of these vendors, mostly African-American men, sold their goods on these streets from horse carts. Baltimoreans call them arabbers (universally pronounced AY-rabbers) and their singsong calls are known as hollers, a sound that’s been heard on these streets since the days after the Civil War. B.J., 26, is one of just a handful of men who remain true to this history, who still guide horses pulling wagons bearing piles of fruit through streets full of traffic and the bass boom of hip-hop blasting from passing cars. But even as the legacy of this trade is fading, B.J. hopes to save arabbing. And he hopes arabbing will save him.