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N THIS ]SSUE

UEST-TDITED BY

N GOODBtjN WITH

REMY TltL ANDEL]ANA lOSSIFOVA

ARCHITECTtJRAL DTSIGN

SCARCITY: ARCHITICTURE IN ANAOE OF DEPLEIING RESOURCTS

Tt]ITORIAL

Helen Castle

ABOUT TilE 6UEST.EDITORS

Jon Goodbun uith Jeremy Tilland Deljana Iossifooa

INTRODUCTiOl,l

Themes of Scarcity

Jon Goodbun, Jeremy Tilland Deljana lossifova

Scarciry and Abundance: UrbanAgriculture in Cuba and the USAndrd Viljoen and

KatrinBobn

OITORIAL BOAROili Alsopnise Brattonul Brislin*rk Burryndri Clhaszargel Coatoer Crxrh

ddy Cruzu liordharrassimiliano 'uksrisrvin IJeathcotechrel I{ensel

nthonr. Hunthuies Jencksb Jlurveli-re JJerkeler Jlurrar'-k Robbins5rrah Saunt:: ,:l Scaaik::r: S:llrracher

r S--.::i::.- : \i:::i:o tr:: 1:.:::t:ri:.. 2..-;r;.Foio

zz Cities, Natures and the Political ImaginarvMaria Kaika and Erik Stoyngedouzo

z8 Architecture and Relational Resources:Towards a New Materialist Practice

Jon Goodbun and Karin Jaschke

34 Visualising Ecological LiterrcyJody Boebnert

38 Invisible AgencyJeremy Till andThtjana Scbneider

44 Systemic Diagramming: Arr Approachto Decoding Urban EcologiesUlyssu Sengupta and DeljanaIossifoaa

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Jon Goodltun and Karin Jaschke

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The most immediate impact of scarcity onarchitecture is the insufficient suppiy of buildingmaterials. As Jon Goodbun and Karin "lasc[rkeexplain, this requires an engagement with morethan the direct influences on the exhaustionof natural resources. Looking beyond theconventional capitalist modei of flows drivenby 'the market', they look at how new ideas onmaterialism are demanding a radical revisionof the relationship between matter and social,economic and political forces.

truction site of heat lunnel, Arcosanti,ona, 2010

santi remains a hybrid of building site,ogical architecture, urbanism schoolexperimental community. The materialrelculture of the construction siie (maiter,. objects, etc) coexists in permanencethe compleied and working parts of the

rimental site.

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Aspects of thinking around scarcity and the built environmentnecessarily demand a consideration of building materials.But thinking about building materials and scarcity is muchmore than a consideration of the availability or affordabilityof commodities. Rather, it demands an engagement withextended processes in space and time: from mines, quarries,oil wells, forests and plantations, via refineries, factories and

technologies ofinconceivable variety, to assemblages on buildingsites and, following periods ofuse and ongoing change throughoccupation, on to abandonment, demolition and/or recycling.Clearly any consideration of buiiding materials necessarilyentails thinking about both the natural and social relationshipsand networks that architectural materials are entr,vined with andproduced through.

A basic systems-theory-based analysis suggests that scarcitiesoccur when resource flows are in some way constrained orexhausted.l The supposed ability of 'the market'to ensureoptimal flow and distribution of material resources is a central

claim of the capitalist economy, but both the ideology of market

efficiency, and the terminology of flows and cycles, with their

connotations of linearity and smoothness, are equally misleading.Material flows are never smooth: rather, they are convoluted and

complex, because matter quite 1itera1ly constifutes and emhodies

economic, political, social and even mental configurations.Moreover, notions of flow and throughput are misleading in that

they suggest that samething passive is being manipulated by

samelne active; that inert matter is being handled by humans,or quasi-alive entities like'the market'.

Against such politically and economically convenientdualisms, an emerging discourse broadly referred to as a'new materialism' is demanding a rudical revision of howwe conceive of matter and life. Ilya Prigogine and IsabelleStengers, whose seminal 1985 book on Order Out of Cbaoshas

become a landmark text in rethinking the nature of materialprocess, proposed a theory ofmatter that calls for a studyof 'the timing of space', and 'leads to a new view of matterin which matter is no longer the passive inert substancedescribed in the mechanistic world view, but is associated withspontaneous activity. This change is so profound that ... wecan really speak about a new dialogue of man with nature.'2And indeed, disciplines as diverse as quanfum mechanics, thecognitive sciences, ecology, complexity and neo-cybernetics

suggest that we need to find new paradigms for thinking aboutthe unfolding dynamic reality of material processes, and ourrelationship to those processes.

More recently, a more explicitly politicised discourse hasbuilt and expanded on these insights, including TimothyMorton's Ecology Without Nature, Jane Bennett's Vibrant

Matter, and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost's collection ofessays on Neu Materialisrzs.3 In these models we find attempts

Paolo $oleri, South Vault, Arcosanti, Arizana,1971-2ln 1969, the itaiian-Amerian architect Paoio Scieri and his research practice, tlre CosantlFoundaiion, bought a large deserl siie near Cordes Junction, AriTcna. ln 1970 work beganon what they describe as an urban laboralory, an experimeniai siructure for 5,000 people

called Arcosanti. Constructi0n v/ork has since c0ntinued thrcugh the labour cf volunteers,

studenis and residents. Tlle South Vault was ihe first major compieted structure, involving

an innovative siit'casting concrete process. The traking of the sudace motifs is an lntegralpart oi the constructioil prOcess: pigment is layered cn the positive sili fonrl and absorbedby the corcrete vJhile ii cures. The sili is then relnoved to create an inhabitaLrle space below

the concrete shell"

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o theorise the fact that, far from human cognition being theole source of agency in the wor1d, it is matter itse]f whicheems to require some conception of performative agency.

Other writers, such as spatial geographer Doreen Massey andhe anthropologist Tim Ingold, have also paid attention to theifferent but interrelated temporalities and agencies ofsocial,

material and geological formations.aBennett claims that'the image of dead or thoroughly

nstrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth

estroying fantasies ofconquest and consumptioris and therere concrete reasons why this matters to architecture. It is

worth recalling the staggering numbers associated with theonstruction industry's consumption of materials: around 40er cent ofglobal material and energy consumption is a directesult ofbuilding activity (and around 10 per cent ofthat is

waste), while the vast majority of the remaining 60 per cent ofhe global economy is inevitably used within the context of theuilt environment.

Of course, many of the real innovations that haveccurred in recent years concerning the development ofmoreustainable design methods, materials and technologies,

nd new way-s of sourcing, reusing and recycling them,rovide some answers to problems of resource depletion andnvironmental degradation. But architecture as a distinctlyocial form ofmaterial practice and knowledge is both in need

Tailing pond of major open-cast mine, Bagdad, Arizona, 2010The a(ificial landscape has its own geological time: successivexpansiDn and iailjng levels can be read off semi-submergedlatural and man-made features in the landscape and the hybridcology that has formed over time.

t i* w*rth {'***121{19't*a e?-a*g**ri*.9 *is.;t=**rc *****etc*witht?;***frst{ltt:tt*nzrt*t:';tr' '*{:{}*.*1Jrfrf}l-i*rtr;tmatxrialsz n'{*urt*. 4* p*r r.*,:,i- *t g1***1 nt**,-*riet ***.ne{gy c*fi9,J{T1frti*{i,iE e ',lirr:r:t. t{:zi-}}''trst *tsiidirtg *r:ti'sitya*r}*r*unrJ 3-d: p*r er:fi+'u *? r:*.:t iz \f,Jez:{*}, w?titr* t?t*

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of, and indeed well positioned to stage, a more fundamentalpolitical and ecological examination ofthe issues at stakein both relative and absolute material scarcity. This is notstraightforward, however, and requires the exploration ofnew forms ofarchitectural practice and production situatedwithin the actor networks of modern material economiesand ecologies, through a hybridisation ofwhat are currentlydistinct practices of architectural historiography, critique andprofessional design services, together with other disciplines.

If 'reality doesnt come with its boundaries already in place',as Bertell Ollman reminds us, then perhaps it is up toarchitectural researchers to trace new disciplinary boundariesin the world, practically and conceptually.5 And the choice ofboundaries and systems which might define architecture andits materiality, is political.

The recent emergence ofa new cross-disciplinary genreofstudies broadly referred to as'urban political ecology'is an important example of this process of reflection andredefinition. The authors involvedT make the case for acomprehensive rethinking of notions of urban metabolism, aradical questioning of the dichotomy of 'natural' and'social'

ecologies, 'natural' and 'man-made' environments and othersuch binaries. Instead, urban processes are conceived as openand dynamic metabolisms spanning very different domains -hydrological, food, transport, etc - mapping these systems as

Copper processing facility, Bagdad,Arizona, 2010Buildlngs are just one node in an extendedecology of often hidden indusirial processesthat continually transtorm the planet aroundus. The production of copper, for exainple,eniails the transformation of immenselandscaps.

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contested political spaces that necessarily include non-humanactors and factors.

Underlying much of these new materialist and ecologicaldiscourses are relational network conceptions of material,biological and social actors that can be found in the workof Manuel De Landa, Bruno Latour and a variety of textsinspired by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and F6lixGuattari (and which typically feature more or less substantialreferences to Alfred North Whitehead, Baruch de Spinoza,

Gottfried Lelbniz and Karl Marx). In work by authors suchas Erik Swyngedouw and Matthew Gandy, what becomesevident is the increasingly complex condition ofcontemporarycapitalism, and the fact that iftraditional distinctions such as'nature'and'culture'can seem problematic to us today, thisis precisely because capital itselfis penetrating the depths ofmatter-

In different though related ways, Bennett, Coole, Frost andIngold all argue that we must develop the ability to imagine,empathise with and experience matter in new ways. This isperhaps also what photographers like Edward Burtynsky andChris Jordan are trying to achieve, in their own particularways, through their work: to capture the'vibrancy'and, onemight say, the'vertigo of matter', in the vastness of miningoperations and manufacturing plants (Burqmsky), the hopelessentanglement ofmatter, in scenes ofurban devastation after so-

Open-cast copper mine, Bagdad, Arizona, 2010An area prepared for the blasting of rock by explosives.

called natural disasters (Jordan in New Orleans), and the sheerabsurdity of late-capitalist material culture (Jordan's'Running

the Numbers').8 Their images are aimed simultaneously atthe shock ofmaterial excesses in late-capitalist society (thecorrelate of consumerism and the economic growth paradigm)and at a sense ofwonder and astonishment, a sense ofbeingimmersed and part of but also lost in a torrent of matter,materials, things. Their work also indicates that this newperspective on matter includes (rather than, as is often argued,

excludes) a significant ethical dimension. While we need todismantle andlor transform the conceptual opposition betweennature and culture (and indeed that between natural andsocial science, and the humanities and sciences), we can in nosense absolve ourselves from our responsibilities towards thenon-human world. Indeed, the enfolding (not levelling) of theontological status ofhuman beings, things and assemblages(in Deleuzet sense), and the processual, relational, metabolicconception ofthe world confer more rather than less ethicalresponsibilities upon us.

What might this mean in architectural terms, then?Perhaps the recent interest in the phenomenology ofhands-onmaking, and at the same time developments around digitalmanufacturing processes, where dematerialised and materialprocesses seem to be nvo sides of the same coin, may be seenas signs of a new materialist sensitivity in architecture. New

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concepts like urban agriculture and landscape urbanism also workon a set ofassumptions that echo our concerns here. Elsewhere,experiments with hylozoic bio-materials like protocells suggesta desire to develop notjust new technologies, but new ways ofconceiving and perceiving the world as a dynamic, interrelatedcontinuum of vibrant matter, bodies and minds.e And we caneven begin to see new forms ofarchitectural practice emerging(albeit not necessarily direcdy engaged wirh the concerns ofecological urbanism) in Rem Koolhaast AMO, in the Crimsonoffice ofarchitectural historians, and in the design activistresearch of muf or Damon Richt Centre for Urban Pedagogy(CUP), and other work towards a'critical urban ecology'and an'ecological history of architecture'.10

Though none ofthese innovations in modes ofarchitecturalpractice capture the firllcombination ofquestions raisedhere concerning material ecologies, nonetlreless it seems thatcontemporary questions around different aspects of scarcityin the built environment mean that this is a good time forarchitecture to embrace a new, materialist mode of practice: onethat is affirmative (rather than remedial or negative), critical(rather than dystopian) and new (rather than post'), and thatlives up to the very vibrancy and vertigiaous nature of the matterthat makes architecture. o

Hennaux abandoned quarry, near Viareggio, Tuscany, 2007The Apuan Alps have been quarried for marble for use iilbuilding siirce Roman times, producing a distinct landscape.Abandoned technoiogies are embedded within the landscapeand continue to interact with ii. -

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i'late:i. gee ficniln ij llaadcws, ihinltirtg rnSi,sferrsj ll Ft irnet, l-.2'tth5t',411 l.Ltitjan),2409.2. 1lya PlgDgijis ani isaDeiie sterg.is,Arder CL;t ni Chaos: llan's 'leY Djaiaue

l.: 1 .l..i98S, p 9.5. see Tiir :iry '\:il.afiui, [ci] t1E ,1-lihcut{,i a t{q : [ieth i n ki t ] E Etl\ i iaa rye n iaAesiheilrs, l-lJrvard Univei itJ FressiCanrb,ridge, ltA;, 2AA1: -iane Serre:1,

Yttrafi tulatt r: A P.litica ec,ilcE cl

llCt, 2010; ard Diailr Colie 4c Sarnanfhiro"il (siisi, lVet/ lfiaie|iaI isns: Dntaicgf,AqexL-{ :ird PdllJas, Drike rJnii/ersi4r PiessiDilrhanr, l.iai, 231C.4. See, ini *xan;pit. l-in ,tB?ld, IleF{:tception of ths fn iitntrcrti: Essays arLirel ihictl, Dvttil rig attrl 5l;il ,'ittllledge

t. " [s1"4' 1.13' 1 l..

Spdcr, lage (Lcndon). 2005.5. Jare Beinel.t, Vib{2t1t Mzttet: A Pi ilicaiLca :tgy tf"iliing5, Drl Ufrivef5iti f?'ess{Drrhail, lj0l, ?-Di'i, ;t tr.6. *t(i'll jlnneu, Dail.;e ol the Didleciit::Steps ii fuliJrx's irlel,lcd, Uti,rei:ii? oi liltroii(Chiftgo, iLi.2403, p i.16.7. i:xafilpies rl LrnaI i-ioiitirei eccirgy,uroDdiy ccNieived, woilitl ilrairde llikt "..,,t1:.-,-' diri,a i,.....s"'....

{edsi, in ihe llaiitre sf a-iiies: Nha,Paliiicil [c,ti.gj ail(] th* Prliiics ci url]anlrle ta bDi brfl Retiiedqe 1 Lofi tiorrl, 2C06.iirii i\laiihew *andy, Cnnueta a.ttl Clal:ftanNatkirg l'1. Lutt: in l\ievt York Ci4t, l:liTPresr iCEmbridgE, \,1A1, 2003.. )or ".5 "

'\ .i '' .d l_-u.,8'- :'. :ai vr'wil/.d .Jar'ibutynksy.f,cIi r[d {riH.ci'irislor{iir.ton.9.ses Ricnel l..rfr3ircng, lilirgAtariituciure: 1n\ i sinthet| Eiola {:ai1

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a,...,,^. "l- (', -,:_iiD Bro (f.i.ri York). 2t12." ...11.-:a',,-. " -'.d:.)::.o:

Arcc5arl:ir itip:/.lechoarf, t: nl . v-cl Clress.ccnr. Thr pfr4tcglrpi-.s liiusiiailrg ihr ariiciehere wei tikelr ty Jiscilke in Tu:cafry ErdAizcna a: pari ti her wofi{ oil ihe ECilCr- ''.' i-::'" -:' ':" i""':'r''LECHC eipior5 the rslaiianshiil "itweerarchitei1urirl lrsitry, th+ eilvircni rerrialCelais, tnd e{rolo(;cal aflc relatisnal thetr-v.l: i;kes extaffdeC ptocesses as ihe fc.us cidfchitectir16l histtry ns firch as cbjeci: ancillrilrJing. aId expirrei frcre pidicinalaryard pet-lorraiive it-rg1icds nf h;sicfioe.apiliap f,ciice.

The landscape sutrounding the abandoned quarry is lacedwith the incisions of major mining operations. These producediandscapes constitute a continuing architectural space, asutreal siage-set for illicit teenage activity, touristic trespassingand motorcross riding. Local rivers are infused with more orless toxic effluent from these operations.

Contemp0raryq uestions a rou nddifferent aspects ofsca rcity in the bu i ltenvironment meanthat this is a goodtime for architectureto embrace a new,materialist mode ofpractice.

Ten O 2012 John Wiley & SorE Lnd.lmag6 o Karin J6.ike