Monthly Archives: September 2012

The Supplanting of Lake Texcoco with Mexico City

Mexico City has now grown to such a size that it roughly covers the same area as the 5 lakes of the Valley of Mexico: Lake Zumpango, Lake Xaltocan, Lake Texcoco, Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco. In fact, the shape of the city almost perfectly matches the lakes’ basin. In the image above I drew an approximation of where the shoreline might have been over a satellite image of the city today. Habitation has spread into the mountains to the west and south, but primarily development has remained concentrated in areas where water easily flows. I believe it was the early 1600’s when Lake Texcoco was drained with canals and irrigation ditches. Today a city has grown to take its place completely.


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The outline of the island capital of Tenochtitlan can still be seen in the arrangement of the streets and residential blocks in the old colonial section of Mexico City. I was able to easily trace the island’s shoreline just be following the main streets. Interestingly enough, the five major causeways that connected Tenochtitlan to the mainland endure as primary streets radiating away from the Zócalo. And of course the Zócalo square is the very same place where Montezuma’s palace stood.

The Draining of the Aral Sea

The Aral Sea had once been the 4th largest lake in the world. It was a source of life for the succession of civilizations that existed in central Asia. People have been fishing its waters since the last ice age. Today it has almost completely vanished.

When the Middle Eastern economies closed to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, cotton became scarce throughout the Communist world. The USSR undertook several waves of ambitious irrigation projects in its southern Republics to make those areas amenable to large-scale cotton cultivation. Beginning in 1971, close to 20 cubic kilometers were diverted from the Oxus and the Jaxartes rivers annually. Little or no water reached the Aral Sea from these rivers which were its main tributaries. At first, the water level dropped only a few inches from year to year, but as the sea began to heat up and the salinity increased, evaporation in the Aral basin exploded. Water level dropped by three or four feet each year during the 1980s. In the last 30 years, the amount of water that has disappeared from the Aral Sea years is roughly equivalent to the entire contents Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The once robust fishing industry has been decimated. Towns along the shore are almost all abandoned. What water that has been making it into the Aral is agricultural runoff filled with pesticides and fertilizer. Each year, the sea became smaller and more poisonous.


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The Aral’s gradual death was not a secret in the Soviet Union. Initiatives were introduced at the Kremlin to make the irrigation system more efficient and to divert other rivers in the region to replenish the Aral. But all proposals that ran counter to the status quo were met with hostility in Moscow. People living in the European republics were indifferent to the problem. Ultimately, it was more profitable to the USSR to protect its cotton production than it was for it to save the Aral Sea from complete destruction. The tens of thousands of fishermen who had made their living on the Aral were ignored and forgotten.

Entrance to Moynaq, once a port town with a thriving harbor.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, what remained of the Aral Sea was split between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The Uzbek government continued to maintain many of the same policies instituted by the Kremlin, especially in regard to agricultural and industrial organization. Today it is one of the top five leading producers of cotton despite its receiving only a fraction of the amount of rainfall needed to successfully grown cotton. Kazakhstan, on the other hand, pursued a very different path by privatizing most of its industries. Since there was money to be made in maintaining at least some of the Aral sea for industrial purposes, a competing demand arose which sought to protect the sea and sustain a regular shoreline. The Kazakhs built a massive dam containing the north stretches of the Aral and preventing it from flowing into the southern part of the basin, controlled by Uzbekistan. It is likely that the North Aral Sea will survive. Unless something is done to by the Uzbek people to introduce new water into the South Aral basin, what we call the South Aral Sea will probably dry completely before the end of the decade and become a vast salt flat desert.

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast

The other day I was looking at a list of provinces that made up Soviet Russia. I found one called Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Of course I had to investigate.

Consequently, it is crucial to bring deeprootsmag.org levitra samples at discount with an endorsement of a spelevitrat to guarantee that you are sufficiently solid to participate in sexual action. However, the patient may have to suffer mentally, financially, and physically throughout the treatment and afterward because of specific chemotherapy side generic levitra pills effects. Do not lowest price for levitra http://deeprootsmag.org/2013/10/01/perhaps-the-richest-body-of-stories-by-any-north-american-writer-of-his-generation/ consume dubious unnamed remedies with unproven efficiency. It is advised that only one tablet of Tadalafil be consumed in a period of 24 hours. buying tadalafil online (Tadalafil) produces very minimum to no side effects generally. This passage in Wikipedia offers a succinct introduction: “Soviet authorities established the autonomous oblast in 1934. It was the result of Joseph Stalin’s nationality policy, which allowed for the Jews of the Soviet Union to receive a territory in which to pursue Yiddish cultural heritage within a socialist framework.” The Soviet Union was made up of 15 separate republics. Each of these was supposed to represent a different nation (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, ect.). Jewish people residing in the Soviet Union asserted that they too constituted a nation and should apportioned the same status and autonomy as the other Soviet nation-states. Since many of the Jewish leaders in the Party were secret Trotskyites, Stalin saw political opportunity in this demand for a “Soviet Zion.” He arranged for the formation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast as a way to dislodge Jewish influence from the political landscape and rob prominent Jewish leaders of their constituency. The new Oblast was 5,000 miles from Moscow. It probably took something like two weeks to reach it on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The land itself was covered in morass and impenetrable forest. The only people who lived in the region were Manchurian Chinese who crossed the border routinely and treated the land as though it was theirs. Living in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast would have been hard, dangerous and utterly desolate. Despite propagandistic novels written in Yiddish describing the Oblast as an unspoiled paradise and numerous “back to the land” campaigns focused upon the largely urban Jewish populace, very few Jews ever went to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
At its highest, the Jewish population in JAO was 30,000; that was in 1948 and still only constituted just 30% of the total population. After the formation of Israel that number dropped to just 17,000. Of course, there were millions of Jews living in the Soviet Union. The proportion of them living in the JAO was negligible. So what we know as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast is Jewish in name alone. One of the Soviet Union’s many failed attempts at social engineering.

Hallucinatory Playground Installations
of the Soviet Union

For some reason, playgrounds in the Soviet Union often featured distorted, inscrutable statues of fairy tale creatures, some legitimate characters from folklore, others just wild fever dream hallucinations. It is difficult to say if the grotesquerie of the figures was an accidental or intended. I like to imagine disillusioned artists from the provinces with no other method of publicizing their work being commissioned to do these jobs. They are uncooperative from the very beginning. They quarrel with the bureaucrats dispatched to oversee the projects. I see local officials despising the works once their finished, but since immediately tearing them down after their completion would be proof of their mismanagement of the project and make them vulnerable to criticism within the party, they leave them up. The disabused artists accomplish their aim: to frighten and terrorize a society which they loathe profoundly, to use the people’s own small mindedness to disturb and cause unease.

Then again, since this was communist Russia, there was probably a single guy who worked for the Ministry of Recreation or some such department whose only job was to design playground equipment for the whole empire. Maybe this gentleman was attempting whimsy but was incapable of imaginative play and humor. Maybe he confused fanciful illusion with basic abnormality. And so we have these images that are actually kind of subversive emerging out of blind ineptitude. I still admire what they were trying to do. The modern playground is built to be nothing more than a mechanism for expending effort through vigorous physicality. They are really just workout facilities for children. The people who designed soviet parks were trying to make these spaces more interesting for kids. The statues are supposed to imbue the playground with enchantment and inspire children to respond involuntarily with wonder. They do succeed in conjuring up a special magic; unfortunately it’s the accursed kind.

All of these images come from the excellent englishrussia.com http://englishrussia.com/2007/08/15/the-most-weird-russian-kids-playgrounds/, a website devoted to Soviet-era kitsch and oddity.

 

 

 


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Die Geschichte vom Volkspark Friedrichshain

The history of Volkspark Friedrichshain is worth recounting. Like everything else in Berlin, its story is astonishingly varied and extraordinary. Neither the largest park in Berlin nor the most famous (that would be the Tiergarten), Volkspark Friedrichshain was the first free land to be opened for use to the general public, and it continues to be central to the city’s civic life. The park was inaugurated in 1848 at a time when Berlin was boiling with unrest. Citizens demanding a democratically elected parliament and rights of free speech had clashed with Prussian soldiers in Alexander Platz earlier that spring. All of Europe was experiencing a spontaneous popular revolution. For the first since antiquity, common people began identifying themselves as citizens of nations rather than simply vassals of a lord or subjects to some far away king. People thrust themselves into civic life and began demanding to have a say in their countries’ destinies.

The creation of Volkspark Friedrichshain was one of the first major projects undertaken by the elected city council of Berlin. Unlike the Tiergarten, which had originally been the hunting grounds of the Hollenzohlern monarchs and was only gradually being made available to the bürger, Volkspark Friedrichshain was a completely open and public space manifested from the will of the people. It is perhaps the first place in all of Germany to be thought of as a possession of the commonwealth, belonging to the people taken together as a nation. For two generations the park was used by the newly emerging working class of Berlin for the enjoyment of their increasing leisure hours. And the, like almost every national expression of the German Volk, Friedrichshain would be seized by the National Socialists almost a century later and perverted for the new state’s senseless, militaristic purposes. Apropos of nothing the Nazis built enormous concrete bunkers in to the park’s carefully tended grounds and erected flak towers to repel air raids from Allied forces. Converted into a military installation, Volkspark Friedrichshain became a target of the war and was utterly obliterated in successive bombing campaigns.

The supporting cast also had some good actors like Wahlberg, James Franco, Mila Kumis, etc. http://www.devensec.com/sustain/eidis-updates/IndustrialSymbiosisupdateJanuary_March2013.pdf cialis price Brandon Johnston is only seventeen years old and was suffering from the problem of severe hair loss and hair thinning for the last several lowest price for levitra months. Applicants can buy Tadalafil 20mg after they check the case and find out the fundamental cause behind the issue likewise influence dosage. online prescription viagra without useful store order cialis It is approved by the governments of all over the world. During the occupation and the subsequent rebuilding of the Berlin, Friedrichshain was used as a dump for the prodigious quantity of rubble and debris left behind from the city’s destruction. The two well-known climbing hills in the park, Mont Klamott and Kleine Bunkerberg, are actually enormous heaps of wreckage covered over in earth. I remember climbing the larger one, Mont Klamott, without any notion at all that I was walking over the interred ruins of the old Berlin, a separate and forgotten city that existed before the war was fought. I do not recall there being a historical marker to tell the story of the hill’s identity. Maybe it is a fact that Berliners would prefer to forget. Then again, maybe it is so commonly known that it need not be mentioned. Almost every German city has a similar rubble pile, covered over and planted with trees and grass. They are so frequent in the landscape of Central Europe that the Germans have a term for them: “Schuttberg.”

Volkspark Friedrichshain was rebuilt by the Deutsche Demokratische Republik once again for the enrichment and well-being of the people. The communist government was redeveloping a new East Berlin. Architects educated in the Soviet Union designed the central city so that it would be egalitarian and functional, with none of the bourgeois conventions that had come to characterize what Berlin had been. They built wide avenues and high-rise housing blocks inspired by Le Corbusier. Individual residents were given much less personal space. To compensate, the volksparks were expanded and improved. These became the city’s backyard. Where children once played make-believe with their siblings in the courtyards that existed in the center of every Berlin block, during the time of the DDR they went to the park after school and played large, organized games with all of their classmates. I remember spotting an old neglected and vandalized ping-pong table in Friedrichshain that dated from the communist era. It attracted my attention because I had never seen a cement ping-pong table before, nor had I ever seen table tennis played in a park. In the United States, ping-pong is decidedly a rec room game. We play it in our houses when entertaining guests. In a socialist country one only owns his paddle. He goes to the park to find a table and people to play with.

Passing Time in Urban Parks

The picture above is an aerial view of Volkspark Friedrichshain in Berlin, Germany. I once stumbled upon this place while wandering the city. I remember being delighted by all the winding trails and secret meadows I found there. There were placid little duck ponds hidden away from the main paths, trysting places for the teenagers to fool around in, occasional statues and fountains. I went on a Sunday, so the park was teaming with people. Berliners seem to use the park for afternoon jogs and walking their dogs. Sometimes you’d see a pairs kicking a soccer ball around or playing Frisbee. The most common activity was just laying in the sun, not for the sake of getting a tan—the Northern European sun is too feeble for that and almost everyone was clothed anyway—but just to be outside, among people. I recall thinking that this park seemed very foreign to me, and that they way people were using the space felt very novel. It is unusual to find parks like Friedrichshain in the United States, with manicured landscapes made to resemble an idealized version of nature. If Americans wish to visit the wild, we get into our cars and drive there. Cities I the United States do tend to have little parks where people can have cook outs on the weekends and walk their dogs on grass to get them to shit. These parks are pretty often under maintained and they aren’t particularly well planned either. They always seem to open and exposed, never enough trees and usually no bushes or interesting flora. I’ve always found that American parks are designed to accommodate a specific set of prescribed activities. They tend not to be places to lay around an loiter. When one goes to a park in the United States, it is usually to play sports, or ride around in a paddleboat, or do something that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do in your own backyard.

 

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This next picture is of the north section of Humboldt Park on Chicago’s west side. With its lagoon and spacious grounds, it could be a very beautiful and bucolic place in the middle of a dense, big city neighborhood. Its designers could have planted dense forests, and they could have carved labyrinthine paths into them like with Friedrichshain. Of course, because of the suspicion everyone in Chicago has for one another and the general anxiety about petty crime, the park is left exposed and only lightly wooded so that it can be easily surveilled. For some reason, all of the interesting spots around the lagoon have been plowed over and made into ball fields. I count seven baseball diamonds and five more diamonds for softball. There is also some sort of ballpark on the left for competitive league play. Continuing to add to the inventory, there are four different playgrounds, four tennis courts, a soccer field, a boathouse, two sand volleyball courts, and the stocking shaped pit in the upper left I believe is an ice skating rink. This is not a place where people go to simply sit and relax. People convene here to play sports. They are keeping busy attending to the performance of an activities. The only people I’ve ever seen lying down in Humboldt Park are the homeless men who live there.

Crowd-made Walkways

I took the photo above at Commons Park in downtown Denver. Years ago, this space was a rail yard. More recently it was converted to an open space park with handsome landscaping and an irrigated grass lawn. This particular part of the park has a nice, wide-open space with paved sidewalks circling the parameter. It seems the sidewalks were designed to form a circuit that people could walk on their lunch hour. As you can see, most people choose to cut through the open field than to walk around it on the sidewalks, so much so that they’ve actually worn trench into the earth that runs from one entrance to the other. The parks people responsible for maintaining the place must have decided that foot traffic was beginning to damage the grounds because they’ve posted a sign reading “PLEASE USE SIDEWALK.” Of course this has succeeded in nothing more than splitting the path at its one side. The allure of the more direct route just proves too tantalizing for people.

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It’s a shame that you don’t get to find out how people are going to use a park until it’s already built. You can’t blame the architects for failing to account for every individual demand placed on the park by its visitors. But now that the path has been trodden and the new route an emergent reality, I think you can begin to fault the city for insisting that the plan continue to be followed rather than accommodating the wisdom of the crowd when it turns in another direction. There’s really no good reason not to install paving stones into the footpath and maintain it as an alternative path. Either the grounds people responsible for Commons Park are too thick to reinterpret the space, or they are stubborn and refuse to adjust their original plan. A better idea would have been to leave the whole place unpaved for a year and then observe how the foot traffic distributes itself across the landscape. That’s actually how public ways were planned before the age of mechanized transportation and our modern predilection for pavement. When Dartmouth College first opened in the late 18th century, the school did nothing at first to demarcate paths from one building to another. When winter came, the school gardener marked the paths students tracked in the snow as they went back and forth to classes. Then the following spring, he cut trails from the tracks. Consequently, Dartmouth today has a terrific snarl of paths and walkways. While the arrangement may not appear symmetrical, it has plenty of practical purpose.