DUS Architects and the Studio for Unsolicited Architecture offer shelter from the storm with their incredible pop-up Bucky Bar made entirely from umbrellas. Built from orange umbrellas in a very Buckminster-Fullery formation, the bar existed for one short evening, dispensing drinks and DJ downbeats.
Inhabitat: Bucky Bar Built From Umbrellas is a Pop-Up Party
(via Cole Tucker)
5. Prypiat, Ukraine
4. Humberstone and Santa Laura, Chile
3. (Parts of) Detroit, Mich.
2. Hashima Island, Japan
1. Centralia, Penn.
HowStuffWorks: 5 Modern Abandoned Cities
(via William Gibson via Mister X)
Acres of vacant land are eyed for urban agriculture under an ambitious plan that aims to turn the struggling Rust Belt city into a green mecca.
Reporting from Detroit – On the city’s east side, where auto workers once assembled cars by the millions, nature is taking back the land.
Cottonwood trees grow through the collapsed roofs of homes stripped clean for scrap metal. Wild grasses carpet the rusty shells of empty factories, now home to pheasants and wild turkeys.
This green veil is proof of how far this city has fallen from its industrial heyday and, to a small group of investors, a clear sign. Detroit, they say, needs to get back to what it was before Henry Ford moved to town: farmland. […]
It is the size and scope of Hantz Farms that makes the project unique. Although company officials declined to pinpoint how many acres they might use, they have been quoted as saying that they plan to farm up to 5,000 acres within the Motor City’s limits in the coming years, raising organic lettuces, trees for biofuel and a variety of other things.
LA Times: Investors see farms as way to grow Detroit
(via Brainsturbator)
Here, 100ft down and hidden from public view, lies an astonishing secret – one that has drawn comparisons with the fabled city of Atlantis and has been dubbed ‘the Eighth Wonder of the World’ by the Italian government.
For weaving their way underneath the hillside are nine ornate temples, on five levels, whose scale and opulence take the breath away.
Constructed like a three-dimensional book, narrating the history of humanity, they are linked by hundreds of metres of richly decorated tunnels and occupy almost 300,000 cubic feet – Big Ben is 15,000 cubic feet.
Read more about the occult commune and ecovillage Damanhur:
Wikipedia: Federation of Damanhur
(Thanks to Dr P Fenderson)
See also:
EsoZone PDX 2009 is over, and I’m still recovering. Here’s some of the stuff people have posted so far:
Jillian’s EsoZone round-up wherein she shares her own experiences at EsoZone 2009.
She’s shared her outline from her “Radical Therapy for Radical Minds” workshop
Garret Daun has shared a PDF of his “Create Deconstruction” workshop.
Above: a short video from Soup Purse’s workshop on audio processing as invocation and divination.
I was just burned by a Daily Mail story and not eager to get hoaxed again, but this is interesting if true. A commenter at Cryptogon notes:
There is indeed a massive amount of shipping sitting idle around here. You can clearly see them off the southern coast of Singapore (where the main container ship harbour is), where they’re scattered across the horizon and on a recent flight to Malaysia, there is a large amount of shipping in the Johor Straits on the northern tip of Singapore, though its hard to say if they’re moving or not.
They won’t come into harbour (which incurrs fees) because there’s nothing to ship. The Western demand for consumer goods has tanked.
From my vague memory of a news report there are supposed to be about 750-800 ships out there.
It’s probably not the biggest congregation ever, but its certainly unprecedented for this neck of the woods.
Cryptogon: The Ghost Fleet of the Recession
Trevor Blake remarks that these idle ships are ripe to be remade into pirate utopias.
These days the only things that land on Hashima Island are the shits of passing seagulls. An hour or so’s sail from the port of Nagasaki, the abandoned island silently crumbles. A former coal mining facility owned by Mitsubishi Motors, it was once the most densely populated place on earth, packing over 13,000 people into each square kilometre of its residential high-risers. It operated from 1887 until 1974, after which the coal industry fell into decline and the mines were shut for good. With their jobs gone and no other reason to stay in this mini urban nightmare, almost overnight the entire population fled back to the mainland, leaving most of their stuff behind to rot.
Today it is illegal to go anywhere near the place as it’s beyond restoration and totally unsafe. The Japanese Government aren’t keen to draw unwanted attention to this testament to the hardship of the country’s post-war industrial revolution either.
The punishment for being caught visiting Hashima Island is 30 days in prison followed by immediate deportation. But the other week, after getting up before sunrise and cutting a secret deal with a local fisherman, some friends and I landed on Hashima Island.
Vice: Battleship Island – Japan’s rotting metropolis
(via The Agitator)
Sabah Electricity Sdn Bhd (SESB) has stepped up efforts to curb Non-Revenue Electricity (NRE) by dismantling illegal connections from squatter colonies here.
Its enforcement unit saw hundreds of metres of illegal wires being seized during a three-day operation from Tuesday.
Daily Express: Power thefts in 12 KK squatter areas
Via Robert Neuwirth, who writes:
If the point is to get people to pay, to turn non-revenue into revenue, then why not work with the squatters to create a solution. It’s such a simple thing, really. Just a slight change in mindset. The South African group Abahlali baseMjondolo has demonstrated in a series of reports that ripping out electrical lines in shantytowns causes deaths, as people return to using candles and lighting fires. There’s a cost in lost revenue and a cost in human lives.
Residents of Copenhagen’s famed Christiania neighbourhood have no right to use the land they have occupied for four decades, a Danish court has ruled.
The 900-odd residents had expected the ruling from the Eastern High Court and planned to appeal, a spokesman said.
The court dismissed a lawsuit by them that they had the right to use the former naval base in the Danish capital even if they did not own it.
Tension has risen in recent years over drug crackdowns and regeneration plans.
BBC: ‘No land rights’ for hippy Danes
This article does at least mention that Christiania DOES pay property taxes and pays city utility bills. They were formally recognized by the Danish government in 1995.
For more information about Christiania, here’s their official site. Previous RF/Technoccult coverage here.
Although it is small consolation in the face of overwhelming economic strife in Detroit and elsewhere as the foreclosure crisis continues, this story gave me a real feeling of hope and renewal. To me, this example and other corresponding cases – like the artist-driven re-imaginings of shopping malls and big box stores seems symbolic of an even larger cultural shift. The arts community isn’t just moving into one downtrodden urban neighborhood; rather, they’re taking on the ruins of the unsustainable. They’re taking on big box stores, shopping malls, and grid-connected homes in the car capitol of North America. And they’re not just creating new art. They’re seizing the opportunity to turn old shells of buildings into independent, renewable energy-powered, 21st century-ready spaces.
What I’m most eager to hear next is that creative pioneers are conquering McMansions in the suburban hintersprawl. As Bryan Walsh wrote recently for Time Magazine, “The Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech predicts that by 2025 there will be a surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (on one-sixth of an acre [675 sq m] or more) in the U.S.”
Will subdivisions be turned into workshops and performance spaces? Or possibly into small-scale agricultural communities, or enclaves for artisan food-production? At the very least, will they become denser, transit-connected and less car-dependent … and what will drive that?
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