INVESTING INTHE GROUND

Douglas Spencer

Douglas Spencer develops David Harvey’s notion of the ‘spatial fi x’ in which material processes in the built environment and the ground itself are repeatedly used up for the purposes of capital investment. This can be to the detriment of the quality of the land itself, which is often abandoned after a period of time as polluted and unusable brownfi eld sites; while available resources are bled dry. It is a situation that has been worsened over the last few decades with the emphasis on entrepreneurial and intensive modes of urbanisation. Spencer indicates how this situation can be negated by landscape urbanism through critical interventions, such as those represented here in the work of the Architectural Association Landscape Urbanism (AALU) Masters programme in London and Groundlab, the practice associated with it.

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Groundlab, Longgang City Masterplan/Deep Ground, Shenzhen, China, 2009Complex tectonic forms integrate landscape, infrastructural elements and other urban programmes within a cohesive urban organisation.

REFLECTIONS ON SCARCITY, REMEDIATION AND OBDURATE FORM

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‘Capitalist activity,’ writes David Harvey, ‘is always grounded somewhere. Diverse material processes (physical, ecological as well as social) must be appropriated, used, bent and reshaped to the purpose and paths of capital accumulation.’1 Where such processes are literally ‘grounded’ in the production of the built environment, Harvey conceives of these as capital’s ‘spatial fi x’.2 He follows Marx here in conceiving of the land as ‘fi xed capital’. In volume three of Capital, Marx wrote that: ‘Capital may be fi xed in the earth, incorporated into it, both in a more transient way, as is the case with improvements of a chemical kind, application of fertilizer, etc, and more permanently, as with drainage ditches, the provision of irrigation, levelling of land, farm buildings, etc.’3 Earlier, in his The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx observed that ‘fi xed capital gets used up just as much as circulating capital. Improvements to the land need production and upkeep; they last only for a time; and this they have in common with all other improvements used to transform matter into means of production.’4

When capital ‘uses up’ the ground in which it invests, it renders resources scarce. Its manufacturing and agricultural industries leave land chemically toxic, soil fertility exhausted and water systems polluted. Large tracts of land are uselessly occupied by the remnants of redundant infrastructures and abandoned elements of the built environment. But the ‘grounding’ of fi xed capital not only results in scarcity; at the same time, Harvey argues, it poses a problem, an unresolvable contradiction in fact, to the process of capital accumulation itself. His concept of the ‘spatial fi x’, while derived from the theory of fi xed capital, extends Marx’s conception to suggest the destructive addiction of capital – like the junkie always chasing the next ‘fi x’ – to the resolution of its crises through measures that ultimately reproduce the very symptoms they were supposed to relieve. It is ‘one of the central contradictions of capital’, says Harvey,

that it has to build a fi xed space (or ‘landscape’) necessary for its own functioning at a certain point in its history only to have to destroy that space (and devalue much of the capital invested therein) at a later point in order to make way for a new ‘spatial fi x’ (openings for fresh accumulation in new spaces and territories) at a later point in its history.5

The sheer obduracy of the forms of investment in the ground produced by capital – its architecture, infrastructure and landscaping – become obstacles in the path of redevelopment, brakes on the mobility and fl exibility of the accumulation process. This contradiction has been rendered especially acute through the shift identifi ed by Harvey from a ‘managerial’ model of urbanisation, which might broadly be identifi ed with a Keynesian economic model, to an ‘entrepreneurial’ one associated with the ‘fl exible accumulation’ of neo-liberal economics since the mid-1970s.6 Furthermore, the ‘inter-urban competition’ by which Harvey characterised this shift7 has become ever more intensifi ed as it has extended beyond the American context in which it was originally framed to encompass the rapid urbanisation of territories now underway in parts of the Middle East, the developing South and, especially, in post-reform China. Concomitant with this intensifi cation of entrepreneurial and speculative investment of fi xed capital – the spatial fi x – is the

Carlos Umaña Gambassi (AALU), Tactical Morphologies, Rugao, Pearl River Delta, China, 2010Section showing the use of cut-and-fi ll techniques to remediate toxic soil conditions within a former industrial core, and their opportunistic use, through the creation of a new artifi cial topography, to coordinate agricultural and residential programmes within the site.

opposite: Diagram indicating the location of the former industrial core’s new green infrastructure, through which industrial, residential, agricultural and agro-touristic programmes are threaded through the site.

Prioritising landscape over architecture as the primary medium of urban design, contributors to the development of landscape urbanism also tended to emphasise rather formulaic arguments for mobility, fl exibility and connectivity as responses supposed to be adequate for the conditions of contemporary urbanisation.

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escalation of scarcity in these territories; the loss of arable land, the degradation of the ground and the paucity of common spaces within the city.

If, however, the contradictions of the spatial fi x that result from entrepreneurial, rapid and intensive modes of urbanisation are inextricably bound up with the production of scarcities within their territories, it is also through this relationship that the possibility of a critical intervention within these conditions by design may emerge. This possibility is suggested by certain projects and positions developed within the Architectural Association Landscape Urbanism (AALU) masters programme in London, and the landscape urbanist practice Groundlab associated with it.

Landscape urbanism emerged, in the late 1990s, as a discipline explicitly concerned with the post-Fordist conditions of cities, such as Detroit, whose depopulated urban fabric they proposed to remediate through the landscaping of former industrial sites and now-redundant infrastructures. According to its chief theorist, Charles Waldheim:

Landscape Urbanism describes a disciplinary realignment currently under way in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism. For many, across a range of disciplines, landscape has become both the lens through which the contemporary city is represented and the medium through which it is constructed.8

Prioritising landscape over architecture as the primary medium of urban design, contributors to the development of landscape

urbanism also tended to emphasise rather formulaic arguments for mobility, fl exibility and connectivity as responses supposed to be adequate for the conditions of contemporary urbanisation. Alex Wall, for instance, wrote in an essay signifi cant to the development of the new discipline Programming the Urban Surface, of the need to emphasise ‘the extensive reworking of the surface of the earth as a smooth, continuous matrix that effectively binds the increasingly disparate elements of our environment together’.9 ‘The function of design,’ he continued, ‘is not only to make cities attractive, but also to make them more adaptive, more fl uid, more capable of accommodating changing demands and unforeseen circumstances.’10 Yet the type of continuously reprogrammable urban surface argued for by Wall, and the fl exible interconnectivity of the ‘fi eld conditions’ proposed elsewhere by Stan Allen,11 would function, in effect, as the ideal paradigms of design through which territories might be made accessible to neo-liberal imperatives, and their need to continually remake the circulatory and governmental order of the city so as to facilitate the shifting modes of capital accumulation described by Harvey as ‘urban entrepreneurialism’.

Rather than affi rming fl exible processes of urban transformation, however, AALU director and co-founder of Groundlab Eva Castro, together with Alfredo Ramirez, has sought to critique these in relation to the impact of neoliberal imperatives upon urban design. In their essay ‘Thickening the Ground’, they write that the ‘”new” urban discourse advocating extreme connectivity, fl exibility and adaptability, and capable of catering to the indeterminacy of programmes’ is one ‘that happily complies with the overall uncertainties of the free market’.12

Informed by this critique, and addressing themselves to the

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concrete specifi cities of particular territories, Castro and Ramirez argue that it is through form that landscape urbanism attains its critical agency as a design practice and is able to commit itself towards specifi c urban scenarios.

Form becomes the vehicle through which we challenge and face different possible urban scenarios. The objective, on the one hand, is to avoid the pitfalls of a traditional masterplan as deterministic, controlled and infl exible, and on the other the looseness of an open framework catering to an infi nite number of scenarios, able to host any brief or given future. In short, Groundlab advocates for highly articulated environments that commit themselves to specifi c scenarios, briefs and contexts: ‘[these] arise from a dialogue between the territory’s requirements (infrastructure) and our capacity to respond to current trends not purely as service providers, but as cultural producers.’13

In design practice, it is the ground, and its articulation, from which form is derived. The ground becomes, as Castro and Ramirez refer to it, a ‘design tool’. Many of the sites with which AALU and Groundlab have been engaged, for example, particularly those in China, suffer from scarcities of land fi t for farming, or even inhabitation, due to soil pollution and degradation that require processes such as excavation, cutting, fi lling and capping in order to facilitate their remediation. More than a problem-solving exercise, however, this type of ‘groundwork’ also provides an opportunity to generate artifi cial topographies with the formal capacity to structure relations between environmental, social, cultural and economic factors on a given site. The remediation of scarcity is grasped as an opportunity for formal interventions, establishing the possibility of specifi c urban conditions not readily amenable to the fl exibility of reprogramming sought by urban entrepreneurialism. As opposed to the conception of the urban as a mere surface always open to reprogramming in the service of strategies of accumulation, form becomes an obdurate investment in the ground.

Furthermore, the obduracy of form is bolstered by a design practice within AALU and Groundlab which, in its transdisciplinarity, seeks to engage and coordinate the design of such artifi cial topographies with those of architecture, infrastructure and landscape engineering. Cohesive responses to the design of urban territories, in which, for example, the forms of buildings and landscaping share common gradients, small-scale agricultural patches are tightly integrated with architectural elements, and infrastructures are embedded within multi-programmatic structures, enable the productive coordination, by design, of urban services, provisions and access. These transdisciplinary approaches may at least present certain obstacles to the purely market-driven remaking of cities in which isolated elements of the urban fabric might otherwise be simply removed, replaced or unplugged from the urban ecology. The ‘rights to the city’, to its resources, to the provision of arable land and common space, around which the politics of the designs of Groundlab and AALU are typically framed, acquire a certain obdurate formal and organisational expression, a consistency that, while remediating the scarcities produced by earlier territorial transformations, presents a degree of resistance to the imperatives of fl exibility set by the neoliberal urbanism agenda. 2

Nicola Saladino (AALU), Dredging Identities, Lingang, Pearl River Delta, China, 2010left top: Phased development of the site through the extension of the existing canal-based village typology towards the coast and dredging to produce artifi cial islands.

left below: Tight integration of the built form, common spaces, landscaping and water-based infrastructures.

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Notes1. David Harvey, ‘A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development’, in Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, Verso (London and New York), 2006, p 78. 2. See David Harvey, ‘Globalization and the “Spatial Fix”’, Geographische Revue, 2, 2001, pp 23–30. For a critical analysis of Harvey’s concept see Bob Jessop, ‘Spatial Fixes, Temporal Fixes, and Spatio-Temporal Fixes’, published by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University; www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/jessop-spatio-temporal-fi xes.pdf.3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 3, trans David Fernbach, Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review (London), 1981, p 756.4. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M Proudhon, Progress Publishers (Moscow), 1955, p 75.5. Harvey, ‘Globalization and the “Spatial Fix”’, op cit, p 25.6. See David Harvey, ‘Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization Refl ections on “Post-Modernism” in the American City’, Perspecta, Vol 26, Theater, Theatricality, and Architecture, 1990, pp 251–72.7. Ibid p 255.8. Charles Waldheim, ‘Introduction: A Reference Manifesto,’ in Charles Waldheim (ed), The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press (New York), 2006, p 11.9. Alex Wall, ‘Programming the Urban Surface’, in James Corner (ed), Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press (New York), 1999, p 246.10. Ibid.11. Stan Allen, ‘Field Conditions’, in Points + Lines, Princeton Architectural Press (New York), 1999. 12. Eva Castro and Alfredo Ramirez, ‘Thickening the Ground’, in Michael Hensel (ed), Design Innovation for the Built Environment: Research by Design and the Renovation of Practices, Routledge (London and New York), 2011.13. Ibid.

Text © 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 82–3, 87 © Groundlab Ltd; pp 84–6 © Supplied by Douglas Spencer

Groundlab, Longgang City Masterplan/Deep Ground, Shenzhen, China, 2009below: Layered diagram showing the correlation of ecological corridors, public plazas, water-fi ltering wetlands and other elements with the city’s urban fabric.

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