Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects

Engineering Earth

Stanley D. Brunn Editor

Engineering Earth The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects

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Editor Prof. Stanley D. Brunn Department of Geography University of Kentucky 40506-0027 Lexington KY, USA [email protected]

Printed in 3 volumes ISBN 978-90-481-9919-8 e-ISBN 978-90-481-9920-4 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Cover Design: Adam White Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

Gilbert F. White pioneering scientist transdisciplinarian humanitarian peace activist international scholarly diplomat

Preface

This volume is an outgrowth of an international and interdisciplinary conference that I initiated and co-organized at the University of Kentucky in July 2008. The purpose of this conference, the title the same as this volume, was to bring together a group of scholars from different disciplines and perspectives who are interested in megaengineering projects who usually do not communicate with each other, even if they study the same topic. These included dams, highways, and mining. The conference was successful because the fifty presentations by social, engineering, and environmental scientists from nine countries addressed the impacts of various megaprojects and because it demonstrated the need for increased dialogue and collaboration. The conference was dedicated to Dr. Gilbert White, who, for more than seven decades was an enthusiastic advocate of those conducting research on important global resource and public policy initiatives and the perception of natural and technological hazards at local and international scales. He was also keenly interested in disseminating research findings to those in the classroom and a wider public. Throughout his professional life, including at TVA, Haverford College, the University of Chicago, and the University of Colorado, he influenced generations of students and professionals of all ages and ranks and those with varying professional interests. Many scholars today, including many who contributed to this volume and who work at the geography/technology/policy/environment interfaces trace some of their intellectual roots to Gil. He received many national and international awards for his achievements, including the National Medal of Science presented to him by President Clinton in 2000. As a long time friend, a fellow Quaker, a solid humanitarian, a peace activist, and international scholarly diplomat, it is fitting to dedicate this volume to him. As I was organizing the conference and also editing this volume, I was asked often how I became interested in the engineering earth topic and megaprojects specifically. The simple answer is that they are an outgrowth of where I have lived and the many conversations and interactions with friends over the years. For many geographers of my generation, we received training in the natural, social, and policy sciences, so studying the impacts of large engineering projects from economic, cultural, and environmental perspectives at local and global scales was understandable. During my lifetime I have witnessed in the many places I have lived, taught and traveled the construction of various megaprojects and vii

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their impacts on people’s daily lives. These include memories of nuclear testing years of the 1950s and 1960s, the construction of the Interstate Highway System, mass-produced “cookie cutter” suburbs and the “malling and Wal-Martization” of America,” the computer worlds before the Internet, GIS, and Google Earth, and social justice issues that result from the social engineering of political America. My research career includes projects examining various geography/technology issues, including the impacts of Three Mile Island in 1979 with Jim Johnson and Don Zeigler, co-editing volumes on the geographies of information and communication and E-commerce with my colleague Tom Leinbach, co-editing with Susan Cutter and J. W. Harrington a centennial volume for the Association of American Geographers on geography and technology, and editing an interdisciplinary book on Wal-Mart. Also I have benefitted from numerous conversations with my own colleagues, especially Matt Zook and Karl Raitz, but also my many friends at the University of Kentucky in biology, astronomy, landscape architecture, economics, engineering, public health, education, social theory, and the Appalachian Center. Living in Kentucky since 1980 and teaching undergraduate classes and seminars on various topics have kept me sensitive to engineering earth questions in my backyard. There are a number of megaprojects that Kentuckians can easily identify. These include the destruction to communities and ecosystems brought on by mountain top removal, the burial of low level nerve gas in rotting canisters stored at the Bluegrass Army Depot near Richmond, the social and environmental engineering of the Bluegrass as an amenity region, the drawing down of water in the Cumberland River dam which negatively impacted the local recreation economies, and the construction of various architectural, landscaping and engineering projects in Lexington for its hosting the World Equestrian Games in fall 2010. A series of other events have also affected my thinking about nature/society issues in recent years. These include the on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are/were certainly megaengineering projects with impacts on economies, culture, and environments, the devastation resulting from Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in Spring 2010, the construction and enforcement of security landscapes since 9/11, and the constant searching for energy alternatives. A key ingredient in my thinking was the field trip at the annual meetings of the Southeast Division, Association of American Geographers in Morgantown, West Virginia in November 2006 that was organized by my good friend, Ken Martis. He showed us firsthand the environmental destruction caused by mountaintop removal, not only the heavy machinery used, but the dynamiting. Understanding fully the impacts of any of the above projects does not come from research within a single discipline, but rather thinking outside our intellectual comfort zones. In many ways the July 2008 conference was, and this book is, about “bridges,” that is, bridges that span “spaces” where the dialogue and scholarly research have often been narrowly conceived and carried out. I am describing those worlds where scholars operate in parallel universes. The conference and this volume are efforts that transcend the all too familiar and intellectually comfortable worlds

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of those interested primarily in economic, environmental, cultural, or engineering solutions as solutions to megaengineering impact questions. I would extend the need for intellectually bridge-building efforts and communities to include those interested in sustainability, empowering (and re-engineering) local institutions, humane landscape designing, megainstitutions (universities, churches, entertainment complexes), alternative energy projects, tourism and event planning, virtual communities, and large scale ICT projects. Organizing this conference and editing this book with contributors from the social, environmental, and engineering scientists have been enjoyable learning experiences. But neither could have been accomplished without the help of a wide network of local and global friends or the Internet. I have “met” many new scholars, especially from the engineering sciences, via email. The first emails were sent in late November 2006. Since then I have sent or received nearly 12,000 emails from local and international friends, conference participants, authors, reviewers, financial supporters, and the publisher. Most of these exchanges were in 2008 and 2009. There are a number of specific individuals who deserve mention for the important roles they have played both with the conference and this publication. First is my colleague, Andy Wood, who prepared proposals for funding, identifying conference topics and themes, and helped organize the conference. Andy also assumed leadership responsibilities when I was a Fulbright professor in Kazakhstan in fall semester 2007. He is a good and valuable colleague. Second is Lori Tyndall, the department’s business officer; she helped organize many tasks both before and after the conference, including meals, accommodations, travel arrangements, and reimbursements. She was a tireless, cheerful and invaluable member of the conference team. Third, I want to acknowledge the financial support provided by various University of Kentucky offices and departments; these include very generous contributions from the Office of the Provost and Dr. Kumble Subbaswamy; the Office of the Vice President for Research, Dr. Jim Tracy; and the following colleges and deans (in alphabetical order): Arts and Sciences (former Dean Steve Hoch and Associate Dean Leonidas Bachas), Business and Economics (Dean Devanathan Sudharshan), Engineering (Tom Lester), the Graduate School (Jeanine Blackwell), and Public Health (Steve Wyatt). We also received very generous support from the Center for Applied Energy Research and Director Rodney Andrews. Dr. Evelyn Knight, Director of the Appalachian Center, also provided financial assistance. And I want to thank Dr. Douglas Richardson, Executive Director of the Association of American Geographers and Ms. Mary Lynne Bird, Executive Director of the American Geographical Society for publicizing the conference to their members and constituents. From the start the Department of Geography was supportive of the conference. I am grateful to Karl Raitz, previous chair, and Sue Roberts, current chair, for their enthusiasm and financial support. Richard Gilbreath, Director of the Cartography Laboratory, provided assistance in many ways: preparing the program, designing the creative coffee mug we gave all participants, and preparing last minute maps for some authors. The quality of Dick’s work is always outstanding and our department is richer because of his many contributions to faculty research. Finally, I want to

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thank Boyd Shearer for designing the conference poster and Jeff Levy and Raegan Wilson for also assisting with some last minute tasks. My task immediately following the conference was to prepare a volume for publication. I approached Springer because it is widely recognized as the leading international publisher in science and technology fields and because it published the AAG centennial volume on geography and technology mentioned above. My contacts at Springer, Evelien Bakker and Bernadette Deelen-Mans, expressed a keen interest in this topic the first time I suggested it and they remained constant sources of support as I patiently waited for last minute authors to come through. I very much appreciate the freedom Evelien gave me to identify authors and topics following the July conference, realizing that an international and interdisciplinary volume of this topic really required some additional efforts. A testimony to the international and multidisciplinary dimension of this project is documented by the several hundred professional and scientific journals cited in chapter bibliographies. The person who helped prepare all manuscripts for Springer was Donna Gilbreath, who has assisted me in previous editorial tasks. She is a very competent, trusted, and reliable professional who enjoys the many major and minor tasks that go with preparing book length manuscripts for a publisher; these include formatting manuscripts, inserting graphics and tables correctly, checking bibliographic entries, and working with authors. I also owe megathanks to Lydia Shinoj who, from half a world away from Lexington, patiently and cheerfully worked with authors on last minute citations, graphics, and phrasing. She is a professional proof-reader and copy-editor in the truest sense and another quality member of the Springer publication team. This volume includes many who presented papers at the University of Kentucky conference, but also others who were unable to attend because of scheduling conflicts. And there are other chapters written by friends and friends of friends. Some chapters are written by individuals who have made a career of studying one or more megaproject; others are written by junior or senior scholars who welcomed the opportunity to conduct research on a new topic. What is very gratifying is that almost all of those who agreed to contribute chapters provided one. I want to thank all the nearly 200 individual authors who contributed original chapters to the volume; the list includes graduate students and senior scholars, 51 women, and scholars from 28 different countries. Projects are discussed in more than forty countries. Many authors have been friends for life; others became good “virtual” friends as a result of many email exchanges. I also want to acknowledge those who suggested contributors. Four who deserve extra thanks are Richard Cathcart, Virginie Mamadouh, Jan Monk, and Herman van der Wusten. Others are (in alphabetical order): Stuart Aitken, Harri Andersson, Holly Barcus, Andy Bond, Kathy Braden, Anne Buttimer, Jean Comaroff, Eric Clark, Paul Claval, Harm de Blij, Alex Diener, Ron Eller, Patricia Ehrkamp, Bent Flyvberg, Brian Godfrey, Susan Hanson, Stuart Harris, Andre Horn, Graeme Hugo, John Jakle, P. P. Karan, Aharon Kellerman, Vladimir Kolossov, Evelyn Knight, David Lanegran, Alan Lew, Markku Löytönen, Ashley Lucas, Elizabeth Lunstrum, Lily Kong, Ken Martis, Julian Minghi, Ed Malecki, Peter Muller, Alex Murphy,

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Tad Mutersbaugh, David Newman, Susan Parnell, Sangkom Pumipuntu, Karl Raitz, Marty Reuss, Curt Roseman, Gerry Rushton, Sue Roberts, Michael Samers, Rich Schein, Seven Scott, Anna Secor, Jeff Steller, Hal Simon, Devanathan Sudharshan, Markku Tykkyläinen, Ian Warrington, Jerry Webster, Mary White, Tom Wilbanks, Jack Williams, Julie Winkler, Antoinette WinklerPrins, Pentti Yli-Jokipii, Don Zeigler, and Matt Zook. I also want to thank artist Adam White for permission to use a much reduced version of his “Children’s Games” for the cover. When I saw it at the Royal Dublin Society’s winter show in November 2009. I knew immediately that I would like to use it. He is a most gracious artist who weaves together technology and environment, a central theme of this volume. I am pleased with those who contributed to this volume as it is truly an international and interdisciplinary effort. There authors include physicists and planetary scientists, anthropologists and economists, architects and historians, Internet and Google Earth specialists, environmental scientists and civil engineers, and those who study social justice, environmental risk, and community restructuring. Most authors are geographers and here are many who have different backgrounds and interests; some have strong regional and nature/society interests, others have major research interests in critical social theory and physical geography, and still others have a strong applied focus to their research. As I read and reread these chapters I was very pleased with the common ground that exists among the many contributors and contributions, whether they are writing about large scale dams, transportation projects, tourism developments or social engineering. Even those contributions dealing with GIS and the Internet, climate modeling, reforestation, megaenergy alternatives, and planetary engineering illustrate the contributions to understanding megaprojects that come from those with different scientific, technical, philosophical, and regional expertise. I hope that the reader will find much in this volume that is of interest for future research. There is clearly much more work that might be, could be (and probably should be) conducted on the impacts of megaengineering projects at all scales and in all major world regions. If this collection stimulates such inquiry, it will have served its purpose. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Natasha, for her interest and support throughout this project. She was a member of Ken Martis’s field trip to the West Virginia coal fields where she witnessed Appalachian megaengineering impacts firsthand, she faithfully attended the conference in 2008, and survived the fall 2007 Fulbright experience in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. I am very grateful for her affection and constant companionship. Lexington, Kentucky

Stanley D. Brunn

Contents

Volume 1 Part I

Introduction

1 Introduction to Megaengineering: The Concept and a Research Frontier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stanley D. Brunn and Andrew Wood

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2 Building the Next Seven Wonders: The Landscape Rhetoric of Large Engineering Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ben Marsh and Janet Jones

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Part II

GIS, ICTs and K-Economies

3 Information Technology as Megaengineering: The Impact of GIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael F. Goodchild

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4 Google and the Internet: A Mega-Project Nesting Within Another Mega-Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maria Paradiso

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5 Cloud Collaboration: Peer-Production and the Engineering of the internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mark Graham

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6 Engineering Community and Place: Facebook as Megaengineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael Longan and Darren Purcell

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7 Real-Time National Stability Engineering: Mapping the 2009 Afghan Election . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tom Buckley, Sean Gorman, Laurie Schintler, and Rajendra Kulkarni 8 Engineering Time and Space with the Global Fiber Optics Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barney Warf

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9 The Internet in Three Finnish Cities: Accessing Global Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tommi Inkinen 10

ICTs and Activities on the Move? People’s Use of Time While Traveling by Public Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bertil Vilhelmson, Eva Thulin, and Daniel Fahlén

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Assembling Video Game Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ian Graham Ronald Shaw

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GPS Collars in Studies of Cattle Movement: Cases of Northeast Namibia and North Finland . . . . . . . . . . . . . Katja Polojärvi, Alfred Colpaert, Kenneth Matengu, and Jouko Kumpula

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Engineering Cattle for Dairy Development in Rural India . . . . Pratyusha Basu

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Social Responses to Crop Biotechnology: Bt Cotton Cultivation in Gujarat, India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Esha Shah

Part III 15

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Agriculture, Fishing and Mining Projects

Turning the Soviet Union into Iowa: The Virgin Lands Program in the Soviet Union . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . William C. Rowe

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The Megaengineering of Ocean Fisheries: A Century of Expansion and Rapidly Closing Frontiers . . . . . . . . . . . Maarten Bavinck

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Impacts of Up-Coming Deep-Sea Mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tetsuo Yamazaki

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When Megaengineering Disturbs Ram: The Sethusamudram Ship Canal Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michiel van Dijk and Virginie Mamadouh

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Deep Drilling: Tunnel Spaces as Gender Spaces . . . . . . . . . . Elisabeth Joris

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The Megaproject of Mining: A Feminist Critique . . . . . . . . . Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt

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The Richest Hole on Earth? Nature, Labor and the Politics of Metabolism at the Bingham Canyon Copper Mine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jody Emel and Matthew T. Huber

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When Boom Goes Bust: Ruins, Crisis and Security in Megaengineering Diamond Mining in Angola . . . . . . . . . Filipe Calvão Ecclesial Opposition to Nonferrous Metals Mining in Guatemala and the Philippines: Neoliberalism Encounters the Church of the Poor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . William N. Holden and R. Daniel Jacobson Character and Scale of Environmental Disturbances Resulting from Mining in the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly . . . . . Alina Nekrich

Part IV 25

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Energy-Hungry Europe: Development Projects in South-Central Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anton Gosar

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The Repercussions of Being Addicted to Oil: Geospatial Modeling of Supply Shocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laurie Schintler, Rajendra Kulkarni, Tom Buckley, Emily Sciarillo, and Sean Gorman

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Part V 32

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Engineering and Re-engineering Earth: Industrialized Harvesting of Ireland’s Peatlands and its Aftermath . . . . . . . Proinnsias Breathnach

The Next Generation of Energy Landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . Martin J. Pasqualetti

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Energy and Industrial Projects

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Global Motor Vehicle Assembly: Nationalism, Economics, and Rationale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Craig S. Campbell Potentials and Employment Impacts of Advanced Energy Production from Forest Residues in Sparsely Populated Areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Olli Lehtonen and Markku Tykkyläinen Megaproject: A 4-Decade Perspective of the Gulf Development Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael C. Ewers and Edward J. Malecki

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Transportation Projects “America’s New Design for Living:” The Interstate Highway System and the Spatial Transformation of the U.S. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joe Weber

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The Transamazon Highway: Past, Present, Future . . . . . . . . Robert Walker, Stephen Perz, Eugenio Arima, and Cynthia Simmons

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Megaprojects in India: Environmental and Land Acquisition Issues in the Road Sector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . G. Raghuram, Samantha Bastian, and Satyam Shivam Sundaram

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Shifting Sands: The Trans-Saharan Railway . . . . . . . . . . . Mike Heffernan

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Will New Mobilities Beget New (Im)Mobilities? Prospects for Change Resulting from Mongolia’s Trans-State Highway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alexander C. Diener

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“America’s Glory Road” . . . On Ice: Permafrost and the Development of the Alcan Highway, 1942–1943 . . . . . Frederick E. Nelson “We Shall Dress You in a Robe of Cement and Concrete:” How Discourse Concerning Megaengineering Projects Has Been Changing in Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Izhak Schnell and Anda Rosenberg Built in a Field of Dreams? Spatial Engineering and Political Symbolism of South Africa’s Rapid Rail Link Development, Gautrain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ronnie Donaldson and Janis van der Westhuizen Manufacturing Consent for Engineering Earth: Social Dynamics in Boston’s Big Dig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James P. McCarthy and Kate Driscoll Derickson Impacts of The “Marmaray” Project (Bosphorus Tube Crossing, Tunnels and Stations) on Transportation and Urban Environment in Istanbul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Recep Efe and Isa Cürebal Scandinavian Links: Mega Bridges Linking the Scandinavian Peninsula to the European Continent . . . . . Christian Wichmann Matthiessen and Richard D. Knowles The Qinghai–Tibetan Railroad: Innovative Construction on Warm Permafrost in a Low-Latitude, High-Elevation Region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stuart A. Harris

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Volume 2 Part VI

Construction Companies and Corporation Strategies

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A Network Perspective on Mega-Engineering Projects . . . . . . Ajay Mehra, Daniel J. Brass, Stephen P. Borgatti, and Giuseppe (Joe) Labianca

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Bechtel: The Global Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jason Henderson

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Chinese Construction Industry: Governance, Procurement and Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jian Zuo, George Zillante, and Zhen-Yu Zhao

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An Overview of the Gulf Countries’ Construction Industry . . . Alpana Sivam, Sadasivam Karuppannan, and Kamalesh Singh

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Exploring the Role of Governance in Sustainable Franchised Distribution Channels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robert Dahlstrom, Arne Nygaard, and Emily Plant

Part VII

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Megafacilities, Designs and Architecture

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Intermodal Terminals, Mega Ports and Mega Logistics . . . . . Jean-Paul Rodrigue

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Mega-Airports: The Political, Economic, and Environmental Implications of the World’s Expanding Air Transportation Gateways . . . . . . . . . . . . . John T. Bowen and Julie L. Cidell

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University as Megaengineering Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Judith A. Martin

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Creating a New Heaven and a New Earth: Megachurches and the Reengineering of America’s Spiritual Soil . . . . . . . . Scott Thumma and Elizabeth J. Leppman

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Mega-Engineering Projects in Russia: Examples from Moscow and St. Petersburg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mikhail S. Blinnikov and Megan L. Dixon

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Engineering New Geographies with the Burj Dubai . . . . . . . Benjamin Smith

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Floating Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alexander A. Bolonkin

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Planning and Implementing Capital Cities – Lessons from the Past and Prospects for Intelligent Development in the Future: The Case of Korea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kenneth E. Corey

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Contents

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Astana, Kazakhstan: Megadream, Megacity, Megadestiny? . . . 1001 Leon Yacher

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Myanmar’s New Capital City of Naypyidaw . . . . . . . . . . . 1021 Dulyapak Preecharushh

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Event Engineering: Urban Planning for Olympics and World’s Fairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1045 Mark I. Wilson

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Sustainable City Regions: Mega-Projects in Balance with the Earth’s Carrying Capacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1057 Richard S. Levine, Michael T. Hughes, and Casey Ryan Mather

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Edge Cities in the Era of Megaprojects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1071 Selima Sultana

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Engineering and the Architecture of Economic Recovery: TARP, the New Deal, and the Evolving Landscapes of Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1089 Andrew Boulton

Part VIII Tourism, Recreation and Amenity Landscapes 63

Engineering Singapore as a City–State and Tourism Destination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1109 Joan C. Henderson

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Val d’Europe: A Mega Urban Project Partnered by Walt Disney Company and the French State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1127 Anne-Marie d’Hauteserre

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Dredging Paradise: The Making of San Diego’s Mission Bay Aquatic Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1147 Larry R. Ford

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Earth as a Medium: The Art and Engineering of Golf Course Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1159 John Strawn, Jim Barger, and J. Drew Rogers

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Engineering Metaphorical Landscapes and the Development of Zoos: The Toronto Case Study . . . . . . . . . . 1191 Paul Harpley

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An Uncomfortable Fit? Transfrontier Parks as MegaProjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1223 Elizabeth Lunstrum

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Dams, Casinos and Concessions: Chinese Megaprojects in Laos and Cambodia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1243 Chris Lyttleton and Pál Nyíri

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Engineering Paradise: Marketing the Dominican Republic’s Last Frontier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1267 Joseph L. Scarpaci, Korine N. Kolivras, and William Galloway

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Perfecting and Recreating Nature on the Upper Mississippi River . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1283 John O. Anfinson

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The Bluegrass of Kentucky: An Engineered Image of a Gracious Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1297 Thomas J. Nieman and Zina R. Merkin

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Constructing Thoroughbred Breeding Landscapes: Manufactured Idylls in the Upper Hunter Region of Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1323 Phil McManus, Glenn Albrecht, and Raewyn Graham

Part IX

Reconstructing and Restoring Nature

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The Earth Restoration Project: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . 1343 Jeffrey Gritzner, Georgia Milan, and Leonard Berry

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Huge Yields of Green Belts? Mega and Micro Plantation Forestry Cases from Indonesia, Ghana and Zimbabwe . . . . . . 1353 Tapani Tyynelä

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Historic Land Use and Social Policy Affecting Large-Scale Changes in Forest Cover in the Midwest United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1369 Mikaela Schmitt-Harsh, Sean P. Sweeney, and Tom P. Evans

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The Historical Decrease of Soil Erosion in the Eastern United States – The Role of Geography and Engineering . . . . . 1383 Stanley W. Trimble

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Re-Making America: Soil Mechanics, Earth Moving, Highways, and Dams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1395 Peter J. Hugill

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Engineering the Emirates: The Evolution of a New Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1409 Pernilla Ouis

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Land Marks in the Cure of Madness: The Shaping of 19th Century Asylum Sites in Melbourne, Australia . . . . . . 1425 Anne Bourke

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Sea Art: The Mediterranean Sea Terrace Proposal . . . . . . . . 1441 Nicola M. Pugno, Richard B. Cathcart, and Alexander Bolonkin

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Part X

River Diversion and Coastal Reclamation Projects

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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Mississippi River Cutoff Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1451 Damon Manders

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The Impacts of Megahydraulic Engineering Projects from a Dutch Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1465 Guus J. Borger, Sjoerd J. Kluiving, and Adriaan M.J. De Kraker

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Dutch Coastal Engineering Projects: Past Success and Future Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1481 Robert Hoeksema

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Moving the River? China’s South–North Water Transfer Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1499 Darrin Magee

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The Siberian Water Transfer Scheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1515 Philip Micklin

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Freshwater Supplies Necklace Super-Project: Floating Bags and Rolling Freshwater Tires Facilitating Future India–China–Bangladesh Life Necessities Trade . . . . . . . . . 1531 Richard B. Cathcart

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Aral Sea Partial Refilling Macroproject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1541 Richard B. Cathcart and Viorel Badescu

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Geo-Engineering South Australia: The Case of Lake Eyre . . . . 1549 Viorel Badescu, Richard B. Cathcart, Marius Paulescu, Paul Gravila, and Alexander A. Bolonkin

Part XI 90

Dams

Mega-Hydroelectric Power Generation on the Yangtze River: The Three Gorges Dam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1569 Stuart A. Harris

Volume 3 91

Demographic Impacts of the Three Gorges Dam . . . . . . . . . 1583 Yan Tan and Graeme Hugo

92

Water Worth Gold: The Itaipú Hydroelectric Project . . . . . . 1599 Melissa H. Birch and Nicolas Quintana Ashwell

93

Megadams for Irrigation in Nigeria: Nature, Dimensions, and Geographies of Impacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1617 Adamu I. Tanko

Contents

xxi

94

Ebbs and Flows: Megaproject Politics on the Mekong . . . . . . 1633 Philip Hirsch and Katherine Wilson

95

Beyond Mega on a Mega Continent: Grand Inga on Central Africa’s Congo River . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1651 Kate B. Showers

Part XII

Military, Security, and Risk Landscapes

96

America’s Military Footprint: Landscapes and Built Environments within the Continental U.S. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1683 William W. Doe III and Eugene J. Palka

97

Constructing the Border Wall – The Social and Environmental Impacts of Border: Mexico-U.S. Border Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1701 Lauren Martin

98

The Engineering of Detentional Landscapes: Australia’s Asylum Seeker Island Prisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1723 Nancy Hudson-Rodd

99

“Alcatraz in the Sky”: Engineering Exile in a Virginia (USA) Prison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1749 Matthew L. Mitchelson

100

An Environmental History of the French Nuclear Complex at La Hague . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1765 Laurent Bocéno

101

Fifty Years of Soviet Nuclear Testing in Semipalatinsk, Kazakstan: Juxtaposed Worlds of Blasts and Silences, Security and Risks, Denials and Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1789 Stanley D. Brunn

Part XIII Socially Engineered Landscapes 102

Florida’s Planned Retirement Communities: Marketing Age, Religion, Ethnicity and Lifestyle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1821 Ira M. Sheskin

103

Re-engineering the Urban Landscape: Land Use Reconfiguration and the Morphological Transformation of Shrinking Industrial Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1855 Alan Mallach

104

Wiring the Countryside: Rural Electrification in Ireland . . . . 1885 Patrick J. Duffy

105

When a New Deal is Actually an Old Deal: The Role of TVA in Engineering a Jim Crow Racialized Landscape . . . . . 1901 Derek H. Alderman and Robert N. Brown

xxii

Contents

106

A Double-Edged Sword: Social Control in Appalachian Company Towns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1917 Thomas E. Wagner and Phillip J. Obermiller

107

Social Engineering: Creating and Now Undoing Apartheid’s Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1937 Vernon A. Domingo

108

Engineering Socialism: A History of Village Relocations in Chukotka, Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1957 Tobias Holzlehner

109

The State of Deseret: The Creation of the Mormon Landscape in the Western U.S. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1975 Samuel M. Otterstrom and Richard H. Jackson

110

Subversive Engineering: Building Names in Singapore . . . . . . 1997 Peter K.W. Tan

111

Empire, Names and Renaming: The Case of Nagorno Karabakh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2013 Benjamin D. Foster

112

Reconstructing Post-Conflict Human Landscapes: The Land Administration Domain Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2031 Douglas E. Batson

Part XIV Political Organization of Space 113

Zoning as a Form of Social Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2053 Bobby M. Wilson and Seth Appiah-Opoku

114

Engineering Borders and Border Landscapes: The Schengen Regime and the EU’s New Internal and External Boundaries in Central-Eastern Europe . . . . . . . 2067 Milan Bufon

115

Engineered Healing and the Northern Ireland Question: Collaboration Across an Increasingly Invisible Border . . . . . . 2089 Caroline Creamer, John Driscoll, Neale Blair, and Brendan Bartley

116

Liquid Urbanity: Re-engineering the City in a Post-Terrestrial World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2113 Philip E. Steinberg

117

Living on the Grid: The U.S. Rectangular Public Land Survey System and the Engineering of the American Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2123 Gerald R. Webster and Jonathan Leib

Contents

xxiii

118

Traces of Power: Europe’s Impact on the Political Organization of the Globe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2139 Corey Johnson and George W. White

119

Air and Space Demarcation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2159 Alexandra Harris and Ray Harris

Part XV

Earth and Planetary Engineering

120

A Perspective on Weather Modification: Planned and Inadvertent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2173 Nancy Westcott

121

Climate Change, Climate Models and Geoengineering the Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2185 Jay S. Hobgood

122

Olivine Hills: Mineral Water Against Climate Change . . . . . . 2201 Roelof D. Schuiling and Elke Praagman

123

Demise of the Geomagnetic Field: An Opportunity for Mega-Engineers to Save Humanity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2207 J. Marvin Herndon

124

Terraforming Mars: A Review of Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . 2217 Martyn J. Fogg

125

Planetary Ecosynthesis on Mars and Geo-Engineering on Earth: Can We? Should We? Will We? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2227 Christopher P. McKay

126

Global Warming and the Specter of Geoengineering: Ecological Apocalypse, Modernist Hubris, and Scientific-Technological Salvation in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Global Warming Trilogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2233 Ernest J. Yanarella and Christopher Rice

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2253

Contributors

Glenn Albrecht School of Sustainability; Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy, Murdoch University, 6150 Perth, WA, Australia, [email protected] Derek H. Alderman Department of Geography, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858, USA, [email protected] John O. Anfinson Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, National Park Service, St. Paul, MN 55101, USA, [email protected] Seth Appiah-Opoku Department of Geography, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA, [email protected] Eugenio Arima Environmental Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY 14456, USA, [email protected] Viorel Badescu Candida Oancea Institute, Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania, [email protected] Jim Barger Landscapes Unlimited, Lincoln, NE 68512, USA, [email protected] Brendan Bartley International Centre for Local and Regional Development, c/o National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland, [email protected] Samantha Bastian Public Systems Group, Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, [email protected] Pratyusha Basu Department of Geography, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA, [email protected] Douglas E. Batson Political Geography Division, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, USA, [email protected] Maarten Bavinck Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development; Centre for Maritime Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, [email protected] xxv

xxvi

Contributors

Leonard Berry Florida Center for Environmental Studies, Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter, FL 33458, USA, [email protected] Melissa H. Birch Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER), University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA, [email protected] Neale Blair School of the Built Environment, University of Ulster, Newtonabbey, Co. Antrim BT37 0QB, Northern Ireland, [email protected] Mikhail S. Blinnikov Department of Geography, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN 56301, USA, [email protected] Laurent Bocéno Department of Sociology, Center for the Study and Research on Risks and Vulnerabilities, University of Caen-Lower Normandy, Caen, France, [email protected] Alexander A. Bolonkin C & R, Brooklyn, NY 11229, USA, [email protected] Stephen P. Borgatti LINKS, International Center for Research on Social Networks in Business, Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Guus J. Borger Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, Institute for Geo and Bioarchaeology, VU University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, [email protected] Andrew Boulton Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Anne Bourke Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, [email protected] John T. Bowen Department of Geography, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA 98626, USA, [email protected] Daniel J. Brass LINKS, International Center for Research on Social Networks in Business, Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Proinnsias Breathnach Department of Geography & National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland, [email protected] Robert N. Brown Department of Geography & Planning, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC 28608, USA, [email protected] Stanley D. Brunn Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Tom Buckley FortiusOne, Inc., Arlington, VA 22201, USA, [email protected] Milan Bufon Department of Geography, Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia, [email protected]

Contributors

xxvii

Filipe Calvão Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA, [email protected] Craig S. Campbell Department of Geography, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, OH 44555, USA, [email protected] Richard B. Cathcart Geographos, Burbank, CA 91506, USA, [email protected] Julie L. Cidell Department of Geography, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA, [email protected] Alfred Colpaert Department of Geographical and Historical Studies, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland, [email protected] Kenneth E. Corey Department of Geography, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA, [email protected] Caroline Creamer National Institute for Research and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA), National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland; International Centre for Local and Regional Development (ICLRD), Armagh, Northern Ireland, [email protected] Isa Cürebal Department of Geography, Balikesir University, Balikesir 10145, Turkey, [email protected] Anne-Marie d’Hauteserre Department of Geography, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, [email protected] Robert Dahlstrom Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Adriaan M.J. De Kraker Institute for Geo and Bioarchaeology, VU University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, [email protected] Kate Driscoll Derickson Department of Geography, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA, [email protected] Alexander C. Diener Senior Scholar in Eurasian Studies, IERES Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, USA, [email protected] Megan L. Dixon Departments of English and Geology, College of Idaho, Caldwell, ID 83605, USA, [email protected] William W. Doe III Warner College of Natural Resources, Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, CO 80523, USA, [email protected] Vernon A. Domingo Department of Geography, Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA 02325, USA, [email protected]

xxviii

Contributors

Ronnie Donaldson Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, Western Cape Matieland 7602, South Africa, [email protected] John Driscoll International Centre for Local and Regional Development (ICLRD), 2235 Massachusetts Avenue, Second Floor, Cambridge, MA 02140, [email protected] Patrick J. Duffy Department of Geography, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland, [email protected] Recep Efe Department of Geography, Balikesir University, Balikesir 10145, Turkey, [email protected], [email protected] Jody Emel Department of Geography, Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610, USA, [email protected] Tom P. Evans Department of Geography, Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA, [email protected] Michael C. Ewers Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-3147, USA, [email protected] Daniel Fahlén Department of Human and Economic Geography, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, SE 405 30, Gothenburg, Sweden, [email protected] Martyn J. Fogg Probability Research Group, London SE19 1UY, UK, [email protected] Larry R. Ford Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA, (contact [email protected]) Benjamin D. Foster U.S. Board on Geographic Names, Foreign Names Committee, Washington, DC, USA, [email protected] William Galloway School of Architecture and Urban Studies, Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA, [email protected] Michael F. Goodchild Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA, [email protected] Sean Gorman FortiusOne, Inc., Arlington, VA 22201, USA, [email protected] Anton Gosar Department of Geography, University of Primorska, Koper/Capodistria, Slovenia, [email protected] Mark Graham Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, [email protected] Raewyn Graham School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, [email protected]

Contributors

xxix

Paul Gravila Department of Physics, West University of Timisoara, Timisoara, Romania, [email protected] Jeffrey Gritzner Department of Geography, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812, USA, [email protected] Paul Harpley PhD candidate, Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada; Director of the Zephyr Society of Lake Simcoe, Sutton West, ON, Canada; Retired, Manager of Interpretation, Culture and Design Branch, Toronto Zoo, Toronto, ON, Canada, [email protected] Alexandra Harris Department of Geography, University College London, London WC1H 0AP, UK, [email protected] Ray Harris Department of Geography, University College London, London, WC1H 0AP, UK, [email protected] Stuart A. Harris Department of Geography, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada, [email protected] Mike Heffernan School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2NR, UK, [email protected] Jason Henderson Department of Geography, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA, [email protected] Joan C. Henderson Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, Singapore, [email protected] J. Marvin Herndon Transdyne Corporation, San Diego, CA 92131, USA, [email protected] Philip Hirsch School of Geosciences; Australian Mekong Resource Centre, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia, [email protected] Jay S. Hobgood Department of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA, [email protected] Robert Hoeksema Engineering Department, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI 49546, USA, [email protected] William N. Holden Department of Geography, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada, [email protected] Tobias Holzlehner Department of Anthropology, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK 99775, USA, [email protected] Matthew T. Huber Department of Geography, The Maxwell School of Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, 13244-1020, USA, [email protected] Nancy Hudson-Rodd Honorary Research Fellow, School of Psychology and Social Science, Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA, Australia, [email protected]

xxx

Contributors

Michael T. Hughes College of Design, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Peter J. Hugill Department of Geography and Bush School International Affairs Program, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA, [email protected] Graeme Hugo Department of Geography, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia, [email protected] Tommi Inkinen Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, [email protected] Richard H. Jackson Department of Geography, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA, [email protected] R. Daniel Jacobson Department of Geography, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada, [email protected] Corey Johnson Department of Geography, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC 27402, USA, [email protected] Janet Jones Department of Classics, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837, USA, [email protected] Elisabeth Joris Historian, Gemeindestrasse 62, CH-8032, Zurich, Switzerland, [email protected] Sadasivam Karuppannan Institute for Sustainable Systems and Technologies (ISST), University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia, [email protected] Sjoerd J. Kluiving Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, Institute for Geo and Bioarchaeology, VU University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, [email protected] Korine N. Kolivras Department of Geography, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA, [email protected] Richard D. Knowles Research Institute for the Built and Human Environment, University of Salford, Manchester, UK, [email protected] Rajendra Kulkarni School of Public Policy, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA, [email protected] Jouko Kumpula Reindeer Research Unit, Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute, Kaamanen, Finland, [email protected] Giuseppe (Joe) Labianca LINKS, International Center for Research on Social Networks in Business, Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected]

Contributors

xxxi

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt Research School of Pacific and Asian Affairs, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia, [email protected] Olli Lehtonen Department of Geography, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland, [email protected] Jonathan Leib Department of Political Science and Geography, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA, [email protected] Elizabeth J. Leppman Walden University, Lexington, KY 40503, USA, [email protected] Richard S. Levine College of Design, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Michael Longan Department of Geography and Meteorology, Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN 46383, USA, [email protected] Elizabeth Lunstrum Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada, [email protected] Chris Lyttleton Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia, [email protected] Darrin Magee Environmental Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY 14456, USA, [email protected] Edward J. Malecki Department of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA, [email protected] Alan Mallach Metropolitan Policy Program, The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC 20036, USA, [email protected] Virginie Mamadouh Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130, 1018VZ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, [email protected] Damon Manders U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Louis, MO 63103, USA, [email protected] Ben Marsh Department of Geography and Program in Environmental Studies, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837, USA, [email protected] Judith A. Martin Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA, [email protected] Lauren Martin Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Kenneth Matengu Social Sciences Division, Multidisciplinary Research Center, University of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia, [email protected]

xxxii

Contributors

Casey Ryan Mather College of Design, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Christian Wichmann Matthiessen Institute of Geography and Geology, University of Copenhagen, 1350 Copenhagen K, Denmark, [email protected] James P. McCarthy Department of Geography, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA, [email protected] Christopher P. McKay Space Science Division, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA, [email protected] Phil McManus School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia, [email protected] Ajay Mehra LINKS, International Center for Research on Social Networks in Business, Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Zina R. Merkin Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Philip Micklin Department of Geography, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008, USA, [email protected] Georgia Milan Women’s Care Center, St. Patrick Hospital, Missoula, MT 59802, USA, [email protected] Matthew L. Mitchelson Department of Geography, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA, [email protected] Alina Nekrich Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, 119017 Moscow, Russia, [email protected] Frederick E. Nelson Department of Geography, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA, [email protected] Thomas J. Nieman Landscape Architecture, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Arne Nygaard Norwegian School of Management, Centre for Advanced Research in Retailing, Oslo, Norway, [email protected] Pál Nyíri Global History from an Anthropological Perspective, Free University of Amsterdam (VU), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, [email protected] Phillip J. Obermiller School of Planning, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA, [email protected] Samuel M. Otterstrom Department of Geography, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA, [email protected]

Contributors

xxxiii

Pernilla Ouis Faculty of Health and Society, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden, [email protected] Eugene J. Palka Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, U. S. Military Academy, West Point, NY 10996, USA, [email protected] Maria Paradiso Department of Social Sciences, University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy, [email protected] Martin J. Pasqualetti School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA, [email protected] Marius Paulescu Department of Physics, West University of Timisoara, Timisoara, Romania, [email protected] Stephen Perz Department of Sociology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA, [email protected] Emily Plant University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812, [email protected] Katja Polojärvi School of Renewable Natural Resources, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, Oulu, Finland, [email protected] Elke Praagman Institute of Geosciences, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands, [email protected] Dulyapak Preecharushh Southeast Asian Studies Program, Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand, [email protected] Nicola M. Pugno Department of Structural Engineering and Geotechnics, 10129 Torino, Italy, [email protected] Darren Purcell Department of Geography, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019, USA, [email protected], [email protected] Nicolas Quintana Ashwell Department of Economics, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, [email protected] G. Raghuram Public Systems Group, Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, [email protected] Christopher Rice Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Jean-Paul Rodrigue Department of Global Studies & Geography, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11550, USA, [email protected] J. Drew Rogers Golf Course Architect, JDR Design Group, Toledo, OH 43617, USA, [email protected] Anda Rosenberg Department of Geography and Human Environment, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, [email protected]

xxxiv

Contributors

William C. Rowe Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA, [email protected] Joseph L. Scarpaci Independent Scholar, Blacksburg, VA 24060, USA, [email protected] Laurie Schintler School of Public Policy, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA, [email protected] Mikaela Schmitt-Harsh School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA, [email protected] Izhak Schnell Department of Geography and Human Environment, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, [email protected] Roelof D. Schuiling Institute of Geosciences, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands, [email protected] Emily Sciarillo FortiusOne, Inc., Arlington, VA 22201, USA, [email protected] Esha Shah Department of Technology and Society Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Maastricht, 6211 SZ, Maastricht, The Netherlands, [email protected] Ian Graham Ronald Shaw Department of Geography and Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA, [email protected] Ira M. Sheskin Department of Geography and Regional Studies, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USA, [email protected] Kate B. Showers Department of Geography, School of Global Studies, Centre for World Environmental History, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9SJ, UK, [email protected] Cynthia Simmons Department of Geography, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA, [email protected] Kamalesh Singh Structure Department, National Engineering Office (Architects and Consulting Engineers), Ruwi, Sultanate of Oman, [email protected], [email protected] Alpana Sivam Institute for Sustainable Systems and Technologies (ISST), School of Natural and Built Environments, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia, [email protected] Benjamin Smith Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33109, USA, [email protected] Philip E. Steinberg Department of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA, [email protected]

Contributors

xxxv

John Strawn Hill and Forrest, International Golf Course Architects, Portland, OR 97212, USA, [email protected] Selima Sultana Department of Geography, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC 27402, USA, [email protected] Satyam Shivam Sundaram Public Systems Group, Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, [email protected] Sean P. Sweeney Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA, [email protected] Peter K.W. Tan Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, 7 Arts Link, Singapore 117570, [email protected] Yan Tan National Institute of Labour Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia, [email protected] Adamu I. Tanko Department of Geography, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, [email protected] Eva Thulin Department of Human and Economic Geography, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, SE 405 30, Gothenburg, Sweden, [email protected] Scott Thumma Sociology of Religion, Hartford Seminary, Hartford, CT 06105, USA, [email protected] Stanley W. Trimble Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA, [email protected] Markku Tykkyläinen Department of Geography, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland, [email protected] Tapani Tyynelä Finnish Forest Research Institute, Kannus, Finland, [email protected] Janis van der Westhuizen Department of Political Science, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, Western Cape Matieland 7602, South Africa, [email protected] Michiel van Dijk Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130, 1018 VZ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, [email protected] Bertil Vilhelmson Department of Human and Economic Geography, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, SE 405 30, Gothenburg, Sweden, [email protected] Thomas E. Wagner School of Planning, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA, [email protected]

xxxvi

Contributors

Robert Walker Department of Geography, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA, [email protected] Barney Warf Department of Geography, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA, [email protected] Joe Weber Department of Geography, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA, [email protected] Gerald R. Webster Department of Geography, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071, USA, [email protected] Nancy Westcott Illinois State Water Survey, Institute of Natural Resource Stability, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA, [email protected] George W. White Department of Geography, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD 57007, USA, [email protected] Bobby M. Wilson Department of Geography, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA, [email protected] Katherine Wilson Geography and International Relations, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia, [email protected] Mark I. Wilson School of Planning, Design and Construction, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA, [email protected] Andrew Wood Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Leon Yacher Department of Geography, Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, CT 06515-1355, USA, [email protected] Tetsuo Yamazaki Osaka Prefecture University, Osaka, Japan, [email protected] Ernest J. Yanarella Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA, [email protected] Zhen-Yu Zhao Department of Construction Management, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, China, [email protected] George Zillante School of Natural and Built Environments, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia, [email protected] Jian Zuo School of Natural and Built Environments, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia, [email protected]

List of Figures

1.1 1.2 2.1

2.2

2.3

2.4

2.5

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1

Mapping the impacts of megaengineering projects . . . . . . . Chapters discussing the impacts of megaengineering projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Traditional 20th century popular presentation of the sole surviving Wonder, The Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, from a vintage postcard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Location of the Hellenistic Seven Wonders and of the 2007 “New 7 Wonders.” The older list (circles) was cosmopolitan within the Hellenistic world of the eastern Mediterranean; the newer list (triangles) delimits popular international travel destinations for European and North American tourists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Los Angeles Freeway Interchange, symbol of efficient modern travel – and also of sprawl and profligate energy consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Civic pride of New York incorporated into a U.S. postage stamp, featuring the Manhattan skyline and the gateway symbols of the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River waterfront . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Skyline of Shanghai, which has thoroughly eclipsed New York in density of skyscrapers. Quintessentially urban landscapes have become more prevalent in Asia than in the Eurocentric world over the last decade . . . . . . . . . . . . My/our/your time person of the year award . . . . . . . . . . . Time and space convergence in various types of large engineering projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Avatars in second life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The multiple representations of trafalgar square in google maps A singular representation of trafalgar square in wikipedia . . . . Uncle GNU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Change in Internet Development Index (IDI), a measure of the relative infrastructure quality, 2002–2007 . . . . . . . . .

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5

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8

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18

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19

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26

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27

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31 68

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70 72 74 74 78

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86

xxxvii

xxxviii

6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 10.1

10.2

11.1 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6

12.7

12.8 13.1

List of Figures

Percentage of the Population in Selected Countries that Use Facebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of the Facebook profile page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of the Facebook home page where the news feed is located . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Camp Roberts architecture diagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Afghan elections architecture diagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . Afghanistan attacks by district, September 2–8, 2009 . . . . . . Change in violence by district, August 11–September 9, 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Total fraud complaints by province for the 2009 Afghanistan presidential election . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Citizen reported election day incidents . . . . . . . . . . . . . Benford fraud analysis of Afghanistan election results . . . . . Qwest national fiber network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The World’s major fiber optic cables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The FLAG network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Africa ONE fiber system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Declining prices of fiber optics services, 2002–2006 . . . . . . Public transportation network in the survey area—Gothenburg region, Sweden. Transportation lines included in the survey are Uddevalla– Göteborg, Trollhättan–Göteborg, Borås–Göteborg, and Kinna–Göteborg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Average time spent on various activities or using various kinds of equipment by travelers who perceive their trips as “very worthwhile” (n = 60). Average trip time = 55 min. Source: Authors’ survey, Gothenburg region, Sweden—preliminary findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of countries participating in the World Cyber Games 2009 Location of study area, cattle enclosures and tracking data . . . Typical livestock enclosure, often called a “kraal.” . . . . . . . Cattle grazing on the Zambezi/Chobe floodplain . . . . . . . . Bull fitted with GPS collar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tracking data from collar no. 9 during July–November 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . During 2002–2005 altogether 40 female reindeer were tracked by GPS collars in the Oraniemi reindeer herding district, Middle-Lapland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . All locations of GPS-tracked female reindeer (n = 29) from 1999 to 2002 (10,981 locations) in the Ivalo reindeer herding district and classified into three seasonal periods . . . . Ten months GPS-track of a reindeer in the Ivalo district . . . . Schematic representation of the Anand model of dairy development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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91 91

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92 106 108 109

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109

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110 111 112 119 123 125 126 127

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148

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152 159 175 175 176 177

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179

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182

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183 185

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195

List of Figures

13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 13.8 13.9 13.10 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 15.6 15.7 15.8 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 16.5 16.6 16.7 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4 17.5 17.6 17.7 17.8

Total milk production in India, 1950–2010 (in million tons). (∗ Figures for 2009–2010 are estimated) . . . . . . . . . . Comparison of numbers of cattle and buffaloes, 1982–2003 . . . Total milk production from cattle and buffaloes, 2003–2004 (in thousand tons) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Proportion of total milk production from crossbred cows, 2003–2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Crossbred cow in village in Gujarat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poster promoting Jersey and Holstein-Friesian crossbred cows as “true friends of farmers” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Portion of poster promoting artificial insemination of cattle . . . Artificial insemination station in village in Madhya Pradesh . . Milking crossbred cow in village in Gujarat . . . . . . . . . . . Khrushchev visiting the farm of Iowa farmers Roswell and Elizabeth Garst, September 1959 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Central Asian agricultural land use map illustrating the major area of the Virgin Lands Project . . . . . . . . . . . . Volunteers in the virgin lands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Constructing outdoor stoves in the virgin lands . . . . . . . . . The first furrows in the virgin lands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plowing in the virgin lands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wheat fields in the virgin lands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dust storm in Astana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . World production capture fisheries 1950–2008. (FAO, 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trends in U.S. real price indexes for fish and seafood products 1947–2006. (World Bank, 2008) . . . . . . . . . . . . State of world marine fishery resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exclusive economic zones of the world . . . . . . . . . . . . . Small-scale fishermen in South India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fleets of small industrialized vessels in South India . . . . . . . The Atlantic Dawn – the world’s largest factory ship . . . . . . Issued mining claims for manganese nodules from ISA in CCFZ Schematic image of manganese nodule mining system and the environmental impact sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schematic arrangement of JET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Disturber track . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Outline of scraper tow (left) and the unit configuration (right) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Observed image of scraper tow tracks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Population change of meiobenthos before and after experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Distribution of known active SMS sites in the western Pacific . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xxxix

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197 199

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200

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201 202

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203 204 205 208

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238

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245 247 248 248 249 250 252

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259

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260 261 262 265 266 269 276

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277 280 281

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282 283

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284

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286

xl

17.9 17.10 18.1 18.2 19.1 19.2 19.3 19.4 21.1 21.2 22.1 22.2 22.3 22.4

23.1 23.2 23.3 23.4 23.5 24.1 24.2 24.3 25.1 25.2 25.3 25.4 25.5 25.6

List of Figures

Structural outline of sulfur oxidizing in bacterial mat field (left) and bivalve field (right) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Comparison of food web structures around hydrothermal vent (left) and in normal benthos (right) . . . . . . . . . . Project location . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of sea routes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Houses of the tunnel workers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miners and engineers and woman tavern keeper . . . . . Allegorical figure of a woman across a map of Europe . . Mariga Perlongo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bingham Canyon Mine – “The richest hole on earth.” . . . Tailings piles – burying the landscape . . . . . . . . . . . Location map of Angola with map of major cities and mining centers in northeastern Lunda region . . . . . Alluvial mining pit in a deviated river course . . . . . . . Maludi’s diamond “comptoir,” established during the 1950s diamond rush . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Calonda Diamang’s model of colonial architecture, common in the region’s urban centers for the purpose of housing mining personnel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of Guatemala, showing the location of Marlin Mine (gold and sliver) and Fenix project (nickel and cobalt) . . Map showing the location of major mines in the Philippines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Extreme poverty in Guatemala . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poverty in the Philippines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vulnerability of the Philippines to El Nino Induced Drought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Lebedinskoye iron ore deposit . . . . . . . . . . . . The algorithm used to assess the complex geoecological assessment of areas at the level of administrative units . . The ecological situation in the Starooskol’skiy and Gubkinskiy rayons (districts) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peatland regions and Bord na Móna bog works . . . . . . Activities associated with the development of Bord na Móna peatlands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1940s hostel for temporary bog workers . . . . . . . . . . Peat milling machine. Spiked drums strip 1.5 cm (0.6 inches) of peat from bog surface . . . . . . . . . . . . Peat harvesting. Milled peat is collected in progressively larger piles prior to loading onto trains . . . . . . . . . . . Peat train. Peat trains, running on temporary tracks, transport peat from bogs to power stations or briquette factories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

287

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. . . . . . . . .

287 299 300 314 317 321 323 354 359

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371 374

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374

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375

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384

. . . . . . . . . . . .

388 396 397

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398 415

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417

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422 431

. . . . . . . .

433 434

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436

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436

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437

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

List of Figures

25.7 25.8 25.9 26.1 26.2 26.3 27.1

27.2 27.3 27.4

27.5

27.6 27.7

27.8 27.9 27.10

28.1 28.2 28.3 28.4

Bord na Móna housing development under construction, early 1950s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rhode peat-fired power station c.1960 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Derrinlough peat briquette factor c.1960 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major recipients of Russian gas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supply of energy resources from Russia and the Caspian Sea area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . EU Slovenia’s pipelines – existing and proposed . . . . . . . . The oil sands of Alberta, Canada. The three areas – Athabasca, Cold Lake, and Peace River – comprise the largest oil-sand deposits in the world. The amounts of recoverable oil in the deposits place Canada second only to Saudi Arabia in reserves. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Colorado oil shale prospective area bureau of land management areas of critical environmental concern . . . . . . Syncrude upgrader operations north of Fort McMurray, Alberta Blocks of sulfur produced during processing, stored at a Syncrude upgrader site north of Fort McMurray, Alberta. No use has yet been found for this a by-product of the upgrading process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parachute, CO, situated along Interstate 70, looking north across the major oil shale fields of North America. Rifle is representative of the small towns in the area that will be susceptible to rapid growth. It had a population in July 2007 of 8,807, an increase since 2000 of 23.6%, largely as the result of the increased development of coal-bed methane and the resurgent interest in the prospect of oil shale development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forest clearing and residential developments are part of the housing boom at Fort McMurray, Alberta . . . . . . . . . The need for housing is already evident in the area near Parachute, CO as a result of ongoing development of coal-bed methane and the resurgent interest in oil shale . . . . . The Callanish standing stones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A protest poster declaring “If we plant these today, what will we plan tomorrow?” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SEGS (Solar Energy Generating Plant) at Kramer junction, west of Barstow, California. These installations are concentrating solar power facilities, using parabolic trough with single-axis tracking. They occupy a low-priority patch of land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major oil pipelines and terrorist attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oil import vulnerability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Percent reduction in import diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dependency on oil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xli

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438 439 441 450

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456 458

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463

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464 467

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467

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470

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470

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471 473

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474

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478 487 492 492 493

xlii

29.1 29.2

29.3 29.4

30.1 32.1 32.2 32.3 32.4 33.1 33.2 33.3 33.4 33.5 33.6 33.7 33.8 33.9 33.10 33.11 33.12 33.13 33.14 34.1 34.2 34.3 34.4 34.5 36.1

List of Figures

GM’s answer to the Japanese – GoogleEarth image of the Spring Hill, Tennessee Saturn plant . . . . . . . . . . . . The Kama River, Kamaz Truck and FIAT plant – the largest motor vehicle plant in the world seen in GoogleEarth. Originally, the total plant size was most of the rectangular area seen in this image – about 12 square miles (7,680 acres or just over 3,100 ha), with automotive operations extending to other parts of the city. This is more space than all the motor vehicle plants in France and almost as much as all those in Japan, though there is some boulevard and green space mixed in here . . . . . . . . . . . . GoogleEarth image of the Hiroshima Ujina complex (Mazda Manufacturing, 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GoogleEarth image of the FAW Chanchun, Jilin works. Over 6,000 vehicles are parked to the southeast – a testament to an undeveloped just-in-time system? The FAW Toyota works are just over a kilometer to the southeast . . North Karelia and its forest sector. The postcode areas are classified according to their socio-economic properties . . . . . The interstate highway system in 1947 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The interstate highway system in 2008. Metropolitan areas are shaded . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Traffic levels on the interstate highway system, 2006 . . . . . . The interstate highway system in Birmingham, Alabama . . . . The extent of BR-230 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transamazon highway road sign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The federal highway network in Amazonas . . . . . . . . . . . Port of Altamira on Xingu river . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Travessão or settlement road . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The cadastral geometry of Transamazonia colonization . . . . . Town of Uruara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Phase of construction for the Transamazonia highway (top) 1975, (middle) 1981, (bottom) 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . Logging truck on unpaved Transamazonia highway . . . . . . Counties crossed by BR-230 in Pará and Amazonas . . . . . . Transamazonia colonist family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pastures where forests once stood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cadastral geometry and fishbone settlement . . . . . . . . . . . Protected areas in the Brazilian Amazonas . . . . . . . . . . . Proportion of projects on schedule (of total projects) . . . . . . Percentage of cost overrun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Environmental approval process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Land acquisition process under the land acquisition act of 1894 Golden Quadrilateral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Population distribution in Mongolia 2000 . . . . . . . . . . . .

.

503

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504

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507

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509

. .

520 555

. . . . . . . . . .

556 557 561 570 573 574 575 578 579 580

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

583 584 586 586 588 590 592 602 602 605 607 610 630

List of Figures

36.2 36.3 36.4 36.5 37.1

37.2

37.3

37.4

37.5

37.6

Transportation infrastructure of Mongolia . . . . . . . . . Projected population redistribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . Existing trade corridors of Northeast Asia (2001) . . . . . Oil in and around Mongolia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (a-left) The ALSIB (Alaska-Siberia) route, showing airfields of the Northwest Staging Route (map courtesy of U.S. Air Force). (b-right) Map of overland routes to Alaska proposed at the outset of America’s entry into World War II. The Alcan route, depicted as a solid black line and labeled with a circled “C,” was chosen primarily because of its distance from potential enemy naval attacks and for its proximity to the Northwest Staging Route. Alternative proposed routes (A, B, D) are indicated, as is route of Canol Pipeline and Canol Highway from Norman Wells to Whitehorse. From Stefansson (1944b). These maps exemplify the cartographic approach of Richard Edes Harrison in depicting geographic relationships between World War II adversaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . B-25 bombers and P-39 fighters at Ladd Field in Fairbanks, AK, awaiting transfer to Russia. The template for Soviet red star insignias used on the aircraft was obtained from a local Texaco gasoline station (Hays, 1996) Map of Alcan Highway route in 1942, showing approximate locations of regimental sectors. Base map from Richardson (1942a: 82) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The sense of displacement and conjugal longing of young soldiers and engineers far from home is well expressed in this cartoon (of unknown origin) from the Herbert Warner collection, American Geographical Society Library, Golda Meier Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Warner was an employee of a private contractor retained by PRA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Life along the construction route of Alcan pioneer road. (a-top left) Primitive camp with sawmill in early 1942. (b-top right) Bridge across a tributary of the Peace River. (c-bottom left) Opening ceremony of the Alcan Highway at Soldiers’ Summit near Kluane Lake, Yukon Territory, approximately 100 mi (160 km) east of the Alaska border. (d-bottom right) Small bulldozer enmired in mud after thaw of ice-rich permafrost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pioneer road construction techniques. (a) Because the roots of many trees do not penetrate permafrost, clearance of rights of way by bulldozers was a relatively easy task over much of the Alcan route. After clearance of felled timber and brush, the ground was scraped, promoting

xliii

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. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

632 635 637 638

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646

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647

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649

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650

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651

xliv

37.7

37.8 37.9

38.1 38.2 38.3 39.1 39.2 39.3 39.4 40.1 40.2 40.3 40.4 40.5 40.6

List of Figures

absorption of solar radiation and thaw of underlying ice-rich permafrost. Three of the seven U.S. Army regiments (93rd, 95th, 97th) involved in construction of the pioneer road were composed of African-American troops. (b) After a period of only several days, ablation of ground ice turned many rights of way into impassible quagmires. (c) Corduroy road construction used to mitigate damage caused by thaw of ice-rich permafrost. Timbers were obtained from slash created by road construction, and covered with brush and gravel to inhibit thaw. (d) Steep section of pioneer road with prominent road cuts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (a) Permafrost profile typical of terrain along the Alcan route. In areas of “warm” permafrost, in which mean annual temperatures are at or just below 0◦ C (32◦ F), the substrate is vulnerable to thaw induced by changes in the insulating layers of vegetation and organic matter at the ground surface. Taliks (unfrozen layers at the top of or within permafrost) may or may not be present, depending on site’s climatic history and local conditions (b) Permafrost profile along a road through swampy terrain, showing the relation between surficial cover and depth to permafrost. Both diagrams appeared in Muller (1944) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (Top) “wrong” and (bottom) “right” methods for constructing roads in permafrost terrain (Muller 2008: 119) Checkpoint at south end of Alaska Highway, fall 1943. Drastic improvements to the road in summer 1943 are apparent from the fact that Carlson traversed the entire highway using the two-wheel-drive staff car shown passing the checkpoint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A map of the Hachula valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The KKL plan for draining the Hachula swamp . . . . . . . Route of the cross Israel road . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gautrain route . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sign depicting Gautrain construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gautrain construction at Tambo international airport . . . . Logo promoting Gautrain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The central artery/tunnel project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The elevated central artery, 2001 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The same area after project completion, 2008 . . . . . . . . Boston harbor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Site of future pier and marina on Spectacle Island . . . . . . Erosion control walls on Spectacle Island made with sections of central artery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . .

652

. . .

654

. . .

656

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

658 667 669 675 687 688 688 691 698 699 700 702 703

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704

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

List of Figures

40.7 41.1 41.2 41.3 41.4 41.5

41.6 41.7 41.8 41.9 41.10 42.1

42.2 42.3 42.4 42.5 42.6 42.7 42.8

42.9

43.1 43.2

Portion of the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway through downtown Boston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Bosphorus and immersed tunnel alignment (Belkaya, Ozmen, & Karamut, 2008) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Location of the study area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Population change in Istanbul, 1927–2010. (TUIK, Turkish Statistical Institute) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Population change in Asian and European sides of Istanbul: 1935–2010. (TUIK, Turkish Statistical Institute) Traffic congestion in Istanbul is getting worse with increasing car ownership and lack of efficient public transportation network (Ministry of Transportation) . . . The plans of Bosphorus tunnel planned during the reign of Sultan Abdülmecid in 1860 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alignment of the Marmaray project . . . . . . . . . . . . The Bored tunnel under construction in Marmaray project Cross-section of the tunnels and stations between Yedikule and Sö˘gütlüçe¸sme (Kadıköy) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . One of the ships that were excavated in Yenikapı . . . . . The Scandinavian links, indicating average traffic per day. (The fixed links are owned by Sund & Bælt Holding A/S, which is owned by the Danish State. A/S Storebælt (Great Belt fixed links) and Femern Bælt A/S (coming Femern Belt fixed link) are owned 100% and Øresundsbro Konsortiet (Oresund fixed link) 50%—the other 50% is owned by the Swedish State.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Great Belt East Bridge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Great Belt’s East Bridge under construction . . . . . . The Great Belt’s East Bridge under construction . . . . . . The Oresund Bridge, which opened for traffic in 2000 . . The giant crane, Svanen (the Swan) is placing a bridge girder at the Oresund Bridge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Construction of caissons for the Oresund Bridge at Malmo North Harbor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . One of several propositions for a bridge solution over the Femern Belt. The fixed link has been finally agreed upon by the governments and parliaments of Denmark and Germany and is stipulated to open for traffic in 2018 . . . Diagram showing the traffic measured by vehicles per year 1990–2008 crossing the straits around the Danish island of Zealand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Location of the Qinghai–Tibet railroad . . . . . . . . . . . Permafrost distribution and mean annual ground temperatures along the higher parts of the Qinghai–Tibet Engineering Corridor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xlv

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710

. . . . . . . .

716 717

. . . .

718

. . . .

719

. . . .

720

. . . . . . . . . . . .

721 722 723

. . . . . . . .

725 729

. . . . .

. . . . .

736 738 739 740 741

. . . .

742

. . . .

743

. . . .

744

. . . . . . . .

745 748

. . . .

749

. . . . .

. . . . .

xlvi

43.3 43.4 43.5 43.6 43.7

43.8 43.9 44.1

44.2

44.3

44.4 44.5 44.6 45.1 45.2 45.3 45.4 45.5 45.6 46.1 46.2 46.3 46.4 46.5 46.6 47.1

List of Figures

The four main embankment configurations of blocks used for cooling the rail-bed over permafrost on the Plateau . . . . Crushed rock revetments in various configurations showing experimentation with different sizes of blocks . . . . Protective toe berms with thermosiphons stabilizing the slopes of the embankment in areas subject to flooding . . . . . Transverse ventilation ducts with automatic shutters (at right) placed halfway up the side of the embankment . . . . . A section of railroad constructed on top of a permafrost (dry) bridge. The bridge shields the ground from direct insolation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A passenger train traveling along the Qinghai–Tibet railroad . Northern entrance to the Feghoushan tunnel at 4,906 m (16,092 ft) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A hand-drawn social network: Positive and negative sociometric choices in a football team. Note: The nodes are team members; lines represent positive and negative feelings towards specific others. (Moreno, 1934: 213) . . . . Number of social network articles published over time (values on the y-axis represent number of articles published in a given year; values on the x-axis represent years) Number of citations to social network articles over time (values on the y-axis represent number of citations received by social network articles in a given year; values on the x-axis represent years) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Two representations of the “kite” network . . . . . . . . . . . Three commonly used indexes of whole network structure . . A whole network (left) and two ego networks (top and bottom right) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of significant Bechtel projects in 2008 . . . . . . . . . . Parody of Bechtel and BART on the cover of the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 1972 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BART extension to Dublin-Pleasanton in San Francisco’s East Bay suburbs, 2003 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bechtel rail projects in the US . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . St Pancreas Station, London – Barlow Shed . . . . . . . . . . Portland MAX light rail extension to airport, 2008 . . . . . . Floor space of building construction 2000–2005 . . . . . . . . The sectors of the Chinese construction industry . . . . . . . The legal framework of the Chinese construction industry . . The process of DaiJianZhi projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Organization chart illustrating the use of the PMC/GCZCB approach in China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Construction sectors promoted for foreign investment . . . . Gulf corporation council countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. .

754

. .

754

. .

755

. .

756

. . . .

756 757

. .

758

. .

770

. .

771

. . . . . .

772 773 775

. . . .

776 784

. .

792

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

795 796 796 797 804 804 809 811

. . . . . .

811 814 821

List of Figures

47.2 47.3 47.4 47.5 47.6 47.7 47.8 47.9 47.10 47.11 47.12 49.1 49.2 49.3 49.4 49.5 49.6 49.7 49.8 49.9 50.1

50.2

50.3

50.4

50.5

Expatriate workforce population as a percentage of total workforce 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Construction site Oman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Construction site in Oman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ajman international airport (left); and Dubai metro (right) . . The Pearl Qatar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The dynamic tower Dubai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Al Madina Azarqa (blue city) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ajman international airport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Labor camp at Muscat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Labor accommodations and Dubai migrant workers in a room Khalifa city, Abu Dhabi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . World container traffic and throughput, 1980–2008 . . . . . . Traffic handled by the world’s 20 largest container ports, 2007 Europa container terminal, port of Antwerp . . . . . . . . . . Port container terminal facility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Panamax containership, port of Le Havre . . . . . . . . . . . Depth and surface distribution of a sample of container port terminals (N = 296) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intermodal rail facility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Economies and diseconomies of scale in container shipping . The largest available containership, 1970–2008 (in TEUs) . . Airport expansion in the Persian Gulf. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the Persian Gulf – especially the 320 mi (500 km) crescent from Doha to Dubai, was home to several of the largest airport infrastructure building projects in the world . . . . . . . . . . New airports of the Pearl River Delta. In the decade and a half after 1990, the Pearl River Delta witnessed perhaps the greatest regional expansion of airport infrastructure in the history of commercial aviation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The new terminal 3 at Beijing capital international airport. As part of BCIA’s “Move Under One Roof” program, members of the Star Alliance including Air China as shown in this photo have been located together in this a concourse of Terminal 3. The picture was taken beneath the wing of a departing 777 operated by Singapore Airlines, another of the 15 Star Alliance members that operate from terminal 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Denver international airport. Since its completion in 1995, Denver international airport has become a symbol of the city and a significant engine of economic growth . . . . . . . Kansai internatioal airport. The artificial island upon which Osaka’s new airport was constructed is connected to the mainland by a 3.7 km bridge. Despite weak traffic

xlvii

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

821 822 823 823 824 825 825 826 827 828 835 853 854 856 857 858

. . . .

. . . .

859 860 862 863

. .

869

. .

870

. .

872

. .

874

xlviii

51.1 51.2 51.3 51.4 52.1 52.2 52.3 52.4 52.5 52.6 52.7 52.8 52.9 52.10 52.11 52.12 52.13 52.14

52.15 52.16 53.1 53.2

53.3

53.4 53.5 53.6

List of Figures

growth at the airport, a second runway was built on newly reclaimed land visible to the right of the original island in this image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Minneapolis campus growth from 1911 (left) to 1996 (right) . . University of Minnesota twin cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . St. Paul campus growth from 1923 (left) to 1996 (right) . . . . . UMORE image from Sasaki plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Worship service at Lakewood Church, Houston, TX . . . . . . . Megachurch locations within the United States . . . . . . . . . The shifting location of Megachurches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Metropolitan Atlanta megachurches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Attender concentration in one Atlanta megachurch . . . . . . . Interior design of Southeast Christian Church, Louisville, KY . James River Assembly, Springfield, MO . . . . . . . . . . . . . The crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, CA . . . . . . . . . . . . The full sanctuary of Southeast Christian Church, Louisville, KY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An aerial view of Southeast Christian Church, Louisville, KY . The literal and figurative churchscape of Southeast Christian Church, Louisville, KY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Re-creation of a small town setting in Liberty Church, Worcester, MA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Youth and educational wing mural at Faith Church, New Milford, CT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Expressive and media-driven worship at Ray of Hope Christian Church, Decatur, GA and Saddleback Community Church, Lake Forest, CA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . One church in 13 locations – the expansive campus of LifeChurch, Oklahoma City, OK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The internet campus of LifeChurch, Oklahoma City, OK . . . . Plan of Moskva Siti lots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Skyline of Moskva Siti as seen from Vorobiovy Hills in the summer of 2007. The highest structure is the Tower on the Quay (268 m; 879 ft). Notice how much larger the project is relative to everything else, including one of J. Stalin skyscrapers. Newer towers are even larger . . . . . . . The Ring road in St. Petersburg (KAD) at its full planned extent with the planned Western Speedway (ZSD) running north-south. The Baltic Pearl is southwest of the main port area The major projects planned for the central city area in St. Petersburg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The winning design for the Gazprom tower from RMJM as displayed publicly in November 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Baltic Pearl business center with a residential complex going up in the background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

880 893 893 894 899 906 909 909 910 910 912 914 914

. .

916 917

.

917

.

919

.

922

.

925

. . .

927 927 935

.

940

.

943

.

944

.

946

.

949

List of Figures

54.1 54.2 54.3 54.4 55.1 55.2 55.3 55.4 55.5 55.6

55.7

55.8

57.1 57.2

57.3 57.4 57.5 57.6

57.7 57.8

57.9

Burj Dubai dwarfing surrounding buildings, May 2007 . . The Dubai world trade centre, Dubai’s first skyscraper . . Burj Al Arab photographed from Wild Wadi Water Park . Billboard advertising Downtown Dubai, featuring young Europeans and East Asians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . One of floating city project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Project having an underwater part . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mobile floating city . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stationary position of floating city . . . . . . . . . . . . . Freedom ship (different views) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cutting of floating platform from ice field. Notations: 1 – ice field in arctic (Antarctic) ocean; 2 – small tractor with band-saw or slicing wire saw; 3 – mechanical band saw or slicing wire saw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ice platform prepared for floating city. (a) Common view, (b) Cross-section of platform. Notations: 1 – ice; 2 – top heat protection; 3 – low (bottom) heat protection and floating support (inflatable air balloon); 4 – cooling tubes Floating city on ice platform: (a) Open floating city, (b) Floating city closed by film. Notations: 5 – city; 6 – protection from ocean waves in storm; 7 – turning connection (joint) of separated ice platform; 8 – fully-rotation azimuth thruster propellers; 9 – film dome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kazakhstan: Centered in Astana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Astana and Kazakhstan relative to Eurasia. Its location is near the geographic center of Eurasia, a point that the country’s national airline, Air Astana, makes in its ads (Yacher, 2009c: 18). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . High-level schematic of agents and inputs to the Astana project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Pyramid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Baiterek, the symbol of Astana. In the background is the Akorda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . KazMunaiGaz. To the right is the ministry of communications. In the background one can notice the construction equipment being used to build Khan Shatyr . Modern sculpture denoting Kazakh art . . . . . . . . . . The monument honors the epic hero Kenesary Khan (1841–1847), recently elevated to the status of a freedom fighter for his defiance of the Russian empire . . . . . . . Children are being engaged in the process of extolling the virtues of Astana. Posters and various advertisements show not only the futuristic Astana but its global presence. More often than not the Kazakh language is used in these

xlix

. . . . . . . . . . . .

956 958 960

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

964 968 969 970 971 973

. . . .

975

. . . .

975

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . 977 . . . . 1006

. . . . 1007 . . . . 1009 . . . . 1011 . . . . 1012

. . . . 1012 . . . . 1013

. . . . 1013

l

List of Figures

57.10

57.11

57.12

58.1 58.2 58.3 58.4 58.5 58.6 58.7 58.8 58.9 58.10 58.11 58.12 58.13 58.14 58.15

58.16 60.1 60.2

60.3

61.1 61.2 61.3

outdoor messages. In the lower right is the commonly used advertizing symbol celebrating the tenth anniversary of Astana’s existence as the Capital: Baiterek . . . . . . . . The rate of construction can be considered intense. Even as the economic crisis has affected Kazakhstan, building of governmental agencies has not abated . . . . . . . . . . New housing has been constructed at a fast pace. Though large in size, these buildings totally ignore the Soviet era block building designs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In old Astana, a number of residential buildings have not changed since independence. The inside quality of the buildings remain in disrepair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Location of the new capital, Pyinmana (Naypyidaw) . . . . Jungles and mountainous terrain of Pyinmana . . . . . . . . Constructing civilian apartments in Naypyidaw . . . . . . . Myowma market in Naypyidaw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Myowma market in Naypyidaw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Residential blocks in Naypyidaw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Naypyidaw bus station complexes . . . . . . . . . . City hall in Naypyidaw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Urban communities and transport networks around the new capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Urban landscape of central Pyinmana . . . . . . . . . . . . Urban landscape of Naypyidaw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plan for fountain construction in Naypyidaw . . . . . . . . Military parade ground in Naypyidaw command center . . . Yezin dam and agricultural areas in Northeastern Pyinmana Senior general Than Shwe and three monarchical monuments: Anawratha (left), Bayinnaung (middle), and Alaungpaya (right) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . One of secret tunnels in Myanmar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An aerial view of the sustainable public administration town-as-a-hill (S-PATH) for South Korea . . . . . . . . . . Land use plans of the three major levels in the S-PATH: Level 4-Platform Level, Level 7, and Level 10-Grand Concourse (shown in Roof/Site Plan) . (Top) The Eastern sloped elevator links the lakefront park and the stepped gardens to the Grand Concourse on Level 10. (Bottom) The Western “Tube” is the main hub for the Bus Rapid Transit System and the main pedestrian artery on the West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Location of selected edge cities in North East US . . . . . . Edge cities with median household income in Charlotte MSA, North Carolina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Southpark, Charlotte, North Carolina area looking to west .

. . . 1014

. . . 1015

. . . 1016

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

1016 1022 1027 1030 1031 1031 1032 1033 1033

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

1035 1035 1036 1036 1037 1039

. . . 1039 . . . 1042 . . . 1058

. . . 1062

. . . 1063 . . . 1076 . . . 1079 . . . 1080

List of Figures

61.4 61.5 61.6 62.1

62.2 62.3 62.4 63.1 63.2 63.3 63.4 63.5 63.6 63.7 63.8 64.1 64.2

64.3 64.4 64.5 64.6

65.1 65.2 65.3 65.4 66.1 66.2

66.3 66.4 66.5 66.6 66.7

Eastern section of college place, Charlotte, North Carolina Typical building in Ballantyne village office park in Charlotte, North Carolina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Street view of Santa Fe, Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky. “Enrollees brushing and rolling top surface of road leading to residence and utility areas, April 11, 1938.” . . . . . . . The American recovery and reinvestment act in Lexington, Kentucky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Enrollees prepare to transplant shrubs and sod, March 1, 1937.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Actual and predicted unemployment rates under ARRA. After Romer and Bernstein (2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Housing Development Board estates . . . . . . . . . . . . City skyline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chinatown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kampong Glam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Esplanade-Theatres on the Bay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marina Bay Sands: Back view . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marina Bay Sands: View from bay Aerial . . . . . . . . . Orchard Road . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The location of the new town of Marne-La-Vallée and of Val d’Europe (sector IV) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The extent of Val d’Europe and the area developed by the Walt Disney Company (as Eurodisney SCA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modernist architecture of public buildings, Serris town hall Hiding the back stage of Disney’s theme parks . . . . . . An old village street and its traditional architecture . . . . The “valley shopping centre” (selling luxury goods at “factory outlet” prices), copying “traditional” French village architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mission Bay aerial photo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kayaking at the park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sail Bay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of Mission Bay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The royal and ancient club house, St. Andrews, Scotland . Old Tom Morris’s son, Young Tom Morris, like his father an Open Champion, wearing The Open Championship’s original prize, the Champions Belt. . . . . . . . . . . . . Old Tom Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Building a golf course by hand in the “Golden Age.” . . . The “Double-Loaded” fairway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plan view of core development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The integrated golf course, South Florida . . . . . . . . .

li

. . . . 1081 . . . . 1082 . . . . 1083

. . . . 1090 . . . . 1091 . . . . 1099 . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

1104 1111 1111 1113 1114 1116 1117 1118 1119

. . . . 1128

. . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

1129 1133 1137 1140

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

1140 1152 1153 1154 1156 1161

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

1162 1163 1163 1167 1168 1170

lii

66.8 66.9 66.10 66.11 66.12 66.13 66.14 66.15 66.16 66.17 66.18 66.19 66.20 66.21 66.22 66.23 67.1 67.2 67.3 67.4 67.5 67.6 67.7 67.8 67.9 67.10

68.1 68.2 68.3

List of Figures

Tools of the modern course builder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Florida fairway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sand hills, Western Nebraska: A contemporary example of a “natural site.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A rendered master plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Whistling straits—Hole #7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Whistling straits—after and before. Creativity and megaengineering applied to a stark canvas. . . . . . . . . Bay Harbor, Michigan: Golf and Marina: A created golf course . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grading a mountainside . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mass grading plan for a par 5 golf hole. Typically provided in 100 scale. Centerline indicated by SW/NE line . . 30-scale detail green drawing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Illustrative cut and fill map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Subsurface modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The impacts of severe weather. Storm damage to a newly turfed golf hole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dubai sports city . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Large contemporary construction site during megaengineering The results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Riverdale zoo monkey cages, 25 September 1913 . . . . . . . Metropolitan zoo map, 1992, showing three project locations . Gorilla rainforest very early concept plan . . . . . . . . . . . African Savanna very early illustrative concept 1987 . . . . . African Savanna project, baobob tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . Consultation about Tundra Trek project with Inuit elders at Baker Lake in Nunavut, Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hudson bay coast entrance, bowhead whale skeleton entrance, Tundra Trek design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hudson bay coast Tundra Trek project (a) Freighter Canoe for field research; (b) Field sketch of the region . . . . . . . . African Savanna field trip by Toronto zoo staff . . . . . . . . Models and sketches used in Toronto zoo projects: (a) African Savanna Lion Kopje Model; (b) Gorilla Rainforest Concept Sketch, Dja Reserve Research Station; (c) Hudson Bay Tundra Trek Project Sketch; (d) Inuit Node Design Sketch, Tundra Trek Project. . . . . . . . . . . . The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, part of the larger Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area . . . . . . . Southern entrance gate to Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transfrontier parks (TFPs) and transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . 1171 . . 1172 . . 1173 . . 1174 . . 1175 . . 1176 . . 1177 . . 1179 . . . .

. . . .

1180 1181 1183 1183

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

1184 1185 1188 1188 1200 1206 1207 1209 1211

. . 1212 . . 1213 . . 1214 . . 1215

. . 1217 . . 1224 . . 1225

. . 1227

List of Figures

68.4 68.5

68.6 68.7 69.1 69.2 69.3 69.4 69.5 70.1 70.2 70.3

70.4 70.5 72.1 72.2 72.3 72.4

“Wilderness” image for tourist consumption in South Africa’s Kruger National Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relocation of rhinoceros from South Africa to restock the Limpopo National Park with wildlife. The international border fence between Mozambique and South Africa is shown. The truck carrying the rhinoceros is waiting for the Mozambican authorities to clear the appropriate paperwork so that the truck can pass from South Africa into Mozambique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preparing release of the rhinoceros in Mozambique a few kilometers beyond the border fence . . . . . . . . . . . . Released rhinoceros in Mozambique . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mekong region with Chinese development projects discussed in the chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of dams built with the involvement of Chinese companies and banks, 2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A page from Golden Boten City’s brochure for investors . Shops at Golden Boten City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Namtha Grand Hotel, Luang Namtha, under construction, in 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Location map of Cap Cana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Portion of Trump-Cap Cana billboard located along road that climbs up to resort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photographic collage of Cap Cana and Trump Farallón. Upper left, clockwise: The allure to the Dominican Republic, but especially Cap Cana, is the powdery beaches; earth-moving equipment has created, allegedly, the largest inland marina in the world, as well as a reconfigured shoreline and lagoons to accommodate the new golf courses; prospective buyers climb elevated decks on each lot to get a sense of the view and surrounding areas; access to the Trump bluffs was made possible (besides the helipad) by a four-lane highway with a manicured median strip. Road construction also exposed the cavernous bedrock, ideal for promoting a wine cellar that can be part of each of the 65 Trump Farallón sites . . Marketing mix of Cap Cana, Punta Cana Hotel & Resorts, and all-inclusive resorts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Welcome center atop Trump Farallón, with view of Cap Cana and ocean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Streets with equine themed names . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ecological regions of Kentucky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Regions defined by various organizations . . . . . . . . . Bird’s eye view of the principal breeding farms of the bluegrass region of Kentucky, 1900 . . . . . . . . .

liii

. . . . 1233

. . . . 1234 . . . . 1235 . . . . 1236 . . . . 1244 . . . . 1245 . . . . 1251 . . . . 1252 . . . . 1254 . . . . 1272 . . . . 1276

. . . . 1278 . . . . 1279 . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

1280 1298 1299 1301

. . . . 1304

liv

72.5 72.6 72.7 72.8 72.9 72.10 72.11 72.12 72.13 72.14 73.1 73.2 73.3 73.4 73.5 73.6 73.7 75.1

75.2 75.3 75.4

75.5 75.6

76.1 76.2

List of Figures

Manchester farm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stone fence along Pisgah Pike, Woodford County . . . . . Plank fencing on Rice Road, Fayette County . . . . . . . Effect of urban service boundary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bluegrass country driving tour map clipping and LCVB web page header . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Festival market building, downtown Lexington . . . . . . Architectural details at Hamburg Pavilion . . . . . . . . . Thoroughbred park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bluegrass airport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lexington-Fayette county detention center . . . . . . . . . Location of horsefarms in Upper Hunter region . . . . . . Thoroughbreds in a paddock of irrigated, green grass in summer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ornate main entrance to Patinack farm . . . . . . . . . . Bunting in the center of Scone promoting the town as the horse capital of Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Male and female toilets near the tourist information center in Scone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Billboard linking horse riding and water quality issues in the Upper Hunter region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Billboard showing coal mining to be a dusty activity that destroys vegetation and the rural landscape . . . . . . Indonesia. The rotation period for industrial tree plantations in Indonesia is only seven years. Fast growing trees, mainly Acacia mangium and Eucalyptus species, are planted for pulp and paper production . . . . . . . . . The Indonesian case study area is located in the Sanggau and Sintang districts, West Kalimantan, Indonesia . . . . Zimbabwe. Small-scale eucalyptus woodlots owned by the local farmers are common in Southern Africa . . . . . . . Zimbabwe. When the woodlots are used as grazing areas trees can often suffer from damages made by grazing animals and especially goats. In this case the coppice stems may be in safe place high above the ground . . . . Local communities’ perceptions of tree plantation project benefits in Ghana (modified from Blay et al., 2007) . . . . Degraded forests (left) have smaller amount of trees and tree species than forest gardens (right) which include some planted trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Percent forest-cover loss in the Eastern United States, pre-1800s to 1909 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cumulative enrollment in the conservation reserve program in Indiana, 1986–2007 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

1306 1306 1307 1309

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

1315 1316 1317 1318 1319 1320 1324

. . . . 1329 . . . . 1330 . . . . 1334 . . . . 1334 . . . . 1335 . . . . 1335

. . . . 1355 . . . . 1356 . . . . 1358

. . . . 1360 . . . . 1362

. . . . 1363 . . . . 1373 . . . . 1379

List of Figures

76.3 77.1

77.2

77.3

77.4

77.5

77.6

77.7

79.1 79.2 79.3

80.1 80.2 80.3

80.4 80.5 80.6

Enrollment in the conservation reserve program in 1997 and net change in enrollment over the next decade . . . . . A severely eroded field typical of large areas on the Southern Piedmont and other areas of the eastern US in the 19th and early 20th centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . A field in Wilshire, UK, 1995. Despite the long and steep slopes, the fact that the furrows run up and down the slope, and the lack of any erosion control methods, there is no apparent erosion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Average annual precipitation compared to precipitation intensity, UK and eastern US. Note that while averages are similar, intensities are much greater in the US . . . . . . Infiltration capacities of soil vs. average rainfall rates, UK and eastern US. Note that excesses in the US are several times those in the UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Before and after soil conservation engineering, Coon Creek, Wisconsin. Top: Early 1934. Note rectangular fields and gully systems extending into upland fields. Bottom: 1967. Note contour strip cropping . . . . . . . . . . Former cropland, now reverted to forest, Southern Piedmont. The forested land is either too eroded for cultivation or is simply economically marginal to better cropland elsewhere in the US. Such reverted land is common and even dominant in many areas of the eastern US Productivity and efficiency of agricultural land use, 1947–1994. Note that land area declined about 10% but productivity increased almost 150% . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (1918–2004) was the leading figure in the greening ambitions . . . . . . . . . . . The covers of two environmental magazines demonstrate the Emirati flag as a central feature in the greening efforts . An illustration of ecological modernization in the Gulf. The picture is from a cover of an environmental show and illustrates a sick earth in a hospital bed surrounded by four male doctors curing the earth with modern technology . . . Yarra Bend Asylum from Studley Park . . . . . . . . . . . . Yarra Bend and Kew Asylums (right), 1900–1910 . . . . . . Map of Melbourne showing geographical location and size of Yarra Bend and Kew Asylum sites (shaded areas at upper right) in relation to general hospital sites (circles) . Map of Yarra Bend Asylum, 1855 showing the location of original buildings in relation to river and public roads . . Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, 1864 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Metropolitan hospital for the Insane, 1869 . . . . . . . . . .

lv

. . . 1379

. . . 1384

. . . 1384

. . . 1385

. . . 1386

. . . 1388

. . . 1390

. . . 1391 . . . 1414 . . . 1415

. . . 1418 . . . 1425 . . . 1428

. . . 1429 . . . 1430 . . . 1433 . . . 1433

lvi

80.7 80.8 80.9 80.10 80.11 81.1 82.1 82.2 82.3 83.1

83.2

83.3 83.4

83.5 83.6

83.7

83.8

83.9

84.1 84.2 84.3 84.4 84.5

List of Figures

Kew Asylum, 1889 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yarra Bend cottages, 1861 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Track to Asylum, Kew, 1920 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Looking toward Zig Zag Bridge and Kew Asylum from site of stables, 1927 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Collingwood from the town hall tower . . . . . . . . . . . . Scheme of the textile barrage (side view) . . . . . . . . . . The Williams channel rectification plan . . . . . . . . . . . Sketch of the Leland Neck cutoff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cutoff Locations from Arkansas to Louisiana . . . . . . . . Overview of northwestern Europe showing the location of the Netherlands at the southern fringe of the North Sea Basin. Adjacent regions are rich in relief and have older geological formations exposed with respect to the Netherlands (arrow) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schematic diagram shows change in reaction of historic humans against rising sea level and coastal hazards. Box 1. Zuiderzee works, Box 2. Delta works . . . . . . . . General map of the Netherlands and locations of mega-scale engineering works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map shows location, nature and size of the different projects of the Zuiderzee Works in the central north of the Netherlands that were carried out between 1927 and 1975. (Cf. Table 83.1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The final stage of completing the Closure Dike (Afsluitdijk) in 1932 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The 32 km (20 mi) long Closure Dike has not really changed shape since the completion in 1932, in spite of modern busy traffic as this photograph from 2006 shows . . Impact of the 1953-flooding disaster in Zeeland causing about 400 km (250 mi) of dike to breach and flooding at least 1,920 km2 (475,000 acres) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The location, nature and size of the different projects of the Delta works in the Southwestern Netherlands and shows the years when they were completed . . . . . . . . . Delta Works: The Storm Surge Barrier is built with a number of large slides held in between piers which can be moved. Normally, the slides are lifted in order to reduce the tides’ impacts, except for extra high tides or during severe storm surges when the slides can be entirely lowered The Netherlands coast – 800 A.D. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Netherlands coast – 1250 A.D. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Netherlands coast – 1600 A.D. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Netherlands coast – Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of the Zuiderzee reclamation . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . 1434 . . . 1435 . . . 1436 . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

1436 1437 1444 1455 1458 1461

. . . 1466

. . . 1468 . . . 1468

. . . 1471 . . . 1472

. . . 1473

. . . 1474

. . . 1475

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

1477 1482 1483 1483 1484 1487

List of Figures

84.6 84.7 84.8 84.9 85.1 85.2 85.3

85.4 85.5 86.1

86.2

88.1 89.1

89.2 89.3 89.4 89.5 90.1 90.2 90.3 90.4

Map of the Delta project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Haringvliet sluice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oosterschelde barrier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maeslant barrier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schematic of SNWT routes (west, central, east). DJK=Danjiangkou, site of intake for central route . . . . Elevation profile of Eastern route . . . . . . . . . . . . . Artist’s rendering of parallel tunnels crossing underneath the Yellow river. Similar tunnels will also be part of the central route . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Workers constructing part of the tunnel to cross under the Yellow river . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Workers increasing the height of the Danjiangkou Dam in 2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mean flow of USSR rivers (km3 /year). Chart A indicates percentage of the USSR’s territory with river discharge into specified sea and ocean basins. Chart B indicates percentage of USSR’s average annual river discharge accounted for by rivers flowing into specified sea and ocean basins. Numbers above the bars indicate drainage basins: 1-Arctic Ocean; 2-Pacific Ocean; 3-Black and Azov seas; 4-Baltic Sea; 5-Caspian and Aral seas . . . . . Final diversion plans for European and Siberian parts of USSR (1984). European Diversions: numbers 1–3-first stage, first phase (19.1 km3 ); number 4-first stage, second phase (10.2 km3 ); number 5-second phase (37.7 km3 ). Siberian Diversions: 6-First phase (27.2 km3 ); 6–7 second phase (32.8 km3 ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Routes for the pipelines connecting Caspian Sea to Aral Sea, with altimetry shown (m) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Port Augusta to Lake Eyre Pipeline Corridor. A slightly different course might prove better if only the South Basin is to be filled at the Lake Eyre terminal south of the proposed Goyder Channel Tension Textile Dam . . . . . . Volume/elevation curve of the Lake Eyre . . . . . . . . . Tube-wall thickness via wall safety tensile stress for different tube diameters and water pressures . . . . . Specific pumping power dependence on water speed and pipe diameter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eyre North and South monthly evaporation rates . . . . . Circular map with China highlighted . . . . . . . . . . . Oblique map of the Yangtze River . . . . . . . . . . . . . Satellite photos of the Yangtze River dam site: (a) 1987, (b) 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of Three Gorges Dam site features . . . . . . . . . .

lvii

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

1490 1492 1494 1495

. . . . 1501 . . . . 1502

. . . . 1503 . . . . 1504 . . . . 1505

. . . . 1517

. . . . 1519 . . . . 1544

. . . . 1550 . . . . 1552 . . . . 1553 . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

1555 1558 1570 1572

. . . . 1573 . . . . 1579

lviii

91.1 91.2 91.3 92.1 92.2 92.3 92.4

93.1 93.2 94.1 94.2 94.3 94.4

94.5 95.1 95.2 95.3 95.4 95.5 96.1 96.2 96.3 96.4 96.5 96.6 96.7 96.8 96.9 96.10

List of Figures

The Three Gorges reservoir area. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Counties of the 11 provinces where TGP migrants were resettled in 2000–2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Annual number of migrants displaced to 11 provinces (2000–2004). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Location of Itaipú dam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aerial view of the spillway and the powerhouse. . . . . . . . View of the Penstocks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schematic of the Itaipú dam showing the dam across the Parana River, the extensive earthworks on the Eastern (Brazilian) side, and the often-spectacular spillway on the Western (Paraguayan) side that allows for diversion of water when the water level in the reservoir is high. . . . . . . Eleven river basins in Nigeria. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Tiga dam – Nigeria’s largest dam for irrigation . . . . . . Course of the Mekong river . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mekong cascade 1987. The main difference from the 1970 plan was the reduced height of the giant Pa Mong Dam. . Dams on the Mekong River and its tributaries, as of July 2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . National Geographic’s December 1968 cover story, “River of Terror and Hope” (left), graphic representations of the terror and hope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dam protest in Bangkok . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How big is Africa. (Trustees of Boston University, n.d. and The White Horse Press, Isle of Harris, 2006) . . . . . . . 1890s map of Livingstone falls showing Inga falls curve. . . . Inga I and II Dams in Nkokolo valley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Proposed Pan-African electricity grid . . . . . . . . . . . . . Proposed Grand Inga electricity corridors (“highways”). . . . U.S. military academy, West Point, New York. . . . . . . . . Army troop deployments in the U.S., 1860 . . . . . . . . . . Army troop deployments in the U.S., 1867 . . . . . . . . . . Current photograph of the remnants of Fort Union, NM, an historic western Army fort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Current photography of the remnants of Fort Laramie, WY, an historic western Army fort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of the Armor Warfare Center Maneuvers in the USA, 1940s (Bischoff, 2008) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Geographical distribution of major military lands in the U.S., 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ecoregional distribution of Army lands in the U.S. . . . . . . Cantonment and training areas on Fort Bliss (left) and Fort Hood (right), Texas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fort Lewis cantonment area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . 1584 . . 1589 . . . .

. . . .

1591 1600 1600 1604

. . . .

. . . .

1611 1618 1622 1634

. . 1636 . . 1639

. . 1640 . . 1646 . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

1653 1654 1667 1668 1670 1685 1685 1686

. . 1686 . . 1687 . . 1688 . . 1690 . . 1693 . . 1694 . . 1695

List of Figures

97.1 97.2 97.3 97.4 97.5 97.6 97.7 97.8 97.9

98.1 98.2 98.3 98.4 98.5 98.6 98.7 98.8 98.9 99.1 99.2 99.3

99.4 99.5 100.1 100.2 100.3 100.4 100.5 100.6 100.7 101.1 101.2 101.3

Phases of U.S. acquisition of Mexican land. . . . . . . . . . . . Existing and proposed fencing projects along the Mexico-U.S. border. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Border Fence, Lighting, and Patrol Roads. . . . . . . . . . . . . Border areas affected by REAL ID act waivers. . . . . . . . . . Example of pedestrian fencing, Arizona. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Border wall construction along levees in Rio Grande River Valley, Texas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Construction filling in Smugglers’ Gulch, California. . . . . . . Mesh fencing with Debris-Filled Grates, Hidalgo County, Texas. The high water mark reached seven feet. . . . . . . . . . Mesh fencing, after debris was cleared. Taken at the same location as Fig. 97.8. Comparison shows that debris was piled at least 2 ft (0.6 m) high at the grates. . . . . . . . . . . . Island locations for Australia Asylum seeker detention. . . . . . ÜNHCR map of “Australia’s Excision Zone” . . . . . . . . . . Location of detention centers in Australia and offshore Islands. . Alcatraz down under: Christmas island detention center. . . . . The Babies Compound: Details of Child Care, Education Units . Caged area for “detainee relaxation” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Caged lights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Entrance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christmas Island CCTV security room . . . . . . . . . . . . . View from a scenic overlook in Wise County. Wallens Ridge stands at the center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of the Wallens Ridge state prison study area . . . . . . . . The costly road to Red Onion State Prison winds up and around the mountain for several miles, at a 10% grade in some places . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . High-pressure sodium lamps that light Wallens Ridge are visible for miles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Boundary of the Red Onion State prison property. . . . . . . . . Location of Le Havre nuclear reprocessing plant. . . . . . . . . Coastline of La Cotentin Peninsula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Satellite image of the Le Havre plant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Le Havre reprocessing plant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rural landscape surrounding Le Hague plant . . . . . . . . . . Dairy farming on La Cotentin Peninsula . . . . . . . . . . . . Rugged and bleak coastal landscape near the reprocessing plant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Location of Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, the nuclear test site, detonation sites, and communities adjacent. . . . . . . . . Physical landscape adjacent to and in the Polygon . . . . . . . Magnitude of blasts and directions of radioactive clouds blasts. .

lix

. 1705 . . . .

1709 1710 1712 1713

. 1713 . 1715 . 1715

. . . . . . . . . .

1716 1732 1735 1738 1739 1741 1741 1742 1742 1743

. 1750 . 1751

. 1753 . . . . . . . .

1757 1759 1766 1766 1767 1770 1771 1773

. 1776 . 1791 . 1792 . 1794

lx

101.4 101.5 101.6 101.7 101.8 101.9 101.10 101.11 101.12 101.13 102.1 102.2 102.3 102.4 102.5

102.6 102.7 102.8 102.9 102.10 102.11 102.12 102.13 102.14 102.15 102.16 102.17 102.18 102.19 103.1

List of Figures

Diorama of the testing area, 29 August 1949 in the Science Museum, Kurchatov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Levels of radiation of sites adjacent to and downwind from the SNTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medical college in Semipalatinsk . . . . . . . . . . . . . Book cover E. L. Yakubovskya et al. Semipalatinsk Test Polygon (2003) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Drawing of one child from Semipalatinsk “How I see my city” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Monument to victims of nuclear testing, Semipalatinsk . . Display in the Ethnographic Museum, Semipalatinsk . . . Semey Artist: Alexander Shevchenko and one depiction of the Polygon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Abandoned buildings in Kurchatov . . . . . . . . . . . . Open border crossing to the Polygon (formerly restricted entry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Location of retirement communities in Florida and South Florida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aerial photo of Century Village, Pembroke Pines . . . . . Main entrance to Century Village, Pembroke Pines . . . . Housing in Century Village, Pembroke Pines . . . . . . . Century Village, West Palm Beach. Note contrast in housing and landscaping with Century Village, Pembroke Pines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Century Village, Pembroke Pines, Shuffleboard Court . . Century Village, Pembroke Pines, Clubhouse . . . . . . . Century Village, Trolley Transportation Service Provided Sun City Center development plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sun City Center, single family dwelling . . . . . . . . . . Sun City Center, lawn bowling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gated entrance to Jewish retirement community in Delray Beach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jewish community, Kiryas Joel, of Satmar Chasidic Sect . Finnish Lutheran Church in Lantana . . . . . . . . . . . Finnish community center in Lake Worth . . . . . . . . . The Palms of Mankota is a Gay-Oriented Retirement Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emergency medical services are a common site in retirement communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Century Village, Pembroke Pines, apartments with elevators that replaced outside staircases . . . . . . . . . Offices of medical specialists are seldom far from retirement communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Abandoned house in Detroit, haphazardly and inadequately secured . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . 1795 . . . . 1796 . . . . 1797 . . . . 1799 . . . . 1808 . . . . 1808 . . . . 1809 . . . . 1811 . . . . 1813 . . . . 1814 . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

1824 1826 1826 1827

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

1828 1828 1829 1829 1830 1831 1831

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

1834 1839 1840 1841

. . . . 1843 . . . . 1846 . . . . 1848 . . . . 1850 . . . . 1859

List of Figures

103.2 103.3 103.4 103.5 103.6 103.7 103.8 103.9 103.10 103.11 103.12 103.13 104.1 104.2 104.3

104.4 104.5 104.6 104.7

104.8 104.9 104.10

104.11 105.1 105.2 105.3 105.4 106.1 106.2 106.3 106.4

Detroit population density by census tract, 1950. . . . . . Detroit population density by census tract, 2000. . . . . . Abandoned, fire-damaged house in Detroit . . . . . . . . Non-market and weak-market areas in Youngstown, Ohio. Abandoned factory building in Detroit . . . . . . . . . . Abandoned storefronts in Cleveland . . . . . . . . . . . . Vacant Packard Motor Car Company plant in Detroit. . . . Street scene on Cleveland’s East Side. . . . . . . . . . . . Abandoned church in Detroit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Old Cleveland Board of Education building, now largely overgrown by vegetation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The DeQuindre Cut in Detroit: a rail line turned into an inner-city walking and bicycling path. . . . . . . . . . . . Map of culverted streams and watersheds in Cleveland. . . Local schoolchildren watch as a rural house is connected. . Advertisement seeking peat for a peat-fired generating station (Kerryman, March 23, 1957) . . . . . . . . . . . . Linesmen and cable drum. Most of the work of the rural electrification program in the late 1940s used locally recruited manual labor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Construction crew. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Crew erecting pole (horse in background). . . . . . . . . . Stringing the new wires. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . One of the most important benefits of electricity on the farm: the electric pump replacing the old water pump in the center picture. The mobile sales van is visible in the background. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ESB map showing areas completed by 1952. . . . . . . . An REO wall map showing the early geographical progress of electrification in 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The formal switch-on ceremony headed up by local clergymen. The new meter box is visible in the background as is the smoke patch from the now-obsolete paraffin lamp. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exhibition of appliances for farm use. There is particular emphasis on “cheap” electricity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of Tennessee Valley Region and TVA dams. . . . . . Norris Dam, Tennessee Valley, 2008. . . . . . . . . . . . A sea of white faces in this photograph of workers at Norris Dam, 1933. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Layout of Norris planned community. . . . . . . . . . . . Early coal mining areas of Harlan County. . . . . . . . . . Harlan County with communities of Benham and Lynch. . Benham, Kentucky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lynch, Kentucky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

lxi

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

1861 1862 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1869 1870

. . . . 1871 . . . . 1872 . . . . 1872 . . . . 1888 . . . . 1889

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

1891 1891 1892 1892

. . . . 1893 . . . . 1894 . . . . 1896

. . . . 1897 . . . . 1898 . . . . 1901 . . . . 1910 . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

1911 1912 1918 1920 1922 1923

lxii

106.5 106.6 106.7 106.8 106.9 106.10 106.11 106.12 107.1 107.2 107.3 107.4 107.5 108.1

108.2 108.3 108.4 108.5 109.1

109.2 109.3 109.4 109.5 109.6 109.7 110.1 110.2 111.1 111.2 111.3 111.4 111.5 111.6 112.1

List of Figures

Lynch amusement building . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Benham YMCA and hotel (background left) . . . . . . . . International Harvester company police in Benham . . . . . Lynch homes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Benham homes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lynch Superintendent’s home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Original Benham store replaced in 1920 . . . . . . . . . . . First united mine workers union meeting in Lynch . . . . . South African provinces and capitals in relationship to former Bantustans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Port Elizabeth legacy residential areas. . . . . . . . . . . . . South end in its heyday. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . South end: a heterophobic townscape . . . . . . . . . . . . District Six, Cape Town in 2009. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Locations of select historic settlements on the Chukchi Peninsula, 1900–1970 (villages mentioned in the text are labeled) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Location of contemporary settlements on the Chukchi Peninsula, 2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Soviet-style houses in Lorino. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Remains of the relocated village (1977) of Nuniamo in 2008. Contemporary hunting camp next to the abandoned village of Nuniamo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1885 Map of Salt Lake City including Mormon wards – the arrow (circled) between the 13th and 18th wards is pointing to Temple Square. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mormon settlements and stakes in 1869. . . . . . . . . . . . Former Zions co-operative mercantile institution (ZCMI) in Franklin, Idaho . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manti temple in Manti, Utah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Logan Utah Tabernacle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LDS Chapel in Mink Creek, Idaho erected in 1928 (“Colonel’s twins” design) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Church headquarters in downtown Salt Lake City, with Temple Square in the middle block. . . . . . . . . . . . The sign at the entrance to Raffles Girls’ Primary School . . Street sign marking Raffles Girls’ Primary School . . . . . Reference map. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Road sign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Population trends in Nagorno Karabakh. . . . . . . . . . . . Number of toponyms by linguistic association. . . . . . . . Spatial distribution of toponyms by linguistic association. . Stepanakert in its many forms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . U.S. military assists displaced persons in the wake of a Central American natural disaster. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

1924 1924 1925 1927 1927 1928 1929 1931

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

1943 1945 1946 1947 1948

. . . 1961 . . . 1962 . . . 1965 . . . 1966 . . . 1969

. . . 1981 . . . 1983 . . . 1985 . . . 1987 . . . 1988 . . . 1990 . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

1992 1999 2000 2014 2016 2021 2024 2026 2027

. . . 2033

List of Figures

112.2 112.3 112.4 112.5 112.6 115.1 115.2

115.3 115.4 115.5 115.6

115.7 115.8 115.9 115.10 115.11 115.12 115.13 117.1 117.2 117.3 117.4 117.5 117.6 117.7 118.1 118.2 118.3

Afghan villagers view satellite image. . . . . . . . . . . . Satellite image of Kabul District 7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Old cadastre map of Kabul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Complexities and conflicts resulting from different types of tenure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hand drawn parcels sketch in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. . . The Irish border region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Application of development typologies to the Irish border region. (a) Application of the OECD typology – areas about 12 m either side of the border; (b) NUI Maynooth’s rural typology as applied to the area about 12 m either side of the border . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Symbols of a political-religious divide include commemorating fallen comrades . . . . . . . . . . . . . Religious affiliation along the Irish border. (a) Percent Protestant; (b) Percent Catholic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The old customs hut on the Pettigo-Tullyhummon (Donegal/Fermanagh) border . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map showing road closures spanning the North Monaghan/South Tyrone Border. The three images are of cratered roads that once spanned the North Monaghan/South Tyrone border. © Fr. Sean Nolan, Truagh Development Association . . . . . . . . . . . . . The dearth of rail crossings in the Irish border region . . . The military check-point beside the GAA pitch in Crossmaglen, Co. Armagh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postal service delivery challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . Service delivery challenges: Currency exchange . . . . . The role of art in peace. The Lough McNean sculpture trail Cross-border collaboration through partnership . . . . . . Importance of various funding streams to local regeneration in the Irish border region . . . . . . . . . . . Baselines and Meridians for U.S. rectangular public land survey system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Township and range in the RPLSS . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sections and fractional sections in the RPLSS . . . . . . New states proposed by Thomas Jefferson in the Northwest territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . U.S. state and county boundaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . Center Pivot irrigation and the RPLSS in Kansas. . . . . . Huron County, Michigan Road Network . . . . . . . . . European influence in the world. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cartoon of Cecil Rhodes spanning Africa. . . . . . . . . . Time sequence map of Colonial Australia. . . . . . . . . .

lxiii

. . . . 2039 . . . . 2040 . . . . 2041 . . . . 2044 . . . . 2045 . . . . 2092

. . . . 2092 . . . . 2093 . . . . 2094 . . . . 2096

. . . . 2096 . . . . 2098 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2099 2100 2100 2104 2104

. . . . 2107 . . . . 2127 . . . . 2127 . . . . 2128 . . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

2130 2131 2132 2134 2140 2147 2149

lxiv

118.4 118.5 121.1 121.2 121.3

121.4 121.5 122.1 122.2 123.1

123.2

List of Figures

Aboriginal claimant applications as of 2009 in Australia, with rectilinear pattern of the Torrens system evident. . . . . Triangulation lines in India and arcs of Great Trigon, Survey of India. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Global temperature anomalies based on four multiproxy and tree ring reconstructions for the period A.D. 900–2005. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide for the past 10,000 years. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Climate model simulations of global temperature anomalies with (a) and without (b) anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Temperature increases associated with three IPCC 2007 AR4 scenarios. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Projected changes to major components of the hydrologic cycle associated with anthropogenic climate change. . . . . Concentration in meq [Ca2+ + Mg2+ ] in spring waters. Total carbon as mg CO2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Artist’s impression of an olivine hill at the campus grounds of the Utrecht University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The mean radius of earth is about 3,960 mi (6,373 km). By contrast the radius of the georeactor is only about 6 mi (10 km), although there is much uncertainty in that estimate. The georeactor, thought to reside within the inner core at the center of earth, is comparably simple in structure. The georeactor sub-core consists of the actinide fuel, the uranium and heaver fissionable elements, such as plutonium, formed by the fission process. The surrounding sub-shell, which is thought to be liquid or a slurry, consists of radioactive decay products and fission products. Heat produced by nuclear fission in the sub-core, causes convection in the sub-shell which will interact with the Coriolis forces produced by planetary rotation and act like a dynamo, a magnetic amplifier, generating the geomagnetic field (Herndon, 2007, 2009). . . . . . . . . . . Oak Ridge National Laboratory georeactor numerical simulation calculated 3 He/4 He ratios, normalized to the same ratio in air, as a function of time. For comparison, ranges of values are shown for helium ratios measured in samples from mid-oceanic ridges. Note the ascent of georeactor helium ratios approaching the present age of earth, indicated by the arrow. Georeactor helium ratios increase as the uranium fuel becomes depleted. Comparably high values are observed in certain deep-source lavas, such as those from Hawaii and Iceland,

. . . 2150 . . . 2151 . . . 2186 . . . 2187

. . . 2190 . . . 2191 . . . 2192 . . . 2202 . . . 2204

. . . 2210

List of Figures

124.1

125.1

125.2

126.1 126.2 126.3 126.4

are evidence that the end of the georeactor’s life is approaching, although the time-scale is not precisely known. Schematic of the runaway greenhouse scenario. (1) Various planetary engineering techniques are used to warm volatile-rich regions on Mars; (2) carbon dioxide in the polar caps and the regolith starts to vaporize; (3) the thicker atmosphere warms the surface and hence causes a further release of gases. If positive feedback is strong enough, self-sustaining outgassing may occur as a result of a comparatively trivial forcing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Habitable compositions for plants and for humans. Bar shows the minimum or maximum allowed for each gas as indicated by arrows. Envelope show total pressure required. (Based on data from McKay et al., 1991) . . . . . Greenhouse warming as an amount of greenhouse gases added to present Martian atmosphere for fluorine gases as labeled. Dotted line is for an optimal combination of the four gases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thermohaline circulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Broecker’s carbon pie chart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pacala and Socolow’s (2004) stabilization wedges . . . . . Geoengineering as substitute and as supplement. . . . . . .

lxv

. . . 2212

. . . 2220

. . . 2230

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

2231 2239 2245 2246 2251

List of Tables

2.1 2.2

2.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 8.1 8.2 9.1 10.1 11.1 12.1 13.1 13.2 15.1 15.2 17.1 17.2

The Seven Wonders of the ancient world . . . . . . . . . “The New Seven Wonders,” a 2007 list derived from worldwide popular vote. (New7Wonders Foundation, 2007) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Examples of modern “wonders” in the U.S. organized by themes derived from the ancient Wonders . . . . . . . The internet as a mega-project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mega-project Google: Portrait . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nesting model for google as a mega-project . . . . . . . . Examples of projects that make use of cloud collaboration Ownership of selected cloud-collaboration projects . . . . Facebook’s 25 largest user countries . . . . . . . . . . . . User feedback to facebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Key terms related to fiber optics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific fiber optics cables . A summary of urban WLAN provision in three Finnish cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Activities while traveling measured in terms frequency and time intensity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Video game assemblages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Number of successfully obtained fixes, fix rates (%) and operation periods of the GPS collars . . . . . . . . . Change in rural-urban distribution of cattle and buffaloes, 1992–2003 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Proportion of total milk produced (in million tons) by cattle and buffaloes, 1995–2004. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grain production in the Soviet Union – 1922–1926 (in millions of pounds) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gross state investment in agriculture 1953–1963 (in millions of rubles) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conditions and results of earlier economic feasibility studies of manganese nodule mining . . . . . . . . . . . World metal production and abundance in earth’s crust . .

. . . .

18

. . . .

20

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

22 50 55 58 71 79 90 96 116 121

. . . .

137

. . . . . . . .

150 165

. . . .

178

. . . .

199

. . . .

200

. . . .

240

. . . .

246

. . . . . . . .

290 291

lxvii

lxviii

23.1 23.2 24.1 24.2 26.1 27.1

28.1 29.1

29.2

30.1 30.2

30.3 30.4

30.5 31.1 31.2 33.1 33.2 33.3 34.1 37.1 37.2 42.1 44.1

46.1

List of Tables

Mine location information for the Philippines . . . . . . . Ecclesial actions against mining in the Philippines . . . . Criteria and parameters used in the complex assessment of human-caused impacts on the areas of iron ore extraction Assessment of the ecological situation in the areas of iron ore mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oil and gas consumption of EU members . . . . . . . . . The total of installed and announced wind development projects in coastal Oaxaca by 2012. The total capacity is comparable to that installed in California by Jan 31, 2009, over a period of 35 years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Energy security outliers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manufacturing plants >700 acres (283 ha). Plants are automobile production unless noted otherwise. Like numbers are in order of size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selected countries and total land in vehicle fabrication specifically comparing to Great Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forest residues by cutting alternatives in North Karelia . . Forestry, the forest industries and socio-economic variables, by types of postcode area (see Fig. 30.1). Most of the information applies to 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Annual energy potential of forest residues and their refined products under two harvesting plans . . . . . . . . Potential effects on employment in forestry and transportation of exploiting forest residues in North Karelia, in person-years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Estimated potential employment effects of sample plants in North Karelia with a composite residue log supply chain The Saudi economic cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Key special economic zones in operation or under construction in Dubai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Build-up of the official highway system in Amazonia . . . Cattle herd and population in the Transamazon Corridor, 2007 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unofficial road construction. Transamazon highway . . . Investment indicators in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Specifications for Alcan highway . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rates of Alcan highway construction during 1942 (after Sturdevant 1943: 180) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The world’s biggest bridges as measured by free span . . Centrality scores for nodes in the Kite network (generated by the network program UCINET [Borgatti, Everett, & Freeman, 2002]) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Examples of mega infrastructure projects in China . . . .

. . . . . . . .

385 389

. . . .

418

. . . . . . . .

424 449

. . . . . . . .

475 494

. . . .

500

. . . . . . . .

506 517

. . . .

520

. . . .

524

. . . .

526

. . . . . . .

528 540

. . . . . . . .

543 572

. . . .

. . . .

585 589 602 653

. . . . . . . .

653 736

. . . . . . . .

781 806

. . . .

. . . .

List of Tables

47.1 47.2 49.1 50.1 50.2 50.3 50.4 50.5 51.1 53.1 54.1 55.1 59.1 61.1 62.1 62.2 70.1 72.1 72.2 72.3 75.1

75.2

75.3

82.1 83.1 86.1 89.1

GCC member countries and their capital, population and area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major projects by various property developers in GCC countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Technical changes in container port terminals . . . . . . . World’s leading passenger airports, 2007 . . . . . . . . . The world’s most expensive airports . . . . . . . . . . . . The world’s most expensive airport expansion projects, 2000–2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A comparison of the new airport terminals in Beijing and London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scheduled airline capacity by region, 1998–2008 . . . . . Largest 15 public university campuses as of fall 2008 . . Data on Moskva Siti objects. (Compiled from various sources by authors) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tallest completed skyscrapers (October 2008) . . . . . . Estimation of different variants of floating platforms . . . Land use legacies of Olympic and world’s fair sites . . . . Selected megadevelopers by region in US . . . . . . . . . Allocation of federal recovery funds by sector in Kentucky WPA expenditures for projects completed to December 31, 1936 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Investment types and spatial impact of Cap Cana . . . . . Growth rates of bluegrass counties . . . . . . . . . . . . Gross domestic product by metropolitan area, 2005 and 2006 (millions of current dollars) . . . . . . . . . . . Selected equine related businesses in the Bluegrass . . . . Benefits of Eucalyptus camaldulensis woodlots under different ownership categories in Mukarakate, North-Eastern Zimbabwe (Tyynelä, 2001a) . . . . . . . . Number of trees and tree species are compared in different forest types in Begoro (moist semi deciduous area) and Dormaa (dry semi deciduous area) in Ghana . . . . . Three different forest plantation types and their main social impacts. Cases from modified taungya system in Ghana, small-scale eucalyptus woodlots in Mukarakate, Zimbabwe, and large scale industrial forest plantations in West Kalimantan, Indonesia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mississippi river cutoffs in 1946 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Areal and temporal dimensions of dikes and polders of the Zuiderzee works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selected economic and environmental characteristics of the first stage Siberian water diversion project . . . . . Parameters for Port Augusta to Lake Eyre Pipeline . . . .

lxix

. . . .

822

. . . .

. . . .

833 864 868 871

. . . .

871

. . . . . . . . . . . .

873 875 890

. . . . . .

. . . .

. . . . . .

. . . .

. . . . . .

. 937 . 956 . 979 . 1053 . 1075 . 1091

. . . . 1093 . . . . 1274 . . . . 1309 . . . . 1310 . . . . 1311

. . . . 1359

. . . . 1363

. . . . 1365 . . . . 1462 . . . . 1471 . . . . 1521 . . . . 1555

lxx

89.2 89.3 91.1 91.2 91.3 91.4 92.1 92.2 92.3 92.4 92.5 93.1 93.2 95.1 95.2 95.3 95.4 95.5 95.6 95.7 95.8 96.1 97.1 97.2 97.3 98.1 98.2 98.3 98.4

List of Tables

Monthly mean of daily global solar irradiation [KWh/(m–2 day–1 )] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cost estimations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Numbers of people actually displaced in the TGP by the end of 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Distribution of migrants displaced via GODR schemes (2000–2006) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Numbers of migrants displaced to 11 provinces via GODR (2000–2004) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Per capita farmland and area of newly built housing of migrants resettled in 11 provinces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Credit Secured by Itaipú Binacional (EOY, 1983) . . . . . . Debt of Itaipú Binacional (EOY, 1983) . . . . . . . . . . . Debt of Itaipú Binacional (EOY 2006) . . . . . . . . . . . Price of electric power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gross Income from Itaipú: 1985–2005 . . . . . . . . . . . Dams and dam operations in Nigeria . . . . . . . . . . . . Features of selected mega dams in Nigeria . . . . . . . . . Chronology of hydroelectric dams with hydroelectric generation capacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ICOLD Classification by dam wall height . . . . . . . . . . African large hydroelectric dams ≥ 100 m in height . . . . Chronology of African mega hydroelectric dam reservoir capacity (85 dams) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dam classification by reservoir surface area . . . . . . . . . Chronology of African large and major dams by surface area Summary: Number of African mega dams by classification system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chronology of African dams’ installed capacity before 1960 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Analogs of Army installations and world-wide operational areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Costs of border fence from 1997–2008 in millions of dollars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Regulations and laws waived by homeland security secretary Chertoff 2006–2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reported number and causes of death along Mexico-US Border, FY 1998–2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Number of unauthorized boat arrivals . . . . . . . . . . . . Refugee humanitarian program, visas by category 1993/1994 to 2007/2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Expenditure on offshore asylum seeker management on Nauru and Manus Island to end May 2002 . . . . . . . . . Estimated expenditure for offshore asylum seeker management 2001/2002 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . 1556 . . . 1560 . . . 1585 . . . 1590 . . . 1591 . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

1594 1605 1605 1606 1607 1607 1621 1623

. . . 1658 . . . 1659 . . . 1660 . . . 1661 . . . 1662 . . . 1662 . . . 1663 . . . 1665 . . . 1693 . . . 1709 . . . 1711 . . . 1717 . . . 1725 . . . 1730 . . . 1736 . . . 1736

List of Tables

98.5 98.6 102.1 103.1 107.1 107.2 108.1 110.1 110.2 114.1 114.2 114.3 115.1 115.2 122.1

126.1 126.2 126.3

Detainees on Nauru and Manus island 2001–2007 . . . Outcome of processing of offshore entry persons 16 September 2002 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Florida retirement communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . Population of principal United States shrinking cities 1950–2007 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1960 Port Elizabeth residential areas; populations forced to move . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selected South African place name changes . . . . . . . Selection of relocation events on the Chukchi Peninsula Distribution of building names: raw figures . . . . . . . Distribution of building names: Percentages . . . . . . Breakdown of 2004–2006 Schengen facility funding (in million C) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slovenia: structure of border crossings per sectors, 1992–2002 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selected characteristics of borders of the Republic of Slovenia, 2002 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Locations at which citizens currently access services . . Location of the closest service by distance (irrespective of border) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Composition (mg/l) of Loutraki mineral water, experimental water made by reacting a sparkling table water with olivine powder, and average magnesium bicarbonate waters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Geoengineering? Engineering earth, seas, and sky . . . Stabilization wedges—Pick 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pleasures of paleolithic life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

lxxi

. . . . . 1737 . . . . . 1737 . . . . . 1825 . . . . . 1858 . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

1945 1950 1964 2005 2006

. . . . . 2073 . . . . . 2082 . . . . . 2083 . . . . . 2101 . . . . . 2101

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

2202 2242 2246 2247

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1

Introduction to Megaengineering: The Concept and a Research Frontier Stanley D. Brunn and Andrew Wood

1.1 Introduction Let’s think for a moment about these familiar historical engineering projects: the Egyptian pyramids, Roman roads and aqueducts, Incan roads, Chichen Itza, Angkor Wat, the Great Wall of China, the Panama and Suez Canals, and the Taj Mahal. And in a more recent context, consider the U.S. Interstate Highway System, the diversion of waters in the Lower Mississippi, nuclear testing sites in Nevada and Kazakhstan, the Transamazon Highway, new capital cities in Australia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, and Myanmur, the Three Gorges Dam and new skyscrapers being erected in the United Arab Emirates. This list includes many that Nozovsky (2006) and Davidson and Brooke (2006) identified as major engineering accomplishments. What do these places have in common? All were or are the sites of megaengineering projects. They are “mega” because of their size, investments in human labor, and financial cost. They were built with the help of many individuals, including architects, engineers, workers, administrators, and we need to add politicians and “dreamers.” There are also examples of major achievements where humans were working both with and against nature. The study of these projects within an historical, contemporary or nature/society context is of interest to scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, but also those in architecture, civil and environmental engineering. We think it is important that social, policy, environmental, and engineering scientists begin to focus on megaprojects and their impacts on regions, cultures, economies, and environments, not only because of their megastructure or visibility (some visible on Google Earth images), but also because they reveal much about how societies, governments, and even scholarly communities look at engineering of the physical and social earth. These are also important research themes today because the modernist hubris that science and technology deliver economic and social progress is under scrutiny, both in the developed worlds and the Global South.

S.D. Brunn (B) Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA e-mail: [email protected]

S.D. Brunn (ed.), Engineering Earth, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4_1,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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The engineering earth concept, as we conceive it, considers the philosophical and ideological underpinnings about a science, technology, and the environment. It also extends beyond the traditional thinking about familiar industrial, architectural, and infrastructure projects to include projects of a social engineering nature. Examples of the latter include social justice issues related to understanding and resolving ethnic conflicts, residential segregation, the zoning of desirable and undesirable land uses, and landscaping for human security. In preparing for the July 2008 Engineering Earth conference described in the Preface, we drew inspiration from two significant watershed volumes on human/environment interfaces published during the past half century. The first is Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1957) edited by W. L. Thomas (1957); the second is The Earth as Transformed by Human Action (1991) edited by B. L. Turner et al. (Turner, Clark, Kates, Matthews, & Meyer, 1991). The former was an outgrowth of an interdisciplinary symposium sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the latter, another interdisciplinary effort, was supported by a variety of foundations and agencies, including the National Science Foundation. Both publications include a diverse group of social and earth scientists, including geographers, biologists, anthropologists, and historians who address the state of the earth and its transformation. The value of both collections is not only in presenting state-of-theart thinking about various earth/human issues in 1957 and 1991, but in setting an agenda for subsequent research by many scholars in the social and environmental sciences. These books are probably among the most frequently cited volumes on nature/society relations. Our volume builds on these previous publications to include recent research on megaprojects and their impacts on environments, economies, cultures, and regions. Among the examples discussed are dams, highways, airports, and major agricultural, transportation, and energy schemes, but also massive tourist projects, skyscrapers, event planning (various sporting venues), new capital cities, and the social engineering. These topics, by their very nature, are important for those trained and practicing in different fields, disciplines, and perspectives (see Cernea & McDowell, 2000; Flyvbjerg, Bruzelius, & Rothengatter, 2003; Badescu, Cathcart, & Schuiling, 2006; Davidson & Brooke, 2006; Bolonkin & Cathcart, 2009). The July 2008 conference was the first major international and interdisciplinary conference that focused solely on megaengineering projects and their role in transforming the earth. The purpose was to bring together a small group of environmental, social, and engineering scientist who would discuss the impacts of megaengineering projects at local and global scales. This publication is an outgrowth of this conference.

1.2 Three Major Foci We conceive of the study of megaengineering and its impacts as fitting within three major and overlapping spheres. They are economic, environmental, and social/political (Fig. 1.1). The economic sphere would include large-scale industrial,

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Economic ICTs corporations & networks financial institutions work forces k-economics new towns

5

energy farming fishing mining tourism and recreation zoos and parks transportation projects airports and ports bridges and tunnels irrigation and dams bioengineering green projects

Environmental river diversion coastal reclamation mining reclamation reforestation weather modification terracing

edge cities construction

GIS and GPS reconstructing nature pioneering projects landscape modification alternative energy projects WWW conservation the internet eco footprints sustainability Facebook environmental risk climate modeling virtual communities amenity landscapes research and development wired cities military ecology gated communities post-conflict reconstruction security landscapes company towns nuclear testing event planning designing cities planetary engineering new capital cities

shelter belts

social districts land survey systems reorganization of space gendered places zoning social engineering and re-engineering megachurches skyscrapers place name conflicts megauniversities

Social and Political Fig. 1.1 Mapping the impacts of megaengineering projects

transportation, agriculture and energy projects, but also new capital cities, planned developments, new towns and edge cities, and the repairing and upgrading of the physical infrastructure. We also consider virtual computer games, on-line gambling, and information/technology products (Wikipedia, Google Earth, GIS and GPS) in this domain, as they are definitely megaengineering projects. The environmental sphere includes a host of projects that transform the physical earth. These include river diversion, coastal reclamation, terracing schemes, reforestation, surface and subsurface mining, but also weather modification and efforts to mitigate global warming. The social and political sphere includes a variety of projects that relate to human settlement and resettlement, social and political discrimination, land use planning and zoning and property demarcation (land survey systems), but also

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the reorganization of social spaces (schools, churches, health services in declining cities), and the construction of mega architectural projects (universities, skyscrapers, churches and entertainment venues). In each sphere there are projects that do not fit nicely into one category, but rather overlap with one or two others. We consider that various extensive national or transnational transportation projects overlap the economic and environmental spheres, as do huge dam and irrigation projects, the construction of tunnels, ports, airports, and harbors, and the development of extensive landscapes for zoos and parks. Examples of megaprojects that overlap the economic and social/political spheres include wired cities, virtual communities, company towns, gated communities and new capital cities. One could also easily argue that the Internet, World Wide Web, Google Earth, eBay, and Facebook also are in reality megaprojects that cut across economic, social, and political spheres. Examples of projects that merge the social/political with the environmental spheres would include the construction of security landscapes (border fences, prisons, etc.), military ecology and the military’s footprint on the land, and the construction and branding of amenity landscapes for tourism. Finally, it is important to consider where all three spheres overlap. In this space we would include megaprojects that relate to the reconstruction of nature, sustainability, the uses of GIS in planning and forecasting, alternative energy sources, and post conflict reconstruction. One could think of additional examples to insert in this diagram. Studying these might call for including knowledge about economies, the physical earth, and social/political engineering.

1.3 Organization of the Volume All chapters in the volume are original. Parts of some were presented at the July 2008 conference, but many other chapters were written by those who were unable to attend. Invitations to contribute were extended to individuals who have studied a specific megaproject or were willing to contribute a chapter on a new topic. Considerable efforts were made to contact and include scientists from engineering and environmental fields, as we believe they have as much to say about megaprojects as do the social and policy scientists, who form the bulk of the contributors. Additional efforts were made to include youth and senior members of scholarly communities, women, and scientists from around the world. In these efforts, we were successful. There are 126 chapters in this volume. Some deal with an overview of megaengineering projects, but most discuss a specific project. Some have strong theoretical bases; others are more descriptive case studies. Altogether, they represent what we consider to be the state of the art about the field of engineering earth today. The contributions are divided into fifteen sections with each section except the introduction having five or more chapters. Following the introduction we focus on various information/communication technology projects including GIS, ICT, and Keconomies. The next set examines specific agriculture, fishing and mining projects;

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there are twelve chapters in this section. The next section, Section IV, includes seven chapters on energy and industrial projects; this is followed by nine chapters on various national, international, and transnational transportation projects (railroads and highways). Five chapters on the construction industry, corporate structures, and networks form the content of Section VI. This section is followed by fourteen chapters on a variety of Megafacilities (airports, ports, universities, hotels, and churches). Tourism and the creation of amenity landscapes are specifically addressed in Section VIII; parks, zoos, and casinos are included in this mix. Reconstructing and restoring nature are the focus of the next eight chapters followed by seven chapters on river diversion and coastal reclamation projects in different countries. Related to these chapters are the six chapters on Megadams in Section XI. Military and security landscapes, especially prisons, border fences and environmental places at risk because of nuclear materials, are discussed in Section XII. A variety of social engineered landscapes (gated retirement communities, post-apartheid, religious settlement and landscapes, post-conflict property claims and controversies over name changes) form the content of Section XIII. The political organization or engineering of spaces, viz., land survey systems, zoning, and property claims, are among the topics covered in Section XIV. The final section examines a number of earth and planetary engineering themes, including weather modification, climate change, and possible massive environmental changes on Earth and beyond. A useful guide to these chapters in this volume is presented in Fig. 1.2, which shows what chapters fit into each of the three spheres and overlapping areas discussed above.

1.4 Specific Topics Awaiting Research While this collection provides a good introduction to studying megaengineering projects, in many ways it represents only the tip of the iceberg of what might yet be studied. We list below some examples of various large projects that we believe merit scrutiny, either by single scholars or those willing to collaborate with specialists in other fields. The examples listed below include historical and contemporary projects and a few that are still on the drawing board. These could be studied using library archives or Web sources, field observation or ethnographic surveys, mathematical modeling or Delphi panels, discourse analysis or descriptive case studies. (1) Dams (existing or under construction): High Aswan (Egypt), Syncrude Tailings (Canada), Srisailam (India), Ataturk (Turkey), Mangala (Pakistan), Versazca (Switzerland), Rogun (Tajikistan), Inga (Dem. Rep. Congo) (2) Transportation (railroads): Trans Siberian Railroad, the Canadian and Union Pacific, Trans-Australian, Sinkansen (Japan), smart highways (3) Transportation (highways): Trans Canada highway, U. S. Highway 30, BaikalAmur Line (Russia), proposed: Silk Road, Cairo-Cape Town (4) Airports: de Gaulle (Paris), Heathrow (London), Frankfurt (Germany), Hartsfield (Atlanta), Hong Kong (China), Singapore

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Economic

Environmental

3, 4, 8, 9, 29, 31, 36, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50

16, 17, 24, 27, 30, 37, 43, 64, 65, 74, 76

21, 55, 77, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126

1, 2, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 23, 25, 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 40, 41, 60, 62, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 95, 103, 104, 105, 5, 11, 22, 26, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110 38, 68, 78, 79, 39, 47, 59, 61, 80, 89, 92, 94, 63, 93, 111, 112 96, 97, 98, 99

6, 7, 10, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 90, 91, 100, 101, 102, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119

Social and Political

Fig. 1.2 Chapters discussing the impacts of megaengineering projects

(5) Canals: Suez, Panama, All-American (U.S. and Mexico), Alentajo (Portugal), Bhakra (India), Grand (China) (6) Bridges (road and railway): Vasco de Gama (Portugal), Bang Na (Thailand), Lake Pontchartrain Causeway (U.S.), Hangzhou (China), King Fahd (Saudi Arabia and Bahrain), 6th October (Egypt), Bering Strait (Alaska and Siberia) (7) Capital Cities (old and new): Canberra, Brasilia, Abuja (Nigeria), Islamabad (Pakistan) (8) Frontier Agricultural Programs: U. S. homesteading, Canadian Prairie Provinces, western Australian, interior Brazil (9) Hydroelectricity: Snowy Mountain scheme, Columbia River project

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(10) Solar Energy (proposed): Mojave Desert, California; Negev Desert, Israel; Upington, South Africa; Seville, Spain; Mildura, Australia (11) Wind Energy: Ireland, Switzerland, Germany, United Kingdom, France, New Zealand, Australia, U. S. (Great Plains, Appalachia, offshore New England) (12) Pipelines: Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (oil: Caspian to Mediterranean Sea); Druzhba (oil: southeast Russia to eastern Europe); China’s West to East (gas); TransAlaska (oil); Gasoducto del Sur (proposed gas: Venezuela to Argentina); Desertec: (proposed solar: North Africa to Europe) (13) Mining: Mirny, Russia (diamonds), Johannesburg, South Africa (diamonds), Chuquicamata, Chile (copper), Saskatchewan, Canada (uranium), Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan (uranium), Kalgoorlie, Australia (gold), Papua, Australia (gold) (14) Tunnels (water supply, rail, roads, metros): Chunnel (UK and France), Gotthard (Switzerland), Seikan (Japan), Moscow Metro, London Underground (15) Irrigation: HNSS (India), Xinjiang (China), Sardar Sarova Narmada Nigam (India), Gharb (Morocco), Guilan (Iran), Imperial Valley, High Plains (16) Dams/Flood Controls: Danube River, Ohio River, Missouri River, Volga RiverYangtze, Ganges (17) Shelterbelts and Windbreaks: U.S. (Great Plains), USSR (southern steppes), Green Wall of China (18) Reforestation: Finland, Canada, China (19) Tourism and Theme Parks: Dreamworld (Australia’s Gold Coast), Everland (South Korea), Ocean Park (Hong Kong), Lotte World (South Korea), Tokyo Disney, Universal Studios Singapore, Disneyland (California) and Disneyworld (Florida) (20) Leisure Spaces: Parks, playgrounds, golf courses (in different climates) (21) Casino Gambling: Atlantic City, NJ; Las Vegas, NV; Monaco; Macao (22) Industrial Cities: Ciudad Guyana, monotowns in Russia, East Europe, and China (23) Skyscrapers: Burj Dubai; Tapiei 101; Shanghai World Financial Center, International Commence Center (Hong Kong), Petronas Towers (24) Decolonization Projects (monumental spaces, renaming, etc.): former British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Italian colonies (25) Contested Property Claims: Israel/Palestine, post apartheid South Africa, post USSR (in Russia and East Europe; former European colonies (26) ICT Networks: telephone and telegraph projects (historical), fiber optics, Internet, Facebook, Flickr, Web services (27) Social Engineering: retirement communities, elite residences, restricted tourism/recreation spaces, marginalized immigrant populations, indigenous groups (Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, U.S.) (28) Security Landscapes: political borders, airports, transcontinental highways, private developments (megamalls, headquarters), cities

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(29) Megadevelopments: Shanghai (Pudong), Hong Kong Waterfront, London Dockyards, UAE islands, Cancun and Miami Beach resort strips, Australia’s Gold Coast (30) Corporations/Firms (networking, greening, etc.): Halliburton (defense contracts), Rio Tinto (mining), Shaw International (construction), Microsoft (information), eBay (retail), CNN (news), Google (images) (31) Project Management: Consulting, Architecture: transportation, pipelines, dams, office buildings, factories, military projects, ICT, skyscrapers, theme parks (32) Financial Organizations: World Bank, EU, regional banks (33) Local/Grassroots Organizations: supporting or opposing projects: mines, highways, dams, new capital cities, theme parks, alternative energy, expansion of airports, universities, and military training areas (34) Re-engineering Cities: reorganizing schools, public health, transportation, also urban homesteading, market gardening, and neighborhood empowerment (35) Upgrading Projects: bridges, highways, railroads, government and office buildings

1.5 Themes for Collaborative Research We also believe the study of engineering earth will be advanced from those willing to collaborate with scholars outside traditional and familiar fields of research. To support this level of intellectual inquiry, we have identified five salient themes. The themes are placed in a larger theoretical framework, rather than mentioning a specific project. The five areas are: (1) Discourses of Megaengineering. The focus would be on the changing narratives of the state vis-à-vis megaengineering initiatives. These could involve how the state envisions a project fitting into discussions about nation-building and statehood. Discussions might include the sites selected for projects, the financial support, concessions to corporations and landowners, the resettlement of disenfranchised populations, and the re-engineering of social spaces. These inquires might be studied within an individual city or at the state level. (2) Networking of Grassroots Organizations. The focus is on how organizations and groups of citizen activists, shareholders, and disenfranchised populations by megaprojects coalesce to form opposition against the construction of megaengineering projects. These could be historical or contemporary studies. Specific resistance groups might include organized labor and immigrant workers, those displaced by megaprojects that changed regional ecosystems, churches supporting liberation theologies, and other NGOs (environmental, gender, indigenous). The research could be studied with respect to property rights, zoning, empowerment, and manipulation of rights (populations at risk, school assignments for children and political gerrymandering.

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(3) Human Security and Social Justice. In post-911 worlds megaengineering by the state and corporate sector has assumed new roles in regards to questions about privacy and protection, including ICTs in public spaces, the work place and home. Borderland security, internet access, censorship, and virtual “living” are issues facing states, the private sector, cities, and homes. While these may not have the pizzazz and visible impacts of megachurches, socially engineered suburbs and workplaces, or alternative energy projects, they are nonetheless megaengineered landscapes. (4) Organizing Alternative Engineering Worlds. While megaprojects are readily visible almost everywhere, there are embryonic shifts occurring in the engineering worlds of some corporations, communities, workplaces, and homes. This technological shift is evident in “meso” and “micro” scale initiatives that are built around “greening,” sustainability, a softer ecological imprint, corporate and household “greening,” and a new ethos built around 4 R’s: repair, recycle, reuse, and re-educate. While most of these projects will not receive the financial support and visibility of megaprojects, we need to weigh their effectiveness, competitiveness, and popularity and study them alongside worlds of megaprojects. (5) Global engineering initiatives. Scientists, we believe, would also be wise to address a series of “macro” questions about the impacts of megaprojects on major regional and global scales. These include the global consumer car culture, the reliance on hydrocarbons for future energy use, the personal, inexpensive, and adaptable ICT advances, cultures of materialism vs. conservation, a culture of “bigness vs. smallness,” patriarchy (certainly a part of megaengineering thinking) vs. gender equity, civil engineering vs. environmental engineering, and social engineering vs. social equity. Most conflicts surrounding food, security, energy, housing access, literacy levels, access to health care, gender equity, and human rights have their root causes in one or more megaengineering project. As noted above, we do not consider one discipline or one field of study to have a lock on providing the best perspective or methodology to investigate a given megaengineering project or topic. Rather we see merits and easily accommodate in our thinking places for regional economists, land use specialists, GIS analysts, landscape architects, and macro-modelers of Plant Earth. We also find much reason to support those engineers proposing solutions to far-reaching problems facing humankind and the planet, those grassroots, community, and virtual organizers who instill community activism and empower indigenous cultures seeking protection from destructive mining and transportation projects, and those atmospheric scientists who seek ways to mitigate adverse climate changes. What will be required for engineering earth to become a legitimate field of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research is an awareness that studying the full impacts of megaprojects within a disciplinary context will yield only partial answers. Bridges will need to be built that span “rivers” of common ground, bridges that are started on both sides of a river.

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References Badescu, V., Cathcart, R. B., & Schuiling, R. D. (eds.). (2006). Macro-engineering: A challenge for the future. Dordrecht, The Nethelands: Springer. Bolonkin, A. A., & Cathcart, R. B. (2009). Macro-projects: Environment and technology. Hauppauge, NY: NOVA Science Publisher. Cernea, M., & McDowell, C. (2000). Risks and reconstruction. Experiences of resettlers and refugees. Washington, DC: World Bank. Davidson, F. P., & Brooke, K. W. (2006). Building the world: An encyclopedia of the great engineering projects in history. Oxford, UK: Greenwood. Flyvbjerg, B., Bruzelius, B., & Rothengatter, W. (2003). Megaprojects and risk: An anatomy of ambition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nozovsky, A. Y. (2006). 100 great wonders of engineering thought. Moscow: Veche (in Russian). Thomas, W. L. (Ed.). (1957). Man’s role in changing the face of the earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, B. L., Clark, W. C., Kates, R. W., Matthews, J. T., & Meyer, W. B. (Eds.). (1991). The earth as transformed by human action: Global and regional changes in the biosphere over the past 300 years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 2

Building the Next Seven Wonders: The Landscape Rhetoric of Large Engineering Projects Ben Marsh and Janet Jones

2.1 Introduction Engineering projects may seem like the least symbolic parts of our culture – isn’t engineering pure rationality? But they are potent and important symbols. Being engineered, the projects often submerge their symbolism within a rational and instrumental scheme, but the symbols are present and highly legible. As high cost productions of large corporate or state actors, megaengineering projects carry symbolic content that is almost always about elaborating and sustaining the authority and power of those actors. The archetypal suite of historic symbols of power and authority is the Hellenistic “Seven Wonders of the World” list, which presents a range of cultural landscape tropes that are easily recognizable today in the political and social messages contained within large scale engineering projects.

2.2 Reading the Cultural Landscape of Megaengineering Megaengineering projects reconstruct the physical landscape toward human goals; they are important elements of our cultural landscape. The idea of cultural landscape can be approached in a range of ways that help explicate the societal functions of megaengineering projects. Cultural landscapes are parts of the natural world transformed by the actions of humans, “manifestations of culture’s traffic with nature,” as Mitchell (2000: 20) puts it. This perspective is rooted in the ideas of Carl Sauer from the 1920s, of course: A cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a culture group. Culture is the agent; the natural area is the medium. The cultural landscape is the result. (Sauer, 1996: 309)

B. Marsh (B) Department of Geography and Program in Environmental Studies, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837, USA e-mail: [email protected]

S.D. Brunn (ed.), Engineering Earth, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4_2,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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This human-environment aspect of the cultural landscape is central to Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Thomas, 1956), and is at the explicit intellectual center of this volume, in its homage to Gilbert White. Megaengineering is certainly an important cause of environmental change and also a manifestation of that change. But approaching megaengineering primarily as an interaction with the physical world strips it of its human complexity by downplaying the subjective aspects of landscape and diluting the landscape’s cultural-symbolic weight. Another approach to the cultural landscape is to see in it the practical machinery of the world of our experiences, viz., our built environment. This is an instrumental conception of cultural landscape, comfortable within landscape architecture and urban studies. It is epitomized by J. B. Jackson: “far from being spectators of the world we are participants in it” (quoted by Meinig, 1979: 221). Questions raised for the observer who sees the cultural landscape this way might include: How does a human moving through the world interact with a project? How does the project affect human lives? But this approach is less well suited to comprehending the cultural role of large-scale constructions. The communicative goal of any project derives from human participation, but the “mega” aspect of these engineering projects draws the viewer away from direct experience, toward experience mediated by the media or by institutional message systems. A third perspective emphasizes the culture in cultural landscapes. Such an approach is able to harvest meaning from large-scale constructions by explicitly regarding the landscape as a set of cultural messages written in human structures, by approaching the landscape as a text. The landscape . . . is one of the central elements in a cultural system for, as an ordered assemblage of objects, a text, it acts as a signifying system through which a social system is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored. (Duncan, 1990: 16)

The landscape is “a way of seeing,” more a method for situating oneself within the world than an object or an image (Cosgrove, 1998: 1). This approach to cultural landscape study has strong connections to cultural studies, as well as to the study of culture. It addresses the world through a search for meaning: seeking the symbolism of an urban layout, of a house type, of a shrine (Duncan, 1976). When approached as texts and symbols, cultural landscapes offer up diverse elements of meaning. Cultural landscapes must always be within cultural systems, that is, they are symbol systems appropriate to the rhetorical forms current in a society. House-types, funeral monuments, and clothing all convey messages to acculturated viewers about the things that are important to the producer, messages about status, conformity, family, or reverence. Each message system has a vocabulary that is shared between the producer and the reader. The builder must use a symbolic language accessible to the observers of the building. The analogy between cultural landscapes and texts goes beyond just vocabulary. “Landscape rhetoric” implies that there are predictable types of messages within any cultural situation, viz., appeals to power, beauty, nationalism, etc. A common range of landscape meanings and types of meaning recur within any given realm of discourse: images of nature, the heroic

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image, sanctity, travelers’ images, etc. But meaning also evolves. New forms of thought require new symbol sets. “Green,” in the environmental sense, is a modern landscape message, and requires new landscape symbols. And old forms develop new meanings. A period style of architecture may later acquire a revised meaning constructed backwards onto the era, as, for example, 1970s suburban houses may have come to represent anomie or conformity in our retrospect. Symbols are culturally and historically specific, but symbols also derive meaning from the universals of human activity. A symbol is a repository of meanings . . . Insofar as symbols depend on unique events they must differ from individual to individual and from culture to culture. Insofar as they originate in experiences shared by the bulk of mankind they have a worldwide character. (Tuan, 1974: 145)

2.3 Landscape Messages of Engineering Projects Large-scale engineering projects represent some of the biggest investments of financial and political capital that most nations and other large institutional entities ever undertake. Like any actions by large institutions, megaengineering projects should be expected, in addition, to performing whatever instrumental functions they have, to transmit strongly conservative messages underwriting the legitimacy of the institutions. Symbolic communication is central to what states do in all their actions: “modern states could neither exist nor operate effectively without an adequate body of symbol and myth, whatever other excuses they may have for their creation” (Zelinsky, 1988: 13). Throughout human history rising cultures have tied themselves into the mythic systems and cultural landscapes of established cultures, to lend themselves legitimacy; this in itself is a performance of power and ideology. The 19th century symbolic landscape of Washington, DC, is an architectural adoption of Greek political antecedents, much as Rome’s authority was sustained by a creation myth of its Greek roots 2000 years earlier. States and similar actors are sustained through reinforcement of their political ideology, so their products endlessly justify or elaborate their power. [T]he exercise of power is expressed forcefully in language and in a wide range of written texts whose function it is to defend and propagate the particular system of ideas and values. . . . [I]deologies exert their authority and find expression not only in language but also in landscape. Non-verbal ‘documents’ in the landscape can be powerful visual symbols, conveying messages forcefully. . . . Ideologies create, unintentionally as well as deliberately, a landscape as a symbol of signification, expressive of authority (Baker, 1992: 5)

Since megaengineering projects are among the largest statements by these entities, the expression of power is very strong through them. One can understand how important symbolism is to megaengineering by examining the economics of the projects. Many megaengineering projects require an investment that far exceeds the economic utility of the projects. Any analysis of

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megaengineering projects will confront what Flyvbjerg calls the “megaprojects paradox:” At the same time as many more and much larger infrastructure projects are being proposed and built around the world, it is becoming clear that many such projects have poor performance records in terms of economy, environment, and public support. Cost overruns and lower-than-predicted revenues frequently place project viability at risk and redefine projects that were initially promoted as effective vehicles to economic growth as possible obstacles to such growth. (Flyvbjerg et al., 2002: 3)

This is only an apparent paradox. Economic performance is not the full measure of success. These projects are planned and executed for a symbolic value that may well exceed their nominal fiscal value. The symbolism born in megaengineering projects is a variant of the familiar cultural messages that can be seen throughout the cultural landscape. Because of the great size of megaengineering projects, their legibility is different from that of more conventional projects. They exercise outsized instrumental functions (airport, rail system, dam) compared to engineering projects on an urban or intraurban scale (train station, boulevard, fountain). Their messages match the statements of civic pride, heroism, and majesty available from equestrian statues, ceremonial spaces, stylish façades, monuments, and historical markers. But they are far bigger, big enough to make them entirely another sort of symbols, different in kind and not just in degree. The “mega” aspect introduces scale as a design factor. Part of the meaning is their size vis-à-vis human bodily experiences. A very big project is different from simply a big project. The observer’s perspective is taken into account within the design of many of these forms; the symbology is meant to be read from a controlled range of perspectives. The modern observer often needs to be omniscient: island terra-sculpting like that of Dubai could be fully legible only to a society with airplanes or Google Earth. In contrast, the perspective of premodern engineering projects is usually appropriate to direct observation, or the stories or drawings of those who observed them directly. When this is not so, in the case as the Nazca geoglyphs of Peru that cannot be wholly seen from the ground, for example, the apparent contradiction between the form and the observer becomes central to our interrogation of the projects. Megaengineered landscapes also provide us with huge altered spaces that do not have clear semiotic content: megacities, suburbs, farming regions, expansive mining, and deforestation. Such landscapes may be thick with meaning at a local scale, but they are not a single project, a single “cultural production.” Landscapes like these are not meant to be seen as a whole. Who sees a city, a highway system, a forest? These landscapes carry some meaning, but they are not intentionally freighted with symbolism. Compare a coin and a washer. They are the same size, and they are both cultural products. The coin is far more “legible” in a cultural sense, however, and its symbolic density is far higher. Similarly, landscapes of industrious economic activity often seem strictly utilitarian – the steel mill, the strip mine. Utilitarianism bears a message, too. Even tools are symbolic; they bear the “meaning” of the other tools in the technology that fits against them. A claw hammer says

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nail, a nail says wood, nail and wood says frame construction, etc., and thereby “hammer” comes to represent an entire technological universe based on access to forests and a certain way of organizing labor. “Landscapes of material are also landscapes of meaning: praxis is itself symbolic, all landscapes are symbolic in practice” (Baker, 1992: 8). Even the most utilitarian megaengineering projects will construct a cultural superstructure atop their instrumental base, to paraphrase Berger (Cosgrove & Daniels, 1989: 7). Utilitarianism itself is a specific statement of values. A plain Amish buggy is, in its very plainness, highly evocative about humility and related social values. Power is the foremost statement of large landscape projects, but the actual messages are diverse. Explication of power is the symbolic “project” of the engineering, but it is not the message itself. Exercise of power requires control and cooperation, which can be attained in different ways. Control comes from fear, and control also comes through benevolence, so the state-level messages of landscape projects might communicate about control in either way. Power can be supported by elevated or base emotions, equally by the love within patriotism, for example, as by shared loathing of the “other.” Messages about power draw upon affective dichotomies like these: safety/insecurity, bounty/want, us/them, pride/fear. The best project has the strongest impact and a strong design seeks to evoke potent emotional responses. A way to understand this is by comparing our modern responses to cultural landscapes with a set of venerable landscape tropes familiar to us from antiquity.

2.4 Landscapes of “The Seven Wonders” The set of landscape symbols found within the classical Seven Wonders of the World is a good map of the symbols of modern megaengineering. Many modern projects seek, in one sense or another, to be the next “wonders of the world.” The messages provided by many megaengineering projects today are shared with the meanings of large projects in antiquity. Looking at past engineering activities is an effective way to understand modern engineering. The psychological distance we have from symbolic projects of the past helps us to see those symbols more objectively. We are not as good at separating ourselves from the symbols that are used today. And the experience of encountering a familiar symbol system in a 2,200-year-old landscape reminds us of how much is immutable in our basic landscape rhetoric. The Seven Wonders of the World represent the archetypal framework of comparative political landscape symbols. They compose a catalog of ancient statesupported and state-supporting large-scale symbolic landscape projects. They were certainly the megaengineering projects of their day. The Seven Wonders are still very much alive in popular landscape appreciation (Fig. 2.1). The list is a Hellenistic structuring of the ancient cultural landscape, completed ca. 240 BCE (Table 2.1). The Seven Wonders represent only a small slice of the great landmarks of antiquity, of course. These particular features were chosen because they share certain characteristics (Romer & Romer, 2001). They were thematically linked through references

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Fig. 2.1 Traditional 20th century popular presentation of the sole surviving Wonder, The Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, from a vintage postcard. (Postcard by Detroit Publishing Company, ca. 1910) Table 2.1 The Seven Wonders of the ancient world Wonder

Site characteristics

Landscape message

Pyramid of Khufu at Giza

Tomb of a pharaoh; resurrection symbol Rich urban garden in a desert Large sacred monument Large sacred building Large, ornate funeral monument for Persian satrap Heroic statue of a Greek god in a commercial port Lighthouse in a Hellenistic city

Sanctity, memorial, abundance

Hanging Gardens of Babylon Statue of Zeus at Olympia Temple of Artemis at Ephesus Tomb of Maussollos at Halicarnassus Colossus of Rhodes Lighthouse of Alexandria

Abundance, control of nature Sanctity Sanctity Sanctity, memorial Exchange, military success Exchange

to Alexander, who had died in 323 BCE. As a unifier of the lands of west Asia, Alexander first brought an awareness of the cultural complexity of the larger world to the Mediterranean heartland, and created the first audience for this globalized sense of wonder. The Wonders display a high level of similarity. Geographically, they follow the travels of Alexander as he moved through the Near East (Fig. 2.2). They were each legible in the landscape to the contemporary viewer in a similar way: they tended to be elevated and they are mostly maritime. They shared a landscape function in that they are nearly all landmarks that would be important to the traveler. These unities among them invite the observer, modern or ancient, to see the Wonders as a set. The

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Fig. 2.2 Location of the Hellenistic Seven Wonders and of the 2007 “New 7 Wonders.” The older list (circles) was cosmopolitan within the Hellenistic world of the eastern Mediterranean; the newer list (triangles) delimits popular international travel destinations for European and North American tourists

original political function of each of the Wonders was parochial aggrandizement of a local ruler. The list was a product of an historical moment when the unity of Greek culture was challenged by the new awareness of the complex, cosmopolitan world in which it existed. The presentation of the landmarks as an ensemble linked the fractured Hellenistic society that elevated them back to the idealized coherent world of Alexander. His greatness was reflected in the authority and power of the lesser kings whose realms fell under the shadow of the hero. The Seven Wonders are landscapes of authority. Among them they demonstrate the range of landscape elements that were recognized in Hellenistic society as projecting and reinforcing a sense of political power. Most of them are unsurprising today as ways to show power. • The cult of personality inherent in memorial structure for great rulers, like Maussollos’s mausoleum or Khufu’s pyramid at Giza, imbues the landscape with the authority of the dead ruler whose majesty demanded the monument. These Wonders are dramatic memorial landscapes used to enlarge and support the legacy the ruler. • Defense is a literal manifestation of power. Defensive works are strong representations of state power. The earliest list of wonders included the walls of Babylon, an expression of Babylonian military authority. • Economic exchange is a potent reinforcement of political power, as it celebrates the material benefits of an effective government. This is illustrated among the Wonders by the lighthouse at Alexandra, as well as by the Colossus of Rhodes, which was an explicit navigation aid as well as a celebration of a military success.

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• Sanctity is a manifestation of power in many ancient realms. Sacred sites were state projects in antiquity, linked closely to the divine royal role in preservation of a harmonious cosmos. The religious Wonders are the oldest structures on the list, drawing on already venerable linkages between power and worship. The sacredness of the fifth century Statue of Zeus epitomized Greek identity in Hellenistic times as did the Temple of Artemis. The pyramid of Khufu supported an important politico-religious function. The afterlife of the pharaoh needed to be sustained to preserve the lives of all Egyptians. • Control over nature to generate abundance is the theme of the Hanging Garden, a landscape whose symbolic connection to power may otherwise seem indirect. The Edenic symbolism of a garden in a desert is potent. The Hellenistic story of this Wonder is that it was a reconstruction of her native northern forests for a beloved homesick queen. It represents the power to alter the very ecology of the desert, and by extension, the ability to provide food in a harsh world by irrigation. The most bucolic of the Wonders is also a symbol of power. Self-conscious modern versions of the Seven Wonders are less reliant on the “power” messages than the original Seven Wonders. Modern efforts to list wonders favor the touristic over the powerful. Wonders on recent lists, such as the web-based, commercialized “New 7 Wonders,” are usually linked not to native political power, but to the subsidiary power of the tourist dollar as it is drawn to the scenic and the exotic. The New 7 Wonders list was announced in 2007 – on the numerologically weighty date of 07-07-07 – after a reported 100,000,000 votes worldwide (Table 2.2; see Fig. 2.2). Individual countries, and their tourist organizations, campaigned tirelessly for votes. The National Geographic Society webpage sniffed “The winners were voted for by Internet and phone, American Idol style.” (Owen, 2007) A more scholarly list of wonders, unconstrained by the occult numerology of 7, is UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee’s “World Heritage Site” list of “878 properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value” (UNESCO, 2009). This list is highly Euro-centric: Belgium has nine cultural sites but Thailand has only three. The selection criteria for the cultural sites are focused on the role of the site within a specific cultural tradition rather than on any universal or global meaning. Related lists abound. A modest empire has been founded by the author of 1,000 Places To See Before You Die (Schultz, 2003) to follow up her lusciously illustrated, Table 2.2 “The New Seven Wonders,” a 2007 list derived from worldwide popular vote. (New7Wonders Foundation, 2007)

Wonder

Location

Christ the Redeemer Colosseum Taj Mahal Great Wall Petra Machu Picchu Chichén Itzá

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Rome, Italy Agra, India China Jordan’s Peru Mexico

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best selling catalogue of tourist destinations; at the www.1000beforeyoudie.com site one can buy regional versions of the list, place-a-day calendars, blank journal books, jigsaw puzzles, and board games. Like the Hellenistic list makers, we are still subsuming the cultural landscapes of others into our world, but now through the power of tourism. Taj Mahal and the Great Wall become part of our own cultural landscape, in the same way that archaeological museum displays have captured others’ landscapes: the Elgin marbles and “Cleopatra’s Needle” were located into the cultural landscape of London, not the Mediterranean (having been previously disassociated from their original locations by the Ottoman Empire). The landscape role of features such as these derives from the individual personal experiences of tourists, rather than from external political actors. The Strip in Las Vegas may provide the best synopsis of the role of wondersof-the-world in modern life. The classic Wonders and other wondrous sights of the world are replicated in desert. Great cultural symbols – The Sphinx, Eifel Tower, Brooklyn Bridge and the cityscape of classical Rome – are harvested from their sites and returned to us as farce, having been stripped of detail, context, scale, and sincerity. Las Vegas reminds us of the importance of the tourist to the symbolic geography of the modern world. MacCannell suggests that it is through the tourist that the modern world makes sense of itself, by providing “a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into unified experience” (MacCannell, 1976: 13). Modernity is not the only source of “discontinuity” for tourism to overcome. The original Wonders list unified the Hellenistic worlds in the same way, by “incorporating its fragments into unified experience.” Alexander’s soldiers were also tourists. But wonders favored by modern tourists reflect a more benign and self-indulgent worldview than the old Wonders did, and only one of the New 7 Wonders could be considered a recent engineering project. The rougher symbol system of the old Wonders is perpetrated more clearly within megaengineering than in the new lists of tourists’ wonders.

2.5 Seven Wonders of Megaengineering How might the landscape tropes derived from the Seven Wonders be mapped onto familiar cultural landscape components of contemporary megaengineering? Table 2.3 offers our list of seven landscape messages broadly derived from the Seven Wonders, matched with contemporary U.S. and ancient examples of such features. Potential negative readings of the same features – “second thoughts” that modern society might have about these feature types – are suggested as well. Perhaps the most common symbolic freight of a modern megaengineered project is abundance through the control of nature, like the Hanging Garden. Dams and irrigation systems show the generative power of their creator, the government. NASA’s space program is another display of the ability of the government to overcome the limits of nature, although its material return to the citizens is limited. Bureau of

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Table 2.3 Examples of modern “wonders” in the U.S. organized by themes derived from the ancient Wonders Familiar and traditional landscape tropes

Possible representative U.S. “wonders”

Hellenistic Seven Wonders comparison

Additional ancient comparanda

Modern “second thoughts” about the trope

Abundance, control of nature

Lower Colorado water system, TVA, NASA space programs

Hanging garden

Granaries, irrigation works

Memorial of rulers; celebration of the state; secular sanctity Military Security

Washington DC, National Mall complex, Arlington

Mausoleum, Temple of Zeus, Temple of Artemis

Column of Trajan, Acropolis

Ecological complexity; obliviousness to natural limits, unintended consequences Cult of personality, incipient authoritarianism

Norfolk, Nevada Test Site, Fort Hood Interstate highways, Panama Canal, JFK airport New York skyline, Brooklyn Bridge, Golden Gate bridge Lower Mississippi flood control, Clean water act Palm Springs, Las Vegas, Disneyworld, mega-cruise ships

Ishtar Gate

Hadrian’s Wall, Great Wall, city walls Roman roads, Phoenician fleet, Corinth canal Aqueducts, theaters, temples

Ruinous expense, imperial over-reach Resources and energy consumption, sprawl, Vulnerability to attack, and to shifting fortunes

Pyramid of Khurfu

Sacrifice sites: Parthenon, Teotihuacan

Vulnerability; the technological fix

Hanging Garden

Colosseum, Taj Mahal, panem et circenses

Excess, inequity, resource consumption; new economic limits

Transport, commerce

Civic identification, Civic pride

Societal protection

Conspicuous consumption, whimsy

Lighthouse at Alexandra

Colossus

Reclamation water projects are said, clichédly, to “turn the desert green.” Billions of dollars are spent to provide irrigation and urban water to the arid Southwest, from the Colorado River and elsewhere. The TVA and the Columbia River Project are additional symbols of productivity, of the government’s capacity to provide. It is notable that many of these projects are rooted in the Great Depression, when the need for material support was strongly felt. The importance in antiquity of water projects as demonstrations of government benevolence is a truism; Wittfogel

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famously hypothesized that the supply water was the primary benefit to the citizens for incorporation into the “pristine state” (1957). Benevolent governmental projects extend far beyond water works. Many governments created their legitimacy through storage and redistribution, borrowing abundance from the population in good times and giving back in poor times. The great granaries of the Inca, Egyptians, and Hittites served this function, and the yearto-year stability that the state provided in this way was essential to societal survival in marginal environments. Some of the greatest expenses of the modern state are similar but non-landscape methods of wealth redistribution to assure the ongoing productivity of the citizens. Social Security and Medicare generate huge political support for the power of the state by transferring wealth between generations. Governmental food subsidies and surplus food distribution are similar phenomena to express abundance by taking relative surplus from a more favored part of the population and giving it to another part. Negative readings of such features of control and abundance are almost as common as positive ones. Gilbert White wrote at length about the ecological hubris of human attempts to control the Colorado, how they generated extensive unintended consequences by altering fluvial systems, and how designers displayed obliviousness to natural complexity (1968). The negative interpretations of human control of nature gain salience as the megaimpacts of megaprojects upon the environment become more widely recognized, viz., deforestation, nuclear war, radioactive waste, ocean pollution, and ultimately global warming. Memorials to leaders and celebrations of state “sanctity” are common uses of public spaces. The state is supported by cults of personality directed toward deceased leaders, or other representatives of the state like soldiers, because these associate the state with the important people and merge that association with the reverence in which the dead are held. The ancient world was thick with grand tombs, burial mounds, and memorial shrines. In Mogul India, leaders would begin building their memorials as soon as they rose to power; those who died young are commemorated only by ambitious foundations. In the U.S. we honor deceased presidents most highly; large engineering projects like cities, airports, a U.S. state, and the entire interstate highway system are named for them. Military cemeteries are some of the most extensive memorial landscapes that can be found in the U.S., and lesser memorials stand in every town in America to hallow senators, generals, and soldiers. The memorials to wars and to past presidents along the National Mall are the grandest examples of these messages in the U.S. But those out-sized monuments from the 19th and early 20th centuries are readily caricatured today by comparison to the massive cult-of-personality installations of the same sort that have been popular in authoritarian states: giant bronze Lenins, Maos, and Saddams. In awareness of this modern re-reading, many recent memorials have been intentionally humansized, such as the 1997 Franklin Roosevelt memorial at which visitors can approach a bronze statue of a man in a wheelchair or pet his bronze Scottie. The famously intimate geometry of the Vietnam memorial on the Mall has a similarly humanscaled feel, especially when compared to the retro formalism and self-conscious neo-neoclassicism of the newer WWII monument.

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Few large memorials commemorate women, beyond an occasional homage to a monarch (Victoria Station or Queen Maud Land) or a religious personage (Notre Dame de Paris, or Calcutta, which was named after the goddess Kali). As with so much about megaengineering, memorials remind us of the extent to which the cultural landscape is usually gendered, and the portions of the landscape associated with authority and power will be male. Of the original Wonders, only two involve women closely, and again it is a queen and a goddess (the Hanging Gardens and the Temple of Artemis). The overall male aspect of the engineering landscapes is pointed up by the fetishization of bridges, towers, machinery, and waterworks – “engineering porn,” as they say – in civic and national imagery. Perhaps only the landscapes of leisure and commerce escape dominance by the masculine. The political obligation for the modern Western state to be secular has diminished the role of the sacred in civic landscape symbolism. But the state capitalizes in non-religious ways on the same sensations of awe that are produced in religious contexts. The state creates a range of spaces that can be considered sacred, including those that are sacred in a nationalistic or secular sense, as well as the literally religious like a cathedral or a shrine. All sacred landscapes bear memories of the most critical cultural productions of a people – moments of literal or figurative worship, moments of awe or reverence. War memorials enshrine the sacrifice of the fallen and, therefore, the authority of the ones who can order the war. Sites of loss, like Arlington, Gettysburg, Normandy, and Ground Zero, are engineered into expansive sites of secular sanctity. And the monument always also commemorates the commemorator; every war memorial is a message from the group that built it to the citizens who see it and about proper personal investments in the state. Some landscapes are venerated in themselves rather than through a personality, such as the historical district or the cultural heritage site like Plymouth Rock. Capital cities express political power through the reverence that is given to them as nationalistic symbols as well as in the majesty of the structures provided by the state. Capital cities are the most common planned cities, and are megaengineered as cultural sites with careful sightlines and artful clusterings of monuments. There are more than a dozen examples of brand new national capital cities having been built, such as Brasilia, Islamabad, Canberra, New Delhi, and Washington. Typically the new city is nearer the center of the state than the previous capital and designed to encourage economic development as well as political unity. New capitals are usually emphatic design statements, using extravagant architecture and formalized and geometric landscapes. Cosgrove (1989) demonstrates the layers of verbal, geometric, and numerological symbolism underlying the landscape of Washington, DC, for example. Security is the plainest imperative of the state. The modern political discourse of security often seems shrill to scholarly observers, but an appeal to security is still the one of the surest ways to capture public wealth. Military security is a perennial concern, and a perennial topic for engineered landscape messages. A few huge military complexes can represent the genre in this country – the Newport News naval yards, the Nevada Test Site, or the Pentagon itself, the world’s largest office building. A critical take on these modern security features is also familiar, viz., that they are

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signs of a paranoid worldview and represent ruinous expenses incurred to support imperial overreach. In earlier times security was shown by forts and other military establishments. In antiquity the wall defined the city, and the wall symbolized the power of the state to protect its people. The Ishtar gate and the Walls of Babylon, from the earlier lists of Wonders, were theatrically grand defensive features. More recent derivative lists of Wonders often include the Great Wall of China, the most emphatic ancient security symbol in the world as well as Hadrian’s Wall. (There is an irony about security being engineered onto the landscape. Although it is a strong symbol, it often falls victim to attackers not connected so tightly to the landscape. The German sweep around the Maginot line during WWI may be the best known example of the contradiction.) Security bears a message for those on the outside of the defended space as well as those within. Security constructions should generate highly levels of confidence and dependence for those within them. And the defenses should project a sense of impregnability from outside, to forestall attack. The best defenses are never challenged. In the post 9/11 world security has become an especially visible landscape element, as U.S. citizens trade freedom of movement and rights to privacy for a (nominal) freedom from fear, which is supported by widespread surveillance in public places, by armored architecture, and by ubiquitous police presences. Today security from violence and terror is often an overprint onto the rest of the landscape: seen in the bomb-proofing applied to buildings, for example, or the securitized structure of the modern airport. Individuals show personal-sized symbols of power by investing in landscapes of security, such as buying into a gated community or hiring guards to accompany them. Ideas of security refer most directly to military power, but modern state security is a more nuanced idea. The U.S. government has been engineering a 2,000 mi (3,200 km) “security fence” on its southern border to protect the country from foreign threats. The threats are not risks of violence, but rather economic threats from low wage labor competition and from drains on the public budget. Security means economic security as well as military security. Transport and commerce are recurrent cultural landscape themes affirming society’s investment in communication and trade. These are highly visible in the U.S. today in the Interstate Highway system, Amtrak, and a dozen giant airports. Travel facilities are overrepresented in the suite of megaengineering projects, as they were among the Seven Wonders. Airports, ports, high speed rail lines, gateway symbols, highways systems, bridges, and tunnels are among the most common examples of megaengineering (Fig. 2.3). The Panama Canal was one of the strongest landscape symbols of the Twentieth Century, an enormous engineering project understood at its time as symbolic of the capacity the United States to alter the landscape to its ends, to make the oceans meet. A modern flip side of the positive image of transport is the great economic cost, and the environmental cost in sprawl, of course, and in the energy and material resource consumption, that these represent. There is a direct political connection from travel facilities to power. In antiquity the road system defined the extent of the empire. The Roman roads were explicit symbols of state power; they were how soldiers traveled quickly to maintain

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Fig. 2.3 The Los Angeles Freeway Interchange, symbol of efficient modern travel – and also of sprawl and profligate energy consumption. (Source: ifoto, copyright 2009, reproduced with permission from Shutterstock Images)

control of an expansive empire. “All roads lead to Rome,” thus they also lead from Rome when that need arises. The Roman roads themselves symbolized the reach of the empire, even when the soldiers were not there. The roads were engineered above the landscape, “sunken walls” as some call them, to be ready reminders to restive locals. The U.S. Interstate Highway system was authorized in 1956 through “The Defense Highway Act,” ostensibly for a similar military reason; the overpasses were engineered to fit the dimensions of the intercontinental missile. Social control is often based on the control of the movement of individuals in time and space, and control of movement is a central power of the modern state as it regulates immigration, labor mobility, long distance commerce, vagrancy, and passports (Torpey, 1998). In antiquity travel could be used as a cultural weapon; for example, the Hebrews were transported in the Babylonian Captivity to separate them from their roots in the landscape and thus to assault their identity. The same rending of cultural roots happens in modern times when populations are dislocated, such as the exchange of Muslims and Hindus between the new states of Pakistan and post-colonial India during the Partition, or the territorial displacements of the Armenians, Kurds, Greeks, and Greek Cypriots during stages of the development of modern Turkey. Conversely, pilgrimages imprint a broadly shared cultural identity on otherwise diverse groups. The Hajj unites Muslims from around the world, and travel to the sacred ghats at Varanasi gives a shared landscape meaning to Hinduism. Christianity offers examples of formal and informal pilgrimage sites. In Medieval

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Europe the faithful walked to cathedrals for the heightened religious experience. In the automobile landscape, driving to suburban megachurches – larger even than the cathedrals – is the optimal religious experience for many. The perceptual significance of travel is important as well. The emotional power of bodily movement upon participants is apparent in the symbolic importance of gates and harbors and terminals, as well as in the ceremonial perambulations that guided the construction of sacred spaces like Hindu temples and Egyptian funereal shrines, and in the processional music of weddings and commencements and inaugurations, in parades, and in military music leading soldiers into battle. Engineering projects related to travel draw on that same psychology of how movement will “transport” the participant. Investments in transport infrastructure also support societal wealth of course; they pay dividends in a simple financial sense. But travel facilities are especially effective carriers of symbolism. Overinvestment in airports and in airport access is common in poor countries. Such facilities are good examples of Flyvbjerg’s megaprojects paradox: hundreds of millions of dollars spent on an airport that handles a dozen international flights a day. Such places are symbolically very important. Travel facilities welcome the stranger, and tell the crucial first story about how well the state supports the interests of its people. Travelers from afar unavoidably witness these projects. Cities, especially, build monuments to their own capacity to command resources and generate civic identification (Fig. 2.4). The term “civil boosterism” was created for exactly this sentiment. Public landscapes speak of economic power of their builders, and the landscape is often the clearest way for cities to brag about their wealth. Aesthetic style is a manifestation of economic power – elegance speaks glowingly of the power to purchase it. A hundred years ago Veblen recognized “conspicuous consumption” as a tool of social differentiation, explaining the

Fig. 2.4 Civic pride of New York incorporated into a U.S. postage stamp, featuring the Manhattan skyline and the gateway symbols of the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River waterfront

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political economy of fancy cars and stylish clothes (1912). A version of this effect can be seen on the cultural landscape in conspicuous construction by cities, states, corporations, and real estate developers. Witness the architectural exuberances of the great urban museums, galleries, opera houses around the world. Sports complexes are examples of this activity, as are skylines and bridges (see Fig. 2.4). However, civic identification is ephemeral, and the monuments are vulnerable either to direct attack like the New York skyline on 9/11, or to vagaries of economics as when a city finds itself with a stadium named after a bankrupt and disgraced company, like Houston, TX, recent home of Enron Field. Societies invest heavily in protecting themselves in non-military ways. Security includes security from threats of nature as well. Flood defense on the Lower Mississippi, one of the largest megaengineering projects in the U.S., was the pride of the region, in the simpler days before Hurricane Katrina. The lower Mississippi flood control systems represent a clear social good, but they are also a strong landscape symbol of government protection. The billions of dollars of pollution control facilities that the government has purchased or mandated, seen in the thousands of expensive sewer plants all over America that keep our water clean, have a similar role. The ancient antecedents for this trope are subtle, or absent in most cultures. The pyramid of Khufu at Giza was understood as a facilitator of societal continuance, since the well being of the Pharaoh in the afterlife was essential for the flood of the Nile and thus the success of the state. Sites of religious sacrifice, such as the great Aztec temples, served to stabilize the ancient world for those people. In modern America landscape features of protection may have come to represent vulnerability rather than safety, after the loss of New Orleans. The diminished sense of security that followed the failure of the levees at New Orleans and an insufficient government response is seen by many as the major assault on the domestic credibility of the administration of George W. Bush. Security is a very important message, in success or in failure. The state is protected through the control of its own citizens. Engineering is often social engineering, to affect the behavior of residents. Buildings that confront explicit security threats are often carefully constructed to guide and divide the occupants. Prisons, airports, high schools, and government buildings are familiar examples. To visit a U.S. embassy abroad in the age of terror is to enter an Orwellian landscape of blank walls, layers of doorways, ill-lit hermetic spaces, and disjointed communication through thick glass. The visitor’s inevitable sense of powerlessness before the strength of the US government may be a byproduct of the need for security, or it may be an explicit design goal. Ancient palaces were designed to inspire helplessness in those who approached them; the Flavian Palace or Mycenaean palaces were heavily guarded, and accessible only through bewilderingly circuitous pathways. The city of Naypyidaw, the new capital of Myanmar that was started in 2005, is a sophisticated social engineering project, protecting the embattled generals from domestic upheaval through the city’s isolation and its dispersed components. Journalist Siddharth Varadarajan referred to the social engineering context of the new city as a “dictatorship by cartography.”

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Vast and empty, Burma’s new capital will not fall to an urban upheaval easily. It has no city centre, no confined public space where even a crowd of several thousand people could make a visual, let alone political, impression. (Varadarajan, 2007: 69)

The modern American city itself is a space that is engineered – or at least evolved – to control people. Central to this control is in the functional apartheid that is imposed on minority residents all across America, through the use of roads and other infrastructure to physically divide populations, through differential access to public resources, and through the use of redevelopment and annexation to control political enfranchisement (Johnson, Parnell, Joyner, Marsh, & Christman, 2004). Finally, much investment by wealthy individuals or by entertainment companies is meant simply to amuse and to display conspicuous wealth. Las Vegas and the desert leisure communities of the Southwest are prime examples. Resorts and gated developments are semi-privatized examples of landscape expressions of economic power. A discussion of these landscapes inevitably turns to narcissists like Donald Trump, but many others have the same inclinations and the same tastes, if not the same resources. The magnitude of geoengineering at resorts, islands, marinas, ski slopes, and golf courses responds to these inclinations. Landscapes of whimsy might be the purest manifestation of this: the extravagant, but entirely functionless, Dubai coastal construction, Christo-like urban-scale art installations, and the fantastic architecture of gambling venues in Atlantic City and Las Vegas are examples. Commercial spaces also engineer human behavior toward more willing expenditures. The architectural analysis of Learning from Las Vegas provides the classic description of the semiotic commercial landscape into which American car culture is immersed (Venturi et al., 1977) and thousands of commercial strips across the country survive through the same principles. Pedestrian commercial spaces are even more manipulative; the intricate design of a department store or an enclosed mall steers the shoppers’ paths through space, and steers their desires and their commercial behavior as well. But these landscapes also represent wretched excess to many viewers, and remind us of the huge economic, social, and environmental cost of the great income inequities within the US. In today’s economic climate, even extravagant landscapes have come to reflect the new economic limits. As growth slows, resorts are under-occupied and leisure real estate values decline sharply.

2.6 Evolving Meanings Within Megaengineering The landscape symbol systems behind our interpretation of megaengineering projects are evolving rapidly in modern times. Changes in the world are forcing changes in the symbolic weight of megaengineering projects. Political landscape symbolism is always unstable in time. Monumental landscape alteration is an activity favored more in some political and historic circumstances than others. Noting that the period of the building the large Wessex henges, including Stonehenge, was followed by a period of much humbler landscape constructions,

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Thomas suggests “It follows that the monuments of the Neolithic are something specific, something which defines a particular social formation” (1991: 29), especially a risky, shifting political environment. The aggrandizing power of monumental features is used more for totalitarian political entities needing enhancement than, for example, for stable and populist social democracies. As political climates shift toward or away from authoritarianism, the political landscapes, including the megaengineered parts, become more or less explicitly about power and authority. Many of our most grandiosely expressive political landscapes are from times of widespread stress, when government paternalism was most welcome. Periods of political uncertain in the 20th century U.S. history are drawn onto the landscape as the massive public work projects of the Depression, the megalithic bureaucratic landscapes of Washington that expanded during WW II, and the many extensive military constructions from the Cold War. An interesting discourse is emerging within the landscape vocabulary about state and corporate behavior. The concept of abundance now includes the new element of “environmental health.” One’s world is only as rich as it is healthy; ironically abundance now can include the idea of not using resources. National parks have projected the concept of wilderness preservation – a variant of the abundance meme – for over a century, but a new measure of state power is the restoration of the previously degraded. States invest in cleanliness, as do corporations. The Kissimmee River in Florida is being restored to its meandering form from before it was “improved” in the 1950s, through billions of tax dollars spent to undo previous engineering. Chesapeake Bay, New York Bight, Boston Harbor, and Lake Erie receive equivalent levels of megaengineered ecological remediation. The ongoing investment of money into removing dams from rivers turns on its head the oddly anthropocentric language once used for control of nature: “reclamation” was what we did to wetlands and rivers when we brought them under human control. Now they are being liberated from human control, although we do not have symmetrical language for “unreclaiming” them. Corporations invest heavily in their own aggrandizement by proclaiming the cleanliness of their effluents; more may be spent on trumpeting some corporate environmental successes than had been spent on the success itself, it seems. Landscape symbols are now experienced from afar far more than before. Landscape features are commonly only seen by secondary presentations of imagery for most people, seen on television far more often than experienced directly. The design of mega-features may be calibrated more for the camera than for the traveler. The internet in general, and perhaps Google maps in particular, level the public experience of distant landscapes: the best view of many places might be digital, no matter how rich you are. As graphical reproduction techniques have improved over the last few centuries, imagery has been displacing direct experience of the built and the natural environments throughout Western consciousness. Even when one is actually on the ground, landscape interaction is often guided by stylized understandings of the correct perspectives on a scene. Tour guides lead their charges to the particular spots from which standard postcard or travel poster images of a site are taken so that tourists’ own pictures will look “right.” Earth itself, with which we

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should be entirely intimate, is frequently represented by the most remote of images, the canonical 1972 Apollo 17 “Blue Marble” whole disk photograph centered over the South Indian Ocean. The mega-landscape “winners,” the makers of the most wondrous megaengineering projects, are a now different group of people than in even the recent past. A couple decades ago landscape extravagance was largely an enterprise of the Eurocentric states. Now conspicuous construction is more apparent in Asia, in the Persian Gulf, in oil-rich Russia, and especially in China. Shanghai has 4,000 skyscrapers, twice the number that New York has, and another 1,000 are expected in this decade (French, 2006). This is exactly the point of conspicuous consumption, of course: it is important that someone can afford a luxury solely because someone else cannot. The “someones” have been shifting eastward (Fig. 2.5).

Fig. 2.5 Skyline of Shanghai, which has thoroughly eclipsed New York in density of skyscrapers. Quintessentially urban landscapes have become more prevalent in Asia than in the Eurocentric world over the last decade. (Source: Claudio Zaccherini, copyright 2009, reproduced with permission from Shutterstock Images)

Of course, the economic deck is getting reshuffled right now, and the near future is especially unclear. In March 2009, the BBC reported that half of Dubai’s residential and commercial construction planned for the next three years, worth US$ 76 billion, has been canceled or suspended. (BBC News, 2009) In the U.S. government investment is typically up during recessions, but the favored projects are less ostentatious and more labor-friendly than during boom times – fewer opera houses and more mass transit systems or greening projects. The messaging success of extravagant projects may be harder to assess these days, as social values shift in response to outside events. What may recently have been confidently presented as a grand and elegant gesture, a luxurious tropical resort, for example, can as easily be seen as an embarrassing symbol of waste and indulgence. Notice that the resale market for corporate jets became glutted early on in the most recent recession, as companies dumped the newly embarrassing symbols. Expanding public concern about poverty, environmental impact and human rights issues can force reinterpretation of the messages. The heterogeneity of global

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culture vastly increases the risk that messages cannot be interpreted as they were sent. The intricate internal power memes of the North Korean autocracy are just tragic and comic to most of the world. The global impacts of macroprojects themselves complicate the semiotics of their landscape manifestation. How should people read a project like the Three Gorges Dam that, in some fashion, glorifies a state, but maybe best known worldwide for its massive degradation of the local environment? Meaning becomes increasingly mutable within the globalized information field.

2.7 Conclusion No aspect of macroengineering makes sense unless it is understood as being part of a landscape symbol system. The magnitude of investment in large projects reflects not only an economic calculation; the projects are also investments in symbolic content. That is why macroengineering seems to present an economic paradox. Many design decisions about large projects act to increase their landscape legibility at the expense of their utility; the engineering itself may become subordinate to symbolic concerns. The messages that are typically linked to the “mega” part are themselves oversized. The project needs to be obvious and emphatic; it needs to evoke “wonder” in a fashion that would be familiar to designers from antiquity. Each large product by a powerful actor supports the ideological legitimacy and authority of that actor. Large scale engineering constructs a landscape that reinforces the power of the builder, whenever it was built. The themes of Hellenistic landscape interpretation represented by the list of Seven Wonders continue to be relevant. As the world evolves, as the world is changed by globalization, geopolitical conflict, economic disruption, and environmental degradation, the landscape symbol systems will change. The most powerful economic actors are likely to be different every few decades, and statements that were admired by one generation may be embarrassing the next. But in many ways the root meaning of large scale alteration of the landscape will continue to resemble the 2200 year old of landscape wonders chosen to track Alexander’s successes through the Near East. Landscape transformation is an explicit representation of economic, military, ecological, and social power, and power is always used to justify more power.

References Baker, A. R. H. (1992). Introduction: on ideology and landscape. In A. R. H. Baker & G. Biger (Eds.), Ideology and landscape in historical perspective: Essays on the meanings of some places in the past (pp. 1–15). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. BBC News. (2009). Dubai property boom hits the wall. Retrieved March 9, 2009, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7933265.stm Cosgrove, D. E. (1998). Social formation and symbolic landscape. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Cosgrove D. E. (1989). Geography is everywhere: Culture and symbolism in human landscapes. In D. Gregory & R. Walford (Eds.), Horizons in Human Geography (pp. 118–135). London: Macmillan.

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Cosgrove, D. E., & Daniels, S. (1989). The iconography of landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duncan, J. S. (1990). The city as text: The politics of landscape interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duncan Jr., J. S. (1976). Landscape and the communication of social identity. In A. Rapoport (Ed.), The mutual interaction of people and their built environment (pp. 391–401). The Hague, Paris: Mouton Publishers. Flyvbjerg, B., Bruzelius, N., & Rothengatter, W. (2002). Megaprojects and risk: Making decisions in an uncertain world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. French, H. W. (2006) Letter from China: Quick, catch a glimpse of Shanghai vanishing International Herald Tribune. 6 April Johnson, J., Parnell, A., Joyner, A., Marsh, B., & Christman, C. (2004) Racial apartheid in a small southern town, Review of Black Political Economy, 31, 4. MacCannell, D. (1976). The tourist: A new theory of the leisure class. Berkeley: University of California Press. Meinig, D. W. (1979). Reading the landscape: an appreciation of W. G. Hoskins and J. B. Jackson. In D. W. Meinig & J. B. Jackson (Eds.), The interpretation of ordinary landscapes: Geographical essays (pp. 195–244). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, D. (2000). Cultural geography: A critical introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. New7Wonders Foundation. (2007). New7Wonders: The official new 7 wonders of the world. Retrieved February 20, 2009, from http://www.new7wonders.com/classic/en/n7w/results/ Owen, J. (2007). Photo Gallery: New 7 Wonders vs. Ancient 7 Wonders. National Geographic Society News. Retrieved February 24, 2009, from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/ news/2007/07/photogalleries/seven-wonders/ Romer, J., & Romer, E. (2001). The seven wonders of the world: A history of the modern imagination. New York: Seven Dials. Sauer, C. O. (1996). The morphology of landscape. In J. A. Agnew, D. N. Livingstone, & A. Rogers (Eds.), Human geography: An essential anthology (pp. 296–315). London: Blackwell. Schultz, P. (2003). 1,000 places to see before you die. New York: Workman Publishing. Thomas, J. (1991). Rethinking the neolithic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, W. L. (Ed.). (1956). Man’s role in changing the face of the earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Torpey, J. (1998). Coming and going: On the state monopolization of the legitimate “means of movement.” Sociological Theory, 16, 3. Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. UNESCO. (2009). World Heritage Center – World Heritage List UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Retrieved March 10, 2009, from http://whc.unesco.org/en/list Varadarajan, S. (2007) Dictatorship by cartography. Himal Southasian, 20, 2. Veblen, T. (1912). The theory of the leisure class: An economic study of institutions. New York: Macmillan. Venturi, R., Brown, D. S., & Izenour, S. (1977) Learning from Las Vegas: The forgotten symbolism of architectural form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. White, G. F. (1968) Water and choice in the Colorado basin: An example of alternatives in water management. National Research Council Committee on Water. No. 1689. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. Wittfogel, K. A. (1957) Oriental despotism: A comparative study of total power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zelinsky, W. (1988). Nation into state: The shifting symbolic foundations of American nationalism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Part II

GIS, ICTs and K-Economies

Chapter 3

Information Technology as Megaengineering: The Impact of GIS Michael F. Goodchild

3.1 Introduction We normally think of engineering, and particularly megaengineering, in terms of big iron: large-scale physical investments in the form of ports, bridges, highways, and dams. Science has its own versions, such as the Hubble Telescope, the CERN Large Hadron Collider, and the South Pole Research Station, each designed in its way to support a number of researchers with a facility that can be shared between them and engineered to high standards of reliability and robustness. Over the years, however, new materials of greater strength, along with various forms of miniaturization, have allowed a steady progress towards engineering solutions that are smaller and in many cases cheaper—towards smaller iron, as it were. New materials led to the vastly increased power of the modern jet engine, and to the light, fuel-saving design of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Most spectacularly, perhaps, the individual vacuum tubes and components of early computer circuits have been replaced with chips that integrate millions and even billions of components into a single unit less than a centimeter across that can be mass produced at very low cost. As a result, it has been possible to replace the big iron of the university central computer of the 1970s with a multitude of small machines distributed in the institution’s offices and laboratories. The in-vehicle navigation system, sometimes called a satnav, provides a compelling case in point. Today one can purchase and install for roughly $100 a unit that will successfully track the vehicle, match the track to a digital representation of a road network, identify an address or point of interest as the trip’s destination, and provide detailed driving instructions. All of these services are provided by a package that is small enough to fit, unobtrusively, on the dashboard of a modern automobile. Paradoxically, however, the name commonly assigned to such devices is a “GPS”, derived from the satellite-based Global Positioning System developed

M.F. Goodchild (B) Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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and managed by the US Department of Defense that provides the essential measurements of current vehicle position. The equally and arguably more important database representing the locations of streets and contained in the system is invisible and intangible to the average user, who is not therefore inclined to refer to the device as such, much to the frustration of the vendors of such databases (Navteq or TeleAtlas) whose brand consequently means essentially nothing to the average citizen. In short, we tend to think of services such as this in terms of their physical, tangible expression—not big iron, and not even iron, but nevertheless constructed of real, tangible materials. The bits and bytes of the database have no physical presence and thus little meaning to the user. Even when the hardware and network connections are of significant physical size, their importance is still often unrecognized. Thus it is the GPS circuitry that dominates the public perception of a satnav, not the chips that perform the map matching and generate the visual displays. One of the largest buildings in the Olympic complex constructed for the 2008 Beijing games was an almost featureless cube with no obviously visible function. It housed the very elaborate and extensive computers, routers, and networks that were needed to manage the enormous flows of digital information from the site, and in the sense of this discussion was as much megaengineering as the instantly recognizable “bird’s nest” stadium. In this chapter I seek to redress this imbalance by arguing that in today’s information economy the bits and bytes of digital systems are at least as important as society’s bridges and highways. More specifically, I argue that geographic information systems (GIS), and more generally the geospatial technologies, are just as important in their impacts on society as the traditional megaprojects, and that their long-term effects will be just as profound. The next section discusses the nature of large scale investment in digital technology, or what is often termed cyberinfrastructure. This is followed by a discussion of geospatial technologies: their history, their role in modern society, and their likely development directions. The final substantive section discusses the impacts of these technologies on society, and the growing interest of society in participating more directly in their application.

3.2 Cyberinfrastructure Parallels have often been drawn between today’s electronic communication networks, and specifically the Internet, and the impacts on previous generations of such major investments as canals, railroads, and telephone networks. Describing the Internet as the information superhighway, a term often attributed to Al Gore, makes the point perfectly, inviting us to compare the impacts of the Internet with those of the construction of freeways (in the US the Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways), and implying that the massive changes of land use that resulted, with the development of new malls, hotels, and housing developments at freeway interchanges, the collapse of many traditional downtowns, and restructured commuting, were likely to be matched or exceeded by the eventual impacts of the Internet.

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In the US the term cyberinfrastructure has been widely adopted, largely at the instigation of the National Science Foundation (NSF), to describe the role of digital technology in revolutionizing the way research is conducted. While NSF has often taken a leading role in the building of the US Internet, part of the latter’s power stems from its ability to integrate numerous subnetworks that have been constructed by other public agencies and by private investment. But the muchcited Atkins Report (NSF, 2003) defines cyberinfrastructure as reaching far beyond the communication network itself, as a “layer of enabling hardware, algorithms, software, communications, institutions, and personnel” that lies between a layer of “base technologies. . .the integrated electro-optical components of computation, storage, and communication” and a layer of “software programs, services, instruments, data, information, knowledge, and social practices applicable to specific projects, disciplines, and communities of practice.” The report sees this investment in infrastructure as nothing short of revolutionary in its impact on the way science is conducted, and on the potential for new discoveries and inventions; and vastly outweighing the impact of any single, more traditional big-iron investment. It describes the new science that is enabled by cyberinfrastructure as more collaborative, no longer requiring collaborators to be co-located; as more integrated given the ease with which researchers from different disciplines are able to collaborate; and as more computational, relying on simulation rather than analysis to study the complex systems and problems that increasingly require science’s attention. While the term cyberinfrastructure has its strongest currency in US science, the same basic idea of information technology as megaengineering, with megaimpacts, has now invaded virtually all aspects of human activity in the developed countries. An increasing proportion of retailing takes place electronically, as does more and more of our communication, whether in the form of speech or email. More and more people obtain their news online, to the extent that many traditional print media, notably newspapers, are in danger of collapse. Online entertainment, in the form of participatory gaming, is now occupying a significant proportion of society’s leisure time. Despite this the digital divide is alive and well, and it would be foolish to suggest that the impacts and benefits of cyberinfrastructure will ever be uniformly distributed around the world and throughout human society. The overwhelming majority of the human population, notably in the developing countries, currently has no access to computers or their communication networks. Great progress is being made, but in the constantly accelerating world of electronic technology it seems virtually impossible for the disadvantaged ever to catch up with the advantaged.

3.3 The Geospatial Technologies 3.3.1 Overview Geospatial information can be defined as information about specified places on or near the Earth’s surface, and thus in the environments within which humans live and act. It can consist of statements about large areas, such as the population of

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California, or about narrowly defined points, such as the height of Everest, but in every case there is a link between some property and an associated place. To be operational, the associated area must be defined in latitude and longitude, or in some system that can be readily converted to latitude and longitude. Today the set of such systems includes street addresses, since it has become easy to convert them to latitude and longitude in most developed countries, a process known as geocoding or address matching. Indexes or gazetteers of recognized features such as states or lakes also exist, allowing properties associated with such features to be positioned in latitude and longitude; and in many countries there are recognized systems of formal coordinates such as national grids. One of the great successes of geospatial technology in recent years has been in making it almost trivially easy, cheap, and reliable to convert between these alternative systems of geographic referencing, and to embed these features in countless Web services. The general public uses these services, often without being aware of their inherent sophistication, in such daily activities as finding the locations of points of interest such as stores or hotels, acquiring driving directions, or planning travel. Over the past few decades there has been rapid development in a number of technologies that create, process, or analyze geospatial information. GPS has already been mentioned, as a system for the rapid and accurate measurement of location. Various versions exist, some capable of determining location to millimeter accuracies. Another technology is satellite-based remote sensing, which dates in its civilian form from the early 1970s. Today a large array of Earth-imaging satellites are in regular orbits, owned and operated by many countries and corporations, and collecting and transmitting images at ground resolutions as fine as 62 cm. In the aftermath of the Wenchuan Earthquake of May 2008, for example, a large collection of fineresolution images became almost immediately available to the Chinese authorities, including imagery acquired for very different purposes by US intelligence agencies. The last and perhaps most important of these technologies is the geographic information system (GIS), a software package capable of performing a wide range of manipulations on geospatial information, including analysis, modeling, storage, visualization, and many other operations. Such packages are available in many different forms, designed for desktop computers, large scale servers, and hand-held devices, and supplied by commercial vendors, academic groups, and open-source communities. Today it is reasonable to assume that a GIS will be capable of performing virtually any conceivable operation on geospatial information. The first GIS was developed in the 1960s (Foresman, 1998) to respond to a very specific requirement of the Canadian government: the calculation of measures of area from tens of thousands of hand-drafted maps based on field surveys. The federal government had established a committee to provide the provinces with detailed analyses of the Canadian land resource, including its current and potential uses. This would have been an enormously tedious, inaccurate, and labor-intensive task if performed by hand, but even in the primitive computing environment of the time it was possible to demonstrate that a computational solution was far preferable to a manual one in both costs and benefits. The maps in this case represented various forms of land use. But it was not long before other applications developed,

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in such areas as transportation and the gathering of the Census, and by the late 1970s a consensus had emerged that a wide range of applications could be served by a single, integrated software environment and a single approach to representing geographically distributed phenomena in digital form. The first commercial GISs appeared at that time and by the mid 1980s a substantial software industry had been established. Geospatial technologies have found viable applications in virtually all areas of human activity. In research, they are now essential to any discipline that deals with phenomena on or near the surface of the Earth, from atmospheric science to criminology. A recent editorial (Nature, 2008) argued that there is no longer any excuse for not recording the exact location of any measurement or specimen collected from the environment, though vast numbers of specimens in our museums have only crudely recorded locational information. Geospatial technologies are used to track migrating birds and animals, to model and predict the effects of global climate change, and to study the emergence of residential segregation in cities (Goodchild & Janelle, 2004). In the commercial world, geospatial technologies are essential for the routing and scheduling of delivery and collection vehicles, for keeping track of the distributed assets of utilities, for improving agricultural production through precision agriculture, and for managing cutting and silviculture in forestry operations. In government, they are essential in support of planning, data-gathering, and assessment. However, the most spectacular recent growth has come in the use of geospatial technologies by the general public. One of the first such services was MapQuest, a site that could generate driving directions to specified destinations. After the release of Google Earth in 2005, and later Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth, it became possible for any user, even a child of ten, to interact with detailed geospatial data and tools. This democratization of GIS (Butler, 2006), or at least of some of its basic functions, and the exposure of the general public to the wealth of geospatial data available from remote sensing and GPS, led to a dramatic increase in awareness and engagement. Google has recorded over 300 million downloads of the Google Earth client. More significantly, the release of the Application Programming Interface for both Google Earth and Google Maps in 2005 led to an explosion in the range of applications, as it became possible for people with minimal computing skills to create their own mashups of new data with the imagery and maps of Google Earth and Google Maps, and to publish the results online. Today Google Maps is used as the underlying mapping engine by an enormous variety of services, from hotel reservations to retailing, and the Google Earth mashup has become popular as a way of disseminating the results of scientific research. While GIS has always had a reputation for being difficult to use, and previous efforts at GIS education focused on the training of an elite cadre of professionals, today virtually anyone with access to the Internet can perform sophisticated manipulations of geographic information. The central educational question has shifted from “What does a GIS professional need to know?” to “What does everyone need to know?” to use these technologies effectively, ethically, and responsibly.

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3.3.2 Development Directions Past evidence suggests that researchers can be spectacularly unsuccessful at anticipating major developments in the geospatial technologies. In their introduction to the second edition of Geographical Information Systems (Longley, Goodchild, Maguire, & Rhind, 1999), the editors commented that the most glaring omission in their first edition, published in 1991, was any reference to the Web, which began its spectacular growth and impact in 1993 with the release of the first public browser, Mosaic. By the end of 1993 Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center had published the first Web-based map services and the first Web-based services for finding and obtaining geospatial data online began to appear in 1994. Within a few years the Federal Geographic Data Committee and the Open Geospatial Consortium had begun the process of developing the standards and specifications that would support today’s complex of Web-based services, often known as the GeoWeb or Geospatial Web (Scharl & Tochtermann, 2007). Nevertheless, it is interesting and useful to speculate on what may emerge over the next few years. What follows is of course a highly personal and idiosyncratic analysis and I fully expect a range of different views from colleagues in the research community. First, GPS is increasingly embedded in a wide range of technologies, from mobile phones to vehicles, enabling them to know their locations to meters. Computers are increasingly location-enabled through online services that convert Internet addresses to latitude and longitude, and the latest Microsoft operating systems do this automatically, so that computers finally know not only what time it is, but where on the planet they are currently located (or more precisely, currently connected to the Internet). RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) also provides the basis for determining location, through the use of small sensors that respond to readers, just as aircraft constantly identify themselves to air-traffic controllers. RFID is the basis for tracking goods from production to sale, for tracking cars through automatic toll gates, and for the congestion charges now being leveled in some cities. Surveillance cameras that can identify faces now offer the potential of tracking individuals as they move around densely monitored areas such as Central London. All of these developments suggest that in future it will be possible to know where everything is at all times. The implications for personal privacy are profound, of course, but so are the benefits of being able to track parolees, pets, and stolen cars, and victims of a major catastrophe. Clearly one would not want to place an RFID tag on every brick in a building, but one might well want to do so with every farm animal in a tightly managed agricultural environment such as the Netherlands, or with every passport issued to a country’s citizens. Second, the geospatial technologies are and have always been primarily twodimensional in their representation of the geographic world. Remote sensing provides two-dimensional images, and while three-dimensional representations can be constructed from pairs of images through photogrammetry, they are limited to the outer surfaces of structures and cannot deal with overhangs, creating models that are often loosely described as “2.5D.” GPS is able to determine elevation as

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well as horizontal location, but less accurately, and cannot do so in places where satellite signals are blocked, such as inside structures. And although progress has been made in recent years, GIS is also dominated by two-dimensional representation, reflecting its historic roots in capturing the contents of paper maps (Goodchild, 1988). In future we should imagine a world in which the geospatial technologies will become fully enabled in the third spatial dimension, and in which systems for navigating indoors will be as common and widely used as the current systems for navigating the two-dimensional outdoors. Retailing and the service economy will provide one strong motivating application by supporting the finding of destinations within the complex three-dimensional structures that increasingly typify urban shopping. Wayfinding within airports, mass transit systems, and universities are other obvious applications, as are the tracking of staff, patients, and other assets within hospitals. Third, geospatial technologies are already enabling the average person to become not only a consumer but also a producer of geospatial data. The phenomenon known as volunteered geographic information (VGI) (Goodchild, 2008a), a form of usergenerated Web content, extends now to a wide range of geographic information types, from street maps to environmental quality, and to a wide range of scales from the global to the neighborhood. Thousands of individuals around the world are actively involved in the creation of VGI in their spare time, with no training in geography or cartography, with no obvious source of reward, and with no guarantee that what they produce is accurate. The question of quality is clearly key, since we traditionally place great trust in the official, authoritative sources of geographic data. However there is ample evidence that volunteered information, while missing the kinds of quality guarantees provided by official agencies, is in practice of equal or higher quality in many instances (Goodchild, 2008b). VGI is particularly helpful when it can take advantage of the presence of humans as observers and interpreters of local conditions and for properties that fineresolution remote sensing is unable to detect. Early detection of change and early evaluation of damage from disasters are two areas where citizens with their dense geographic distribution are able to provide information that officialdom would find impossibly expensive or time-consuming to collect. While he or she may be of little help in classifying and mapping local soils, the average citizen is an expert in the naming of local features, measuring simple parameters of the environment, and even with a little training in counting local populations of birds or plants. Finally, geospatial technologies are increasingly able to detect and map phenomena in real time. Traditional mapping has been a slow process and maps may in some cases be years out of date before they are published, distributed, and used. But sensors are now available to monitor and sample properties of the environment at frequent intervals, and Web-based technologies allow such data to be assembled and disseminated almost instantaneously. In future, then, it is conceivable that we will know the complete state of the world at all times. Loop detectors, cameras, GPS, vehicle probes, and RFID can potentially tell us the real-time state of a transportation system, allowing citizens to know the level of congestion and associated

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pollution at every point in an urban road network, or the precise arrival time of any transit vehicle. Trucks arriving at ports to collect containers could be precisely scheduled, avoiding the complex process of restacking containers to find and load the correct one, and reducing the pollution created by idling trucks. The detailed state of the environment and the state of human health are other arenas where access to real-time geospatial data, and associated monitoring, could provide real benefits to society.

3.4 The Impacts of Geospatial Megaengineering Metrics of the total commitment to geospatial technologies are hard to come by. In the early 1990s the U.S. Office of Management and Budget conducted a survey of annual investments in the acquisition of geospatial data, and showed a total of over $4 billion. But that figure excluded all of the remote-sensing programs of NASA, the GPS program of the Department of Defense, and many others, and was concerned only with data acquisition. We know that ESRI, the leading vendor of GIS software, has an annual turnover of roughly $1 billion. But there are no assessments of the amount of time citizens spend using geospatial technologies, or the amount of time invested in VGI. Nevertheless, it seems clear that despite its diffuse nature and comparative invisibility, the sum total of activity centered on the geospatial technologies is a significant proportion of GNP in the developed countries and that it also occupies a significant proportion of volunteered time. More broadly, information technology now consumes a measurable and growing proportion of the US energy supply; represents an enormous public and private investment in communications infrastructure; and consumes a large and increasing share of household, corporate, and governmental budgets. The geospatial technologies have some very unique and specific impacts on human behavior, however. It is helpful at this point to distinguish between virtual and augmented realities. In a virtual reality (VR), computing technologies are used to replace the user’s real geographic environment with one created entirely from a database. The virtual environment could be immersive, so that all signals from the real geographic environment could be excluded. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, for example, an immersive environment consisting of a 30-ft (9.1 m) diameter sphere with projected 3D vision and sound, the Allosphere (http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/allosphere/), recently became available for interdisciplinary research. In an augmented reality (AR), on the other hand, information technology serves to augment rather than replace the signals coming from the environment. By definition, then, an AR requires the user’s actual location and the location represented in the database to be coincident; whereas in VR they must by definition be disjoint. An AR environment may consist of a heads-up display in which information from the database is superimposed directly on the user’s field of view or it may consist of no more than the screen of a mobile phone. In both cases the role of AR is to

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augment what the user can see, touch, hear, feel, and smell, by providing supplementary information through the visual or auditory channels. AR can also play a vital role in replacing a missing sense, as for example in applications that assist the visually impaired to navigate through complex environments without sight by providing audible directions (see, for example, Golledge, Loomis, Klatzky, Flury, Yang, 1991). AR can inform a construction project of the positions of utilities under a street, or inform tourists of the locations, menus, and reviews of nearby restaurants. It can provide emergency personnel with vital information about the hazardous chemicals stored in a building, or about the real-time locations of other rescue workers in a smoke-filled structure. The applications of AR to human activities are limited only by our imagination. Nevertheless it is the long-term impacts of AR that are likely to be the most profound. Consider, for example, a tourist in a strange city searching for a coffee shop. Traditionally such services have had to advertise themselves visually, through signage or the adoption of conspicuous locations. But AR-enabled customers can easily find wayfinding instructions to the nearest outlet using online databases. Thus conspicuous locations and intrusive signage are no longer needed, and services can retreat to the cheaper, less obvious locations. In such a world services would no longer need to pay a premium for locations on street corners and main streets, leading to a substantial restructuring of the retail landscape. Real-time knowledge of the state of transportation networks will allow drivers and passengers to respond quickly to congestion, construction, and other interruptions. An interesting pattern may emerge in such situations, as individuals decide whether to reroute, or to hold course on the grounds that conditions will improve as others leave the route. In principle the result of such behavior should be instability, because of the speed with which information passes around the system; perhaps information technology has played a similar role in the instabilities of the world economy that became almost uncontrollable in late 2008. More broadly, geospatial technologies have greatly increased the ability of individuals to see what is happening in their own neighborhoods and around the world. Google’s decision to provide frequently updated, fine-resolution imagery of the Darfur region undoubtedly led to a greater sense of awareness of the atrocities being committed there. At the other end of the spectrum many local communities are employing geospatial technologies to help them understand and manage their own neighborhoods, raise awareness of potential problems, and engage with planning authorities.

3.5 Conclusions I have argued in this essay that the geospatial technologies deserve the status of megaengineering. While they are highly dispersed, often miniaturized to the point of being virtually invisible, and produced by a complex array of companies, individuals, and agencies, many of them acting essentially independently, the sum total

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of this investment, nevertheless, combines to produce a substantial set of impacts on human activity. The geospatial technologies largely evolved in a world of two spatial dimensions and with a focus on those aspects of the geographic landscape that are essentially static—the aspects such as topography, soils, and land cover that are the focus of traditional mapping. Recently, however, there have been major advances in our ability to characterize and monitor the world in real time, through the use of networks of sensors and through the willingness of individuals to volunteer information through the Web. The third spatial dimension is also becoming more important in a range of applications and in future it seems likely that the geospatial technologies will operate in the full four dimensions (three spatial dimensions plus time) of the geographic environment. In the human body the various parts develop and function largely independently. The functions of the liver, for example, are very different from those of the foot or the head. The circulatory system reaches all parts of the body, making it difficult to target specific sites such as tumors with drugs introduced into the bloodstream. Only the nervous system is spatial, telling the brain exactly where pain is felt. By analogy, the geospatial technologies acquire, integrate, process, and distribute information that addresses not only what but where, and have consequently been argued to form a nervous system for the planet. What is missing at the global scale, of course, is the equivalent of the brain that integrates incoming signals, stores and processes them, and executes its decisions by passing signals back through the nervous system to control muscular action. Great progress has been made in the past few decades in integrating geospatial data, but we have not yet begun to build the kinds of integrated decision-making systems that can guide the planet into an increasingly uncertain future.

References Butler, D. (2006). The Web-wide world. Nature, 439, 776–778. Foresman, T. W. (Ed.). (1998). The history of geographic information systems: Perspectives of the pioneers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR. Golledge, R. G., Loomis, R. L., Klatzky, A., Flury, A., & Yang, X. L. (1991). Designing a personal guidance system to aid navigation without sight: Progress on the GIS component. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, 5(4), 373–395. Goodchild, M. F. (1988). Stepping over the line: Technological constraints and the new cartography. American Cartographer, 5, 311–319. Goodchild, M. F. (2008a). Commentary: whither VGI? GeoJournal 72, 239–244. Goodchild, M. F. (2008b). Assertion and authority: the science of user-generated geographic content. Proceedings of the Colloquium for Andrew U. Frank’s 60th Birthday. GeoInfo 39. Department of Geoinformation and Cartography, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna. Goodchild, M. F., & Janelle, D. G. (Eds.). (2004). Spatially integrated social science. New York: Oxford University Press. Longley, P. A., Goodchild, M. F., Maguire, D. J., & Rhind, D. W. (1999). Geographical information systems: Principles, techniques, management, and applications. New York: Wiley.

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National Science Foundation. (2003). Report of the National Science Foundation blue-ribbon panel on cyberinfrastructure. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation. Available online http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/reports/toc.jsp Nature. (2008). Editorial: A place for everything. Nature, 453, 2. Scharl, A., & Tochtermann, K. (Eds.). (2007). The geospatial web: How Geobrowsers, social software and the web 2.0 are shaping the network society. London: Springer.

Chapter 4

Google and the Internet: A Mega-Project Nesting Within Another Mega-Project Maria Paradiso

4.1 Introduction This chapter discusses the role of the Internet and its main rider “Google” as megaprojects encompassing a global scale, having some universal features and an omnipresence, mediating numerous spheres of everyday life, and possibly exerting deep global impacts with emerging and relevant geopolitical, cultural, and economic implications. The chapter begins with brief discussions of the “meganess” of the Internet followed by itss essence compared to civil engineering megaprojects. In the third section I present its evolution and possible implications for human activities, including those related to information, communications and cognition. I introduce in the forth section, the “Google” case, a major Internet rider, as a megaproject, followed by the fifth section that discusses Google’s nesting within the Internet and theorizing a model of virtual megaproject nesting. The reflexive understanding of Google’s “meganess” is reflected (a) in terms of its nesting, virtually and locally, (b) its roles as a major gatekeeper for digital information; (c) as the principal mediator for communication, (d); its being a most powerful repository of computing power; (e) its constitution the largest storage of localized data; and (f) its being a virtual earth information indexing and mapping tool. All of these initiatives of converge capacities of a mega information and communication system. Also all have geopolitical, political, and cultural significances for the globe. As I discuss below, Google highlights the significance of megaprojects as a new path in the human experience of dwelling in the world, perceiving and having cognition of it, doing business, travelling around it, as well as its building and transformation. The concluding section highlights the significance of Google’s “invisible” cyberspace organization and performances, viz., the culture, the logic, strategies of information and communication organization and practices and what it implies in terms of convergence of corporations, individuals, and places on a global scale, but managed privately. M. Paradiso (B) Department of Social Sciences, University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

S.D. Brunn (ed.), Engineering Earth, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4_4,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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4.2 Essence of the Internet as a Megaproject The Internet has been considered a number of ways in recent years, for example, as a global network of computers linked by telecommunications and protocols (Dodge & Kitchin, 2001) and as the most comprehensive information system (Kellerman, 2002) impacting on geography (Brunn, 1998a) and also as a factor of possibly new geopolitical relations in a frame of a multidimensional state of nodes and networks (Brunn, 1998b). Considering the Internet as a megaproject offers a new perspective within which to examine its very essence, its evolution and impacts. Theorizing the Internet as a megaproject may provide a powerful unified discourse on the significance of the Internet in terms of global trends, since, I argue, the Internet is a force which blurs world cultures, influencing place cognitions and use, enabling individuals, even creating new geopolitical power. In addition, discussing the Internet as a megaproject serves as a powerful cognitive perspective to perceive and assess the global nature of its deep impacts on humanity. In primis, compared to the majority of megaprojects, the Internet is mostly virtual rather than physical. But its nature is also of a general-purpose technology (GPT) (Malecki & Gorman, 2001) (Table 4.1). In this, it is similar to industrial age technologies, such as electricity, railroads, highways, which were and still are megaprojects (for example, the Trans-Siberian project). Secondly it is not just located in one place, as a precise location on specific geographic coordinates, but it is globally extended as a network, that is, a networked geographical structure. Thirdly, it is large in size, as are other traditional megaprojects. One major difference between the Internet megaproject and civil engineering mega-projects is that the Internet is a not owned entity (NOE) while the others are owned entities. Nobody owns the infrastructure of the Internet, not even a single state, nor can any corporation or individual control, maintain, sell, dismiss, rent or even regulate it. For the Internet this “ownership” entails conditions of a no man’s land, or a not-owned entity. And since communication flows span millions of individuals freely interacting in cyberspace and not in a bounded institutionalized locality, the Internet can be considered a borderless entity. Similarly to the majority of megaprojects, the meganess of the Internet can be appreciated at first glance in terms of size and in part from its nature as a general purpose technology. It differs in morphology, not located just in one bounded place,

Table 4.1 The internet as a mega-project Feature

The internet

Traditional mega-projects

Substance Ownership Morphology Scale Organization Maintenance

Virtual Not-owned entity Network Global Distributed Distributed

Physical Owned Point Regional/National/Intern. Centralized On-site

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but also in scale: it consists of a global scale with global coverage ensured by computer networks spanning the whole world and connected by telecommunications systems (Dodge & Kitchin, 2001). The meganess of the Internet is certainly marketed in terms of its worldwide distribution and size. Its “virtual” substance is currently present in everyday human life and practices even in remote areas, it shapes places on earth and the life of individuals, as well as mediating and changing many spheres of human activity such as culture, politics, sociality (Adam & Ghose, 2003; Zook, 2000, 2003) and mirror localities (Aoyama, 2001). In other words the meganess of the Internet is also marked by its huge global impacts. As discussed in the literature, the emphasis in understanding the Internet shifted from the pipelines of telecommunications to their “contents,” viz., information (Kellerman, 2002) capable of redefining economic and social geographies. Specifically, the Web, as a mega human-machine space, is capable of giving rise to all kinds of human artifacts (cyberspace) (Dodge & Kitchin, 2001, 2005a, 2005b). This means that the “virtual” nature of the Internet, the socio-technological evolution of the Web, makes its “magnitude” is felt not only in terms of size but its profound impacts affecting the globe. Since the Internet is the most comprehensive information system, as Kellerman (2002) defined it is used and produced by millions of individuals and entities all over the Globe. Thus the Internet’s organization, contents, production and maintenance are distributed and not centralized compared to traditional megaprojects. Moreover, I would argue that in the current path of evolution, the converging nature of technologies highlights its impressive and pervasive nature in terms of the most comprehensive information and communication system. Thus it typifies the Internet and specifically the Web as megaprojects on a global scale. Until a few years ago one could have had the impression that information and communications were the same. But I argue that we can no longer consider the Internet contents, structure and functions only in terms of storage, retrieval, manipulation, exchange, and creation of information. The emergence of converging communication technologies such as VOIP (Voice On Internet Protocol), Internet TV and broadcasting, the evolution of cyberspaces and sometimes their evolutionary dynamics real new human artifacts such as social networks, blogs, scientific projects (working both in a distributed and collective way), advertising, geo-based services, and real time mapping. These advances make the point that the communicative character cannot be conceived as a mere component of a broader concept of information. The communicative power of the Internet allows many actions: instant communications, e-mailing, software like “Meet up” and video calls, all which are communicative means used in decision making in setting up strategies and arranging operations such as mobility. Mobility is important in business, but also in grassroots organizations, for socializing among young people, or perhaps even for terrorists. “You Tube” is yet another example used for by all kinds personalities or “philosophies” to communicate, for sharing actions, in both good and bad events. During the riots in Naples in Winter, 2008, people were linked to the public protests and demonstrations related to the waste disposal

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problem, while yet another group of public disorder “professionals” filmed themselves with mobile phones while communicating police positions, deciding on tactics and movements and interspersing all these actions with slogans, propaganda and the cultural message of hostility to rules, police etc. Obviously, communication activity serves to create additional information: one example is given by the citizen’s media where the experience of communicating in a blog on the tsunami proved to be the best and most powerful way of producing information in chaotic situations via communicative practices. Open source teams allow faster collective reception of new knowledge from all over the world. All these examples show the connectivity and creative power of the Internet as a mega-project for information, communication, and organization. However, communications can also be recorded, analyzed and profiled, which raises concerns of cyber-surveillance and privacy. Paradigmatic it has been the case of Skype China: Tom-Skype, which is monitored and stored chat through filters applied to political sensitive key words (Quomedia, 2008a quoting a report by the Toronto Citizen Lab reference), but also Google’s dilemmas on China about accepting Chinese censorships demands. In the United Kingdom there is a government project worth more than £12 billion pounds for infrastructure (a development of the Ehelon program) to listen to any call and read every SMS or mail, and check every Internet website visited by a UK citizen (Quomedia, 2008b). Some Internet firms can also profile people’s behaviors for commercial and other purposes. In principle, there is an enormous power-information asymmetry between the users exposed to the availability of contents and services on the Web, with themselves and their practices becoming enormous containers of available data which are linked to many activities performed on the web, for example, searching, buying, chatting, creating avatars, calling, protesting, loving, hating, advertising, producing imaging, giving information and data. Looking at the Internet “landscape,” moving through its labyrinth of cyberspace rooms after knocking on the doors of the major gatekeepers (Google, msn, Yahoo), commentators would also argue in terms of intersecting nets, inter zones, grey zones (Bonora, 2001) of human artifacts, objectives, cultures, skills, needs and desires. The emerging key issues are how is the meganess of global communication (the Internet) changing the World? Is there any entity gaining crucial power on the Internet? I could thus argue that the Internet is a powerful “device of complexity” shaping the meanings people assign to the world, with a decisive role performed by programmers and managers who make decisions on software and commercial practice and influence, in a way that is not immediately readable, or people’s visions and meanings. The building techniques of civil engineering embedded in its mega-projects, the architectural culture and skills and the needs of the contractor and future owner, come together to shape the product’s quality, its cultural significance and its influence on competitors, visitors and users. Similarly, software engineering and the needs of profit-oriented Internet companies, shape the quality of the Internet as a powerful mediator of individuals’ behaviors in cyberspace. They also shape sensu

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latu, Human-Earth relations since cyberspace is another layer of life (Graham & Marvin, 1996) and we live at the intersection of two reciprocally transformative worlds (Batty & Miller, 2000). The difference in the two forms of meganess is that the Web’s “virtual-cultural architectures” are less readable for the layman. They are less evident because of the more immaterial and codified nature of the telecommunication-software engineering and the Internet company. They are also more “obscure” since the relevant knowledge is relatively new. Neither the technological expertise of software writing nor the coding represents a merely technological construct: if “code is almost infinitely malleable but is ultimately structured by the desires and constraints imposed by its programmers and managers” (Zook & Graham, 2007: 466) as well by their education and curricula (see Paradiso, 2006 for a reflexive discussion on a bridge between engineering, geography and social sciences in the Information Age). Profit goals and stock options are clearly important reasons for modeling software and services. Briefly, both the Internet and the traditional megaproject are not merely technological or business-oriented constructs or neutral spaces. Also the more common mega-projects from Civil Engineering are not neutral and can be contested by citizens. To be sure they are not neutral since they shape places and flows and, in some cases without public consultations, can dramatically alter citizens’ settlements and practices. However the Internet’s meganess as a cultural complexity device seems to affect the mindset and practices even more than traditional mega-projects.

4.3 The Evolution of the Internet and its Implications The Internet is increasingly embedded in everyday life. The more spaces are linked to Internet navigation and interaction, the more life is loaded up with software and codes (Thrift & French, 2002) and the more people using information and communication technologies for personal uses, the more they are exposed to cyberspace. As the cyberspace people are exposed to becomes more complex, the proposal is made to classify it as communication space and cognitive communication cyberspace and refer to it as a novel human spatial experience (Kellerman, 2007). Cyberspace goes becomes mobile via converging technologies in portable personal devices which generates new personal mobilities and shapes the way of living and behaving in places (Kellerman, 2007). As the power of the code is intended to set rules for behavior (and users do not normally know how codes or algorithms are designed), there can be problems associated with an automatic production of information that shapes individuals and the automated production of space given the new landscapes of codes (Dodge & Kitchin, 2005a, b; Thrift & French, 2002; Zook & Graham, 2007). As the information market (Web organization) seems to be oriented towards concentration (market shares of search engines, advertising and the power of online presence versus offline presence), and the Internet rapidly spans earth, there is ample opportunity (but it is

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of great significance), to explore Internet meganess also in terms of (mega) impacts on earth in terms of privacy, power, freedom, equity and surveillance. Obviously these kinds of concerns are typical of democratic, secular countries: can the Internet be the geopolitical arena of a special clash of civilizations? These are concerns of the democratic State versus the dictatorial State (with élites in power), but also of what is collective property (individual rights) versus the space owned by corporations but contributed to the community. In the metaphor of connected earth an enormous “asymmetric relation” of power is fixed, viz., that of information between corporations having an enormous power of calculation and global storage and data tracking, that is, of millions people spread over the earth individually perceiving, using, benefiting and being influenced in their cognition and communication by the Internet in terms of information and communication systems. The relationships of geography (earth) with the Internet can affect several principal human spheres that have a cultural dimension as the most comprehensive information and communication system on earth, a political dimension due to its rapid coverage and reach as regards international or national regulation of communication protocols and standards, an economic dimension as regards investments in infrastructure and research, profit accumulation, market share and control and social, technological, and business dimensions and drivers of change for its adoption and evolution constitute a global space for human cognition and action and that affect individual perception, cognition, action and systems of localized values and meanings. If information and communication technologies are contributing to attenuating the force of destiny towards opportunities for individuals and places (see Kellerman & Paradiso, 2007 for a detailed discussion on the positive side of the coin), some applications and developers, market operations, practices of ranking, mapping, and delivering representations of place, concern how codes, practices in cyberspace negatively shape our world. Researches by Zook and Graham (2007); Graham and Zook (2006); Dodge and Kitchin (2005a) pivotally explore interactions between codes and information and place constructs mostly by means of the case study of geo-coded services and mapping DigiPlace or Google Earth. Next I wish to conceptually and critically discuss the “Google” case, a major Internet rider mostly characterized by giant ambitions and performance of “meganess” on earth namely in terms of the corporation being a major gatekeeper for digital information, It is also the principal mediator for communication; the most powerful repository of computing power on earth; the largest storage of localized data; and the major virtual earth information indexing and mapping tool, with an enormous monetary accumulation in a period of global financial crisis. Google, sometimes confused with the Internet, here is conceptualized as a privately owned mega information and communication system. It seems to have geopolitical, political, cultural and perhaps also environmental significance for the globe, as I will discuss. I mainly argue that the Google megaproject is having a real geopolitical power and profile that also has a quasi military strategy for expansion via a strategic thinking and brilliant technological performances. It is also a “seductive” megaproject

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in terms of style and offer that is aimed at the deep nesting in the Internet, in cyberspace, in the everyday life of individuals connected on earth.

4.4 Google as a Megaproject “Every age has a raw material that defines its historical moments. . . . In ours it is information and Google has become its preeminent steward” (Stross, 2008: 3). Certainly, as many would argue, Google is more than a brand name: it is a way of life (Reagan, 2008), given its expansion into every digital communications sector and its endless offer of new enabling services which model the cultural universe of the web. Its market share for web searching (more than 68% estimated for September 2008 by Stross, 2008) and its “relational economics” for advertising pricing and open sources practices, shape the economic universe of the web and mediate a global market for ads. Google also influences the perception of online and offline presence of enterprises with an increasing power to the larger ones (Zook & Graham, 2007). Several reasons can be found for highlighting Google as a megaproject (Table 4.2), including its most ambitious goals and performances (indexing all the web contents, the principal gatekeeper of information globally and mediator of communication, its market share both in terms of major web searches and advertizing), its concentration of talents, its wide distribution of sales, its R&D centers scattered all over the world, and the fact that its enormous computing power exceeds that of Table 4.2 Mega-project Google: Portrait Feature

Elements

Gatekeeper One-stop search destination Money power Human power Web domination Web advertising monopoly? Global knowledge management Global communications Global information and computing Global leader

Global world digital information 68% of all Web searches in 2008 Enormous profits Surplus of talent Like Microsoft for the PC Unsuccessful deal with Yahoo Beyond search: services and applications Ubiquitous: homes, offices, and mobile Three trillion URLs Over 100 international domains with 35 languages for results display and >100 languages for interfaces Agreement with principal DNA research Private co. to access individual DNA data

“Panopticon” Concerns of privacy and discrimination Google as “superpower”

Google.org: addressing the 5 most sensitive geopolitical concerns

Source: Author’s elaboration from: Battelle (2006), Glazowsky (2008), Ippolita (2007), Reagan (2008), Vise and Malseed (2007), Google Corporate information and milestones http://www. google.Com and.it

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State owned entities by increasing the power of knowledge as well as cross-listing data and establishing profiles. Google has launched about 100 products and services that accompanying many spheres of personal information and decisions where relevant data can be profiled and tracked. For services provided, introduced practices and superiority for its algorithm (Page Rank for searching for example), its functional philosophy in leveraging the quality of information related to popularity of sites based on clicks (a disputable approach indeed) and popular site pages inspection, Google can be defined in terms of a complex but also pervasive global system for knowledge management. It behaves like a mediator in information production and consumption and reproduction, practically a standard for present-day communication. Its successful (recently under scrutiny for privacy rights including G-mail scanning of e-mails for advertisements and privacy) expansion into each digital global communication sector and its universalism in terms of more than 100 languages offered and translation are shaping a cultural universe like the web. Its capacity to accumulate, store, track, profile information of different types (images, numbers, texts, calls, emails, newsgroup messages etc) is practically unlimited until a data house can be established on earth. These factors and many other elements reveal a strategy of cultural dominion while becoming a “Global Idol” (Vise & Malseed, 2007 discuss the universal Google appeal and use the expression), that is, (1) The “problématique” of Google “cookies” until 2038 and the unknown filters and controls to deliver search results (Ippolita, 2007). (2). The global reach of its services and initiatives. (3) Its support to Internet satellite coverage projects to reach 3 billion people in developing countries (Rhoads, 2008) and potentially grasp new users worldwide in increasing markets. (4) Its initial “mantra” “Don’t be evil” deteriorated after many events like also the permission for Chinese censorship on behalf of business expansion into potential markets. (5) The seductive approach of relational economics but with asymmetric power (like open source hosted in Google owned code, or ads pricing, the “coopetition” Google-AskJeeves). (6) The Google-open source initiative and agreement with Sun as web developers and creators of standards. (7) The technocratic approach of sensitive global initiatives undertaken by Google.org. Recently Google has undergone scrutiny for possessing too much personal information (Glazowsky, 2008; Ippolita group, 2007; Reagan, 2008). There is a hint of monopoly. The Association of National Advertisers claims to DOJ (Department of Justice) about the Google deal with Yahoo. The World Association of newspapers is concerned that Google in partnership with Yahoo will “become a market controlling behemoth” (Glazowsky, 2008: 3). They made a deal on advertising with Yahoo but, Glazowsky continues, Google does not allow Yahoo to show Google ads on the websites of new publishing partners acquired by Yahoo after is deal with Google. Even though not a monopoly, if the deal materializes there has been a case of impressive concentration of much of the traffic (90% control over search advertising inventory according to the Association of National (U.S.) Advertisers, quoted in Glazowsky, 2008: 2) in cyberspace going in one direction with huge repercussions on numbers of competitors and jobs involved: Google then decided to give up on

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Yahoo. It has concentrated in about 50 companies, some of them being global entities and megaprojects like You Tube, others working in a frame of open source (but open source is never completely free and the platform owners can at any moment refuse the developer his/her invented application). Google Earth and the increasing “granularity” can be problematic in terms of privacy, but also in non-deconstructed software and business strategy and in representing the presence of online and off line enterprises (Graham & Zook, 2006). Google is undertaking a new venture and in the physical mega-project style. It is taking the data storage literally out to sea in non-territorial areas (Quomedia, 2008c) in “no man’s territory” with no specific State jurisdiction! Google will not pay taxes on the platform since they are off-shore. Installing the “Marine” server will allow Google to reach all earth time zones (a true Global reach) and it will achieve even more computing power. It would use water for engine refrigeration. What is the environmental loss in reduced biodiversity due to the increased temperature for fauna? Wave movements could be transformed into energy. I argue that the Google megaproject consists of two dimensions: its meganess (size, performances, and impacts) and its “nesting” strategy of the Internet. Its impressive, large scale “nesting” in the Internet (cyberspace, nesting “inside” the nest), in telecommunications (going mobile, WiFi, satellite), and in places (conquering new territories and markets through external nesting, opening commercial, and R&D centers) make one envisage a quasi culture of dominion and as a most daring mega ambition for global conquest and control via seductive products and services, alliances, or purchasing agreements with States. It also reveals the global mass effects because of its incredible information, communication, monetary and human potential. Progressively, country by country, it is conquering physical spaces/markets on the globe and via users and uses of cyberspace. Numerous questions are being raised, including: what are the implications of being the major information gatekeeper and the increasingly powerful communications mediator, the most powerful supercomputing capability on a earth, the largest repository of direct and derived data, the most important concentration of talents, and a surplus place for money on an earth in need of liquidity. Do answers to these questions suggest that Google.org is becoming both a major player and also addressing global problems?

4.5 Google’s Nesting Within the Internet: A Model of Virtual Megaproject Nesting The emerging meganess of Google originated mostly originated from its progressive nesting in the Internet, but in later phases also in personal mobile communications and wide geographic areas (Table 4.3). I suggest four different nesting phases (I and II in cyberspace, III on places, IV in States and in people’s mindset): nesting in cyberspace and becoming a dominant force in it (cyberspace/internal nesting: phase I search monopoly, phase II search as a business); nesting on places by becoming indispensable for people’s every day practices and mobility (places/external, going

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M. Paradiso Table 4.3 Nesting model for google as a mega-project

Phase

Years

Major developments.

Search monopoly

1997–2000

Search as a business Indispensability and ubiquity

2000–2002 2003–2006

Google as a superpower?

2007–2008

World as an index and Google as its manager. Universalism and market conquest Launches of many services, applications, projects, R&D centers, acquisitions of enterprises, partnerships. People’s everyday life enabler; communication mediator. Universal technocratic potential: Cloud computing; Google.org dedication to solutions of crises worldwide; Android. Google Earth as an open geospatial standard.

Source: examples of major developments from http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html accessed 24 October 2008

on mobile phones and offering local information, communication etc: phase III); nesting in States and in people’s mindset (cultural/mega, phase IV, Google as a “superpower”). Google address needs for simplicity, accelerates time and space compression, brings closer information and communication from far away. Also Google exploits the Internet potential for a “collective brain,” giving the illusion that the earth is on our desktop or possibly on the mobile phone screen. The nest metaphor itself can be likened to the idea of a bird (the Internet) building a nest (the web) where a new bird (Google) nests and later inherits the Nest. However, this metaphor is not enough: Google doesn’t inherit the nest (Internet) but it develops and deeply revolutionizes it. Google is its gate keeper and developer, it nests also on earth through projects and branches and by becoming a “global Idol” (Vise & Malseed, 2007) and mediating people’s communication and information needs and practices, the automatic production of space while influencing cognitive patterns via surfing practices as well as computing of fragmented tracks of information, and also beginning to compete with states and NGOs in international cooperation. I argue for a nesting model of a virtual megaproject with some specific geographic “coordinates,” its origins in Stanford and Silicon Valley, its personal “regional” touch using different languages for search results and interfaces to expand its geographical reach, engaging in geomarketing in analyzing search demands and advertising that is offered in a country and then opening branches in specific countries. It is also being projected to the new Frontier: Asia and China, occupying all possible channels of communication (from wired to mobile), overcoming possible country barriers, for example, global search for talent, distributed cyber collaboration, the global market of “words” exchanged for advertising and processing information). Their corporation’s ambition is profoundly geographic: giving free accessible information to all (digitalizing and indexing and displaying the earth: Page Rank, a Universal library, Google Earth) with a universal research

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community (open source strategies, offering computing power for external projects) an indispensable mediator of communication and recently addressing global concerns which may affect also the Giant Google. These are: renewable energies, diseases and illiteracy. Meganess and nesting, recently also via Google.org global partnerships and philanthropy can reflexively lead us to consider Google as a potential world geopolitical entity and also culturally as a global device of cultural complexity (or reduction?) for humankind’s cultural production or reproduction ranging from cyberspace to the globe and vice-versa. One can also envisage a technocratic-scientific illusion of providing universal information: all world information is tracked and stored in one place. This has been a recurrent illusion with illustrious antecedents in the encyclopedic initiatives and less illustrious human fear of not knowing enough and the ambition to know everything. The effort of knowing and representing everything is well illustrated in the Borges’ metaphor of the cartographer trap of representing earth with granularity step by step arriving at a 1:1 representation: the map becomes the earth! The conceptual model used for their brilliant and superior search algorithm is the “tree” graph via links. The tree metaphor makes it possible to surf branches via branches where our perception of the cultural universe explored is the subsystem of the tree’s branch and whose accuracy and completeness we cannot estimate. The latter depends on the information basin bounded by language contents, our key searches and their assessment of content quality we are not normally conscious of filters and controls that are not public. The following examples (Google Corporate, 2008a, b) of major developments and phases identify the steps and results in the emerging “meganess” of Google and its nesting.

4.5.1 Nesting Phase I: Search Monopoly 1997–2000 The emerging “meganess” of Google: The mission for Google’s founders was “to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.” The E-World is an ocean of information, it needs to be indexed, the World is an Index and Google manages the Index via its superior Page Rank searching algorithm and idea of ranking results (Battelle, 2006). The changes in the nesting process of Google within the Internet: The crucial intuition was that the search is the Internet core; the Google founders’ brilliant minds developed a superior search engine, achieved an attractive image which made them become the gatekeeper of information. It has also made the Internet progressively evolve into a cultural universe thanks to performance, style, morphology, personal customization and languages.

4.5.2 Nesting Phase II: 2000–2002 Search as a Business: Google’s Universalism and Market Conquest The emerging “meganess” of Google: the developers (http://www.google.com/ press/pressrel/pressrelease34.html) started offering searches in Chinese, Japanese

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and Korean. Google reached a point of offering a total number of 72 language interfaces: languages are a sign of Google universalism and strategic Market Conquest. Google AdWords later launched a major overhaul for AdWords, including new costper-click pricing. The self-service ad program promised online activation with a credit card, keyword targeting and performance feedback. They showed an innovative approach of narrow target publicity to provide discrete but useful visualization of search results and ads in two columns. They added search and browse features and launched it as Google Groups. Google.com was available in 26 languages. Google Toolbar was released. It is a browser plug-in that makes it possible to search without visiting the Google homepage. They showed a distinctive and unusual approach of “mass” personal customization, the oxymoron referring to customization possibilities (personal touch) plus worldwide markets (mass effects). Image Search was launched which offered access to 250 million images. A partnership with Universo Online (UOL) made Google the major search service for millions of Latin Americans. And there is the first public acquisition: Deja.com’s Usenet Discussion Service, an archive of 500 million Usenet discussions dating back to 1995. The major partnership with AOL offering Google search and sponsored links to 34 million customers using CompuServe, Netscape and AOL.com Google Labs allowed users to try Google’s new beta technologies from their R&D team. Google News was launched with 4,000 news sources. Users were able to search for things to buy with Froogle (later called Google Product Search). Google’s first hardware release was Google Search. Google revolutionized the Internet as the Gutenberg printing invention empowered people (Vise & Malseed, 2007) and they appear to have revolutionized cultural reproduction and transmission. Changes in the nesting process of Google within the Internet: Google became a Giant of the Ads Market and the most lucrative company introducing more transparent and self service mechanisms for pricing, advertising, and obtaining feedback from campaigns. The company seemed to be opening up a more “democratic” market where smaller online firms seem to have comparable possibilities with bigger ones. Cash is available night and day with a click, money flowed to Google. Via acquisitions, alliances and innovations. Google became not only the gatekeeper to the Internet, but it was launched to become a main Mediator of Communications (Personal, Social, Business, Innovation ones).

4.5.3 Nesting Phase III 2003–2006 Indispensability and Ubiquity: Google Enables, Goes Local, at Our Home, and Goes Mobile The emerging “meganess” of Google: It is now mobile, ubiquitous, multifunctional, versatile, flexible, attractive, and a good interpreter of human needs of simplicity and speed and being facilitated in everyday life routines. Google retains its technological advantage looking for talents all over the world and all over the net! In August 2004 Google’s initial public offering of 19,605,052 shares of Class A common stock took place on Wall Street. Google.cn, a local domain version of Google, went live in China. “Don’t be Evil” mantra collapses under Chinese censorships demands and

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business competition pressure. Google advances cyberspace by cyberspace, media by media, country by country, use by use. The changes in the nesting process of Google within the Internet: This corporation launched a massive number of services, made new acquisitions, deepened distributed collaboration for software programming, and it entered new ventures: mobile telecommunication, even more hardware, local contents production, merging different nature and sources information. The company nested also at the user’s home and people mobility facilitated many routines. Google is now mobile, ubiquitous, multifunctional, versatile, flexible, attractive and a “good interpreter of human needs of simplicity” (Vise & Malseed, 2007). Also speed is no longer only the gatekeeper to the Internet or a main mediator of communications (personal, social, business, innovation), but “the Global knowledge management system (all chains of production, consumption, transmission, use) and communications mediators.” Google directly challenges Microsoft’s core business. Google became “the” Internet, the global web developer, a global laboratory, a cultural universe where technocracy is in power. Detailed examples are given in the Table 4.2. Here I mention only one service; Search History launches in labs that allow users to view all the web pages they have visited and Google searches they have made over time. Everyone can keep track of her/his search results but also the Corporation can access and record individual searches. This constitutes a formidable database to be logically processed to detect mental processes and logic in finding result. Is this one step towards Artificial Intelligence?

4.5.4 Nesting Phase IV 2007 – Google as Superpower? Universal Technocracy Potential Versus the Traditional State The emerging “meganess” of Google: Google now ranges from Universal Search and a global collective innovation service and into a new sphere, viz., global philanthropy. Work in progress can be envisaged for the next Google identity .org as a global player in critical world fields (but also related to its primary concerns): Google.org launches collaborations for addressing world critical problems worldwide. It announces five key initiatives: there is a new dedication to solutions that can predict and prevent crises worldwide, improve public services, and fuel the growth of small enterprises. They also announce the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, in collaboration with Intel, Dell, and more than 30 other companies. Google Earth Outreach is introduced and designed to help non profit organizations use Google Earth to advocate their causes. Together with Yahoo and MySpace, they announce the OpenSocial Foundation, an independent non-profit group designed to provide transparency and operational guidelines around the open software tools for social computing. Google. Inc is going towards Market predominant force (in November they finally gave up seeking to acquire Yahoo), a panopticon with an enormous amount of money in time of crisis, plus also a surplus of talent and technological power, a global loci for collaboration and information production and exchange.

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The corporation announced a partnership with China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile telecom carrier, to provide mobile and Internet search services in China. Google Apps Premier Edition launches, bringing cloud computing to businesses. Cloud Computing means that information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, notebooks, entertainment centers, tablet computers, wall computers, handhelds, sensors, monitors etc (Wikipedia, 2009). For example, Google Apps provides common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser while the software and data are stored on the servers. This is a rather controversial and disturbing concept for privacy and surveillance concerns. With Candidates@Google series kicks off Google becoming a political arena. Traffic information in available on Google Maps for more than 30 cities around the US: the granularity of Google’s geographical information can be under scrutiny for privacy concerns. They sign partnerships to give free access to Google Apps for Education to 70,000 university students in Kenya and Rwanda: the strategic frontier and traditionally States’ monopoly of Education and international cooperation are crossed. They introduce the Gmail Paper Archive. They are under scrutiny for scanning practices of personal communication for purposes of targeting ads. Eight more languages to Blogger, bringing the total to 19: will global communications be detected and profiled? They announce new strides taken towards universal search. Now video, news, books, images and local results are all integrated together in one search result. Google Hot Trends launches, lists of the current 100 most active queries, showing what people are searching for at the moment: sign of high potential database in de-codifying people’s needs and mental paths since people searches per countries – an enormous database- are processed and clustered. Street View debuts in Google Maps in five U.S. cities: New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver. They are currently under scrutiny for privacy concerns. The corporation may be preparing for the next geo-economic frontier, viz., “space:” to infinity and beyond!’ Sky launches inside Google Earth, including layers for information on constellations and virtual tours of galaxies. They partner with IBM on a supercomputing initiative so that students can learn to work at Internet level on computing challenges. They announce OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for developers to build applications for social networks. Android, the first open platform for mobile devices is announced as is the Android Developer Challenge (the Android platform is “a software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and key applications. Developers can create applications for the platform using the Android framework, program in Java and use the free Linux kernel, Google Android, 2008). The changes in the nesting process of Google within the Internet and States at large: Google has now “superpower” potential with information power as “the largest repository of data all forms all sources,” human technological power with a concentration and surplus of talent plus distributive brain power collaboration on line and worldwide, incredible money and liquidity, the largest powerful super computing system, data collection, storage and processing capability. Google is a cultural universe (where technocracy is in power even though people perceive just

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the surface) with an appealing and influential image and mass consensus although some products or alliances are currently under scrutiny.

4.6 Conclusion This chapter has discussed the Internet and its main current phenomenon, Google, as megaprojects and has theorized a nesting model within each other of two “virtual” megaprojects. Also I have highlighted the implication of such nesting. The similarities between the two categories of “virtual” and “physical” megaprojects can be found in terms of size (big) and nature of GPT (general purpose technology). Differences consist mostly in terms of nature (the Internet and Google are mostly virtual, the Internet is a not owned entity) while traditional engineering megaprojects are physical and owned. They differ in morphology and scale: the Internet is a global system, Google also became like this by spanning the whole world in the form of a network. Physical megaprojects are localized in a specific location and the reach is not immediately global. These virtual megaprojects are pushed forward by distributed contributions from individuals located everywhere. Traditional “mega” seem to have a more centralized organization and local and on-site maintenance. Reflexive thoughts on the “meganess” of the Internet and Google and its nesting in the Internet leads to considering this kind of megaproject as a global device of complexity (or reduction) for human cultural reproduction and transmission. They also serve as a global mediating system for information and communication on earth. I have presented Google’s impressive nesting results in three broad phases: internal nesting on cyberspace, external nesting on places, and “internal” nesting in mindset and in States. My thesis is that Google currently has all the features of a genuine geopolitical “superpower.” It has also showed a quasi military expansive strategy via its strategic thinking, an idealistic but technocratic culture, brilliant technological performances (but unknown basic search filters) and a seductive offer approach: the offer of service is really helpful and enable users, however the benefits for the Corporate in terms of accumulated information, potential profiling information, developed applications are of a non-calculable asymmetry of information between the corporation and users/contributors. This special mix of strategies and actions is aimed at nesting deeply in cyberspace, in individuals’ everyday life linked on earth, and in States and in global policy concerns. There is ample room from these examples and discussion to highlight further implications in terms of generated information that is taken for granted. These include a sense of place, asymmetric power of information, a computing and technocratic approach as well as the concentration of surplus resources. Worldwide Internet development intrinsically owes a debt of gratitude to Google for no longer being a topic of interest only for experts and academics. Google made the Internet mobile and indispensable. Google is a dominant force within the Internet and a global player on earth. It is also starting with traditional megaprojects (projects for a data server on an ocean platform). Google’s ideology is: fast

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surfing, speed, simplicity, ranking per popularity multitasking: these constitute our civilization and that of the Internet. Google did not simply inherit the Internet but it has been its main development force and modeling force in a global information management system and as a device of global cultural complexity. Google.org initiatives reflect their technocratic mindset. Its power may now create envy and lead to external challenges of the triadic management power of its two brilliant founders and the CEO. How long can a private entity accumulate so much information and ensure both privacy and avoid surveillance even by the State? Their superpower of money, talent, equipment, and computing, united in all their calls for partnerships in developing countries, challenge both the traditional State initiatives or State organizations in the field of cooperation. Will Google nest and permeate in specific developing regions of the world? Google celebrated its tenth birthday in 2008. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Aharon Kellerman for his thoughtful comments. Responsibility for the article lies, though, with the author only.

References Adam, P. C., & Ghose, R. (2003). India.com: the construction of a space between. Progress in Human Geography, 27, 414–437. Aoyama, Y. (2001). The information society, Japanese style: corner stores as hubs for e-commerce access. In T. B. Leinbach & S. D. Brunn (Eds.), Worlds of e-commerce: Economic, geographical, and social dimensions (pp. 109–128). NewYork: Wiley. Battelle, J. (2006). Google and the others. Milano: Raffaello Cortina (Italian edition, original title The Search, 2005). Batty, M., & Miller, H. J. (2000). Representing and visualizing physical, virtual and hybrid information spaces. In D. G. Janelle & D. C. Hodge (Eds.), Information, place, and cyberspace (pp. 133–146). Berlin: Springer. Bonora, P. (2001). Communicative dominions between borders of sense of attachment and electronic benches. In P. Bonora (Ed.), Comcities. Communications geographies (pp. 3–48). Bologna: Baskerville (in Italian). Brunn, S. D. (1998a). The “Internet” as “The New World” of geography: Speed, structure, volume, and humility. Geojournal, 45(1–2), 5–15. Brunn, S. D. (1998b). A treaty of silicon for the treaty of Westphalia. Geopolitics, 3(1), 107–131. Dodge, M., & Kitchin, R. (2001). Mapping cyberspace. London: Routledge. Dodge, M., & Kitchin, R. (2005a). Codes of life: Identification codes and the machine-readable world. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23(6), 851–881. Dodge M., & Kitchin, R. (2005b). Code and the transduction of space. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95(1), 162–180. Glazowsky, P. (2008). Google-Yahoo might be ok for Yahoo, but what about everybody else? September 21, 8:42 am PDT. Retrieved October 6, 2008, from http://mashable.com/ 2008/21/google-yahoo-again/ Google. (2008a). Corporate information. Retrieved October 6, 2008, from http: //www. Google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html Google. (2008b). Google milestones. Retrieved October 24, 2008, from http://www.google.com/ corporate/history.html Google Android. (2008). Retrieved January 7, 2009, from http://code.google.com/android/ documentation.html Graham, M., & Zook, M. (2006) The soft-ware and hard-where of GoogleEarth: Privatizing DigiPlace? Paper presented at the Association of American Geographers, Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.

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Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (1996). Telecommunications and the city: Electronic spaces, urban places. New York: Routledge. Kellerman, A. (2002). The Internet on earth: A geography of information. London and New York: Wiley. Kellerman, A. (2007). Cyberspace classification and cognition: Information and communications cyberspaces. Journal of Urban Technology, 14, 5–32. Kellerman, A., & Paradiso, M. (2007). Geographical location in the information age: From destiny to opportunity? Geojournal, 70, 195–211. Ippolita (2007). Google’s lights and shadows. Milano: Feltrinelli (Italian). Malecki, E. J., & Gorman, S. P. (2001). Maybe the death of distance, but not the end of geography: The Internet as a network. In T.R. Leinbach & S. Brunn (Eds.), Worlds of e-commerce: Economic, geographical and social dimensions (pp. 87–105). Chichester: Wiley. Paradiso, M. (2006). The bridging role of information geography in integrating the social sciences and engineering. Journal of Urban Technology, 3, 77–92. Quomedia. (2008a). Google walks on the waters, 22 September 2008 (Italian). Retrieved October 6, 2008, from http://quomedia.diesis.it/news/14433/google-cammina-sulle-acque Quomedia. (2008b). Skype monitored chat messages in China, 3 October 2008 (Italian). Retrieved October 6, 2008, from http://quomedia.diesis.it/news/14643/skype-monitorava-messaggi-chatin-cina Quomedia. (2008c). United Kingdom: the Big Brother is arriving and will check calls, sms, and the Web, 6 October 2008 (Italian). Retrieved October 6, 2008, from http://quomedia. diesis.it/news/14666/regno-unito-arriva-il-grande-fratello-che-controlla Reagan, G. (2008). The Google monster. The New York Observer, September 29, 2008. Retrieved October 6, 2008, from www.observer.com/2008/arts-culture/google-monster Rhoads. C. (2008). Start-up seeks to link 3 billion to Net. Google and others invest $60 million in Satellite plan, Wall Street Journal, September 09 10:04 AM PDT. Retrieved October 6, 2008, from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122091223182012137.html Stross, R. (2008). Planet Google. One company’s audacious plan to organize everything we know. New York: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Thrift, N., & French, S. (2002). The automatic production of space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., 27, 309–335. Vise, D., & Malseed M. (2007). The Google story. Milano: Egea (original title 2005 by D. Vise, The Google Story, New York: Random House). Wikipedia. (2009). Cloud computing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing Zook, M. (2000). The economic geography of commercial Internet content production in the United States. Environment and Planning A, 32, 411–426. Zook, M. (2003). Underground globalization: Mapping the space of flows of the Internet adult industry. Environment and Planning A, 35, 1261–1286. Zook, M., & Graham, M. (2007). Mapping DigiPlace: Geocoded Internet data and the representation of place. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34, 466–482. doi:10.1068/b3311.

Chapter 5

Cloud Collaboration: Peer-Production and the Engineering of the internet Mark Graham

cyberspace is real –President Barak Obama (2009)

5.1 Introduction Many of the megaengineering projects constructed throughout human history have left us with immense and spectacular features on the Earth’s landscape. The Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Panama Canal and Burj Dubai all offer visually unforgettable reminders of the feats that can be accomplished by the concerted efforts of thousands of laborers (c.f. Edwards, 1985; McCullough, 1977; Verner, 2001). The element that all of these engineering projects have in common is the convergence of thousands of laborers in specific moments in space and time. However, with the onset of the Computer Age, an epochal shift in the ways that the fruits of labor can be combined has taken place. Widespread access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and agile and adaptable systems of workflow now allow people across the globe to collaborate on virtual mega-engineering projects that are unprecedented in scale or scope. Ten or even hundreds of thousands of workers are now able to combine their efforts to create virtual projects that are less visible (from the physical world), but no less ambitious than their material counterparts. Wikipedia, for example, currently (in mid-2009) has 75,000 active contributors working on ten million encyclopedia articles in 260 languages (Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, 2009). YouTube, the popular video sharing website, now hosts approximately 100 million videos, created and uploaded by hundreds of thousands of people. Perhaps even more astoundingly,

M. Graham (B) Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected]

S.D. Brunn (ed.), Engineering Earth, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4_5,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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200 million people have now uploaded text, hyperlinks, photographs and videos to a Facebook profile. Such amalgamations of the combined efforts of so many people in distinct moments in time and space are simply unprecedented in human history. This fact has not gone unnoticed by social commentators, and there are few remaining large organizations or companies that have not attempted to use the internet to harness the work of segments of the connected global labor force. Indeed, in 2006, the millions of creators of user-generated content on the were awarded Time magazine’s Person of the Year award (Fig. 5.1), with the editor arguing that Web 2.0 (or the technological frameworks for bringing together the contributions of millions of people) represents nothing short of a revolution because it is no longer “the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species” (Grossman, 2006). This chapter begins by reviewing these new ways of organizing labor, focusing on the variety of forms that cyberprojects can take. The chapter then discusses the very properties of the internet that allow people from around the world to “come together” and construct projects using the internet. Finally, the chapter concludes by

Fig. 5.1 My/our/your time person of the year award. (Source: Wikipedia.org)

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examining whether Web 2.0 projects signal the beginnings of open and democratic cyberspaces, or if they instead represent new forms of exploitation.

5.2 Construction in the Cloud Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a deeper transformation of the fundamentals of our social life. As political, economic, and social systems transform themselves into distributed networks, a new human dynamic is emerging: peer to peer (P2P). (Bauwens, 2005)

The defining feature of the enormous projects being constructed through the internet is the fact that they are being engineered by labor forces that engage in non-proximate and distributed collaboration. While this phenomenon is both new and unprecedented in human history, it has already been labeled with an assortment of terms: “crowdsourcing,” “cloudsourcing,” “user-generated content,” “peer-topeer collaboration,” and “Web 2.0.” However, I would argue that the term that best encapsulates the dynamics of this distributed, decentralized, and largely volunteer workforce is “cloud collaboration.” The metaphor of a cloud is a useful way to refer to the spatiality and the topologies of the internet. The cloud can be seen and moved through, but is not a place that we could ever inhabit. The cloud also represents the totality of cyberspace: a space that certainly exists, but is difficult to draw clear boundaries around (Scanlon & Wieners, 1999). Before examining in more detail the ways that cloud collaboration is structured, it is useful to discuss exactly what is being created. Non-proximate labor forces have been organized to create impressive feats of engineering before. Indeed, it could be argued that most of the products created by transnational corporations (TNCs) in the world today are created by vast workforces of non-proximate laborers. It is, therefore, important to distinguish between engineering projects that create outputs that are plural in nature (e.g. projects run by TNCs like Airbus, Apple or Toyota that exert most of their efforts building thousands (or even millions) of copies of each product), and those that create outputs that are singular in nature and are rooted to one physical or virtual place (i.e., in these cases, a majority of effort is spent designing and creating the project rather than creating copies of it). It is the latter form of virtual project that this chapter explicitly focuses. Considering convergence in both time and space is crucial to understanding how projects created through cloud-collaboration contrast to other large engineering projects (Fig. 5.2). Most megaengineering projects that have been constructed have required laborers to converge in both time and space. The Egyptian pyramids or the Three Gorges Dam could not have been built if workers reported to the construction sites whenever they chose to and stayed at work for as long as they wanted to. Similarly, while the workforces of a TNC may not all converge in space, they do come together in time. Jet planes, iPods, pickup trucks, and every other product made by a TNC could never be efficiently put together if workers did not report to factories at designated times. However, with the projects created by

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Fig. 5.2 Time and space convergence in various types of large engineering projects. (Source: author)

cloud-collaboration there is rarely any push for workers to report to duty at specific times. Web 2.0 content is not hosted in any one centralized place, but is rather stored in distributed servers that can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. Contributors therefore generally work whenever they want and for as long as they want. It is also important to distinguish between projects created on the internet and projects created through the internet. Many of attempts to harness cloud collaboration focus on the latter type of project, and almost always have concentrated on building computer software. One of the most well known examples is the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which has a stated goal of ultimately making software freely available for all computer users.1 These projects work by bringing together the expertise of people around the world to participate on different aspects of the same piece of software.2 While the ability of groups like the FSF to bring together thousands of workers through the internet is certainly an impressive feat,3 their outputs pale in comparison to user-generated content being created and organized in the cloud rather than through it. A variety of forms of collaboration exist which bring together thousands of workers to construct projects in the same cyberplaces. The range of types of collaboration can be generally classified into three types, although there are naturally examples of overlap between categories (Table 5.1).

5.2.1 Social Spaces This category refers to the enormous social forums that have been built in recent years. Online social forums exist in a variety of guises, but primarily serve to facilitate some form of social networking. In some social spaces, contributors are expected to upload personal information including text, pictures, sounds and videos. This information is then brought into the same virtual networked space as the

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Table 5.1 Examples of projects that make use of cloud collaboration Social spaces

Content spaces

Cosmographies

World databases of people Spaces in which knowledge is brought into the same social brought together about specific spaces. subjects.

Representations of the physical world in cyberspace using the Earth as an organizing principle.

Project

Description

Project

Description

Project

Description

Facebook

Social networking Business networking Partner search

Flikr

Photo sharing

Bing Maps

Web mapping

WikiAnswers

Questions and answers Ethical consumption Encyclopedia

Google Earth

Virtual globe

WikiMapia

Virtual globe

Video sharing

Wikipedia

Global travel guide

Linkedin Match.com Second Life Warcraft

Wikichains

Virtual Wikipedia world/social networking MMORPG YouTube

OpenStreetMap Street map

Source: author

information provided by each contributor’s family, friends, and colleagues. These have in many ways turned into a giant database of a significant portion of the world’s population. For instance, 200 million people have contributed information to Facebook (a social networking site), over 100 million have uploaded content to MySpace (another social networking website), and 15 million people have provided information to Match.com (an internet dating website). Other social spaces focus less on creating a database, and more on facilitating or bringing into being spaces in which social interaction can occur. The precursors to the large social spaces that exist in cyberspace today were chatrooms and internet forums, with distributed contributors providing the bulk of content. This is not to imply that chat rooms are a thing of the past. They have steadily grown in size, and some such as the Japan-based 2channel now have millions of new posts every day. However it is the massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) that perhaps provide the best examples of spaces being created through cloud collaboration. World of Warcraft, for example, currently has 11.5 million subscribers; each of whom designs an avatar and interacts with other subscribers in an online universe. Second Life is an even more interesting example of a social space created through cloud collaboration. Any of the 15 million users can build virtual objects, own virtual land, buy and sell virtual goods, attend virtual concerts, bars, weddings, and churches, and communicate with any other member of the virtual world (Fig. 5.3). Second Life has become so popular that a variety of institutions based in the physical world have purchased virtual land within the virtual environment4 (e.g. Sweden, Israel, and the Maldives have established embassies, and the British Council, Goethe Institute, and Cervantes Institute have constructed virtual schools in Second Life).

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Fig. 5.3 Avatars in second life. (Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lindenlab/2551390368/in/set72157605197609174/)

Users of Second Life create almost every aspect of the virtual world and, as a result, a relatively complex society and economy has developed (Boellstorff, 2008).

5.2.2 Content Spaces Content spaces are locations on the internet that bring together large amounts of media. Users are both producers and consumers (prosumers) in these spaces (Ritzer, 2009). The most well known example of is YouTube, a video-sharing website onto which 100 million videos have been contributed by thousands of people. Twenty hours of videos are now uploaded by users to the site every single minute of the day (this is the equivalent of 86,000 full-length films being released each week) (YouTube, 2009). Other examples include Scribd, a document-sharing site onto which 50,000 documents are uploaded every day, and Flikr, a photo-sharing site that now contains over 3 billion images uploaded by users. Many content spaces employ the wiki model of collaboration. A wiki is a website that allows anyone to add, modify, or delete content. Some of the most important websites in this category are Wikipedia5 (by far the largest encyclopedia ever put together with 12 million articles in 262 languages), WikiAnswers (a site containing 9 million questions and 3 million user submitted answers), and Baidu Baike (the largest Chinese-language encyclopedia containing 1.5 million articles). The largest wikis impose few restrictions on the scope of their projects. Almost any question can be asked on WikiAnswers (and it is difficult to think of any original question not already included in the 9 million that have been asked on the site. Wikipedia similarly aims to cover “the sum of all human knowledge” in every human language (Dodson, 2005). However, rather than allowing an unlimited scope for contributions, most wikis encourage contributors to focus on specific topics such as psychology (Psychology wiki), the production networks of commodities (WikiChains), and sensitive documents and leaks (Wikileaks).

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The fact that anybody can contribute to a wiki from anywhere in the world has led to wikis being described as an exercise in both anarchy and democracy (Ciffolilli, 2003). They allow a deconstruction of monopolies on truth and grand narratives and instead encourage a move towards plural and relatively unstable little narratives. Knowledge constructed in wikis is able to take on a fluid and unfixed character in two main ways. First, content is never considered finished or complete. Wikis always allow information to be moved altered and deleted. A static location in cyberspace (for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President) can thus display very different content at different times. Second, wikis generally do not discriminate against different types of contributors. Most wikis allow anonymous contributions, and never require contributors to submit any professional credentials. While articles can be written collaboratively by people from around the world, a core characteristic of wikis is that they necessitate agreement. Subject matter can be described and represented in only one way. For example, there is only one Wikipedia article that focuses on the Thai island of Ko Tao, while on other Web 2.0 projects (such as YouTube), the island is represented in a multitude of ways. This means that although any person can in theory comment on any subject, there are in fact distinct rules and power-relationships that influence the organization of the labor force. Disputes about visible content are a common feature of wikis, and the methods employed to resolve disputes are often opaque and favor certain segments of the online population. These issues are addressed in more detail following a brief discussion of the final category.

5.2.3 Cosmographies While social spaces and wiki spaces bring together masses of information about the world into centralized nodes or locations on the internet that are organized around theme, person, or any other imaginable principle, cosmographies are built around the idea that the Earth itself can be used as an organizing principle. Included in this category are Google Earth/Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Microsoft Live Search Maps,6 Wikipedia, WikiMapia, and OpenStreetMap. In each of the cosmographies, the physical world is represented by contributors from around the globe. Some of the cosmographies allow multiple representations of the same place in the physical world to coexist on the internet. Figure 5.4 is an example of user-generated representations of London’s Trafalgar Square in Google Maps. The website brings together the hundreds of user-generated comments, photographs, and videos of that specific part of London and allows them all to be accessed by navigating to Trafalgar Square using the Google Maps interface. Other cosmographies necessitate agreement and only allow the physical world to be represented in one way. Figure 5.5, for example, is a representation of Trafalgar Square taken from the Wikipedia website. Here, over five hundred creators of the article have to decide on how to best represent any specific part of the world. Many of the physical and cultural characteristics of the planet have now been mapped out by the army of volunteers that contribute their time to one or more of the online cosmographies. Wikipedia has over 50,000 places represented, over

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Fig. 5.4 The multiple representations of trafalgar square in google maps. (Source: maps. google.com)

Fig. 5.5 A singular representation of trafalgar square in wikipedia. (Source: wikipedia.org)

a million page edits, and over 40.000 contributors. WikiMapia, has an even larger database of user-generated content, with over 10 million places represented in May 2009. The work behind OpenStreetMap is perhaps even more impressive. On 4 May 2009, 113,201 people had uploaded 801,461,215 GPS points into the online database. Google Earth is perhaps the most widely used member of this group, and has been downloaded 500 million times. There are now over one million members of the Google Earth community (bbs.keyhole.com), with almost 700,000 bookmarked placemarks listed on the Google Earth community page7 and over 200 million maps created by users (Scott, 2009). The fact that hundreds of thousands of people have been able to create millions of profiles, encyclopedia entries, and representations of the physical world has lead commentators like Kevin Kelley (2009), in Wired magazine, to claim that cloud collaboration marks a crucial shift in human history: a move towards a new untried

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form of socialism or dot-communism (see also Barbrook, 2000). Not only can any virtual project, in theory, now be built by a labor pool of millions of people, but the outputs of that labor will also supposedly be non-hierarchical and democratized (Butler, 2006; Hall, 2007). The virtual world will be created not through top-down decision making, but instead through collaboration, participation, and transparency. It is to a more detailed analysis of these claims that the remainder of this chapter turns.

5.3 Characteristics of the Cloud Accurately defining the distributed, decentralized, and volunteer work that is taking place through the internet is crucial to being able to formulate accurate understandings about the nature and types of projects being constructed. There is a significant amount of power embedded into the terminology and metaphors that are regularly used. For instance, it is often claimed that anybody, anywhere on the planet with the requisite hardware, software and internet connection can contribute to Web 2.0 projects like Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap; thus implying that 1.5 billion people (the current number of internet users) can potentially be brought into the same virtual construction site for any project (Beer, 2008; Breen and Forde, 2004; Goodchild, 2007; Kelley, 2005). Eric Raymond, in a now famous essay on the collaborative software development model, compares the shared cyberspaces in which virtual construction sites are created to a bazaar (1999). Raymond thus implies that two or more collaborators inhabiting non-proximate locations in physical space are able to share more than a topological connection; they are instead seen to be occupying the same virtual space, cyberspace, or “global village” (c.f. McLuhan, 1962). Cyberspace, in this sense, is able to take on an ontic role. It becomes both an ethereal alternate dimension that is infinite and everywhere (because all potential laborers have access to it irrespective of their location in physical space) and fixed in a distinct location, albeit a nonphysical one (because, despite being universally accessible, all willing participants are thought to arrive into the same virtual construction site). It becomes a shared virtual reality and a consensual hallucination (Gibson, 1984), which is “generating an entirely new dimension to geography” (Batty, 1997: 339). This a priori ontology of cyberspace as simultaneously infinite and fixed is prevalent in much of the popular and academic literatures on the potentials of cyberspace (Graham, M. (2010). The spatialities of the digital divide, “Unpublished manuscript”). However, despite widespread adoption, it remains that such conceptions of cyberspace are not particularly useful to our understandings of the ways in which the Internet offers a platform upon which virtual megaengineering projects are constructed. Instead of thinking of cyberspace as an absolute ontic space that is largely disconnected from the physical world, it is perhaps more appropriate to envision cyberspace as “as a socially constructed discourse that simultaneously reflects and constitutes social reality” (Warf, 2001: 6). It can be thought of as existing in a

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symbiotic relationship with physical space in which users exist in between the physical and virtual worlds (Graham, 2008; Kitchin, 1998; Zook & Graham 2007b, 2007a). In other words, cyberspace does not allow most users to fully divorce themselves from material realities. Why do ontologies of cyberspace matter to the construction of the virtual world? The fact that 1.5 billion people are not actually being brought into a singular virtual space means that despite the global reach of megaprojects like Wikipedia, there remain pronounced geographic biases which are unsurprisingly not dissimilar from the biases in the internet itself (c.f. Castells, 2002; Dodge and Kitchin, 2001; Gorman & Malecki, 2002; Townsend, 2001; Zook, 2000). These biases generally take two forms. First, just because a non-proximate labor force can hypothetically be brought together from all corners of the globe, does not necessarily mean that it will. It is increasingly clear that a large part of the user-generated content on the internet is created by people in the world’s wealthiest countries (EthnicLoft, 2006; Zook & Graham, 2009). Furthermore, not only is there a geographic bias in the creation of content, but it also seems that most contributors are young, highly-educated, and male. A 2008 survey of Wikipedia, for example, found that only 12.8% of contributors were female and the average age was 26.8 years (Wikipedia, 2009). The fact that English is a dominant language on the internet explains some of this bias (Flammia & Saunders, 2007). Social norms, practices, and restrictions also play a significant role. For instance, studies have found that because of the persistence of masculine logics of conflict and honor on the internet, female contributors are often ignored, trivialized, or criticized by their male counterparts (Morahan-Martin, 1998; O’Neil, 2009). Crucially, it also seems likely that it is only those possessing the luxuries of large amounts of disposable time and income that can contemplate donating their labor for free. Second, and perhaps more importantly, just because online content can be created that references any point in the physical world does not necessarily mean that it will (Graham, 2010). Representations of the physical world in cyberspace are overwhelmingly biased towards cities in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia (Zook & Graham, 2009). Large parts of the world remain terra incognita in cyberspace, while others are characterized by myriad layers of detail (Graham, 2010). The differences between various parts of the Earth in cyberspace are often staggering. For instance, in Google Earth, there is now more user-generated virtual content about the Tokyo metropolitan area than the entire continent of Africa (Zook & Graham, 2009). We are, therefore, seeing a correlation between the locations in which the non-proximate labor force is based and locations about which they are creating content.

5.4 Cloud Collaboration Capitalism has discovered a way to exploit the labor power of a whole new population. The only thing better, from the capitalist’s point of view (especially in terms of low-skilled

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work), than a low-paid worker is someone (the consumer) who does the work for no pay at all. In Marxian terms, the worker produces a great deal of surplus value, the consumer who “works” produces nothing but surplus value. (Ritzer, 2009: 20)

We have seen that labor resources can now be pooled in ways never before imagined. Yet, puzzling questions remain. Why are millions of people contributing their labor for no apparent material rewards? Who is organizing all of this labor? And perhaps most importantly, who is benefitting? Cloud collaboration, in many ways, appears to represent a step away from the systems of exchange that we are familiar with in contemporary capitalism. The means of production have in many cases become a virtual commons, and private virtual property has become devalued with the emergence of a widespread gift-culture (Barbrook, 1998, 2000; Barbrook and Cameron, 2001). Millions of people are willing to contribute their labor for free in order to share original and remixed contributions with the world as part of the online tapestries of intertextuality (Diakoupoulos, Luther, Medynskiy, & Essa, 2007). Some people simply enjoy contributing, while others do it for personal gain and recognition (Ritzer, 2009). However, behind most contributions lies a belief in the transformative power of the new projects and spaces that are being created. Cyberspace has often been argued to be a bastion of freedom away from many of the constraints inherent to our physical existences. For instance, John Perry Barlow, the author of the now famous “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” stated (to those who seek to control content on the internet) “the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us” (Barlow, 1996). Web 2.0 projects have appeared to be no different, and the organizational structures behind most projects created through cloud collaboration appear to be open, inclusive, transparent, and democratic; thus leading contributors to feel that they are working not for a higher authority with interests divergent from their own, but instead for the good of the virtual communities that they belong to. Many of the projects that rely on cloud collaboration actively recruit their labor force by highlighting ideas of freedom, openness, inclusion, and democracy. The GNU (GNU is a recursive acronym that stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”) free-operating system project, for example, has created the Uncle GNU poster (Fig. 5.6). The image is a play on the 1914 British “Lord Kitchener Wants You” and the 1917 American “Uncle Sam Wants You” posters, and suggests that contributing to the free-software movement (just like contributing to the war efforts) is some sort of moral duty. Despite the apparent shift to a freer and more open paradigm of labor, there remain a number of problematic aspects to cloud collaboration. First, it is important to recognize that online projects and communities are not non-hierarchical; there are constraints and controls placed on the enormous amount of work being put forth. These controls can be highly visible and instituted by the corporations or private owners of cyberprojects (Schiller, 1999). Google, for example, often determines what is made visible and invisible on the internet based on human judgments about value (Zook & Graham, 2007a). Controls can also be far less visible (but no less powerful and effective) when they are based on factors like charisma, markets, social

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Fig. 5.6 Uncle GNU. (Source: Wikipedia.org)

norms, and architecture (code) (Lessig, 1999). Mathieu O’Neil (2009:79) notes that underneath the rules and institutional structures of many online projects there exists an archaic residue: “a zone of rude aggression which is primarily the site of ritualised male proofs of valour and honour.” The charisma of certain personalities (for example, the founder of Wikipedia is able regularly overrule collective decisions due to his prestige) and the transfer of forms of domination and hierarchy into the online world from the offline one means that the construction and organization of online projects is governed by more than just codified rules (O’Neil, 2009). Furthermore, because non-codified forms of power are often difficult to see and pin down, the design and meta-construction of most projects created through cloud collaboration remains a black box to most contributors. Perhaps more worrying are the ways that the financial rewards of cloud collaboration are distributed. O’Neil (2009: 21) argues that “with the mass rise of Web 2.0 and, in particular, of social networking platforms: consumers are now themselves expected to provide the content which will then be used to attract advertising revenue.” Cloud collaboration is thus simply facilitating the accumulation of profits to

Private company Private company

Private company (IAC/InterActiveCorp)

Private company (Linden Lab) Private company (Activision Blizzard)

Facebook Linkedin

Match.com

Second Life

Source: author

Warcraft

Project

Owner

Project

YouTube

Wikipedia

Wikichains

Flikr WikiAnswers

Content spaces

Social spaces

Non-profit (Wikimedia Foundation) Google

Yahoo! Private company (Answers Corporation) Non-profit

Owner

Table 5.2 Ownership of selected cloud-collaboration projects

Wikipedia

WikiMapia

OpenStreetMap

Bing Maps Google Earth

Project

Cosmographies

Private company (Internet Brands)

Non-profit (OpenStreetMap Foundation) Private company

Microsoft Google

Owner

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those in control of the advertising space of each project (see also Fuchs, 2008). In other words, with cloud collaboration, consumers (because they are also producers) end up paying for their own means of production (Ritzer, 2009). George Ritzer (Ritzer, 2009: 24) argues that this system of labor is inherently a form of control and exploitation. He states that: While it may not in the beginning have been capitalistic, prosumption on Web 2.0 is moving seemingly inexorably in that direction. That is, web sites that might have been created with grand intentions are increasingly being bought up by, or attracting the attentions of, major corporations that are seeking to acquire them because they see in them a huge source of income and profit.

Many companies have now recognized that it makes sound economic sense to use the “wisdom of crowds” to make profits (Finkelstein, 2008). Most of the largest cloud collaboration projects are run by for-profit companies (Table 5.2). Only three of the projects listed in Table 5.2 are operated on a not-for-profit basis, and every major social networking website (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Orkut, Second Life, Twitter, etc.) is run as a for-profit company despite relying almost entirely on freely submitted content. In addition, some of the largest and most popular (and in many cases the most profitable) websites on the internet owe a large degree of their success to incorporating cloud collaboration into their business model. For instance, Google has developed a system in which people can place tags on any image in order to improve the Google image search results, and a significant amount of the content on the Amazon group of websites now consists of user-submitted reviews and rankings. It is well known that capitalism is always searching for new, innovative, and more effective forms of exploitation (Ritzer, 2009; Roemer, 1982). However, some such as Tapscott and Williams (2007) now argue that cloud collaboration is simply exploitation that has gone too far. Exploitation is not a simple coercive production practice in the Web 2.0 ecosystem, but is rather something far less obvious. Often repeated claims about shared, open, transparent, and democratic cyberspaces are in many cases failing to match the realities of privately owned and for-profit projects created by an unpaid labor force of millions.

5.5 Conclusions Cloud collaboration has allowed projects of previously unimaginable scale and scope to be constructed. Social spaces have brought together the work of hundreds of millions of people to construct a detailed database about a significant portion of the world’s population. Wiki spaces have provided a forum for millions of people to create and categorize almost all forms of human knowledge; cosmographies similarly have allowed millions to map out countless features of the Earth in centralized databases. Although the internet and various Web 2.0 frameworks have allowed a pooling of labor power from all over the world, the projects created by cloud collaboration

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are not created by a representative sample of the world’s population. Rather than bringing everyone into a global village, the internet instead enables hybrid physical/virtual spaces to be created that can never eliminate the global economic inequalities that characterize the physical world. Projects built through cloud collaboration are thus overwhelmingly created by people in cities in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, and online representations of the physical world are equally biased towards those same places. Perhaps most troubling is the fact that despite oft repeated claims about cloud computing being a way for humanity to build a shared, open, transparent, and democratic space, new cyberspaces are frequently subject to many of the same forms of control and power relations that characterize the offline-world. It seems particularly problematic that large profits are being made from freely contributed labor. The dream of a digital commons, democratically constructed by people from around the world, may yet be realized. However, until then, it will remain important to ensure that the many new megaengineering projects on the internet represent more than just new forms of exploitation.

Notes 1. The founder of FSF, Richard Stallman, believes that his organization’s goal will ultimately “liberate everyone in cyberspace” (Daly, 2009). 2. It should be pointed out that such projects are not limited to the free or open source community. Microsoft Vista took five years and 10,000 workers from around the world to build (Takahashi, 2006). 3. For instance, it is estimated that 60,000 years of work were contributed to the Fedora Linux operating system released in 2008 (Kelley, 2009). 4. While it may initially seem remarkable that embassies are being established in a virtual world, the fact that the population of Second Life is larger than that of a number of countries makes this trend less surprising. 5. The largest languages on Wikipedia are English (2.9 million articles), German (900,000 articles), French (810,000 articles), and Japanese (590,000 articles). The language of Wikipedia content is thus more closely related to indices of wealth and prosperity than the total number of speakers of any given language (e.g. more Wikipedia content has been created in relatively small languages like Dutch or Swedish than in languages like Chinese or Bahasa Indonesian with many more speakers). 6. Some of the cosmographies do not host much of their content themselves, but rather import it from third-party collators of user-generated content. Google Maps and Google Earth, for example, incorporate photographs that people upload to Panoramio.com and comments that people upload to Tripadvisor.com. 7. The Google Earth Community is an online forum focused on producing and organizing placemarks that can be viewed in the Google Earth software.

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Barbrook, R., & Cameron, A. (2001) Californian ideology. In P. Ludlow (Ed.), Cyrpto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (pp. 363–387). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Barlow, J. P. (2009). A declaration of the independence of cyberspace. 1996. Retrieved May 19, 2009, from http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html Batty, M. (1997). Virtual geography. Futures, 29(4/5), 337–352. Bauwens, M. (2005). The political economy of peer production. Ctheory td026. Beer, D. (2008). Making friends with Jarvis Cocker: Music culture in the context of Web 2.0. Cultural Sociology, 2(2), 222–241. Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of age in second life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Breen, M., & Forde, M. (2004). The music industry, technology and utopia – an exchange between Marcus Breen and Eamonn Forde. Popular Music, 23(1), 79–89. Butler, D. (2006). Virtual globes: The web-wide world. Nature, 439, 776–778. Castells, M. (2002). The galaxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ciffolilli, A. (2003). Phantom authority, self–selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Wikipedia First Monday 8(12). Daly, S. (2009). Interview with Richard Stallman. Groklaw 2006. Retrieved April 27, 2009, from http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060625001523547 Diakoupoulos, N., Luther, K., Medynskiy, Y., & Essa, I. (2007). The evolution of authorship in a remix society. Paper read at HT’07, September 10–12, at Manchester. Dodge, M., & Kitchin, R. (2001). Atlas of cyberspace. London: Addison-Wesley. Dodson, S. (2005). Worldwide Wikimania Guardian Unlimited, October 3. Edwards, I. E. S. (1985). The pyramids of Egypt. London: Penguin Books. EthnicLoft. (2009). Preserving ethnic languages: Swahili on Wikipedia. Newsvine.com 2006. Retrieved April 25, 2009, from http://ethnicloft.newsvine.com/_news/2006/09/06/353434preserving-ethnic-languages-swahili-on-wikipedia Finkelstein, S. (2008). When you have a Wikipedia, everything looks like an edit. Guardian, 8 May. Flammia, M., & Sanders, C. (2007). Language as power on the internet. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(12), 1899–1903. Fuchs, C. (2008). Internet and society: Social theory in the information age. London: Routledge. Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. London: Harper Collins. Goodchild, M. F. (2007). Citizens as sensors: The world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal, 69(4), 211–221. Gorman, S. P., & Malecki, E. J. (2002). Fixed and fluid: Stability and change in the geography of the internet. Telecommunications Review, 26(7–8), 389–413. Graham, M. (2008). Warped geographies of development: The internet and theories of economic development. Geography Compass, 2(3), 771–789. Graham, M. (2010). Neogeography and the palimpsests of place: Web 2.0 and the construction of a virtual earth. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 101(4), 422–436. Graham, M. (2011). Time machines and virtual portals: The spatialities of the digital divide. Progress in Development Studies (in press). Grossman, L. (2006). Time’s Person of the Year: You. Time. Hall, M. (2007). On the mark: Will democracy vote the experts off the GIS island? Computerworld News. Retrieved June 1, 2009, from http://www.computerworld. com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=299936 Kelley, K. (2005). We are the Web. Wired 13(8). Retrieved June 1, 2009, from http://www. wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html Kelley, K. (2009). The new socialism: Global collectivist society is coming online. Wired 17(6). Retrieved June 1, 2009, from http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/1706/nep_newsocialism Kitchin, R. (1998). Towards geographies of cyberspace. Progress in Human Geography, 22(3), 385–406. Lessig, L. (1999). Code and other laws of cyberspace. New York: Basic Books.

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McCullough, D. (1977). The path between the seas: The creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914. New York: Simon and Schuster. McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Morahan-Martin, J. (1998). The gender gap in Internet use: Why men use the Internet more than women—A literature review. CyberPsychology and Behavior, 1(1), 3–10. O’Neil, M. (2009). Cyber chiefs: Autonomy and authority in online tribes. London: Pluto Press. Obama, B. (2009). Obama’s remarks on cyber-security. New York Times 2009. Retrieved May 30, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/politics/29obama.text.html Raymond, E. S. (1999). The cathedral and the bazaar. Sebastapol, CA: O’Reilly. Ritzer, G. (2009). Production, Consumption . . . Prosumption? Georgeritzer.com Work in Progress. Retrieved June 1, 2009, from http://www.georgeritzer.com/work.html Scanlon, J. H., & Wieners, B. (2009). The cloud. The Industry Standard 1999. Retrieved April 26, 2009, from http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,5466,00.html Roemer, J. (1982). A general theory of exploitation and class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scanlon, J. H., & Wieners, B. (2009). The cloud. The Industry Standard 1999. Retrieved April 26, 2009, from http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,5466,00.html Schiller, D. (1999). Digital capitalism: Networking the global market system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Scott, L. (2009). Personal correspondence with Laura Scott: Communications and Public Affairs Officer at Google, June 1. Takahashi, D. (2006). Why Vista might be the last of its kind. The Seattle Times, Dec 4. Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. SD. (2007). Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything. New York: Penguin. Townsend, A. M. (2001). Network cities and the global structure of the internet. American Behavioral Scientist, 44(10), 1697–1716. Verner, M. (2001). The pyramids. New York: Grove Press. Warf, B. (2001). Segueways into cyberspace: Multiple geographies of the digital divide. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 28, 3–19. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. (2009). Wikipedia: About. Wikimedia Foundation 2009. Retrieved April 14, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About YouTube. (2009). Zoinks! 20 hours of video uploaded every minute! YouTube 2009. Retrieved June 5, 2009, from http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=on4EmafA5MA Zook, M. (2000). The economic geography of commercial content production in the United States. Environment and Planning A, 32, 411–426. Zook, M., & Graham, M. (2007a). The creative reconstruction of the internet: Google and the privatization of cyberspace and digiPlace. Geoforum, 38, 1322–1343. Zook, M., & Graham, M. (2007b). Mapping digiPlace: Geocoded data and the representation of place. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34(3), 466–482. Zook, M., & Graham, M. (2009). Mapping the GeoWeb: The spatial contours of Web 2.0 cyberspace. In Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting. Las Vegas, NV.

Chapter 6

Engineering Community and Place: Facebook as Megaengineering Michael Longan and Darren Purcell

6.1 Introduction Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles. It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up and down it. (Stephenson, 1992: 24)

Like the Street in Neil Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, millions of people from around the world gather on Facebook at any moment in time. Moreover, decisions about Facebook’s virtual spaces are made centrally by Facebook’s engineers and designers, much like the centrally controlled Street. The juxtaposition of widespread, global use and centralized control suggest that Facebook may be characterized as a mega-engineering project. On the face of it, the argument may seem preposterous. Unlike a highway, dam, or bridge, social network sites (SNSs) like Facebook leave no readily visible imprint on the landscape and are created through software rather than by bulldozers. Indeed, we argue that Facebook and other SNSs, including MySpace, represent a form of social mega-engineering, though we also suggest that they play a role in transforming material spaces. While the diffusion of SNSs has been uneven at best and follows the geography of the digital divide (Williams, 2001), few technologies save the Internet itself and perhaps Google (see Paradiso, 2010, this volume) have the potential to unify the masses onto one software platform to share their interests, passions and their consumer tastes. SNSs are infrastructures that bring people together virtually, just as many of the megaengineering projects chronicled in this volume facilitate flows of goods, resources, electricity, and people among material places. Engineers build network infrastructure and write computer code to create virtual spaces that encourage the formation of communities which generate shared social capital. Moreover these communities also constitute an engineered audience for marketers. SNSs are a Janus-faced M. Longan (B) Department of Geography and Meteorology, Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN 46383, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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marketer’s dream and nightmare as the volumes of information generated are only now becoming intelligible. As megaengineering projects, SNSs also deserve to be considered separately from the Internet. While the Internet is engineered to move data efficiently, SNSs facilitate flows of information among people and create a virtual community of exchange. Because information constitutes the basic building material of SNSs, users play a significant role in crafting their virtual spaces by sharing their own information. Users become engineers. This chapter first documents changes in Internet infrastructure that allowed SNSs to develop. It then explores the concept of virtual places and how they have been conceived of as tools for the social engineering of community. The remainder of the chapter focuses on Facebook and shows how its virtual spaces help to generate community ties and social capital, and in turn, how these virtual spaces may help transform the material world. Finally we examine the notion of few-to-many engineering as well as how users participate in and challenge the engineering of Facebook.

6.2 Facebook’s Mega Audience The fact that SNSs are engineered software platforms attracting millions of users from around the world places them in the same category as the other megaengineering projects discussed in this volume. Growth in the number of Internet users globally has changed the calculus for those seeking to develop SNSs. Internet access and use has diffused from core regions to semiperipheral and peripheral regions of the globe (Fig. 6.1). The decline in the cost of access coupled with deregulation policies and states working to facilitate an “information society” as a path to economic development led to rapid Internet adoption rates in the semiperipheral and peripheral regions of

Fig. 6.1 Change in Internet Development Index (IDI), a measure of the relative infrastructure quality, 2002–2007. (Data source: International Telecommunication Union, 2009). [IDI is not limited to physical infrastructure but also incorporates data linked to levels of education that impact technology usage.]

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the globe. A combination of private and public efforts have created more bandwidth in countries as varied in their political economy as South Korea and the Middle Eastern monarchies (Abdulla, 2007; Jin, 2005; Lee, O’Keefe, & Yun, 2003). Many peripheral and semiperipheral countries have seen increases in the provision of high quality Internet broadband services in their eagerness to transform their economies and to a lesser degree, their societies (Boas, 2006). This growth across the globe has yielded approximately 1.6 billion Internet users. The growth in physical access and educational attainment along with cultural changes that allow for integration of Internet technologies into daily life have created a critical mass of users to support the development of specialized Internet services (International Telecommunications Union, 2009). The increase in internet usage has also made the Internet potentially more useful for reaching consumers through advertising as well as a tool for gathering information on consumers. Though the Internet sounds like a marketer’s dream, the sheer amount of data available and the lack of standard formats means that it is both difficult to target advertisements and to collect meaningful consumer data. Just as providing free music via radio helped to create an audience that could be packaged and sold (Adams, 2005), marketers need ways to gather audiences online. SNSs perform both of these functions by encouraging consumers to provide personal information in a standardized format as well as providing applications for targeted advertising based on that data. Moreover, because SNSs are engineered communities, they allow marketers to encourage users to participate as spokespeople for their products. SNSs serve as virtual marketplaces that corral and concentrate user attention for marketers.

6.3 Engineering Virtual Spaces While we invoke the term “engineered” to denote the creation of Internet infrastructure, it may also denote the construction of virtual spaces by engineers and users. Though they lack materiality, virtual spaces may be considered to be a type of space. The existence and importance of virtual space is underscored by Shields (2003) who argues that the concept of the virtual has a long history predating the emergence of computing technology, and that scholars should investigate the reality that online virtual spaces hold for users. Individuals carry the social structures and expectations of their material existence with them to their interactions online, which impacts how they use online spaces (Hargittai, 2007). Scholars have observed that even if online spaces differ in form, they often function similarly to material spaces and exhibit place-like qualities. Adams (1992) convincingly argued that television is a gathering place replete with shared social norms that transcend time and space. Others have described the use of technologies to support the formation of communities (Kuehl, 2007; McArdle, 2008; Rheingold, 1993). As the mobile technologies for accessing the Internet become more sophisticated, the interaction among virtual and material spaces increases. Zook and Graham (2007a, 2007b) coined the term

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“digiplace” to describe the real-time interaction of physical and virtual spaces produced through the use of geocoded and mapped data using through mobile phones and online mapping technologies. What gives communication technologies, and by extension virtual worlds, their power as spaces is the concept of extensibility. This term denotes a person’s ability to influence events in space and time (Adams, 1995, 2005; Janelle, 1973). Extensibility varies for all people as a function of their class, race, employment structure, nature of their work, and their own motivations. At the same time, extensibility emphasizes the fact that humanity’s epistemology is derived from the body. The concept of extensibility helps one to visualize the multiple linkages forged in the virtual and material realms. Internet technologies enhance extensibility rather than transport a disembodied mind to a virtual realm separate from material space.

6.4 Using Virtual Spaces to Engineer Place-Based Community The mutual construction of virtual and material spaces through extensibility is an important theme in Internet geography research and applies to understanding the interconnection of virtual and material communities (Graham & Marvin, 1996). As with research on the Internet in general, writing about virtual communities in the 1990s focused on their seemingly global and placeless nature as well as the idea of community without propinquity (Webber, 1964). Nevertheless, Rheingold’s (1993) account of life in a virtual community explored the way that virtual community helped to support and enhance face-to-face community in the San Francisco area. His writing influenced an important, but unrecognized, predecessor to Facebook’s social engineering of community, the Community Networking Movement. Community networks are localized networks designed to provide free or low cost access to the Internet and host local information and community discussion. Community networking activists hoped to use Internet access to engineer placebased community. The Internet was a catalytic tool that community networking activists could use to help reconstruct a sense of community and promote civic participation that had been lost to the pressures of modern city life. As Schuler (1996: 9) put it, Community Networking could help to construct “New Communities” that would be “fundamentally devoted to democratic problem-solving.” While many community networks succeeded in providing access to community information, they have had limited success in engineering community because they tended to elide distinctions among community and place. They emphasized providing information about places via the World Wide Web instead of using communication tools to facilitate community conversations (Longan, 2002). Community networking organizations have been more successful at promoting social ties within their own organizations. The construction of the network itself serves as the “res publica” or public thing (Kemmis, 1990) around which community ties are formed (Longan, 2005). As will be shown below, a user’s common participation in constructing social ties with Facebook similarly provides a catalyst for community formation.

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Community networks are just one example of how people have sought to use online communication to reshape both society and the material landscape. SNSs largely achieve what community networking activists sought to achieve; they provide users with powerful tools that significantly alter both online and offline social relations and spaces.

6.5 Social Networking and Facebook SNSs have existed since 1997 and developed with increasing speed in the middle part of the decade (Boyd & Ellison, 2008). SNSs are distinct from other web sites because they “allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (Boyd & Ellison, 2008: 211). Users define an online persona and identify contacts publicly for others to see. SNSs often integrate other communication features including e-mail, chat, and photo and video sharing for example. Facebook, our case study, is arguably the fastest growing of the SNSs both in number of users and in their global distribution. It was originally created for Harvard University students, gradually expanded to other universities, to high schools, and later to the general public. Despite the initial dominance of teens and college-aged users, more non-students are joining Facebook (Kirkpatrick, 2008), with growth now approaching an estimated 200 million users. This means that there over one million users for each Facebook software developer (Facebook, 2009e). As Table 6.1 and Fig. 6.2 indicate, the United States is the largest Facebook user followed by the United Kingdom and Canada. The diffusion of Facebook is highly uneven. Countries such as Indonesia and India have significant numbers of users, but these barely comprise one percent of the population. In smaller countries, usage rates of over 25% of the population are not uncommon; indicating the adoption of Facebook is not limited to student-aged populations. Norway stands out at 43% of its population as registered users, and Denmark at 39%. Low usage rates in some countries are likely due to the popularity of other SNS services including Orkut, in Brazil and India and Xiaonei in China (Table 6.1 and Fig. 6.2).

6.6 Engineering Place and Community with Facebook W. Mitchell (1995: 5) argued that the most important task for architects of the digital world is “one of imagining and creating digitally mediated environments for the kinds of lives that we will want to lead and the sorts of communities that we will want to have.” By comparing different kinds of material spaces with their virtual analogs he demonstrated that architecture matters in the virtual world. In the material realm, bulletin boards, postal mail, living rooms, classrooms, and town halls

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Country

Number of facebook users

United States United Kingdom Canada Turkey France Italy Australia Spain Colombia Chile Argentina Indonesia Venezuela Mexico Belgium Sweden Denmark Germany Norway Hong Kong India Greece South Africa Switzerland Egypt

62,614,120 18,148,900 11,637,740 10,767,060 9,706,260 9,301,500 5,601,260 5,305,660 5,152,600 4,704,780 3,765,940 3,245,640 3,146,260 2,330,540 2,251,160 2,161,820 2,148,840 2,083,320 1,986,740 1,818,660 1,689,740 1,482,200 1,471,960 1,429,140 1,319,480

Population estimate 2009 307,212,123 61,113,205 33,213,000 76,805,524 64,420,073 58,126,212 21,007,000 40,525,002 45,644,023 16,454,000 40,482,000 240,271,522 26,814,843 111,211,789 10,404,000 9,059651 5,500,510 82,329,758 4,660,539 7,055,071 1,166,079,217 10,737,428 49,052,489 7,604,467 83,082,869

Percent of population that uses facebook

Percentage of all facebook users

20 30 35 14 15 16 27 13 11 29 9 1 12 2 22 24 39 3 43 26 0 14 3 19 2

31.21 9.05 5.80 5.37 4.84 4.64 2.79 2.64 2.57 2.34 1.88 1.62 1.57 1.16 1.12 1.08 1.07 1.04 0.99 0.91 0.84 0.74 0.73 0.71 0.66

Note: Data derived from figures provided to prospective advertisers on Facebook. They offer only a snapshot and approximation of the geographical distribution of users. The researchers noted minor fluctuations in the data within a 24 h period.] (Source: Facebook User Data Estimate from Facebook.com, 29 May 2009; Population estimate from U.S. Census Bureau, 2009)

are all spaces for community formation. Their analogs, web pages, chat rooms, and discussion forums may be used in attempts to engineer community online, however, unlike their material analogs they are not integrated into everyday life. A critical mass of participants must intentionally seek them out and few forums not devoted to a specific topic succeed online. The user profile on Facebook performs a similar function as a traditional home page on the Internet (Fig. 6.3). Like a home page the profile provides a space for users to represent themselves on the network by sharing interests, photos, and contact information. Profiles are perhaps the most important spaces on Facebook, but it is not the profile itself that encourages community formation. The Internet, Mitchell suggested, replaces contiguity with connection and streets with web links. Yet streets, hallways, sidewalks, yards, and the aisles of the grocery store are some of the most important spaces for community formation. As Massey

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Fig. 6.2 Percentage of the Population in Selected Countries that Use Facebook. (Facebook data from Facebook.com, accessed 29 May 2009. Population data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Population Database, accessed 2 June 2009)

Fig. 6.3 Map of the Facebook profile page

(1994) reminds us places are not simply bounded spaces, but nodes of interconnection. Links and pathways are as important as destinations for the construction of place and the formation of community. In addition to providing gathering spaces, Facebook engineers community by providing links and pathways between profiles. Unlike traditional Internet home pages, users link their own profile to other’s profiles by sending friend requests. Friends may also engage in public discussion by writing on each other’s profile “wall.” Unlike a traditional home page, profiles are produced collectively as well as individually. “Because social network sites do not provide

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Fig. 6.4 Map of the Facebook home page where the news feed is located

physical walls for context, the context that users create is through their choice of Friends” (Boyd, 2006). Indeed, one study found that the physical attractiveness and social behaviors of one’s friends on their Facebook profile influenced perceptions of the physical and social attractiveness of the profile owner (Walther, Der Heide, Kim, Westerman, & Tom Tong, 2008). Links to friends and writing on friend’s walls transforms profiles from simple destinations into nodes of interconnection. Yet in order to interact, one must still visit other people’s profiles. Were it not for the News Feed, which enables virtual travel, profiles would be like rooms without windows (Fig. 6.4). The News Feed, controversially introduced in 2006, automatically distributes news about updates to the profiles of one’s friends (Sanghvi, 2006). It creates an “ambient awareness” of other people’s activities, moods, and lives (Bødker & Christiansen, 2006; Thompson, 2008). Reading the News Feed is like walking down a sidewalk, bumping into a friend, and having a short conversation about how things are going. The only difference is that one knows most of the people on the sidewalk. The News Feed therefore acts much as a sidewalk would in a small town where people know each other. Facebook also helps to engineer community in material spaces. As the small town analogy suggests, people use tend to use Facebook to maintain contact with friends they already know, contrary to popular perceptions that social networking is about interacting with strangers (Manjoo, 2009). SNSs and material spaces are highly interconnected (Boyd, 2006). Online social ties are predominately extensions and intensifications of social ties first forged in material spaces. Users on Facebook join regional and local networks based initially on schools, workplaces, and regions which makes finding existing local friends and acquaintances easy. In concert with

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privacy settings these networks help to simulate friction of distance. Though users can change their privacy settings, by default more of one’s profile is visible to other people on one’s network than to people on more distant networks, thus making it easier to learn more about people close by than distant (Facebook, 2008). The result of this scalar geography is that people tend to use SNSs as a map of one’s existing place-based social relationships and to coordinate daily activities with friends who are close by (Stern & Taylor, 2007). Ambient awareness about others’ activities means that when friends meet face-to-face, they spend less time catching up and more time deepening their relationship. For instance, teachers who share appropriate information about themselves with their students via SNSs can improve their classroom climate as well as teaching outcomes because students learn more about their teachers than they would from their formal interactions in the classroom (Mazer, Murphy, & Simonds, 2007). Groups and events applications allow Friends to efficiently coordinate activities in material space, though there’s no guarantee that that friends will show up (Niedzviecki, 2008). While Facebook is primarily used to maintain existing friendships, it can also be used to forge new relationships in material space. The News Feed often reports on a friend’s interactions with their other friends, meaning that it is possible to encounter people one does not know. In addition, Facebook suggests possible friends who are friends of friends. A search on Facebook can also be used to find out more about people one has met briefly in a face-to-face context or someone seen regularly around town, but with whom one has never had a conversation. A subsequent conversation, “Hello, I recognize you from Facebook!” in material space or a Friend request leads to future online and offline contact and even perhaps real friendship. Here, Facebook functions as a catalyst for contact, converting spatial proximity into social proximity by bridging social distance. Though Facebook friends are not necessarily the same as “real” friends, a study of college students (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007), suggests that even informal contacts may help to enhance one’s social capital. Drawing from Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000), the study concluded that Facebook helped students to generate and maintain both bridging social capital, generated through weak tie relationships, and bonding social capital, generated through strong tie relationships. The social network helped students create relationships that they could draw upon to combat loneliness, ask for favors, or mobilize to accomplish common tasks. Moreover, the researchers also found that Facebook helped students to maintain social capital after moving to a new place. That Facebook helped students to maintain relationships after they have left a place suggests one final way that social network spaces and material space interpenetrate. Facebook allows place-based relationships to continue even after they have been disembedded from place.

6.7 Facebook’s Role in Transforming the Earth The social capital that Facebook helps to generate may in turn have a role in transforming the face of the Earth, as well as in transforming Facebook itself. Identifying and measuring the ways that Facebook alters both societies

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and material landscape is difficult. Nevertheless, we suggest some ways that Facebook may transform the Earth in the realms of the environment and geopolitics. First, Facebook’s size means that it has a major environmental impact, similar to other server-intensive computing operations such as Google (Da Silva, 2008). In addition to power consumption by servers, the energy used to cool the computers is a major component of overall energy use. While estimates vary, one study suggests that data centers may contribute 0.3% of carbon dioxide emissions. This figure is half of the carbon dioxide emissions of the airlines industry. Put another way, data centers generate more carbon dioxide than industrialized economies such as Netherlands, Argentina and Malaysia. (Forest & Brill, 2008). Recent figures provided by Facebook put the number of servers in use by the company at 10.000 (Miller, 2008). Facebook’s contribution to this total will only grow as it continues to expand globally. Beyond its direct environmental impact Facebook may also have other positive and negative effects on the environment, most of which are difficult to measure or confirm. People may substitute communication via Facebook for physical travel or use Facebook to coordinate their travel and improve its efficiency. Alternatively, because Facebook helps people to expand the scale of their contacts to regional, national, and international scales, it may encourage people to travel more than they would otherwise for face-to-face meetings (see Mokhtarian, 2002 for an overview of this issue). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, individuals and environmental organizations use Facebook to raise awareness about environmental issues as well as for fundraising. The political ramifications of Facebook and other SNSs are now becoming apparent. The 2008 United States Presidential campaign saw extensive use of SNS platforms to reach the “Facebook generation” (Fraser & Dutta, 2008) and they are given some credit for successful fundraising efforts, in particular by the Democratic party. Presidential candidates had Facebook pages (a specific type of profile that businesses, politicians, and celebrities may create for publicity) that were heavily visited, and communities formed around each, fostering the drive to donate. The use of social networking in political campaigns is expected to diffuse to other countries, though the effectiveness in other political contexts remains to be seen. Conversely, governments often fear the impact of Facebook. Iran’s government blocked access to Facebook through denial of service for specific URL addresses in the months before the June 2009 Presidential election, only to restore access weeks before the election. After the election the government increased monitoring of Internet use in Iran through the use of deep-packet inspection equipment (installed by Nokia Siemens Networks) that allowed the government to sift through data (e-mails and digital voice communication) via a single chokepoint on the network (Zetter, 2009). Earlier observers noted that the change may have been used by the government to attempt to appear open and democratic, and may have also allowed it to monitor activities of dissidents sharing their opinions on Facebook (Rahmi & Gheytanchi, 2009), and given post-election actions, these views were borne out. Beyond elections, nationalist political movements use SNSs to articulate geopolitical visions and aspirations for sovereignty, which becomes a site of contestation

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over the meaning of space (Purcell, 2009). As the Kurdistan and Somaliland Facebook groups illustrate, non-existent and unrecognized countries are represented in the virtual world. Those opposed to such political movements fight back virtually, making offensive posts in opponent’s groups or creating oppositional Facebook groups of their own. While clearly not “real” in a legal sense, the creators of Facebook sites for the Kurdistans and Somalilands of the world see these “countries” as quite real and inevitable, and use Facebook to educate the globe about their reality. A multitude of other political activism groups and pages also populate Facebook, taking advantage of SNS tools for organization as well as the large potential audience for their message. Facebook allows for regular communication across a community of people who choose to participate. This results in messages communicated to a niche public that are then shared virally. Upon reaching hard-core committed group members, messages may be posted to personal Facebook sites and forwarded in emails within minutes of viewing. Users are updated regularly with short messages, web links, video, and other media that are intended to reinforce a message, and be shared with others. The speed at which group members can be notified with detailed information and suggestions for action is superior to most other communications platforms, thus the ability to act quickly meshes well with the media environment groups work within.

6.8 Few-to-Many Engineering Although Facebook users have significant power to shape their own profiles and contribute content, they do so within constraints determined by the network’s engineers. Here there are parallels with city planning. Just as urban planners determine the infrastructure needs of a city, create zoning codes that regulate land use, and set design guidelines for districts, Facebook’s engineers and designers design it’s online spaces, determine how its core applications work, and how the interface will look. Moreover, different SNSs have different “zoning codes.” MySpace, for example, resembles Houston, which does not have a formal land use zoning code, because it allows users to do most anything they want with their profile regardless of clarity or usability. Users may alter the default profile’s layout, include their own background images, insert videos and songs, and customize font colors and sizes. Facebook on the other hand, resembles Santa Fe where uniformity of design is enforced across all profiles and “unsightly” applications are relegated to “boxes” that operate like fenced off back yards full of junk. Decisions about zoning and design are enforced through computer code rather than through laws (Dodge & Kitchin, 2005). Where code is inadequate to shape behavior, customer service representatives enforce terms of service rules by limiting access or exiling transgressors (Facebook, 2009c). Unlike a planning agency or a government, Facebook is a business and therefore may engage in few-to-many engineering. Changes can be made to the service without warning or input from users. This top-down hierarchical method of engineering

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resembles massive engineering efforts more than contemporary planning practice which emphasizes citizen input and participation in decision making. Moreover, while promoting health, safety, and welfare are central goals for planning, a central goal for Facebook is delivering the attention of users to advertisers. Nevertheless, users are not powerless to shape Facebook and may participate directly in engineering Facebook itself. Facebook’s international expansion required that the site be translated into hundreds of different languages. Rather than hiring translators, Facebook’s engineers created an application that invited users to translate Facebook’s pages into different languages. A voting system helped the engineers to find the best translation. Within 24 hours, 90% of the French version of Facebook had been completed (Facebook, 2009d). “Crowdsourcing” (the sharing of projects and problems online for others to contribute solutions, often without compensation) of problems allows a small group of engineers to have a worldwide impact in very little time. Users also help engineer the site through both sanctioned and unsanctioned feedback that can be either private or public (Table 6.2). Facebook solicits sanctioned Feedback in at least two ways. First, Facebook conducts user experience studies with users and non-users away from public view (Facebook, 2009a). Second, Facebook inconsistently solicits user input for proposed changes to the service both through private feedback and by providing spaces for users to publicly comment on changes. After experiencing bad publicity from the introduction of the News Feed in 2006, Facebook launched a page for users to provide both public and private feedback on proposed changes to the design of user profile pages in 2008 (Zuckerberg, 2008). Later, in early 2009, users and the media interpreted an unadvertised change in Facebook’s terms of service to mean that the company could use data that users uploaded to the service in any way that it wanted (Walters, 2009). Based on the uproar that followed the discovery of the changes, Facebook subsequently reverted to its old terms of service and invited users to participate in a vote on newly revised governance documents (Facebook, 2009b). Initial unsanctioned and public user feedback forced Facebook to create a sanctioned and public process for determining its governance documents. Just months later, Facebook significantly revised the design and function of the user Home page and provided users with a link to provide private feedback to the company but did not provide space for public feedback on the changes (Cox, 2009). While many Facebook users complained privately to their friends via wall posts and status updates, there was no central place for them to publicly express their displeasure or support for the changes to Facebook. As a

Table 6.2 User feedback to facebook Sanctioned

Unsanctioned

Public

2008 Profile Changes Comment process

Private

Solicited feedback on 2009 Home Page Changes

Anti-Change groups and commentary in unrelated Facebook Forums Private discussions among users about changes

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result, users posted complaints in Facebook-oriented forums unrelated to Facebook governance, informing friends of their disenchantment, and directing them “where” to go on Facebook to find others in agreement. Users’ sanctioned and unsanctioned responses to top-down design changes as well as Facebook’s attempts to social engineer user responses mirror attempts to socially engineer material public spaces. As D. Mitchell (2003: 33) writes “representation, whether of oneself or of a group, demands space.” Furthermore while public spaces for debate can be designated, what makes them public is not the designation. “Rather, it is when, to fulfill a pressing need, some group or another takes space and through its actions makes it public. Representation both demands space and creates space” (Mitchell, 2003: 35). Absent a sanctioned, public space for users to register their discontent, the users took over spaces on Facebook intended for other purposes by flooding them with comments, much like protesters taking over the streets of a contemporary city. While Facebook resembles traditional megaengineering projects, a significant difference is related to spatial inertia and the malleability of virtual space. Whereas the landscape is irrevocably changed when a dam is built to make way for a reservoir, changes online have less spatial inertia. Facebook’s response to the terms of service controversy was simply to turn back the clock and revert to the old terms of service. While Facebook did not simply revert to its older home page in response to user rebellion, it has modified the initial design significantly to address concerns expressed by users (Schoenfelder, 2009). The lack of spatial inertia online means that changes to the virtual space of the network can be made suddenly, but also that the response by users can be just as swift.

6.9 Conclusion Though it may have started out as a small operation, Facebook has become a megaengineering project because of its large and growing user population. Engineers employed by Facebook make decisions everyday that affect the lives of people around the world. Facebook engineers four things. First it engineers the physical infrastructure that allows the service to be offered via the Internet. Second it engineers software that creates virtual spaces and places for users to “inhabit.” Third, those virtual spaces and places are tools that Facebook uses to socially engineer online and offline communities. Finally these communities produce information that can be used to engineer audiences that are then sold to advertisers. Each product of engineering relies upon the output of the previous one. What differentiates Facebook as megaengineering is the degree to which users both participate in and resist the engineering and design of the service and its virtual spaces. In the future, the Internet itself will look more and more like Facebook and other SNSs (Kirkpatrick, 2009). Moreover, SNSs will cease to be contained within the boundaries of the web browser, moving onto mobile platforms, game consoles, and other devices. They will be an integral part of the development of “digiplaces”

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(Zook & Graham, 2007a, 2007b). Diffusion of SNSs will continue to mirror the diffusion of Internet access. Conflict over privacy issues and governance will continue, however they may be mitigated as social norms and laws develop to regulate the use of private information from SNSs. We envision three possible scenarios for the future of technological social networking. In the first scenario, the need to deliver and identify an audience may encourage the maintenance of centralized control and few-to-many engineering with competition among different social networking applications vying for hegemony in the marketplace. In the second scenario, the reluctance of users to recreate their profiles on multiple networks, the continual development of platforms that lower barriers to non-English speakers, and the integration of technologies and protocols that support social networking may enable mergers that lead to a dominant centrally controlled social network system. Finally, increasing integration of SNSs may result in the creation of open source social networking platforms. SNSs will interconnect and one will travel among networks using the same central profile which they own and control. Many-to-many engineering will ultimately trump the few-to-many engineering of today. The central questions for the future will be: Who does the engineering? Where? And for what purposes?

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Mazer, J., Murphy, R., & Simonds, C. (2007). I’ll see you on “facebook:” The effects of computermediated teacher self-disclosure on student motivation, affective learning, and classroom climate. Communication Education, 56(1), 1–17. McArdle, S. (2008). Come ‘out,’ Come ‘out,’ wherever you are: The MySpace lesbian and her material social worlds. Unpublished MA thesis, Department of Geography, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC. Miller, R. (2008) Facebook now running 10,000 servers. Data Center Knowledge. April 23rd. Retrieved June 1, 2009, from http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/ 04/23/facebook-now-running-10000-web-servers/ Mitchell, D. (2003) The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space. New York: Guilford Press. Mitchell, W. (1995). City of bits: space, place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mokhtarian, P. L. (2002). Telecommunications and travel: The case for complementarity. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 6, 43–57. Niedzviecki, H. (2008). Facebook in a Crowd. The New York Times, October 26, sec. Magazine. Retrieved September 22, 2010, from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/magazine/26livest.html. Paradiso, M. (2010). Google and the internet: A mega-project nesting within another megaproject. In S. D. Brunn (Eds.), Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects. Dordrecht: Springer. Purcell, D. (2009). Stateless of Facebook: Constructing Representations of Territorial Aspirations. Presentation at the annual meeting of the association of American Geographers, Las Vegas, NV. Power Point Slides. Retrieved June 7, 2009, from http://ou.academia.edu/ DarrenPurcell/attachment/109619/full/Stateless-on-Facebook–Stateless-on-Facebook– Constructing-Representations-of-Territorial-Aspirations. March 24, 2009. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Touchstone. Rahmi, B., & Gheytanchi, E. (2009). “The Politics of Facebook in Iran” Open Democracy. June 1. Retrieved June 4, 2009, from http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/the-politics-offacebook-in-iran Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Sanghvi, R. (2006). Facebook gets a facelift. Facebook Blog. September 5. Retrieved June 8, 2009, from http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2207967130. Schoenfelder, S. (2009). Facebook relents on redesign; Is it a good move? Retrieved June 1, 2009, from http://www.digidaydaily.com/stories/facebook_relents_on_redesign_is_it_a_good_move/ Schuler, D. (1996). New community networks: Wired for change. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Shields, R. (2003). The virtual. London: Routledge. Stephenson, N. (1992). Snow crash. New York: Bantam Books. Stern, L. A., & Taylor, K. (2007). Social networking on Facebook. Journal of the Communication, Speech & Theatre Association of North Dakota, 20, 9–20. Thompson, C. (2008). Brave new world of digital intimacy. The New York Times, September 7, sec. Magazine. Retrieved September 22, 2010, from http://www.nytimes. com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all Walters, C. (2009). Facebook’s new terms of service: “We can do anything we with your content. Forever.” The Consumerist. February 15. Retrieved May 20, 2009, from http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-wewant-with-your-content-forever Walther, J., Der Heide, B., Kim, S., Westerman, D., & Tom Tong, S. (2008). The role of friends’ appearance and behavior on evaluations of individuals on Facebook: Are we known by the company we keep? Human Communication Research, 34, 28–49. Webber, M. (1964). The urban place and the nonplace urban realm. In M. Webber (Ed.), Explorations into urban structure (pp. 79–153). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Chapter 7

Real-Time National Stability Engineering: Mapping the 2009 Afghan Election Tom Buckley, Sean Gorman, Laurie Schintler, and Rajendra Kulkarni

7.1 Introduction The re-building of institutional capacity in post-disaster and post-war zones requires massive engineering efforts. The needs of people on the ground in these situations are often approached from the top-down via emergency groups, NGOs, and governments (Jones, Wilson, & Rathmell, 2005). For actors on the ground, research has shown that such efforts may require ad-hoc capacity to adapt, understand, share, and quickly assess their situational context (NRC, 2007). In the study outlined below, participants were plagued by a variety of barriers ranging from lack of power to lack of trained technical personnel. In a report on improving geospatial support for disaster management the National Research Council identified several critical barriers to successful response to emergencies: a combination of lack of adequately trained staff and technically complicated geospatial software tools, lack of agreement and means for successful data distribution, and data “format[s] which are unrecognizable or unusable [for] responding agencies (NRC, 2007: 157).” A collection of researchers, open source software projects and companies has been developing technology to advance the delivery of geospatial and data sharing capabilities to non-technical users in ad-hoc environments. Recently, a few of these participants coordinated a volunteer effort to test how individual actors might apply such technology in Afghanistan. Specifically, the team deployed a collection of interoperable technologies in Jalalabad Afghanistan to support data sharing and mapping initiatives for the humanitarian, governmental, and indigenous stake holders in the region. This overview will give some background to the project. First, the paper will briefly review how data has been collected and mapped in Afghanistan for the past 50 years. Second, a review on the project’s background will be provided. Third, the paper will review the construction of a coalition of civilian, business, and government technologists including USAID, NGA, NDU, Naval Post Graduate School, UNDP T. Buckley (B) FortiusOne, Inc., Arlington, VA 22201, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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– FortiusOne, Google, OpenStreetMap, Sahana, Stamen, INSTEDD, Development Seed. Lastly, there will be a discussion of specific mapping cases and analyses from the Afghanistan elections.

7.2 Historical Background Between 1950 and 1960, the U.S. Government and Russia reached an agreement with the government of Afghanistan for creating maps from aerial photographs of the country. Russia photographed the northern quarter of the country, while the U.S. photographed the bottom three-quarters. Both countries produced high quality maps from the imagery, which became the National Atlas for Afghanistan at the time. During the 1980s, after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan the US Department of Defense produced numerous detailed maps as part of their support for anti-Russian insurgents. In one account, paper maps were kept out of Russian hands in the late 70s by an Afghani cook who dropped them off at the U.S. Embassy (Shroder, 2001, 2008). Mapping in Afghanistan is still undertaken by the U.S., as well as other military forces, the United Nations, and numerous NGOs (Beck, 2003). As was the trend in the 1970s, nations still fight to gain control over information, which they think of as strategic. In 2001, as the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan, the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency bought all rights to imagery of Afghanistan taken by the IKONOS satellite, at the time the satellite with the most detailed imagery (BBC, 2001). This purchase meant not only that the U.S., would have access to all the imagery, but no other country or organization could buy them Demographics in Afghanistan have been described as “wild guesses and inadequate data (Dupree, 1980).” Throughout the hostilities of the 1980s the Central Statistics Office (CSO) of Afghanistan was largely unable to collect data. In 1992 it effectively shut down. Many of the records that the CSO had collected have been destroyed. Post 2001, the staff of the statistics office has increased tenfold and a housing and population census was implemented in 2003 and 2005. In spite of this, social statistics today are still described as being based on “ad hoc surveys” (CSO Afghanistan, 2007).

7.3 Taj Project Background For several years, individual volunteers and NGOs have worked to provide infrastructure for the Jalalabad area to promote civil-military information sharing. In trying to achieve this goal, stakeholders have run into a variety of challenges ranging from Internet connectivity to the inability to effectively map the variety of contributed formats. A crucible for testing solutions to these problems evolved at the Taj where stakeholders regularly meet, both formally and informally. The Taj is a guesthouse that was once part of the United Nations compound in Jalalabad, which has the benefit of satellite based Internet connectivity and wifi for visitors.

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The social networks created at the Taj have resulted in ad hoc data sharing between the disparate government, humanitarian, construction and NGO groups in the region. The enhancement and promotion of these kinds of information exchanges can be a boon to such groups (Bennett, 1995). This activity was semiformalized when a hard drive was donated to reside at the Taj to provide a simple repository for shared data. The data-sharing program was started by the Synergy Strike Force (SSF), which was established by Dave Warner of Mindtel. The SSF is a volunteer team that works to support humanitarian relief and stabilization efforts in post conflict environments such as those in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The program consists of a private volunteer organization comprised of individuals with various technical skills and access to a wide range of social networks. Much of the data shared at the Taj was geospatial in nature, but mapping it was challenging. Most of the stakeholders in the field did not know GIS, and even if they did, were lacking access to desktop applications. The SSF team found one of the volunteer team’s Web based mapping services, GeoCommons, and started using the public Website to map data. The downside to this approach was their satellite up-link powering the Taj’s wifi was slow and connectivity could be intermittent or plagued by brown outs. After learning from the team at the Taj about their use of GeoCommons, the team let them know about appliances that had self-hosted OpenStreetMap and Blue Marble map tiles that could run locally without Internet connectivity. Traditionally, this work has been done via a rack-mounted server, but that solution did not make sense for SSF’s purposes. As a result, the team sent a prototype deployment on a Mac-Mini, loaded it with numerous Afghanistan data sets, and donated it to the program.

7.4 Camp Roberts Exercise Shortly after the discussions with SSF several team members attended CrisisCamp in Washington DC, and met a variety of stakeholders interested in using technology to help with humanitarian relief projects. John Crowley invited several of the team members to participate in a STAR-TIDES sponsored exercise at Camp Roberts to simulate deploying technology for humanitarian relief in harsh climates (no power, no Internet etc.). SSF member Todd Huffman attended the exercise, and brought along a hardware appliance to test out integration possibilities. In addition to the Afghanistan data the appliance included an Afghanistan specific geocoder for georeferencing data from the field. Once at Camp Roberts, Todd integrated the appliance into a larger workflow of participating technologies. The set up at Camp Roberts included the technologies diagramed in Fig. 7.1. The basic workflow started with NGA FedExing a brick of Afghanistan imagery to Camp Roberts for the exercise. Next, the data was stripped off the brick and loaded into Google’s portable Fusion server. The fusion server then served up tiles to

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Fig. 7.1 Camp Roberts architecture diagram

the GeoIQ appliance as well as the Sahana and Development Seed mapping applications, which were also being leveraged in the exercise. Field data collected through spreadsheets, SMS, and paper annotations, was then uploaded, geo-referenced, shared, mapped and analyzed in GeoIQ. This allowed data to be easily collected in the field and then overlaid and analyzed on top of NGA imagery by non-technical users. Not only did this allow for more efficient and robust field operations, but also data from the field could now be easily shared back to headquarters. From a potential operational scenario, this could allow NGA to not only send out imagery but also have data easily federated back for further analysis and dissemination. The testing went exceedingly well and several of the participants became interested in the Afghanistan test deployment that the team was participating with through SFF and Todd Huffman. Google graciously donated a mobile Google Fusion server and configured it to serve tiles to the GeoIQ appliance. In addition, Walking Papers was loaded onto the GeoIQ appliance to work with the OSM tile generator already in place. Walking Papers allows a user to print a map with the NGA satellite imagery and OSM street data, take it into the field, and then make annotations with any kind of writing instrument (pen, pencil, marker). Each map also has a QR code, which allows the data annotated on the image to be easily digitized and brought into OSM as new features. At the simplest level a field operator simply takes pictures of the map, sends it back via email or MMS, and the image can be digitized. When the new digitized data is fed into OSM it can trigger the GeoIQ appliance to render a new tile with the updated data. This is a compelling tool for updating data in a dynamically changing environment. For instance, a bridge is

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sabotaged and the map can instantly reflect its loss and communicate the fact to a large universe of users as the most current map for the area of operations.

7.5 Field Deployment for the Afghanistan Elections The first test for the appliance was the Afghanistan elections. Todd and the SSF team had already coordinated with a wide variety of NGO’s in Afghanistan to share data throughout the elections. By leveraging the GeoIQ appliance they were able to georeference large amounts of ad hoc data and create a variety of pertinent maps with the information. In addition, all the shared data sets were cataloged in the appliance creating an archive that could be searched by any of the participating groups to find data from the various contributing organizations. USAID took a lead in sponsoring the pilot for the election and opened up several of their databases to be made available through the appliance. This resulted in hundreds of datasets being available to the team including data from the field and legacy databases providing detailed information on the historic and current state of Afghanistan. In addition to the data contributed from organizations, the appliance also tapped into the SMS messages being catalogued by Alive in Afghanistan that were being reported by citizens during the election. These included reports of violence and potential voter fraud. This provided a critical real-time perspective from citizenry on the unfolding elections, leveraging the potential of mobile phones to be fieldbased sensors. Like news sources, live feeds from individuals can result in biased analysis, but steps can be taken to reduce the way that biased data affects analysis (Danzger, 1975). The combined workflow of the Afghanistan deployment can be seen in Fig. 7.2. The data sharing initiative in Jalalabad resulted in a tremendous amount of data being contributed and shared with the various participating stakeholders. Over a terabyte of data was collected from a multitude of government agencies, NGO’s and humanitarian volunteers. The process of engaging with various stakeholders in Afghanistan provided three key lessons that helped successfully enable effective data sharing in the field: (1) Create immediate value for anyone contributing data: when users contribute data they should get an immediate return on that investment. In the case of the Afghan pilot that meant getting to see contributed data on a map of highresolution satellite imagery as soon as a contributor uploaded it. The imagery for Afghanistan was made available by NGA, then tiled and served up on the Google Fusion Server. (2) Make contributor’s data available back to them with improvements: any data that goes in should be available to download back out again. Further, the data should come back better than when it went in. In the Afghan pilot this meant if a participant shared data as a spreadsheet format into the platform they could get

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Fig. 7.2 Afghan elections architecture diagram

the data back out in a variety of other useful formats – KML, shapefile, Atom, JSON, spatialite. (3) Share derivative works back with the data sharing community: urge users who create derivative works, with shared data, to contribute their data products back to the group. In the case of the Afghan pilot researchers were taking the detailed data from the field and feeding it into their sophisticated models and simulations. Researchers would then upload the results into the appliance to share the derivative works back with the data sharing community. This meant that agencies and individuals that shared data again got a better product back by contributing. The researchers get better data to feed their models, and a virtuous self-perpetuating feedback loop is created that sustains increasing data sharing. While a wide variety of data was collected and mapped throughout the pilot one of the main focuses was providing data transparency and analysis of the August 20, 2009 Afghanistan presidential election. One of the persistent realities of daily life in Afghanistan is violence and visualizing the location and concentration of violence through maps provides a personalization that highlights the depth of problem. Specifically the team was interested in mapping violence during the election, so its impact on voter turnout could be assessed. Figure 7.3 provides a small slice in time for violence between August 11 and August 26, 2009. The map highlights an interesting spatial pattern illustrating violence in both urban areas like Kandahar, Kabul, and Jalalabad as well less populated

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Fig. 7.3 Afghanistan attacks by district, September 2–8, 2009

Fig. 7.4 Change in violence by district, August 11–September 9, 2009

mountainous regions. The violence appears to be coalescing largely in the Southern regions of Afghanistan with pockets of violence in the Northwest region of the country. While there are patterns over time, violence in the country is transient and insurgent activity can increase and decrease dynamically based on a variety of factors. Figure 7.4 illustrates how violence changed between August 11 and September 9, 2009 allowing us to view the pattern of violence before and after the elections. The areas in orange have experienced an increase in violence since the election and the areas in blue have decreased in violence. This exposes interesting patterns in places like Kandahar where violence is spilling over from recently secured areas

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to geographically tangential locations. Overall there does not appear to be a systematic spatial pattern to where violence is increasing and decreasing, but should be examined in a more rigorous manner in the future. Hopefully the apparent lack of systematic violence means that any single political or tribal was not targeted to prevent their turnout. Again this is an assertion that needs to be examined more rigorously. The presence of insurgent violence driven by tribal warlords, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda threatened holding safe and fair elections in Afghanistan. The US government, NGO’s and the Afghanistan government all put precautions in place to enable an effective election process, but there were still wide spread reports of election violence and fraud (Constable, 2009). One of the main objectives of the pilot in Jalalabad was to provide transparency around the elections through citizen access to data on results fraud and Election Day violence. The last two maps provided a high level perspective of where violence may have influenced voter turnout. The following maps provide multiple perspectives on Election Day fraud issues from different stakeholders. Figure 7.5 illustrates where official fraud complaints where made about the election, aggregated by province. The second map illustrated Election Day complaints and incidents reported through Alive in Afghanistan’s mobile phone based SMS service. The service was set up to allow Afghan citizens to report election related violence and fraud through anonymized text messages from their mobile phones. This effort was set up outside of the government of Afghanistan and United States concerns by “Alive in Afghanistan”; a group of volunteers working on providing a voice to Afghan citizens. Their volunteers utilized a mobile phone based violence monitoring platform

Fig. 7.5 Total fraud complaints by province for the 2009 Afghanistan presidential election

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Fig. 7.6 Citizen reported election day incidents

called Ushahidi. The platform was developed during the Kenyan elections to allow citizen reporting and monitoring of violence. It was subsequently made available as a free open source platform to be used across the world for related efforts. To date this has included monitoring strife or election fraud in Gaza, India, Uganda and Kenya. The map of Election Day incident reports is shown as Fig. 7.6. The maps provide two different perspectives on Election Day irregularities. The first map’s data was generated by the Independent election Commission of Afghanistan, the official government election agency. The second map was generated by volunteer efforts which anonymized citizens’ reports. While both maps show concentrations in the Kabol area, the anonymized data from Alive in Afghanistan shows a divergent pattern from the official government reports. It is beyond the scope of this brief survey to analyze these patterns, but there are rich opportunities for examining the intersection between volunteered geographic information and official source information. This is especially true when there are concerns of fraud or corruption from official source data. To further inspect the potential for fraud and corruption in the official source information the data from the Independent Election Commission seen in the previous map provided the opportunity to run fraud models with the data collected from the field. Specifically, a fit to Benford’s law was run to detect the potential for fraud in the preliminary vote results. Benford’s law states that in lists of numbers from several, but not all, real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. More precisely Benford’s law posits “the null hypothesis that the first digit in the candidates’ absolute numbers of votes is consistent with random selection from a uniform, base 10 logarithmic distribution modulo 1” (Roukema,

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Fig. 7.7 Benford fraud analysis of Afghanistan election results

2009). Applying this technique to the Afghanistan election results produced the map shown as Fig. 7.7. The areas in dark grey illustrate provinces where the likelihood of fraud is high because the numerical distribution of digits is far from what would be expected according to Benford’s law. This provides an interesting contrast to what was seen in the official fraud reports. There is a distinct divergence between the two, although there are similarities between Benford analysis and what was reported by citizens through the “Alive in Afghanistan” service. It is not the intent of this paper to delve into the methodological details of using Benford’s analysis to scrutinize voter fraud, but more detailed reviews of the technique applied to the topic can be found in papers by Roukema (2009) and Mebane (2009). The results of the fraud analysis do provide a good example of how data collected in the field can be leveraged by researchers to produce derivative products and then share those back with stakeholders to create mutual benefit. Researchers get access to higher quality and more recent data while field contributors get access to analysis of their data to better inform their efforts on the ground. Further, researchers can receive valuable feedback from the field on the accuracy of their models to provide better error bounding and validation for future work.

7.6 Conclusion Engineering earth covers a wide variety of human endeavors, and perhaps one of the most challenging is building stability in conflict regions around the globe.

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Afghanistan is one of the most difficult environment encountered having challenged the British, Soviet and American attempts to provide stability to the region. While it is debatable whether or not it is the roles of external powers to stabilize and build sovereign nations this paper has outlined a piloted attempt to facilitate better information sharing and transparency between indigenous and external stakeholders. Transparency around the political process is one key aspect to providing confidence in government by citizens and thus a key pillar to nation stability. While engineering is often associated in the building of physical things, increasingly information infrastructure, both technical and tacit, is critical to providing the foundation for human endeavors.

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Chapter 8

Engineering Time and Space with the Global Fiber Optics Industry Barney Warf

Among the various ways in which human beings have engineered the earth’s surface, the contemporary worldwide fiber optics network surely ranks as one of the largest, more important, and impressive for its sheer size and impact. Fiber optics lines – the seamlessly integrated network of glass wires about the size of a human hair, bundled together in cables of several thousand – form the core of the global telecommunications infrastructure. Indeed, far more than any other technology, such as copper cables, microwaves, or satellites, fiber optics supply the vast bulk of data, voice, and video transmission services around the world. Because of their capacity to deliver high volumes of information rapidly and securely (e.g., via broadband), fiber optic cables form the backbone of the Internet as well as private corporate lines, and are widely used in the electronic media for commercial and residential purposes (e.g., cable television). The technology is thus central to understanding contemporary economic, political and cultural transformations. This chapter offers an overview of fiber optics as a technology, an industry, and a force within the contemporary world. It begins with a brief history of how this phenomenon came to be, including the long history of scientific innovation behind it. Second, it situates and contextualizes fiber optics within the contemporary information-intensive global economy. Unfortunately, this issue has often been approached in apolitical and technocratic terms that ignore the social origins and consequences of the industry. Third, it turns briefly to the urban dimensions of this technology, the ways in which it is implicit in folding and refolding the spatiality of urban accessibility. Fourth, it maps out the global geography of fiber optics, focusing on the two major markets across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Fifth, it explores three consequences of the fiber boom of the 1990s, including a wave of corporate failures, the emergence of so-called “dark fiber,” and the challenge that fiber poses to the satellite industry.

B. Warf (B) Department of Geography, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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8.1 A Brief Historical Overview of Fiber Optics Fiber optics are long, thin, flexible, highly transparent rods of quartz glass (or less commonly, plastic) about the thickness of a human hair that can transmit light signals through a process of internal reflection, which retains light in the core and transforms the cable into a waveguide (Agrawal, 2002; Crisp & Elliot, 2005; Freeman, 2002). (See Table 8.1 for a brief list of key terms relating to fiber optics.) They can transmit voice, video, or data traffic at the speed of light (299,792 km/s); because light oscillates much more rapidly than other electromagnetic wavelengths (200 trillion times per second in fiber cables v. two billion per second in a cellular phone), such lines can carry much more information than other types of telecommunications. Modern fiber cables contain up to 1,000 fibers each and are ideal for high-capacity, point-to-point transmissions. Moreover, fiber cables do not corrode or conduct electricity, which renders them immune to electromagnetic disturbances such as thunderstorms. Their development reflects a long history of experimentation and technological change. The origins of fiber optics go back to Jean-Daniel Colladon at the University of Geneva, who demonstrated light guiding in 1841. Subsequent experiments in 1870 by British physicist John Tyndall, who used moving water through curved rods to conduct light, showed that optical signals could be bent and that light therefore did not need always to travel in a straight line. In 1880, William Wheeling patented the method of “piping light” through mirrored pipes. Alexander Graham Bell’s “photophone” in the 1880s transmitted voice signals on a beam of light; the concurrent introduction of Thomas Edison’s light bulb enhanced the popularity of technologies of light. In the 1920s, Scottish television inventor John Baird and Clarence Hansell in the U.S. patented the idea of using transparent rods to transmit images (Hecht, 1999). In the 1950s, experiments by Brian O’Brien at the American Optical Company and Narinder Kapany (who coined the term “fiber optics”) at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London developed a fiberscope, or forerunner to contemporary fiber optics, a technology that led to laparoscopic

Table 8.1 Key terms related to fiber optics (1) Dark fiber: fiber optic cables that are not in use, resulting from either planned or unplanned overcapacity. (2) Deregulation: decrease or removal of government controls in an industry, including prices, ownership, and market penetration. (3) Fiber optics: glass wires that transmit information via rapidly oscillation pulses of light over long distances. (4) Globalization: increase in the volume, scope, and rapidity of international transactions. (5) Internet: worldwide interconnected system of computer networks designed to transmit information of various types, including data, voice, and video. (6) Overcapacity: excess supply of a good, in this case fiber optic cable transmission ability, relative to demand, resulting in unused or underused portions. (7) Repeaters: devices designed to capture, amplify, and transmit information along fiber optic cables to minimize signal attenuation.

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surgery. The introduction of a dense coat, or cladding, around the glass core, by Lawrence Curtiss of the University of Michigan, prevented the loss of light and led to near-perfect internal reflection within the core of the cable. In the 1960s the use of laser diodes in helium-neon gas perfected this technique at Bell Labs in New Jersey. In 1956 British physicist Charles Kao showed that light attenuation was caused by impurities in the glass and suggested optimal maximum levels of glass purity for long distance transmission. Ten years later, Robert Maurer, Donald Keck and Peter Schultz of the Corning Glass Works (later Corning, Inc., now the largest provider of fiber cable in the world) developed rods of pure fused silica that greatly reduced light attenuation to the levels that Kao specified. In 1960 Theodore Maiman of the Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu California produced the first operational laser. As computer equipment became rapidly more sophisticated and widespread, US military uses of fiber optics began as it deployed them for communications and tactical systems. In 1975 computers at the NORAD headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain were linked by fiber optics. The technology was also central to the development of the Internet. Indeed, much of the durability and reliability of the Internet reflects its military origins, for its original purpose was to allow communication among computers in the event of nuclear war. Simultaneously, the microelectronics revolution initiated enormous decreases in the cost of computers and exponential increases in their power and memory, making communications the primary bottleneck to corporate productivity. As fiber optics increasingly appeared to meet rising demand in this sector, corporate applications rose steadily (Jorgenson, 2001; Olley & Pakes, 1996). In 1977, AT&T installed the first telephone lines to use fiber optic cables, a network 25 miles in length that could carry 672 voice channels, beneath downtown Chicago; GTE followed immediately in Boston (Goff, 2002). However, it was during the massive global changes in the world economy at the end of the 20th century that fiber came into its own as the dominant medium of telecommunications. Telephone companies and other providers of telecommunications services began rapidly replacing older copper wire cables with fiber optics, which many observers expect will become virtually the only telecommunications transmission technology in the future. Fiber optics facilitated the explosive growth of e-commerce, which includes both business-to-business transactions as well as those linking firms to their customers, including electronic data interchange (EDI) systems, digital advertising, online product catalogues, the sharing of sales and inventory data, submissions of purchase orders, contracts, invoices, payments, delivery schedules, product updates, and labor recruitment. Indeed, fiber optics arguably transformed the Internet from a communications to a commercial system, accelerating the pace of customer orders, procurement, production, and product delivery (Malecki, 2002). In addition, fiber optics are used in a variety of scientific and medical equipment. Fiber cable itself comprises are relatively small share of the total cost of an undersea cable system. Thus, improvements in fiber optics capacity and efficiency in the 1990s rested on other components of the system. Because signals inescapably attenuate during transmission, repeaters are necessary to maintain the fidelity of

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optical signals. The first generation of repeaters converted optical signals into electronic voltage in order to amplify them, then reconverted them to optical signals; early fiber cables required frequent repeaters, often every 5–10 km (3.1–6.2 mi). As the purity of fiber cables improved, and as repeaters improved in power, the need for repeaters decreased accordingly. In 1991, optical amplifiers, which remove the need to convert light to electronic signals, such as the erdium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), improved the efficiency of transmission over electronic amplifiers by a factor of 100. The TAT-12 line, installed in 1995, was the first long-haul system to use EDFA technology. Today, in long-haul cables, repeater distances range as high as 500–800 km (310–497 mi). Similarly, dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), first developed in the 1970s, made it possible to transmit multiple wavelengths over a single fiber. As a result of these numerous improvements, fiber’s bandwidth capacity increased more than 200-fold, from 10 mbps in the 1970s to as high as 50 terahertz per second (thzps) in 2005.

8.2 Theorizing the Growth of Fiber-Based Capitalism As numerous observers have pointed out, global capitalism in the late 20th century underwent an enormous sea-change. Telecommunications constitute an integral part of this transformation. The ability to transmit vast quantities of information in real time over the planet is crucial to what Schiller (1999) calls digital capitalism. Large transnational corporations with offices and plants located in multiple national markets require intense coordination of the activities of vast numbers of employees working within highly specialized corporate divisions of labor. Information acquisition, processing and dissemination lie at the heart of many such activities. The exploding demand for high bandwidth corporate communications has thus been a major force behind the growth of the international communications infrastructure. For Castells (1996) this transformation is mirrored in the space of flows and the new geometries that accompany it, which wrap places into highly unevenly connected networks, typically benefiting the wealthy at the expense of marginalized social groups. However, the global space of flows is far from randomly distributed over the earth’s surface: rather, it reflects and reinforces existing geographies of power concentrated within specific nodes and places, such as global cities, trade centers, financial hubs, and corporate headquarters. Indeed, because the implementation of fiber lines reflects the powerful vested interests of international capital, these systems may be seen as “power-geometries” (Massey, 1993) that ground the space of flows within concrete historical and spatial contexts. Financial and producer services firms were at the forefront of the construction of fiber networks in large part because they allowed the deployment of electronic funds transfer systems, which comprise the nervous system of the international financial economy, allowing banks to move capital around a moment’s notice, arbitrage interest rate differentials, take advantage of favorable exchange rates, and avoid political unrest (Langdale, 1989; Warf, 1995). Fiber carriers are heavily favored by large

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corporations for data transmissions and by financial institutions for electronic funds transfer systems, in large part because of the higher degrees of security and redundancy this medium offers. Such networks give banks an ability to move money around the globe at stupendous rates: subject to the process of digitization, information and capital become two sides of the same coin. Liberated from gold, traveling at the speed of light, as nothing but digital assemblages of zeros and ones, global money performs a syncopated electronic dance around the world’s neural networks in astonishing volumes. In this context, finance capital is not simply mobile, it is hypermobile, i.e., it moves in a continual surge of speculative investment that never materializes in physical, tangible goods. The world’s currency markets, for example, trade more than $1 trillion every day, dwarfing the $25 billion that changes hands daily to cover global trade in goods and services. In the securities markets, fiber optics facilitated the emergence of 24 h/day trading, linking stock markets through computerized trading programs. Deregulation was also a fundamental part of the growth of the global fiber optics system. This process was initiated by the US with the breakup of AT&T in 1984, which had long enjoyed a monopoly over domestic telephony and was broken up by an antitrust suit. Deregulation opened the door for a proliferation of new fiber optics service providers such as MCI, which grew to become the second largest provider in the world. Sprint arose as the first corporate telecommunications provider entirely based on fiber optics; others such as Qwest followed shortly (Fig. 8.1). In the US the 1996 Telecommunications Act further eliminated regulatory oversight, effectively ending the boundaries between local and long distance traffic and opening the door to a wave of mergers and acquisitions

Fig. 8.1 Qwest national fiber network. (Cartography by Dick Gilbreath; source: www. alliancedatacom.com)

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(Warf, 2003). Soon thereafter, British Telecommunications, France Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom were partially or totally sold en masse to private investors, and in Japan, the monopoly long held by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) was broken by government fiat (although like France Telecom, it remains largely publicly owned). The World Trade Organization’s Basic Telecommunications Agreement, which went into effect in 1998, also fostered competition worldwide. Today, stateowned or regulated telecommunications monopolies are increasingly rare around the world. In 2005 roughly 1,000 fiber optics and two dozen public and private satellite firms competed to provide international telecommunications service, the vast majority of which originated in economically developed countries. The consequences for the market structure of telecommunications were dramatic, including new competitors, improved service, and rapidly falling costs, although Graham and Marvin (1996) note that in this climate, providers may freely engage in “cherry picking,” i.e., servicing only high-profit clients at the expense of the needy and disempowered. Large fiber networks are generally owned and operated by consortia of firms. Until the 1990s, all commercial fiber lines were built, used, and paid for by a handful of monopoly carriers such as AT&T, British Telecom, Japan’s Kokusai Denshin Denwa (KDD), known informally in the industry as “The Club.” The Club system allowed telecommunications carriers to construct and own undersea cables and to serve as their users or vendors. Typically, landing facilities are owned by carriers from the country in which the facility is located but the “wet links” (undersea cables) are jointly owned by club members. Under the club system, AT&T, for example, ventured aggressively into the international fiber optics market as it globalized in the face of declining market share in the US, often by entering strategic alliances that stretched across national borders (Warf, 1998). Similarly, Sprint affiliated with France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom to form Global One in 1996, and AT&T and British Telecom acquired a 30% share of Japan Telecom. Table 8.2 lists the major submarine cable networks in place in 2003 for the two largest markets across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Under the Club system, capacity was allocated and payments made before or during construction of the network. Members were required by national regulators to sell capacity to non-members on a non-discriminatory basis close to cost. Allegations arose that Club members discriminated against new entrants by offering disadvantageous conditions of membership, such as capacity prices. However, as deregulation encouraged new entrants into the cable markets, the Club system began to fragment. Private systems, in which carriers invite non-carrier investors such as banks, emerged as an alternative system, and recently, non-carrier systems have also appeared.

8.3 Urban Geographies of Fiber Optics Starting in the 1980s, telecommunications firms began to build a large interurban network of fiber optics lines in the US, whose aggregate networks exceeded 50 million km (30.5 million mi) by 2001. The largest fiber optic lines

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Table 8.2 Major trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific fiber optics cables Name

Operational capacity

Date

Landing station locations

TransAtlantic: TAT-8 PTAT-1 PTAT-2 TAT-9 TAT-10 TAT-11 TAT-12 TAT-13 Gemini AC-1 Columbus 3 TAT-14

560 mbps 1.26 gbps 1.26 gbps 1.12 gbps 1.12 gbps 1.12 gbps 5 gbps 5 gbps 2.5 gbps 2.5 gbps 2.5 gbps 10 gbps

1988 1989 1992 1992 1992 1993 1995 1995 1998 1999 1999 2000

FLAG Atlantic Apollo TransPacific: HAW-4/TPC-3 GPT H-J-K NPC TASMAN-2 TPC-4 HAW-5 PacRim East PacRim West TPC 5/6 KJG TPC-5 Southern Cross China-US

10 gbps 10 gbps

2001 2002

U.S., U.K., France U.S., U.K., Bermuda, Ireland U.S., U.K. U.S., U.K., France, Spain, Canada U.S., Germany, Netherlands U.S., U.K., France U.S., U.K. U.S., France U.S., U.K. U.S., U.K., Germany U.S., Spain, Portugal, Italy U.S., U.K., France, Netherlands, Germany U.S., U.K., France U.S., U.K., France

560 mbps 280 mbps 280 mbps 1.26 gbps 1.12 gbps 1.12 gbps 1.12 gbps 1.12 gbps 1.12 gbps 5 gbps 1.12 gbps 5 gbps 2.5 gbps 2.5 gbps

1989 1989 1990 1990 1991 1992 1993 1993 1994 1995 1995 1996 1999 1999

PC-1 Japan-US FLAG Pacific 1

10 gbps 10 gbps 10 gbps

2000 2000 2002

California, Hawaii, Guam, Japan Guam, Philippines, Taiwan Hong Kong, Japan, S. Korea Oregon, Alaska, Japan Australia, New Zealand California, Canada, Japan California, Hawaii Hawaii, New Zealand Australia, Guam California, Oregon, Hawaii, Japan S. Korea, Japan, Guam California, Hawaii, Guam, Japan California, Hawaii, Fiji, Australia California, Hawaii, Guam, S. Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan Japan, U.S. Japan, U.S. Japan, U.S., Canada

Source: Smith (2003)

(T3, OC-3, OC-4, and OC-12) lines connect a handful of large metropolitan areas, whose comparative advantage in producer services has benefited significantly by publicly-installed telecommunications systems (For examples, see http://cybergeography.planetmirror.com/cables.html). While the largest metropolitan regions are well served (particularly New York, Chicago, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Seattle), many other areas (such as the rural South) have few connections. High capacity fiber lines are particularly important in regard to access to high-density material, e.g., graphical content on the WWW. For high volume users (typically large service firms), for whom the copper cables used by

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telephone companies are hopelessly archaic, these lines are an absolute necessity. For large real estate developers, fiber capability has emerged as a critical issue in determining the price and attractiveness of corporate office space, indicating that relative space via connectivity is as important as accessibility via conventional transportation. Moreover, numerous cities have taken the initiative to establish their own municipal fiber networks as part of their economic development strategies to attract firms rather than wait for the private sector, often in the form of public-private partnerships. In such cases, fiber lines are often packaged along with the other municipal utilities such as water, electricity, or natural gas. Thus, a grid of fiber lines surrounding the core of cities has become an indispensable part of urban comparative advantage. Rural areas, in contrast, often suffer a distinct disadvantage in terms of this digital divide (Gabe & Abel, 2002). Fiber optics providers prefer large metropolitan regions where dense concentrations of corporate and residential clients allow them to realize significant economies of scale and where frequency transmission congestion often plagues satellite traffic (Singhi & Long, 1998). So-called “global cities” such as New York, London and Tokyo (Sassen, 1991) are prime beneficiaries, using fiber optics lines to spread their sphere of influence around the planet. For example, the Atlanta metropolitan region exhibits 400,000 mi (644,000 km) of fiber optic lines, which have been important to the revival of downtown regions and enhanced its competitive position within the national urban hierarchy (Walcott & Wheeler, 2001). Within cities, fiber lines accelerate the creation of wealth by corporate elites, generating geographies of inequality in which the wired and the wireless, the haves and have-nots of the information, live in close proximity; even in the most networked of cities, there exist large disenfranchised groups who pay the costs of the digital economy but reap relatively few of the benefits. In contrast with metropolitan areas, rural areas, with relatively small populations and low market potential, hold little market appeal. This urban bias, and the social schisms it deepens, is replicated at the international scale; Graham (1999) notes that the skein of fiber cables linking the world’s major cities is vital to their role and domination over the world economy. Despite the mythologized notion that fiber optics lines erase spatiality, therefore, it is evident that the geographic impacts of this technology are highly selective. The growth of fiber optics for commercial and residential purposes, such as cable television, assumes that local lines are effectively linked to high-capacity backbone routes. However, this connection often confronts the “last mile” problem, the gap between a facility or client and a Point of Presence (POP), the point at which the facilities of an inter-exchange carrier are accessible. Telecommunications and cable television companies have devoted substantial resources to overcoming this problem, and as a result, broadband access has improved gradually. Some, such as Verizon, have pioneered the development of fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) networks.

8.4 Geographies of Global Fiber Optics Networks Despite exaggerated popular claims that telecommunications render distance meaningless (e.g., Cairncross, 1997), the geography of fiber optic lines reflects the

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accumulated imprints of successive rounds of investments in space and time. The placement of terrestrial networks reflects the complex ways in which space, the global economy, and technology are wrapped up in each other. Spurred by the growth of information-intensive services and predictions of unending growth in Internet traffic, telecommunications companies undertook an orgy of fiber optic cable construction in the 1980s and 1990s. Laying transoceanic fiber cables entailed a host of technical and organizational issues, a process that extends back to 19th century attempts to cross the oceans with telegraph lines (Hugill, 1999). In addition to the costs of purchasing fiber, telecommunications companies must pay for the laying of fiber across the ocean floor and the installation of “manholes,” on-shore bunkers designed to allow access for repairs. AT&T’s Submarine Systems, the world’s largest supplier of undersea telecommunications systems, operates a fleet of six cable ships to service its 230,000 km (142,915 mi) of undersea cable. Submarine lines must be routed to avoid seismic activity (earthquakes and undersea avalanches), ships’ anchors, deep sea currents, fishing trawlers, and military activities, and must be armored against sharks, which are attracted by electromagnetic emissions. While the original lines were point-to-point, the development of submarine branching units (SBUs) allowed multiple points to be served simultaneously, leading to more complex network configurations. Moreover, most submarine cables today are “self-healing,” meaning that they offer redundant capacity and high resiliency, so that the loss of one link can be easily and rapidly compensated by others. Today, the world’s fiber system totals more than 25 million km in length, connecting all the world’s continents except Antarctica (Fig. 8.2).

Fig. 8.2 The World’s major fiber optic cables. (Source: Adapted from Staple, 2007)

The geography of global fiber networks centers primary upon two distinct telecommunications markets crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, connecting two of the major engines of the world economy, North America and East Asia

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(Chaffee, 2001). In 1988 in conjunction with MCI and British Telecommunications, AT&T initiated the world’s first trans-oceanic fiber optic cable, Trans-Atlantic Telecommunications (TAT-8), which could carry 40,000 telephone calls simultaneously. The trans-Atlantic line was the first of a much broader series of globe-girdling fiber lines that AT&T erected in conjunction with a variety of local partners. Because large corporate users are the primary clients of such networks, it is no accident that the original and densest web of fiber lines connects London and New York, a pattern that extends historically to the telegraph and telephone (Hugill, 1999). The next generation, TAT-9 and TAT-10, which began in 1992, could carry double the volume of traffic of TAT-8. The third generation, TAT-11 to TAT-13, was the first to use EDFA rather than older repeaters. Newer generations of cable were even more powerful. Starting with the Trans-Pacific Cable (TPC-3) in 1989 connecting the New York and Tokyo stock exchanges, a growing web of trans-Pacific lines mirrored the rise of East Asian trade with North America, including the surging economies of the Newly Industrialized Countries. In 1996 the first all-fiber cable across the Pacific, TPC-5, was laid. In 2006 a consortium including Verizon and five Asian providers announced plans to lay an 11,000 mi (17,703 km) US-China link that would support 1.28 terabits of information, 60 times the capacity of the next largest cable, in time for the Beijing Olympics in 2008 (Shannon, 2006). In 2007, Google announced the purchase of large quantities of trans-Pacific fiber cable with the aim of launching a multi-terabit Unity service in 2009. The complex interplay of deregulation, globalization, and technological change increased the international transmission capacities and traffic volumes for fiber optics carriers explosively. Between 1988 and 2003, for example, trans-Atlantic fiber optic cable capacity increased from 43,750 voice paths to 45.1 billion (103,000%), while across the Pacific Ocean, cable carriers’ capacity rose from 1,800 voice paths to 1.87 billion (an astonishing 1.6 billion percent). In addition to the two major markets, fiber lines have extended into several newer ones. In 1997 AT&T, NYNEX and several other firms (including, for the first time, non-telecommunications firms) opened the self-healing Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe (FLAG), a system that eventually expanded to 55,000 km (34,175 mi) connecting Europe and Southeast Asia (Fig. 8.3). The world’s longest submarine telecommunications network (Denniston, 1998), FLAG, the world’s longest submarine telecommunications cable, filled a void in undersea cable capacity between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It also hooked into regional systems such as the Asia Pacific Cable Network, a 12,000 km (7456 mi) system linking Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, as well as the Caribbean Fiber System (i.e., the Eastern Caribbean Fiber System, Antillas 1, Americas 1, and Columbus 2). Unlike earlier systems, FLAG allowed carriers to purchase capacity as needed, rather than compelling them to purchase fixed quantities. Africa is surrounded by an interlinked series of fiber systems (Fig. 8.4). The first of these includes a dense network that extends across the Mediterranean Sea and exit via the Suez Canal, such as the Columbus III, SeaMeWe, and the self-healing

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Fig. 8.3 The FLAG network. (Cartography by Dick Gilbreath)

Fiber Link Around the Globe (FLAG, the world’s longest) line, each of which has extensions into cities in Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. The widely publicized Africa ONE (Optical NEtwork) system designed to surround the continent collapsed in the dot com crash of the early 2000s. In its wake, consortia of telecommunications companies led by AT&T, Sprint, Vodacom, and Verizon gradually pieced together a network on the western side of the continent. A third system, centered on East Africa, includes the privately-funded, 17,500-km. long Seacom cable completed in 2008 and owned mostly by African investors, which links to 21 countries. In 2010, the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System, or EASSy, also came on-line, further adding to that region’s supply of telecommunications services.

8.5 Three Consequences of the Fiber Optics Boom The massive surge of supply in the global fiber optics industry generated three distinct, important, but unintended effects: oversupply and economic crisis, the growth of “dark fiber,” and a serious challenge to the satellite industry. As with all industries in which supply increases markedly more rapidly than demand, the explosive growth in the world’s fiber optics capacity ultimately led to overcapacity and declining utilization rates (ElBoghdady, 2001). As the growth of the world’s fiber optics networks’ transmission capacity outstripped the rise in demand, transmission prices plunged in a deflationary spiral throughout the first decade of the 21st century, often by as much as 90% (Fig. 8.5).

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Fig. 8.4 The Africa ONE fiber system. (Cartography by Dick Gilbreath; source: http://news.bbc.co.uk)

Telecommunications corporate stock prices plunged, forcing numerous fiber optics firms into debt and bankruptcy and most others into financial restructuring. The list of casualties from this debacle in the early 2000s included: Global Crossing, Metromedia Fiber Network, Viatel, MCI/Worldcom, Williams Communications, Winstar Communications, and PSINet. Some victims were purchased by buyers eager to become players on the global stage: in 2003, for example, FLAG Telecom was bought by the Indian wireless services provider Reliance. Low fiber transmission prices, in turn, helped to keep down the costs of telephone calls and other applications of the technology.

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100 90 80 70 Miami-Sao Paulo

60

Hong Kong-Tokyo

50

Los Angeles-Tokyo 40

London-New York

30 20 10

: 20 2 02 :3 20 02 : 20 4 03 : 20 1 03 :2 20 03 : 20 3 03 :4 20 04 : 20 1 04 :2 20 04 : 20 3 04 : 20 4 05 :1 20 05 : 20 2 05 :3 20 05 :4

02 20

20

:1

0

02

Monthly cost of 1.55 mbps connection ($000s)

8

Fig. 8.5 Declining prices of fiber optics services, 2002–2006. (Source: Calculated from data in Staple, 2007)

Overall capacity utilization rates fell below 50%, leading to large quantities of unused “dark fiber.” With considerable amounts of dark fiber, corporate clients often lease excess backhaul capacity from former monopolies in order to connect domestic networks to the international system. In addition to system overcapacity, dark fiber reflects the high costs of planning and instilling fiber lines, which leads providers to lay more than necessary in anticipation of rising future demand. For example, a utility company may deliberately install dark fiber in the expectation of leasing it to a cable television company in the future. In addition, however, dark fiber also came to mean the leasing of unused fiber capacity from network service providers. (Indeed, some companies specialize in this market.) A third consequence of the explosion of fiber capacity was mounting competition with the besieged satellite industry, with which fiber optics are quasi-substitutable (Pfeifenberger & Houthakker, 1998). While satellites are ideal for point-to-area distribution networks common in the mass media, especially in low-density regions, fiber optic lines are preferable for point-to-point communications, especially when security is of great concern (Maclean, 1995). Before the explosive growth in fiber capacity in the 1990s, satellites were traditionally more cost-effective for transmission over longer distances (e.g., more than 500 mi (804 km), while fiber optic lines often provided cheaper service for shorter routes (Langdale, 1989). The rise of the integrated global fiber network, however, steadily eroded satellites’ share of global traffic in data and video transmission services. Despite the pitch by satellite operators that satellites could provide Internet backbone services as a way to bypass terrestrial congestion, fiber remains by far the preferred technology. Satellites simply cannot offer sufficient security or backup capacity to be economically competitive with fiber. In 2003 fiber optics carriers comprised 94.4% of worldwide transmission capacity (up from 16 % in 1988), including 91.3% across the Pacific and 95.2% across the Atlantic Ocean (Warf, 2006).

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8.6 Concluding Thoughts Fiber optics are one of the great transformative innovations to emerge from the microelectronics revolution of the late 20th century. The development of this technology was the culmination of a long history of research by individuals, universities, the military, and corporations, and led to a mode of telecommunications significantly more powerful, secure, and rapid than competing technologies. However, because technology is a social, not simply technical, phenomenon, the dramatic expansion in fiber optics capacity and utilization reflects the historicallyspecific circumstances of global capitalism as it emerged from the crises of the 1970s and the end of the post-WWII economic boom. Fiber optics were ideal for the information-intensive nature of financial and producer services, particularly when security is of critical importance, and firms in this sector comprised the driving force behind the demand that propelled a vast global network of lines in the 1980s and 1990s. Whereas the two largest markets are those stretched across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, newer networks have increased the reach of fiber optics into Latin America and Africa. At multiple spatial scales, from the urban to the nation to the world, therefore, fiber optics lines realigned the geographies of centrality and peripherality. Far from annihilating space, therefore, the industry reconfigured it. However, the logic that propelled the industry to such prominence also gave rise to the overcapacity and end of the “dot com” boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, initiating a severe period of corporate retrenchment and restructuring. Unused capacity, dark fiber, appeared in both planned and unplanned forms. The dramatic decline in prices that accompanied this trend posed severe competitive problems for fiber optics providers, including a wave of bankruptcies, but also eroded the market share held by substitutes to fiber such as satellite services. What does the future hold for this industry? In the short term, the substantial overcapacity in long-distance fiber generated by the boom of the 1990s will be difficult to overcome. Future market potential likely rests in the provision of services to residences (e.g., cable television and high-speed Internet), if the last mile problem may be conquered effectively. The wireless revolution may also pose a competitive challenge to fiber optics. It is evident from these remarks that fiber exhibits the dynamism and fluidity characteristic of the telecommunications sector as a whole.

References Agrawal, G. (2002). Fiber-optic communication systems. New York: Wiley. Cairncross, F. (1997). The death of distance. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell. Chaffee, C. (2001). Building the global fiber optics superhighway. New York: Springer. Crisp, J., & Elliot, B. (2005). Introduction to fiber optics (3rd ed.). London: Newnes. Denniston, F. (1998). FLAG – fiber-optic link around the globe. Sea Technology, February, 78–83. ElBoghdady, D. (2001). Fiber-optic firms face issue of overbuilding. Washington Post, February 28, 1.

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Freeman, R. (2002). Fiber optics systems for telecommunications. New York: Wiley. Gabe, T., & Abel, J. (2002). Deployment of advanced telecommunications structure in rural America: Measuring the rural divide. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 84, 1246–1252. Goff, D. (2002). Fiber optics reference guide (3rd ed.). Woburn, MA: Focal Press. Graham, S. (1999). Global grids of glass: On global cities, telecommunications, and planetary urban networks. Urban Studies, 36, 929–949. Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (1996). Telecommunications and the city: Electronic spaces, urban places. London: Routledge. Hecht, J. (1999). City of light: The story of fiber optics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Hugill, P. (1999). Global communications since 1844: Geopolitics and technology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. Jorgenson, D. (2001). Information technology and the U.S. economy. American Economic Review, 91, 1–32. Langdale, J. (1989). The geography of international business telecommunications: The role of leased networks. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 79, 501–522. Maclean, G. (1995). Will fiber optics threaten satellite communications? Space Policy, 11, 95–99. Malecki, E. (2002). The economic geography of the Internet’s infrastructure. Economic Geography, 78, 399–424. Marra, W., & Schesser, J. (1996). Africa ONE: The Africa optical network. Communications Magazine, 34(2), 50–57. Massey, D. (1993). Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place. In J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson, & L. Tickner (Eds.), Mapping the futures: Local cultures, global change (pp.59–69). London: Routledge. Noam, E. (1999). Telecommunications in Africa. New York: Oxford. Olley, G., & Pakes, A. (1996). The dynamics of productivity in the telecommunications equipment industry. Econometrica, 64, 1263–1297. Pfeifenberger, J., & Houthakker, H. (1998). Competition to international satellite communications services. Information Economics and Policy, 10, 403–430. Sassen, S. (1991). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schiller, D. (1999). Digital capitalism: Networking the global market system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shannon, V. (2006, December 19). Group plans to build China-U.S. fiber optic link. New York Times. Retrieved September 15, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/ technology/19cable.html?pagewanted=all Singhi, M., & Long, H. (1998). New undersea cable developments and satellite services: Toward complementary coexistence in the 21st century. Proceedings of the 20th Pacific Telecommunications Conference (pp. 566–569). Honolulu: Pacific Telecommunications Council. Smith, D. (2003). Digital transmission systems. London: Springer. Staple, G. (2007). Telegeography 2006: Global telecommunications traffic statistics and commentary. Washington, DC: Telegeography, Inc. Walcott, S., & Wheeler, J. (2001). Atlanta in the telecommunications age: The fiber-optic information network. Urban Geography, 22, 316–339. Warf, B. (1995). Telecommunications and the changing geographies of knowledge transmission in the late 20th century. Urban Studies, 32, 361–378. Warf, B. (1998). Reach out and touch someone: AT&T’s global operations in the 1990s. The Professional Geographer, 50, 255–267. Warf, B. (2003). Mergers and acquisitions in the telecommunications industry. Growth and Change, 34, 321–344. Warf, B. (2006). International competition between satellite and fiber optic carriers: A geographic perspective. The Professional Geographer, 58, 1–11.

Chapter 9

The Internet in Three Finnish Cities: Accessing Global Networks Tommi Inkinen

9.1 Introduction Large scale engineering projects are traditionally associated with physical structure development. One term used to describe these massive processes and their final outcomes is megaengineering. Massive projects have emerged during the history. Brunn (2008) outlined examples such as the Egyptian pyramids, Roman Coliseum, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, and more recently the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Common to all these examples is that they are local, regional or national developments having a visible physical form. What we consider as “large scale” is dependent on time of their construction and the contemporary context when they are analyzed. A common denominator for these tasks countable as “mega” is that they are extensive in their size and economic costs. They also have significant impacts to economic, environmental and social dimensions within the context they emerge. These impacts expand to global scales far beyond their original geographical location. Massive structures are also often used as landmarks and tools for location marketing. Hoover Dam located in the state border of Nevada and Arizona is a good example of both an electricity production site and a tourism attraction. In addition to location-bound foci of civil engineering, there are other types of technological engineering trajectories accountable as mega. In a contemporary world the information transferring technologies are examples of immaterial megaprojects based on software development. The most important technological advancements include the development of global mobile networks and the emergence of the Internet available to wide populations. These developments have small or non- visible consequences compared to the physical structure building, but their immaterial impacts in the world economy and on local living have been enormous. It is noteworthy that these two megatrends have been converging during the last

T. Inkinen (B) Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected]

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decade. The Internet was originally an issue of computing whereas mobile networks derived for the need of voice communication. I consider the development of the Internet as a “mobile turn” (e.g. Urry, 2002; Uteng & Cresswell, 2008) and the emergence of global online services clearly as megaprojects. Even though their provision structure is rather different from “single purpose” targeted structure developments, the Internet has several analogues common to physical megaprojects. First, it has impacted economies greatly and provided new ways of creating massive amounts of wealth. Second, information accessibility and Internet connection availability can also be considered as a civic right. The support actions to enhance the electronic inclusions traditionally involve the provision of free Internet access in libraries, education units from elementary levels to universities, and in public offices. In addition, there arel businesses that offer free Internet access within their premises. Third, technology integration into urban structures contributes to place promotion. This is one of the main drivers to motivate cities to participate in network structure creation. I present here a network example of megaengineering, viz., how to make the Internet (as a megaproject) accessible to various societal groups in open and public city space. As such, this paper includes aspects relevant to large scale developments: social (or electronic) inclusion in that project. This view describes rather well the term “augmented city” (e.g. Aurigi & De Cindio, 2008) which refers to technology implementations within city space. Spatial concepts, such as public space, have parallels to urban network terminology including popularities of open access, hotspots, open networks or social media.

9.2 Access to the Internet as Socio-Spatial Technology Phenomena Large engineering projects are often considered as symbols of development. For a geographical perspective such the development, usually understood in economic terms, gives impetus to widely used slogans such as creative development, informational development or knowledge-based development. These terms are often used to highlight technology-driven local, regional and national development. Also on particular policies and policy documentations which have emerged to support the alliance between economic and technology development within a context of location. An influential term used in the debates surrounding technology project implementations and social inclusion of all parts of population is digital divide, which is mainly associated with global scale differences in the Internet penetration among countries (e.g. James, 2008; Norris, 2001). Digital divides also occur and emerge within regions, cities and societal groups. Earlier studies on the geography of the Internet showed that the main determinant in the Internet use depends on the life situation. Age is one of the main explanatory variables in the content use of Internet resources. Age also reflects education phases and finally income levels. The most active user groups are students and knowledge workers (Inkinen, 2006).

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Megaengineering projects, by definition, include a combination of vast resources through various networks. This definition applies to the Internet as well, because the Internet is a network in the very essence of the term. Data transaction networks such as telephone, cable TV, and electricity lines and grids deliver data signals carrying specific contents trough nodes including fixed and wireless terminals and modems. From the engineering point of view, the Internet access provision is a question of using existing networks to provide content via user interfaces. Internet is as worthy as the content it delivers. The contents are created by organizations and individuals and their cross- and overlapping networks. In a geographical sense, the Internet provides a potential for location-free information distribution. In the late 1990s and early 2000s this perspective was commonly associated with the debate of “diminishing meaning of distance” or “death of geography.” However, later the analysis pointed out that the content provision and technological development of the Internet, both in terms of accessibility and bandwidth (hardware) together with contents (software), are locally constructed and bound to global networks. Internet technologies can be divided into the main categories of hardware and software. These technologies capture also the essence of “physical” and “immaterial” (or virtual). Some scholars have also pointed out that software itself is only a carrier for content. Thus, software should be separated from content because, for example, the word processor is empty and the author creates the content. There are really two distinct segments in a legal sense (Benkler, 2000). Similarly, another type of classification was used by Loo (2007) in the analysis of Internet service provision and “Internet development.” She refers to information production (content creation) and the uses of the information (content consumption). Kellerman (2002, 2006) has examined both the worldwide Internet distribution as well as mobile turn within geographical setting. He (2006: 101) approaches wireless information technologies with a classification that includes selected properties of individual, societal and spatial aspects. My approach involves all these three aspects because individuals, as citizens or consumers, are a typical target group of technologies. Societies can also be regarded as cities or communities that are also collective organizations on local level. Finally, spatiality defines the context in which technology implementation takes place. This point is evident considering, for example, the maintenance of megaengineered projects. Internet maintenance is always a dispersed individual issue of server support or access provision. Civil engineering projects on the other hand are concentrated to the sites on question. The Internet access provision structure also has relevance. Private sector Internet service providers (ISPs) commonly offer services based on their hotspot locations. They are commonly located in hotels, airports and other location specific places. These services are either provided by national or international Internet operators. In general, teleoperators commonly have a strong position in Internet service provision. Private hotspot Internet use is priced according to each company’s policies depending on use time from minutes to weeks. Free-of-charge urban Internet access networks have been implemented in cities around the world. They are commonly created in joint cooperation between local

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organizations. In many cases, universities play an important role in these developments together with a local development company (often owned by the city) or from one to three companies. These Internet access networks often cover only core centre areas. However, coverage expansion varies according to the service provision solutions. This type of collaborative network access provision is an example of a triple-helix (for example, Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2001) or B-U-G (businessuniversity-government) collaboration (for example, Kasvio & Anttiroiko, 2005). They also demonstrate the varying attitude of local city administrations towards the “global access” rhetoric. The emergence of the Internet as a megaproject technology for a long time stressed mainly technology aspects. Today’s concept of the Internet is founded on the origins of the U.S. military network Arpanet created in the early 1970s in which four universities (UCLA, Santa Barbara, Stanford and Utah) played significant roles in the creation of this first four-node experimental network. The commercial use of the Internet and the expansion of the network to ordinary homes started in the mid 1990s. Currently, the discourse of “wireless Internet” or “fidelity” (WiFi) is dominant in terms of marketing and technological development. Outdoor urban networks are actualizations of this discourse, that is, comprising the essentials of “wireless society” through information transfer and exchange. Another main strand in access provision concerns Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) and mobile networks. In terms of hardware and signal processing WLANs are based on standardized industry technologies. The three main solutions are variants of the IEEE 802.11 standard (802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11 g). Subsets (a) and (g) provide theoretical speed of 54 Mbps and the (b) standard 11 Mbps. These are also used in studied case networks. Questions of standardization and interoperability between the different technology domains remain one of the main challenges. Influential future development will be the battle between market shares of short ranged WLANs (computer) and 3G or 4G (mobile phone) technologies. Currently, 3G networks still provide rather slow connection for the majority of users. In Finland, the most common mobile phone data transaction rate is currently around 386 kbs whereas WLANs provide an access speed around 2 mbs. In addition, there are 3G experiences problems related to functionality and international pricing. Contracts between telephone companies vary and in particular the Internet use in foreign countries with 3G may result in significant expenses. There has been cases in which the monthly telephone invoice has exceed 10, 000 Euros due to Internet use abroad with mobile telephones, even within European Union countries. Voice calls are regulated by the EU (a call from one EU country to another costs a maximum of 56 Eurocents per minute from 1 July 2009 onwards), but data transaction costs are not. This cost information exemplifies the problems of market pricing in the field of international data transactions with consumer products. However, if 3G services are priced reasonably and their connection speeds increase to fixed broadband level, it seems likely that mobile 3G Internet accessing will become dominant due to extensive geographical coverage. In technical terms, another major debate surrounding information technologies and computing is the dualism between open access (OA) service provision and

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closed systems. Perhaps the most well known general example is from the operating system Linux. This debate fits well into other topics than engineering due to the fundamental distinction between (closed) in-house product development against (open) user community development ideology. This aspect also combines technology development to social structures, human behavior and interaction. The Internet has also another side of the coin considering the marriage of finance/economy and technology. It impacts masses in all parts of the world and in several cases has become a necessity for information distribution and also obtaining information. Therefore, social structures and the adaption processes of new technologies gain relevance. I deepen the social scientific foci of this paper to consider the perspectives of technology adoption and related implications that technologies have to end-users, whether they are citizens, customers or producers of Internet contents. The Internet includes elements of transforming human practice into codes: search engines are good examples. Information searches become an unquestioned routine and the codified process through which information sources are accessed. Technologies tend to be embedded into everyday life resulting often in uncritical considerations of the electronic footprints that the user leaves behind. For example, a primer in user friendly technology development has been the mantra of usability. User interface design aims to produce as easy to use as possible solutions for consumer markets. This, however, includes a paradox: the development of user interfaces to “plug-and-play” ideology definitely makes technology penetration higher, but also the number of technology users not knowing enough of the implications of their network behavior, for example, in terms of information security, at the same time also increases. This path leads actually to a quasi informal development that refers to increasing possibilities to use technologies, but also contributes to a relative decrease in levels of knowledge regarding technological functions among technology users. Knowledge regarding basic functionalities of the Internet and computer technologies, including software viruses, data protection and privacy, is fundamental to secure and protect work stations from not being abused by a third party.

9.3 Internet Technology and Social Life Next I summarize some complexities involved in these crossings concerning the Internet in terms of technology, information distribution, economy and social life. These points also illustrate the dimensions relevant for the actualization of a global megaproject at a local level: Technology: Issues in Internet accessing are a concern in three main spheres. They are: signal provision method (WLAN vs. 3G), software and content creation logic (OA vs. closed), and selection of end-devices (mobile devices vs. lap-tops). The distinctions in these categories become blurred in time due to the evident technological convergence of these technologies depicting theories presented in the 1980 that related to the social-shaping of technology and technology-society interrelations (e.g. Heap, Thomas, Einon, Mason,

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& Mackay, 1995). Currently, we are able to witness merger between the computer and mobile devices. Information distribution: The Internet has provided a new means to distribute information particularly in countries with democracy deficits. There are several examples concerning countries that deliberately want to control Internet contents among their population such as China and Iran. The openness promotes freedom of speech and to the politics of democracy. Moreover, these manipulations are dependent on service provider agreements (e.g. Google and national government). Thus, local level information producers may achieve a global audience through the Internet, while the local (national) context determines to a large extent the way the Internet is regulated and how accessible it is. Economy: The creation of innovative Internet services has produced massive amounts of wealth and income for some producers. Search engine companies are perhaps the best examples. Terms such as “new economy” or “information economy” have been conceived. The main source of financial flows on the Internet is derived from marketing (banners and sponsored links) or end users payments. The global economy is reflected at the local level via online shops (market places), networking (user communities) and virtual contents (products). The Internet has extended the possibilities of immaterial or virtual products and income sources. Social life: The contents of the Internet function as a means to create knowledge from information. Thus, individuals create their image of the world to a large extent via indirect information sources. The Internet provides an easy option to access information from varying spatial scales. A critical assessment of the information quality should be recognized. This point relates to the simplified “press the button” doctrine of computing user interfaces. Issues of privacy and Internet security (in terms of abuse of open networks) remain one of the key challenges in their provision. These four main groups are one way of looking at the complex web of information distribution and Internet access provision. They have parallels to each other and contribute to each other’s contents. The main recognition is that the internet access provision is not only a simple issue of technology provision but it also reflects broader societal and communal ambitions and values that have impacts on everyday life.

9.4 Global Network Locally Accessible in Three Finnish Cities I begin with three major questions: (1) What types of solutions have the cities used, if any, to provide Internet access? (2) What organizations participate in the provisions of these networks?

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(3) Who is able to used them and have the service providers identified specific user segments with different fees? I used fieldwork observation with a laptop computer to answer these questions. Table 9.1 is constructed on the basis of discussed socio-spatial spheres of the Internet. Observation (Hay, 2000) is commonly used to analyze human behavior in a location. My approach focused on technology availability. I walked the streets of the central areas of these Finnish cities with a laptop and estimated the extensiveness of the network coverage. In Helsinki this was problematic because the city does not have a “single branded” network; also available outdoor networks are provided either by ISPs or other businesses. Therefore, the network descriptions available regarding these networks are augmented with the observation method. It can be regarded as a modification of observation on location. I also considered the functionalities of the network according to my use and experience. These tasks included being familiarity with the functionality of the network, that is, I was able to connect to the network (as it was supposed to) and actualize the data transaction speed. In theory, the networks should provide 10 mbs connection, but in practice the data speed was between 50 and 150 kbs. Moreover, there were no significant differences in the actual network speeds between the cases. The objective network descriptions (see http://www.panoulu.net, http: //www.sparknet.fi/index.php, and http://ptp.hel.fi.wlan/) that are available regarding these networks are augmented with my experience of the access functionalities (see Townsend, 2008: 231). The following cases are from Finland, which is considered a

Table 9.1 A summary of urban WLAN provision in three Finnish cities Property

Helsinki

Oulu

Turku

Network coverage

Fragmented center Private

Core center

Extended centre

Payment per use

Fully OA (RotuaariWLAN) Non

Private sector No

Triple-Helix Yes

Semi (Sparknet) Private (Openspark) Membership in participating organization Triple-Helix Yes

Non (service providers)

City of Oulu

N/A

1065 (2009)

ICT Turku Ltd (Publicly owned development company) 2365 (2009)

High due to high number of independent providers

Dependent on a location network

Dependent of home organization network

Access logic (OA, semi, private) Login requirements

Provision arrangement Elements of location marketing Main organization

N access points (hotspots) Reliability

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Nordic welfare state (e.g. Esping-Andersen, 1990, 1996) with relatively low income differences between societal groups and regions. I will present three case cities and their efforts to provide urban space outdoor Internet access, referring to the possibility of logging into a WLAN in an outdoor conditions within their city centers. The case study cities are Helsinki (population 570,000), Turku (170,000) and Oulu (130,000). Table 9.1 illustrates the main differences among these cities. The city of Oulu is selected because it has used IT as a place promotion tool since 1980s. Today, the city hosts one of the Nokia’s main product development sites and the corresponding subcontracting network has created an impressive growth in terms of population and tax income. The provision a fully OA urban network continues the enhancement of this “technology centre” discourse, which is strongly supported by the city administration (Äikäs, 2000). The WLAN network itself has been realized in collaboration between the University of Oulu, Oulu polytechnic, and the local telephone company. The collaboration agreement was made in 2003. Four networks are combined under the brand of PanOulu (http://www.panoulu.net). These cover different areas in the city center such as the city hall, educational units and city center. The network usable in the city center is fully open access, that is, not requiring user specific authentication process. The second case is the city of Turku and Sparknet (http://www.sparknet. fi/index.php) outdoor network. It is managed by a local, city owned development company, ICT Turku Ltd. Originally, the network was created by the University of Turku and a small private company. The city joined the organizational collaboration in 2003. Thus, Oulu and Turku created their urban Internet access networks approximately at the same time. Sparknet has the widest geographic area in all urban networks in Finland (Sparknet, 2009). It has two network systems. “Sparknet” is the network used by organizational partners and is accessible with user rights provided to these organizations. “Openspark” is a community network targeted to residents of Turku. The individuals that are not involved with organizations provided Sparknet may purchase access time similar to other private ISPs. However, Openspark’s physical coverage area is more extensive than in the cases of hotspot service providers. The third case city, Helsinki (http:ptp.hel.fi/wlan/) exemplifies a business driven fragmented competition model of Internet service provision. The mayor of Helsinki has stated that the city will not start to compete with Internet operators by providing no cost or low cost Internet access services. Therefore, Internet use in the center of Helsinki is more expensive and is based on numerous private actors. Helsinki misses the collaboration link that smaller cities have been able to produce. From the end-user point of view the collective and wide coverage network in Helsinki would be easier and cheaper to use than fragmented private sector short-distance networks. Table 9.1 summarizes case study locations of Helsinki, Turku and Oulu. The answer to the first question stated above is presented in the “Access login” and “Login requirements” segments of Table 9.1. Illustrates the Internet provision

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in cities reflects examples of broad societal ideologies: a market driven competition model referring to access pricing through market competition (Helsinki), a mixed model including organizational and individual alternatives for access charge (Turku) and a public financed experiment with full open access (Oulu). Networks of Oulu (PanOulu) and Turku (Sparknet and Openspark) are collections of organizational networks. These include accesses provided by educational units, libraries, administrative offices and other organizations within the network. The second main question is answered in the “Provision arrangement” and “Main organization” segments of Table 9.1. It indicates that when city organizations participate in joint collaborative efforts, they also want to use the provision as a tool for their image marketing nd place promotion campaigns. For example, in the case of Turku, the old city history (starting from the 13th century) is intertwined with discourse on the information society explicitly (also Äikäs, 2000). The main question concerns civil society and segmenting of the population: how targeted is the user of these networks. The division in Table 9.1 (who is the user) shows that in the case of Helsinki the user is the customer, that is, a person ready to pay for Internet accessing. In the case of Turku organizational membership matters and in Oulu everyone is provided OA service. The OA ideology in the access provision is intriguing, as it also includes several information security threats. Therefore some urban administrations want to have a least a registration process for use of the service to help to identify user misconduct. From the end user this is the easiest and the most convenient way to proceed, but as discussed, it includes risks for network misuse such as spamming, illegal downloading, and the distribution of questionable materials. These security issues, including the abuse of a fully open network, are evident and expected in this type of experiment. The network connections must be changed in short periods to short coverage distances in Helsinki. In addition, the accumulate charge for using networks is considerably higher for the end-user. Turku, on the other hand, provides a rather reasonable middle way. Access requires registration to one of the public sector institutions, such as the library or an educational unit. Individuals can participate in the expansion of the network coverage through the Openspark network. The idea is that the person participating is given a segment of the bandwith for public use and then granted the right to use the whole network. Finally, it should be remembered that there are other several public sector organizations that also provide outdoor Internet access to their members. Examples include universities which are public institutions in Finland which provide their own network services. All Finnish higher educational units belong to a so-called HAKA system that enables all persons with within one university passwords to access WLANs in all other universities. However, this access is limited only to the vicinity of university controlled hotspots. Quite commonly they cover an entire campus area, but in the case of e.g. Helsinki, where the central campus is dispersed across the central city, it is in practice possible to use free WLAN with a rather extensive coverage.

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9.5 Discussion: Internet Access in Finland and Megaengineering? The paper title at the outset asked whether local access outdoor Internet can be regarded as an illustration of megaengineering. The answer depends on what point of view is used. In local, regional and urban development, Internet technologies are something that commonly is taken for granted. To the social scientist, however, the presented structuring “how to create these networks” raises the question whether the service should be free of charge or not to the end user? And what socio-spatial and economic implications do these solutions hold and how do global businesses and information sources fit into the picture? The attitude towards a “no cost” Internet service provision also reflects society’s attitude and tradition to information use and knowledge creation. Urry (2002: 270) discusses issues of mobility and raised relevant questions regarding virtual mobility and social condition. His article deals mainly with the intersection of physical movement and virtual presence, that is, who is present on the Internet and who is not? These concerns also relate to the studied access provision. Low or no cost Internet access provision benefits people who are able to use mobile devices such as palm- or lap-tops. For them WLAN accessibility provides one more option to participate and use a global megaproject. Another question is whether the information inquiring person’s use would decrease if these networks would not exist. Due to this fact, the access provision itself does not aid those who are unable to use computing in the first place. Therefore, the no cost Internet provision might also be seen as supporting the already networked or computer literate societal groups and, thus, further increases the digital divide, that is, it has the opposite effect. In Finland wireless Internet access costs as well as mobile telephone costs for the end-user are, and have always been, relatively low. Finland is ranked as the fifth cheapest country in mobile telecommunications pricing in Europe (Ficora, 2009). All Nordic countries are among the nine cheapest EU-countries. This result should be considered in light of general price levels, considering consumer electronics, Finland is the fourth most expensive country in the EU (Eurostat, 2008). This illustrates the bias between costs in products that are expensive compared to relatively inexpensive communication costs. The outcome is a complex mix of spatial scales and organizations operating on them as well as public authorities and the agreements between them. In addition, the role of creative individuals who might come up with a breakthrough idea should not be underestimated even in a large picture. There are countless examples, particularly in the contents of Facebook, Linux and Skype. All these services have in common the idea of an open access information provision. In the case of Linux, the whole system development has been dependent of the user community. However, it seems that when innovative “open” systems and make a global breakthrough these systems tend to start moving towards “closed” systems. For example, copyright issues of user provided personal photos and pictures in Facebook illustrate this trend.

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There are several open questions that need be considered in future research dealing with societal implications of technology, especially when thinking of changes in spatial scales from global phenomena (Internet) to local reality (access provision and content creation): (1) The importance of location as a context. Global processes always have their roots in a spatial context. Internet expansion to worldwide information sources and information distribution channels provide information that is used in locations. These interactions between global information and local conduct are a potential field for geographical research. For example, how does the emergence of new ideas and innovations diffuse through the Internet and what local factors are determining the phase of the adoption process? (2) The applications and implementations of Internet access should be framed into comparative perspectives and into wider societal contexts. National values and ethos reflect the methods that are used in the service provision. They also determine the extensiveness of information availability to different societal groups. For example, how do different countries use and make benefit of the Internet and computer technologies in elementary education and thus create a tradition of information technology use as an everyday resource? (3) There is a need to further develop measurements for human-technology/human interactions on the empirical level. This is a difficult task due to the fact that the most important impacts that technologies bring are bound to the using the information obtained from networks: the use of information (or technology) is mainly an individual process of thought whereas measurements operate on an aggregate level. The transformation of the subjective experience of importance into a measurable code illustrates the problem of quantifying qualitative phenomena. How does one measure the importance of the Internet in the addition to individual knowledge resources? The combinations of perspectives at varying spatial scales may also provide fruitful research designs, that is, combining individual, local, regional, national and finally international aspects probably results in synergies in the knowledge creation regarding the information society development. Thus, the development of measurements of various scales and the integration of specific content areas of information technology and society in geographical contexts will broaden our view of the contemporary world.

9.6 Conclusions The Internet is without doubt a megaproject in the sense of networking. The network provides its own replenishment through other networks. Public open access Internet networks exemplify local efforts to generate an information society. Whether or not cities start to create their own network access systems is dependent on the motivation and need of the local condition. The drivers for the motivation are coming from

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global sources. Technological development has made it possible for actors at various and changing spatial scales to take part in networks outside their own local vicinities. Furthermore, “networking” will continue to grow its importance in global affairs as well as the importance of the Internet as an information resource itself continues to grow. Finland has a long tradition of technology discourse as part of its national development. Nokia’s development and its present status have influenced not only the telecommunications industry in Finland, but also it has increased its national profile and international awareness of Finland (Castells & Himanen, 2002). Technological advancements in ICTs, therefore, have implications that are far more reaching than just economic success or a marvel of engineering; they reflect societal conditions and the image of a nation and its citizens. The main reason for cities to provide free of charge Internet access relates to image creation. Information and knowledge cities have been widely used to describe efforts in place promotion. Local development companies, commonly operating with public sector funding from the city, are usually the key organizations responsible for public Internet access provision. These companies are often organizing the required public-private partnerships or “triple-helix” functions of local resources. In this regard, technology/knowledge oriented development discourse, in several cases, use relatively studied concepts of economic geography. In an empirical sense, Finland provides several different solutions to noncommercial Internet access networks in outdoor spaces. The main question is that whether or not Internet access should be considered as a civic right or a commercial product. In more detailed way, the question concerns the right to obtain information. Commercial Internet service providers usually overprice their services in short access sessions. Countries with great differences between socioeconomic groups have a higher probability of experiencing both spatial and social digital divides. Therefore, the Internet and online resources, whether mega or not, have local impacts in terms of information provision and use. Acknowledgements This paper is part of research funded by the Academy of Finland project 127213.

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Chapter 10

ICTs and Activities on the Move? People’s Use of Time While Traveling by Public Transportation Bertil Vilhelmson, Eva Thulin, and Daniel Fahlén

10.1 ICTs, Time Use, and Travel 10.1.1 Issue Are people’s perceptions and uses of travel time changing in our ever-expanding information society? Is the capacity to use time more meaningfully while on the move enhanced by the spread of modern mobile information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as laptop computers, cell phones, portable music players, wireless broadband, and the Internet? One line of mobility research questions the established view of travel time as wasted time in people’s daily lives and doubts whether travel demand only derives from a desire to engage in activities at destinations (Lyons & Urry, 2005; Mokhtarian & Salomon, 2001; Urry, 2006). More useful or productive travel time is believed to be a salient feature of the emerging network society. Train cars and buses are changing into “mobile spaces” where various useful activities, such as work, social interaction, and relaxation are performed while on the move. The notion of more useful travel time may have implications for future mobility levels and the modal distribution of travel, making longer journeys more acceptable (fueling regional extension and urban sprawl) and improving the competitiveness of public transportation versus the car. Our intention is to draw on this alternative perspective on travel time and to consider the significance of productive/useful/meaningful travel time given present mobility levels. First, we glance at the theoretical background, after which we present some preliminary findings from our ongoing project examining the relationships between ICT, activities, and transportation.

B. Vilhelmson (B) Department of Human and Economic Geography, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, SE 405 30, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]

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10.1.2 Theoretical Concern In most transport modeling, travel is treated as a cost and disutility in people’s lives. Travel time is assumed to be unproductive and wasted. It is treated as distinct from the meaningful and productive activities people perform at the various locations distributed in space and that give rise to travel. The only value of time spent traveling is derived from what is undertaken at the destination (Holley, Jain, & Lyons, 2008). Accordingly, it is no surprise that major investments in the transportation sector are often justified by the travel time they can save (Jain & Lyons, 2008). Current research is challenging this position (e.g., Lyons, 2003; Mokhtarian, 2005; Ohmori & Harata, 2008). One argument is that the activity of traveling itself can possess a positive utility in people’s lives. The individual traveler gains something from being away from or between fixed locations, activities or people. Ory and Mokhtarian (2005) review a list of reasons why daily travel might be desirable for its own sake: adventure, variety, independence, status, exposure to the environment, escape, curiosity, and physical/mental relaxation. It has further been suggested that account should be taken of the utility derivable from activities undertaken while traveling. Travel time is not necessarily wasted, “dead,” or empty time (Holley et al., 2008; Kenyon & Lyons, 2007; Lyons & Urry, 2005; Mokhtarian, 2005). On the contrary, time spent on the move (i.e., in the bus, train, and car) can and is being used to perform various meaningful activities, such as working, relaxing, socializing, and communicating. It is further emphasized that people’s capacity to perform activities while on the move is enhanced in our increasingly informational society. Schwanen and Kwan (2008) suggest that modern ICTs (cell phones and the Internet in particular) can fundamentally increase the spatial and temporal flexibility of people’s daily lives. From a time-geographic perspective, they argue that the constraints of capability, coupling, and authority that surround various activities are reduced by ICTs, as people can meet, communicate, and interact almost anywhere, anytime, and for any reason. ICTs make activities less tied to specific time-spaces and let people undertake more activities at any given time or place. Furthermore, ICTs are increasing the windows of opportunity for shopping and other errands, allowing people to circumvent the restrictions imposed by the opening hours of various facilities. All in all, ICTs, especially the cell phone, make people more connected, allowing interaction-based planning and activity-scheduling that is more instant, flexible, and spontaneous in time and space (Thulin & Vilhelmson, 2008). The spread of modern ICTs combined with the ongoing virtualization of many everyday activities (e.g., e-work, e-shopping, various e-services, and contacts via e-mail, MSN, SMS, and blogs) could weaken the association between activity, place, and time (Couclelis, 2000, 2004). Mobile ICTs, such as laptops, cell phones, and wireless Internet, provide new opportunities and access to activities for those traveling. People can make more productive use of “empty” moments throughout the day, for example, using travel or waiting time more productively. Daily travel is transformed into a hybrid mobile place where certain activities can take place and virtual and physical communication can occur simultaneously. Train cars

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and buses may become regular places of work and business interaction, places where people organize daily meetings or rest and relax. Mobile technologies and networks—enabling potentially new ways of engineering time and space—are certainly expanding this range of opportunities, but how are they really being accessed and used in real life?

10.1.3 Previous Empirical Studies A few empirical studies have specifically addressed the question of travel time use. Recent surveys of how passengers (business travelers in particular) use their time when traveling by train have been conducted in England (Axtell, Hislop, & Whittaker, 2008; Lyons, Jain, & Holley, 2007), Japan (Ohmori & Harata, 2008) and Norway (Hjorthol, 2008). Findings from these studies indicate that leisure activities were most common, activities such as leisure reading and window gazing/people watching. Relatively few people were using their travel time productively for work or study. The results also indicated that differences in traveling mode (i.e., different classes of travel), journey duration, and work hours affected the participation rate in different activities. Most passengers were using cell phones while on the move, while other mobile ICTs, such as laptops and wireless Internet, were relatively uncommon. There were substantial though not overwhelming signs that travel time was acquiring a positive utility; only a minority of travelers considered their travel time to be wasted time. Productive uses of travel time were generally considered more worthwhile than time spent on “anti-activities.” Using focus group interviews, Jain and Lyons (2008) explore the notion of travel time as “a gift” in people’s daily lives. They find two key categories of travel time where the traveler actively benefits from the journey: travel time as transition time (giving time to adjust and transition between places and activities) and travel time as time out (legitimizing a break in daily activity). They further conclude that mobile technologies expand the opportunities for travelers to equip themselves for the transition time and time out. In addition, based on small-scale qualitative research on mobile workers and their travel, Poppitz (2007) stresses the importance of putting the use of regular commuting time use into the context of everyday life, and of not exaggerating the role of single determinants, such as new technology and specific equipment.

10.2 Mobile Activities on Bus and Train 10.2.1 Preliminary Findings of a Swedish Survey In the following, we present some empirical observations from ongoing research on how people actually spend their time when traveling by bus and train in an everyday context. We initially explore what activities really take place while traveling. Is travel dominated by work, leisure, relaxation (“time out”), and social interaction,

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or perhaps by “anti-activities” such waiting, doing nothing, and sleeping? We further consider the role of equipment and the extent to which mobile ICTs are actually used. Finally, we discuss how worthwhile passengers consider their travel time to be. We draw on data from an activity-based time-use survey of 400 passengers of public transportation. The survey was recently conducted in the Gothenburg metropolitan area, the second largest metropolitan area in Sweden with a population of about one million (in 2009). In the November 2008–January 2009 period, respondents were recruited among passengers on four train and bus lines linking four towns in the region with the city of Gothenburg (Fig. 10.1). The lines were regarded as typical routes for intraregional commuting (i.e., excluding local and interregional trips),

Fig. 10.1 Public transportation network in the survey area—Gothenburg region, Sweden. Transportation lines included in the survey are Uddevalla–Göteborg, Trollhättan–Göteborg, Borås– Göteborg, and Kinna–Göteborg

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and the average journey length was one hour. In total, 402 passengers on 42 departures (10 by train and 32 by bus) on regular weekdays (between 06:00 and 22:00) were included. The respondents were contacted personally en route, told about the survey, asked whether they were willing to participate, and, if so, asked to pay attention to their use of travel time and be prepared to report how they spent it on the actual trip. A link to a web-based questionnaire was then sent to the respondents via e-mail. The response rate was 51% of all passengers. The composition of the sample was typical of users of regional public transportation in Sweden, as 60% were women and most passengers were either students or gainfully employed commuters. Due to the design of the study, elderly people (with no e-mail), people difficult to contact (sleeping or extremely hurried), and children were underrepresented. The survey primarily concerns how journey time was spent on various activities, what equipment was brought and used, and how the traveler valued the time use en route. Special attention was paid to the use of portable ICTs (e.g., cell phones, laptops, and mobile broadband). Questions were also asked about trip characteristics (e.g., distance, duration, and purpose) and relevant background data concerning the individual. This includes information on circumstances that might affect activity patterns and time use, such as commuting habits, perceived stress, environmental attitudes, and attitudes towards public transport. To extend our investigation beyond the limits of previous research on mobile activities, our investigation captures the time-use dimension more systematically. Furthermore, we focus on everyday regional travel (not interregional or local travel) and include travel by bus (not only train). Consequently, the respondents report an average trip time of one hour (mean value = 54 min; s.d. = 16) and that 95% of all trips lasted more than 30 min. As expected, trips were concentrated in rush hours in the morning, at lunch time, and in the afternoon. Forty percent of all trips were to or from work, 40% were related to school, and the rest were for various shopping, visiting, and leisure purposes.

10.2.2 Frequent Activities en Route Now, what do people really do when they regularly spend an hour traveling on public transportation? This basic question of the study could of course be answered in several ways, depending on how activities are measured. One straightforward measure is how many passengers engage in particular activities during the trip; this approach indicates that the most frequent activities are very passive in character (Table 10.1). “Doing nothing,” “window gazing,” and “sleeping/resting” are common “anti-activities” performed by around half of all surveyed passengers. Other common and somewhat more active activities are “using the cell phone,” “thinking/planning,” “listening to music,” “reading,” and “socializing,” while even more active or productive activities such as “studying” and “working” are only performed by one fifth of all passengers. In general terms, it seems that “passive” activities are more common than more “active” ones. In terms of the most frequent activities, it appears that actual travel time use (in regional commuting) conforms to an

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Activity

Frequency—percent of all travelers performing a certain activity

Time intensity—minutes per person engaged in a certain activity

Window gazing/doing nothing Sleeping/snoozing SMS/cell phone calls Thinking/planning personal issues Listening to music/radio/e-book Reading for leisure Talking to other passengers Studying Working Eating, drinking Other leisure activities E-mail/chat Taking care of children Hobby

53.5 46.0 43.5 38.8 31.8 30.6 21.4 21.4 16.9 11.7 8.0 6.7 5.0 3.5

16 21 9 14 32 24 40 23 26 9 15 13 21 13

Source: Authors’ survey, Gothenburg region, Sweden, 2009

expected stereotype: mobile time as a kind of unproductive waiting-time, a disutility that is more or less motivated by purposeful stationary activities surrounding the trip. A person could, however, engage in more than one activity during the trip, for example, resting a while and then starting to read or study.

10.2.3 Time-Intensive Activities Yet, the importance of activities could be measured more elaborately, not least as regards to how much time is really spent on particular activities. If we focus on how much time a person engaged in a specific activity really spends on it—what is here called time-intensity—we get a different picture from that given by merely ranking the frequency of common activities (see Table 10.1). The list of time-intensive activities is topped by “social interaction” and “listening to music,” as well as cognitively more intense and demanding activities such as “working” and “studying.” “Sleeping/resting” and “doing nothing” are here are ranked lower, indicating that most people take just a little time out, maybe only a few minutes, during a journey. From this time-use perspective, it seems that active or productive time uses, such as social communication, work, and study, when performed take more time than do more passive ones. This further indicates that many people spend their travel time in rather meaningful and productive ways that are hard to consider as disutility or a waste of time.

10.2.4 Equipped Time This leads to the question of “equipped” travel time. To what extent do travelers bring certain ICT equipment and portable devices with them on their journeys?

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This also indicates intentions or plans to actively use the journey for meaningful activity. Not surprisingly, the cell phone is the most common device used by the travelers, and newspapers, books, music players, and material for studies or work are also common. Slightly more than 20% of all surveyed passengers carry laptops; about 40% of these passengers actually use their computers during the trip and 20% connect to the Internet via mobile broadband, in other words, becoming virtually mobile. (It is reasonable to believe that this virtually mobile group is growing fast). In addition, when used, the computer is a very time-intensive type of equipment: on average, a laptop user spends 40 min (of the average 55-min trip) using her/his computer, that is, for most of the journey. As regards to other types of equipment, material for work and study and music players comprise considerable travel time.

10.2.5 Valued Time This brings us to a third dimension of time use en route, namely, whether travel time is considered worthwhile or wasted. Notably, we find that two-thirds of the surveyed passengers find time use on the actual trip to be “rather” or “very worthwhile,” and that only one third find it more or less wasted time. If we focus on one important group of passengers, those who found their travel time “very worthwhile” (15% of all surveyed travelers; n = 60), and consider how much time they spend on certain activities or using certain equipment, we find that productive activities such as studying and working rank high (Fig. 10.2). In addition, these truly satisfied travelers frequently spend time using ICT-based equipment, such as laptops, cell phones, and portable music players. We see a tentative relationship between the amount of ICT use, on the one hand, and travel satisfaction, on the other—an important observation warranting further analysis. As these early mobile ICT users could be regarded as “forerunners,” they represent the potential for an increase in the popularity of public transport (versus car driving). Our findings are, of course, not homogenous across the surveyed passengers. There are some notable differences between young and old, and, not least, from a gender perspective. More men than women perceive their travel time being worthwhile (69% vs. 60%). Also, productive activities and the use of laptop computers are slightly more common among men. However, the spread of mobile ICTs that can be used for productive purposes is still comparatively limited, though progress is rapid, especially among working people. What are the technical and social conditions necessary for continuing growth in ICT-based mobile work during travel time? A preliminary look reveals that 50% of all surveyed passengers were gainfully employed, meaning that many could potentially do some work en route. In fact, 40% of these employed passengers state that they could already do so, and 15% can even include working en route in their regular working time, indicating institutional incentives to promote mobile work. From the point of view of technical access, 25% of those gainfully employed also brought laptops on their journeys to/from work, 67% of them actually used them, and 28% accessed the Internet via a private mobile broadband connection. Finally, the cell phone is of course a more established tool for work-related communication and,

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Fig. 10.2 Average time spent on various activities or using various kinds of equipment by travelers who perceive their trips as “very worthwhile” (n = 60). Average trip time = 55 min. Source: Authors’ survey, Gothenburg region, Sweden—preliminary findings

not surprisingly, was used by most commuters during their trips. It is reasonable to believe that cell phones serve as continuing enablers of the use of laptops and the Internet.

10.3 Concluding Discussion This report is based on preliminary findings concerning how people use travel time in a period of growing “virtual mobility,” that is, access to and the use of mobile ICTs. Our conclusions must, therefore, be tentative in nature. Overall, a preliminary general impression is that our results, which are valid for intraregional trips by bus and train, to some extent confirm previous research on long-distance travel by train in various parts of the world. We conclude that even comparatively shorter trips also increasingly integrate physical and virtual spaces, leaving room for extended mobile activity. It is not difficult to see that the spread of mobile ICTs has played a role in transforming the use of travel time. In addition, we conclude that most passengers already find their travel time valuable and do not only perceive it as wasted time or a cost. We find some indications that ICT may play a reinforcing role here, a crucial issue for further data analysis. We also find that using time productively (for study or work) and using various types

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of electronic equipment (e.g., laptops, music players, and cell phones) are significant features of trips that are considered very worthwhile. However, it should be noted that, as mobile ICT use is still rather low in terms of frequency of use by all travelers, it should still be regarded as offering considerable potential for growth. Our results further indicate that productive time use and laptop computer use are more common among men compared to women. Men are also more satisfied with their travel time than women. Thus, gender aspects and digital divides are of crucial importance for the continued analysis of people’s mobile engineering of time and space. Accordingly, it is important to recognize the broader perspective of daily life when discussing the use and value of travel time. The context of everyday activities and routines essentially structures people’s use and perception of time, even when on the move (Vilhelmson, 1999). This is indicated by the fact that most of the surveyed passengers use parts of the journey as transition time or time out. Therefore, ICTs may well confer more utility and meaning on certain existing activities undertaken while traveling, but perhaps not fundamentally transform the basic activity patterns of and need for rest, listening, reading, communicating, and working throughout the day. Finally, the notions of mobile space and productive travel time may have implications for future mobility levels and the modal distribution of travel. Enhanced possibilities to undertake worthwhile activities while on the move may extend journey times and make longer journeys more tolerable; for example, the working day could be said to start at the beginning of the journey. This might have geographical impacts, for example, fuelling intraregional migration, regional enlargement, and urban sprawl. By improving the competitiveness of public transportation, better opportunities for activities undertaken on the move may encourage a modal shift away from the car system to more sustainable and environmentally friendly mobility options.

References Axtell, C., Hislop, D., & Whittaker, S. (2008). Mobile technologies in mobile spaces: Findings from the context of train travel. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 66(12), 902–915. Couclelis, H. (2000). From sustainable transportation to sustainable accessibility: Can we avoid a new tragedy of the commons? In D. G. Janelle & D. C. Hodge (Eds.), Information, place and cyberspace (pp. 341–356). Berlin: Springer. Couclelis, H. (2004). Pizza over the Internet: E-commerce, the fragmentation of activity and the tyranny of the region. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 16(1), 41–54. Hjorthol, R. (2008) Bruk av reisetid ombord på toget. Report no. 983/2008. Oslo: Transportökonomisk Institutt. Holley, D., Jain, J., & Lyons, G. (2008). Understanding business travel: Time and its place in the working day. Time & Society, 17(1), 27–46. Jain, J., & Lyons, G. (2008). The gift of travel time. Journal of Transport Geography, 16(2), 81–89. Kenyon, S., & Lyons, G. (2007) Introducing multitasking to the study of travel and ICT: Examining its extent and assessing its potential importance. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 41(2), 161–175.

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Lyons, G. (2003). Future mobility—it’s about time. Paper presented at the Universities Transport Study Group Conference, Loughborough, UK. Lyons, G., & Urry, J. (2005) Travel time use in the information age. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 39(2–3): 257–276. Lyons, G., Jain, J., & Holley, D. (2007). The use of travel time by rail passengers in Great Britain. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 41(1), 107–120. Mokhtarian, P. (2005) Travel as a desired end, not just a means. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 39(2–3), 93–96. Mokhtarian, P., & Salomon, I. (2001) How derived is the demand for travel? Some conceptual and measurement considerations. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 35(8), 695–719. Ohmori, N., & Harata, N. (2008). How different are activities while commuting by train? A case study in Tokyo. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 99(5), 547–561. Ory, D., & Mokhtarian, P. (2005) When is getting there half the fun? Modeling the liking for travel. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 39(2–3), 97–123. Poppitz, A. (2007). Work and ride: The everday life of mobile workers during train travelling. Paper presented at the Third International Winder Academy: New Work in a Mobile World, Rovaniemi, Finland. Schwanen, T., & Kwan, M.-P. (2008). The Internet, mobile phone and space-time constraints. Geoforum, 39(3), 1362–1377. Thulin, E., & Vilhelmson, B. (2008) Mobile phones: Transforming the everyday social communication practice of urban youth. In S. Campbell & R. Ling (Eds.), The reconstruction of space and time: Mobile communication practices (pp. 137–158). London: Transaction Publishers. Urry, J. (2006). Travelling times. European Journal of Communication, 21(3), 357–372. Vilhelmson, B. (1999). Daily mobility and the use of time for different activities: The case of Sweden. GeoJournal, 48(3), 178–185.

Chapter 11

Assembling Video Game Worlds Ian Graham Ronald Shaw

11.1 Introduction Orbited by two moons, White Lady and Blue Child, Azeroth is a world inhabited by elves, humans, dwarves, goblins, trolls, gnomes, and dragons. It is a world comprised of three main continents, with islands spattered across its dangerous seas. Azeroth’s geography ranges from lush forests with wild fauna, to lonely snowcapped mountains and enchanted cities. This strange universe is the setting for the award-winning online video game, World of Warcraft. With over 11 million subscribers the game is currently the most popular “massively multiplayer online role-playing game” (MMORPG), having captured well over half of the online multiplayer market in 2008. If World of Warcraft was a country, it would be the 75th most populated in the world, one ahead of Greece. With such an enormous userbase and numerous accolades and cultural memes, the game is a mainstream hit and for many users is their primary form of social recreation. Adopting a unique online persona or “avatar,” players can enact and perform a multitude of alternative characters, genders and races. Indeed, this escapism is part and parcel of the attraction of the game. But beneath this quite extraordinary virtual community, there is a complex assemblage of software code, hardware technology, and communication channels that enable a seamless virtual experience. What is particularly interesting in the context of this book are the ways that such communities blur the line between an engineered “reality” and an engineered “virtuality.” It is precisely this unclear interface that this chapter seeks to further elaborate. Traditional megaengineering projects, from dams to skyscrapers, have discrete material boundaries and relations. They can be identified, counted, and navigated, even if they are, in turn, comprised of a complex network of people, places, and technologies. With the explosion of the internet and the proliferation of video games in homes across the world, an interesting shift has taken place. No longer are engineering projects solely material enterprises, and no longer is the design of the project I.G.R. Shaw (B) Department of Geography and Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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ever “complete.” Instead, virtual worlds have come to occupy an increasingly complex domain of interaction for software engineers and players throughout the globe. Taking its cue from this shift, this chapter elaborates on gaming communities as assemblages that constantly slide between (and blur) the clear divide between the “real” and the “virtual.” Deploying the conceptual blueprint of “assemblage theory” from Manuel DeLanda, I argue that games such as World of Warcraft are spaces produced by a hybrid assemblage of material and representational components, and that, far from ever being “closed,” are worlds engineered to be in a deliberate and constant state of transformation. The chapter is composed of the following sections. First, it explores the economics of the video game industry, noting the transfer between real and virtual currency. Second, it explores the multiplayer aspect of games through Xbox Live. Third, the chapter takes hold of some of the controversy in the literature surrounding racist, gendered, and violent on-screen representations. Fourth, the “military entertainment complex” is explored through America’s Army. Finally, the main theoretical contribution of the chapter is made, with assemblage theory used to construct an analysis of video games based on the interaction of material, representational, territorializing, deterritorializing, and coding components.

11.2 Assembling the Video Game Industry Before unpacking the complex assemblages of online gaming communities, this section will provide context for what is an enormous and expanding industry. For example, while the U.S. economy grew at less than 4% between 2003 and 2006, over the same period the video game industry expanded by 17% and will support over 250,000 American jobs in 2009 (Entertainment Software Association, 2009a). Within the U.S., the industry has a highly uneven geographical concentration, with the majority of design and production clustered in the state of California. The company Activision Blizzard Inc, formed as the result of an $18.9 billion dollar merger in 2008, is headquartered in Santa Monica. Owning the rights to extremely popular franchises from Warcraft to Crash Bandicoot, the company shrugged off worldwide recession by posting revenues of $5 billion dollars in 2008. Overall, the video game industry enjoyed record sales in 2008, with 97.6 million units sold, amounting to a staggering $11.7 billion in revenue. The Entertainment Software Association (2009b) reveal startling data on players, too; for example 68% of American households play video games, the average gamer is 35 years old and 25% are over the age of 50. Women over the age of 40 are the industry’s fastest growing demographic, accounting for 40% of players overall. What is also significant are the ways the virtual worlds of video games are themselves spaces for economic activity (and not just in terms of subscription fees for online video games that average $15 dollars a month). We are all by now used to brand placement in movies. But it is only more recently that advertisers have targeted video game worlds for their products. Players often utilize and navigate

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objects in gaming worlds that are apt for branding, from luxury cars to in-game placards that can advertise anything. This growing phenomenon of in-game advertising was worth $80 million dollars in 2005. This is hardly surprising, given that Nelson, Yaros, and Keum (2006) argue that feelings of in-game immersion can persuade the player to purchase real-life brands. But there are more commercial opportunities in video games than brand placement and subtle (or not-so-subtle) advertising. I remember being struck, back in 2005, when the MMORPG Everquest II incorporated a feature in the game that enables you to order a pizza while in the middle of a virtual universe. Players simply typed the command “/pizza” in the game console, placed their order, and a fresh pizza would be delivered shortly after. Further economic “blurring” between online and offline worlds is outlined in Malaby’s (2006) study of “capital” in video games. Here, in-game virtual items that represent a high degree of social capital within the game, such as valuable weapons or high-level characters, are sold and traded online. With close to a million participants and a turnover of $360 million dollars in 2006, Entropia Universe is a prime example of a virtual world with a real cash economy that allows fortunes to be generated from virtual business transactions, such as trading in-game real estate. It is no exaggeration to say that megaengineering brings in megabucks. Indeed, the trading of virtual currency for real currency is estimated to generate between $200 million and $1 billion annually and employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, with a consumer market of between 5 and 10 million people (Heeks, 2008). Although now clamped down upon by game developers, “gold farmers” are online players that amass virtual “gold” within games like World of Warcraft and then sell it on auction sites like eBay for real money. China represents 80–85% of total gold farmers, with each “employee” earning an average of $130 dollars a month. Each “farmer” is predominately male between the ages of 18–25, working 12 h shifts 7 days a week, and is often a rural migrant. Since the predominant cost of gold farming is labor, it come as no surprise that gold farms are located in low-wage countries like China, a country that has at least 50,000 of these virtual workshops (Heeks, 2008). Within China they are located in urban areas of coastal provinces, due to the proximity of ICT infrastructure, gamers, and overseas connections. Such is the staggering scale of this virtual economy that in 2009 the Chinese government banned the trading of virtual currency. This controversial move, while certainly affecting millions of users and reducing the billions of Yuan traded each year, may simply push the practice even further underground, and to other countries such as India. More generally, the regulation of online currency trading throws up a host of legal problems, many of which call into question the notion of ownership and property rights, as well as the law’s ability to define fictive universes (Humphreys, 2009; Lastowka, 2009). There is also the issue of virtual sovereignty, since the trading of virtual currency is not currently regulated by any kind of overarching legal body (such as the WTO). Commenting on China’s recent move to limit virtual transactions, Edward Castronova notes: “This action shows that at least one government is concerned about the way virtual worlds challenge its control of society,” adding “As virtual currencies take over more and more purchasing power, control over the

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effective money supply shifts from the central bank to the game developers” (New York Times, 2009). Companies like Zeevex have started to provide digital “lockers” to act as online storage for an array of virtual currency and in-game items. Indeed, it is simply a matter of time before governments and international trade bodies themselves begin regulating what is a multi-billion dollar industry that transcends traditional geographic boundaries. As we are beginning to appreciate, video games that enable online play are extremely social spaces that connect existing peer friendships and bridge together other gamers from around the world. In this sense, to think of video gaming as either isolating or anti-social is somewhat misleading. They are geographically expansive domains that can bring together players from diverse settings and backgrounds. Indeed, they often have implicit rules and expectations that require careful cooperation (Smith, 2007). “Clans” are just one example of both formal and informal gatherings of people that play together. These online social networks range in size from a handful of friends to groups with hundreds of members, from female-only versions to those that cater only for mature players. Clans usually have a leader responsible for organization, and can be found online with their own websites and forums. Clan versus clan matches are organized events and rely on team communication, coordination, and a careful division of gaming skill. In addition to role-playing games, clans compete against each other in “first-person” shooting games like the Unreal Tournament, Call of Duty, and the Halo series of games. Clans often have their own system of organizational ethics and expectations. One of the largest clans, “The Art of Warfare” (TAW) states on its website: “All orders must be followed, whether in combat, training, in daily TAW duty, and including the installation of communications software on the member’s PC. Orders are not up for discussion” (The Art of Warfare, 2009). The World Cyber Games, the largest gaming festival in the world, was held in Cologne, Germany, in 2008 and brought together participants from 74 different countries (Fig. 11.1). The total prize pot was $470,000 dollars. Just like other sporting events, the cyber games involve celebrities, corporate sponsorship deals (such as Microsoft and Intel), and huge international audiences.

11.3 Assembling the Multiplayer: Microsoft’s Xbox Live Service Originally available in 2002 on the first Xbox console, but relaunched again in 2005 on the Xbox 360, “Xbox Live” is Microsoft’s flagship online interface that knots together a portal for online gaming and content delivery. Based on two different types of membership (Silver and Gold – the latter costing around $50 per year subscription fee), the service is certainly an example of a gigantic, networked megaengineering project that has transformed how console gamers play and communicate with each other across the planet. To date, over 30 million Xbox 360s have been sold. As well as traditional play, members can befriend one another, talk over microphones, send messages, and even communicate with video chats. As one of the cornerstones of Microsoft’s home-market strategy, Xbox Live is now part of the gaming experience for most Xbox users, especially those with broadband

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Fig. 11.1 Map of countries participating in the World Cyber Games 2009. (Source: http://www. wcg.com/6th/history/countries/countries_search.asp). The World Cyber Games, the largest gaming festival in the world, was held in Cologne, Germany, in 2008 and brought together participants from 74 different countries (World Cyber Games 2009)

connections. It is now rare for games to be released without some kind of online component. In addition, Microsoft has partnered with companies like Netflix to enable users to stream movies for a price. Xbox Live has 20 million users from 26 countries across the globe, installed on over 30 million consoles – with 12 million units sold in the U.S. and four million in the U.K. alone. Instead of hosting players on centralized servers, Microsoft uses a client-based format whereby individual Xbox 360 consoles host each online match. Players are able to battle each other on a range of games, including the popular titles Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. Millions of people can be found playing at any one time. Each user is identified by their own personal “Gamertag,” which is a unique name capable of identifying the player across each game she or he plays. In effect, they are similar to the avatars of MMORPGs, and are now fully customizable (the player is able to modify and manipulate the appearance of their avatar – an invention lifted right from Nintendo’s “Mii”). These identifiers allow for the accumulation of player statistics, rewards, achievements, and reputation. For example, on Bungie.net players can view in extreme minutiae a track record of their performance in the game Halo 3. The website also reports that within the last 24 h over 750,000 players has battled on over two million matches. Microsoft recently attracted controversy by preventing users from stating their sexual preferences in their Gamertag. Once the Xbox 360 is switched on, the player is automatically logged into Xbox Live. A pop-up window displays if the player has any new personal messages, and also shows the number of friends that are currently online. To take Halo 3 as an example, once the game has been loaded (from either the DVD or hard drive) the player has the option of choosing from a variety of multiplayer game modes. After selecting the game type (for example a “team slayer” – where two teams fight each other on a single map), Xbox Live searches for people of a similar level of

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skill and experience, and will then populate the map with these players – all of which are identified by their unique Gamertags. Within the game map, the player is able to communicate with team members through the microphone (which can get increasingly annoying – and can be muted), taunt the opposition (likewise), as well as befriending somebody that they get along well with. The seamless blending of human-to-human conversation and virtual gaming is the main attraction of Xbox Live, and goes a long way to explaining its enormous popularity. Of course there is more to Xbox Live – including a “Marketplace” where older games can be purchased (for $5–15), movies rented, television shows downloaded, and a range of other content that is available for a price. In addition, trailers and game demos can be downloaded to the Xbox 360’s hard-drive for free. The list of other features includes Windows Live Messenger, as well as upcoming services such as the use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Taken together, it is no underestimation to call Xbox Live a megaengineering project; it assembles together millions of human bodies, television screens, modems, wireless routers, digital content, messages, video chats, and innumerable technologies to deliver a single social space that is not quite virtual, and not quite “real.” Played on Earth: but not quite as we know it.

11.4 Assembling Controversy Given any megaengineering project, from nature-changing dams to Le Hague nuclear plant in France, there are economic, environmental, social, political, and cultural consequences. This is the unavoidable result of altering the interface between humans and environments. Video game worlds are no different. As engineered products, distributed to millions (who are in turn connected together via meganetworks), they are never far away from public controversy. Linked to violence and criticized for racial and heteronormative representations, video games are inseparable from wider cultural debates and “wars” (Squire, 2002). To elaborate, the portrayal of women in video games is usually highly sexualized, and more often than not, women are absent from games altogether (Burgess, Stermer, & Burgess, 2007). Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series of games and one of the most iconic female figures to have emerged on any platform, has all the stereotypical hallmarks of an industry dominated by masculine imaginaries and discourses (Cassell & Jenkins, 1998) as well as a more general tendency to privilege white users (Lovink, 2005, Jansz & Tanis, 2007). In 2008 a European Parliament report called for an end to gender stereotyping in video games. But perhaps the situation is more complex than a first glance would admit. For although an abundant number of games released are wrapped and packaged in masculinist and belligerent narratives, there is the constant space for the subversion of traditional gender roles and expectations (Bryce & Rutter, 2003; Royse, Lee, Undrahbyan, Hopson, & Consalvo, 2007; Walkerdine, 2006). At the start of this chapter I discussed the creation of on-screen “avatars” in games like World of Warcraft. These are virtual characters designed and manipulated from an inventory

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of possibilities by the player. From choosing between races (elf or human) to deciding between different types of classes (warlock or warrior), a unique avatar is born on-screen, destined to be played by the gamer sat at home. This ability to perform as somebody else and in a different world is part and parcel of hyperreal experimentations in postmodern identities; “Indeed, virtual worlds may offer opportunities to recreate gender identities in ways that we have only begun to imagine” (Hayes, 2007: 47). Of course, it is equally likely that one’s virtual persona will be no different from their everyday one. The gendered and racial dimensions of video games usually take a backseat to the controversy generated by violent gaming worlds. Graphic violence, murder, and on-screen crimes are frequently linked to the same activities off-screen, precipitating annual waves of moral panic by the public. In the U.S. and Canada the gaming industry is self-regulated by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, which awards “ratings” to games submitted – from “early childhood” to “adults only”. One of the most recent controversies surrounded the release of the phenomenally successful Grand Theft Auto IV – a game series never far from criticism. The organization “Mothers Against Drink Driving” decried the “drunk driving” element to the game, where the main protagonist is able to become intoxicated and then drive recklessly (with accompanying blurred vision). Similarly, the video game Bully drew negative attention from educators, parents and politicians due to its (admittedly tongue-in cheek) theme of bullying in an imaginary school. Perhaps the most controversial of all recent releases is the game Manhunt (and its sequel), in which the player is encouraged to perform stylistic and brutal executions. Despite the “violence for the sake of violence” motif of the title, whether or not there is a “spillover” into the real world remains a hot topic. The literature on violence and video games is dominated by a multitude of psychological studies, yet remains largely divided and lacks a clear consensus as to whether or not there exists a concrete correlation between video games and violence, and indeed whether such causation can be established beyond doubt. A range of other factors interfere with any simplistic claim: . . .the research data don’t support the simplistic claims being made about a causal relationship between violent video games and real-world violence perpetrated by the broad range of teenagers who play them. More important, focusing on such easy but minor targets as violent video games causes parents, social activists and public policy makers to ignore the much more powerful and significant causes of youth violence that have already been well established, including a range of social, behavioral, economic, biological and mental health factors. In other words, the knee-jerk responses distract us from more complex but more important problems. (Kutner & Olson, 2008: 190)

11.5 Assembling the Military Entertainment Complex War is a megaengineering project that involves the massive mobilization of bodies, logistics, and communications, not to mention the dispersion of propaganda and the careful construction of spectacle. The so-called “War in Iraq” (and Afghanistan for

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that matter) is a multi-billion dollar trans-national project that continues to drain resources from the U.S. and other countries involved in the occupation. It is difficult to imagine the management of a bigger event; the construction of nuclear power plants or irrigation schemes, while certainly complex, are largely limited to single sites or groups of sites. War on the other hand is multifaceted, emergent, unpredictable, and dispersed across a multitude of geographies. One of the geographies that the U.S.’s war has come to occupy most insidiously is virtual space. That is, video games have become enlisted in the ubiquitous 21st century “War on Terror.” Video game worlds are perennial ideological spaces. Whether racialized or gendered, it has always been difficult to step outside of their political milieu. Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, video games have become increasingly complicit in furthering the spread of dangerous neo-Orientalist spectacles (Höglund, 2008). To borrow a Lacanese turn of phrase, the War on Terror has become an ideological “quilting point” – a Master Signifier that organizes the representations internal to video game worlds around a dominant theme of a superior U.S. and a barbaric Middle-East. Of course, it is primarily war games that have been quilted with U.S. imperialism, but these are extremely popular genres. Consider the fact that war game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (set within a generic Middle East landscape) has sold over 13 million copies to date. The War on Terror spectacle is by no means exclusive to video games. Everyday life is itself a militarized domain, shot through with mundane but no less pernicious hegemonic representations, whether on televisions or in the movies. But how did this situation come to pass? Leonard (2004) argues for a “Military-Academic-Entertainment Triangle” in which in the U.S. Army is itself responsible for the production of video games. Moreover, virtual space is not just an ideological product, but is engineered to serve as a “training ground” for soldiers: The Defense Department has also been closely associated with games such as Rainbow Six: Raven Shield and Socom II: U.S. Navy Seals, utilizing each as a means to test and train military personnel in leadership skills. In 2003, the Army also signed a $3.5 million deal with There Inc. to develop a series of virtual military theaters, including a virtual Kuwait City to train soldiers in a simulated attack on the U.S. Embassy there. (Leonard, 2004: 3)

This unholy union is the subject for Halter’s (2006) analysis of the crosspollination between video games and the U.S. Army. The first-person shooter America’s Army, while by no means alone in its on-screen orientalist depictions, is certainly the crystallization of imperial representation. Financed by the U.S. government (costing over $7 million), developed by the U.S. Army and distributed for free download on the internet, the game was first released in 2002 and has had a number of updates since then. As the official website for the game advertises: America’s Army is one of the ten most popular PC action games played online. It provides players with the most authentic military experience available, from exploring the development of Soldiers in individual and collective training to their deployment in simulated missions in the War on Terror. (America’s Army, 2009)

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Players can choose their Army role within the game, from an “automatic rifleman” to a “combat medic.” Like many games of ilk, the basic premise of the game does not steer far from the tried-and-tested formula of first-person shooter games. The difference with America’s Army is the level of realism and propaganda tied to the game. Where the bleed between reality and virtuality hits a high note is with the “Real Heroes Program.” The game incorporates a “Virtual Recruiting Station” where players are able to interact with the profiles of veterans of the “Global War on Terrorism.” Real soldiers’ biographies are available to read, videos can be streamed, and a range of real-life acts of bravery can be discovered. In addition, the America’s Army website features profiles of real-life soldiers playing the game, listing a brief blurb about their experiences. Quite where the distinction between real and virtual propaganda lies is difficult to obtain. Instead, the game is much more of a Möbius Strip, where divides like “inside” and “outside” are replaced by a looping continuum of information. The community of America’s Army players is part of a large and acentered assemblage: the “War on Terror” is waged across deserts, media stations, and PC screens. Having explored this game in detail, I want to conclude this section by discussing war games more generally. It is worth quoting at length the following observation from Leonard (2004: 4): War video games are no longer purely about training soldiers already enlisted; rather, they are about recruitment and developing future soldiers, while simultaneously generating support among civilian populations for increasing use American military power. Americans of all ages are thus able to participate collectively in the War on Terror and in Operation Iraqi Freedom, just as if they were members of the military. Their trigger happiness becomes a metonym for their happiness with American military efforts. With a little money and the switch of a button, the divide between real and virtual—between civilian and military, between domestic and foreign—is erased as we wage war through gaming.

The consequences of playing war games can spill out from the screen. Whether galvanizing racial stereotypes, ossifying Oriental depictions, rewriting history, or sanctioning the War on Terror, video games are far from simplistic child’s play. They contribute to a hegemonic “common sense.” It is not just that video games are alone in their imperial representations, but rather they assemble together to form a larger “Military Entertainment Complex.” It is precisely within the mundane, the implicit, and the common sensical, that ideological hegemony reveals its grasp. The renewed post-9/11 appetite for “good versus evil” narratives is often played out in video games through allegory, intertextuality, and subtle manipulation (Ouellette, 2008). In this sense, the military entertainment complex is an assemblage of overlapping megaengineering projects, from the U.S. Army’s reliance on the engineering of consent, to the game developers that depend on those profits reaped from Orientalist spectacle. The mere existence of video games produced by the U.S. Army should be taken as proof positive that virtual space is integral to an interlocking geography of war. The War on Terror is now universally mediated through image and spectacle; the real is relegated to a second-order tier for those viewers and gamers in the West. Nowhere are the consequences of this more dangerous than in the depictions of

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torture in video games. Here, not only is torture glorified, but its logics and rationales are far too simple and carefree. Torture is rendered down to an uncomplicated and binary algorithm, in which moral choices and complexity have been evacuated. As Sample (2008) argues, George W. Bush’s “advanced interrogation techniques” are integrated into a gaming world in which successful torture is guaranteed: the enemy will always “cough up.” Bringing in the work of Georgio Agamben, Sample goes on to assert that torture in games like Splinter Cell and 24: The Game naturalize a “state of exception” in which the state transgresses the law in order to preserve it. In this sense, the state of exception, as an already prominent feature of democratic nations, becomes legitimized in virtual space. What is at stake then, are the ways virtual geographies engineered in video games come to overlay and dominate the real geographies of the world. From Full Spectrum Warrior and America’s Army (both developed and funded by the U.S. Army) to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the Middle East is an ideological space of Oriental design and fantastical implementation, disseminated for public consumption and sanction of the War on Terror. Arabian cities are represented as maze-like worlds, where women and children are distinctly absent, and the only residents are gun-toting “enemies” intent on killing Americans: a state of “perpetual war” (Höglund, 2008). It is precisely these virtual topographies that must be combated, not with guns and bombs, but with ideas in the classroom (Leonard, 2004), and above all, a firm recognition that gaming worlds cannot be treated as innocent spaces.

11.6 Assembling Video Games Assemblages, writes DeLanda (2006), are wholes whose properties emerge from the interactions between parts. Deploying a realist social ontology, DeLanda’s work builds on the theory of multiplicity from Gilles Deleuze and seeks to bridge the gap between the “micro” and the “macro,” or between individual and society. In particular, DeLanda is dismissive of any approach to ontology that defines identity through accounts of “interiority.” This view is expressed most fully in the “organismic metaphor” whereby parts are defined by their internal relations to an all-encompassing and transcendent whole. But neither does the opposite atomistic logic hold true. In contradistinction to both types of reduction (to the whole, to the individual), assemblages must be thought as constituted immanently by variously mutating connections of self-subsistent component parts. Assemblages are thus the outcome of their relations of exteriority. Parts can be attached and reattached to other assemblages, and this addition of new parts will recalibrate the assemblage itself. In this sense, there is nothing “necessary” about an assemblage; it is instead a contingent and non-linear outcome of the capacities of component parts. In addition, DeLanda defines the assemblage as located between two principal axes: one axis is the role that the assemblage plays from a purely material to a purely expressive or representational one. The other axis defines the processes underwriting the assemblage from stabilizing (territorializing) to destabilizing (deterritorializing) forces. A third axis defines specialized media that code and decode the assemblage,

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Table 11.1 Video game assemblages Material

Representational

Geographies Technologies Bodies Territorializing Repetition: old parts Software Code

Spatiality: perspective + freedom Architecture: ludological + social Discourse Deterritorializing Difference: new parts

such as genetic and linguistic parts. In any such case, each of these is just another component of the assemblage and must be thought immanently and not as a transcendental structuring device. What I want to loosely retain and transform from DeLanda’s complex blueprint are the material, representational, territorializing, deterritorializing, and coding axes, in order to position video games as hybrid assemblages. Notwithstanding the multitude of components involved in their production, this will involve (a) assembling the geography of video games in terms of material sites, bodies, and players (b) discussing the “worldy representation” of video games (c) arguing for the “repetitious” and “differential” nature of video games (d) discussing software code (Table 11.1). What I want to impress is the idea that engineering video games, specifically online ones, requires bringing together a potentially infinite number of assemblages. The first part of this thinking involves an investigation of the material geographies unique to a video game’s development. At the start of this chapter I mentioned the American video game industry which employs 250,000 people and is concentrated in California. More broadly, Johns (2006) demonstrates that the international video game industry is structured around three main global regions: America, Japan, and France. Emerging markets such as Latin America and Asia remain a marginalized consumer and producer market due to piracy in the regions. What began as a rich and heterogeneous landscape of developers and publishers is now concentrated in large firms like Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft and Vivendi Games. This developer consolidation is a reflection not only of the drive for publishers’ profit, but also an outcome of the massive costs involved in producing video games for today’s high-end platforms. For example, 1982s Pacman cost $100,000 to develop, whereas today the average Playstation 3 game costs an estimated $15 million (BBC News, 2007). In addition to geographic sites, technological materialities are important for constructing any video game. Virtual worlds today are far larger and more complex than they were even five years ago, and this is directly tied to technologies available for development. Finally, the “affective” or embodied dimension is our last material component. As I have argued elsewhere, the player’s body is always-already entwined in the experience of video game play: Video game worlds expose bodies to events which produce a range of affects from fear to joy. Game space is increasingly an affective landscape, and once the player turns his or her attention to the experience of space, he or she is shaped not by the representations of space, but of the body’s affective articulation in another world (Shaw & Warf, 2009: 1340–1341).

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The materiality of video games is, therefore, assembled by (a) geographies, (b) technologies, (c) and bodies. Now we must turn our attention to the “worldy representations” of video games, the expressive assemblages that get by far the most attention in the game studies literature. Here again, these representational assemblage are constructed by three main component parts (a) worldy spatiality, (b) worldy discourse, and (c) worldy architecture. Briefly, the worldy “spatiality” points to the perspective and freedom of the virtual world. Worldy discourse covers the symbols, narratives, and ideological meanings animated by the world. Finally, worldy architecture incorporates the basic ludological structures or “rules” of the game, as well as the social infrastructure incorporated. Taken together, they provide an analytical blueprint for interrogating the complexities of virtual gaming worlds. There are elsewhere discussions of spatiality in video games (Wolf, 1997). While I could elaborate upon a potentially infinitesimal typology of spatialities, I think it is most helpful to discuss spatiality in terms of the perspective utilized by the game, as well as the degrees of freedom available to the player. There are three main types of perspective: transcendent, mediated, and immanent. Transcendent perspectives are remote and detached. Pioneered by industry giant Peter Molyneux, the godgame genre of games such as Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper and Black and White fully exploit this Cartesian removal to engender the feeling of spatial omnipotence. Mediated perspectives are “third person” perspectives, likened to viewing a camera affixed a few feet above from the on-screen characters head, such as the Tomb Raider series of games. Finally, immanent perspectives remove the on-screen character altogether, and interaction between virtual space and the player is experienced directly. This is seen in first-person shooters like Call of Duty 4. In terms of degrees of freedom, each spatiality is positioned somewhere between a “smooth” and a “striated” typology (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Smooth spaces are rhizomatic, open, non-linear, and posses high degrees of freedom. The player is able to manipulate the world and make organic choices. In contradistinction, striated space is rigidly mapped, closed, and linear, possessing limited degrees of freedom. The player is bound by strict spatial axiomatics. Together, perspective and freedom construct the unique worldy spatiality of each video game. Moving on to worldy discourse, we have just covered the neo-Orientalist imaginaries animated in war games. More generally, each video game contains an array of discourses, symbols, meanings, and ideological narratives that often reflect realworld counterparts. These can be implicit or explicit, and most studies tend to focus on gendered, racial, sexual, and violent elements. In this sense, video games can be “read” as types of texts (Klastrup, 2009; Lastowka, 2009) that can offer the player a deep and immersive textual realm and back-story (Krzywinska, 2006). Nowhere is this more important than in role-playing games, from offline titles like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, to online worlds such as Everquest II. In either case, there is a discursive textual landscape that the player enters a relationship with. The final component of worldliness is its architecture. This involves a discussion of two types of architecture within any video game: a ludological and a social one. In the first case, what are the rules of the game? What are the play mechanics?

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What can the player do and not do within the virtual universe? In contradistinction to representational assemblages, ludological architectures are what enable activities of play (Frasca, 1999). Social architecture on the other hand, while certainly integral to the virtual world, is distinct to the extent that in-game chat and communication is not a necessary element of play. That is, in many online games like World of Warcraft, players can chose to form communities called “guilds.” Social architecture is extremely important in engineering virtual worlds and in-game cultural norms (Yee, 2009). As Chris Lena, producer of Everquest adds “You make real friends, real life friends, and you spend a lot of time with them. That’s emotional attachment, there are feelings and shared experience, exposure of self that creates really strong bonds” (Hayot, 2009). In this sense, the socially engineered components of virtual worlds lend themselves to long-term emotional investment by the player, both consciously and unconsciously. DeLanda (2006) adds territorializing and deterritorializing components to enable discussion of the stability of the overall assemblage. In the context of video games, what kinds of forces and components are responsible for this stability and instability? What I want to discuss here is the role that innovation and creativity plays in the industry. Unfortunately, many mainstream hits are based on multi-million dollar sequels that seldom deviate from tried and tested formulas (Call of Duty 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Halo 1, 2, 3). While this template often guarantees profit for developers and publishers, it means that video games are often accused of becoming increasingly “dumbed down” to appeal to the masses. Ontologically then, there is a great degree of repetition within the overall identity of any given video game. Opposing this stabilizing force is the risk-taking role played by creativity and difference. Deterritorialization involves a deviation from existing blueprints, and a truly novel approach to the construction and implementation of video games. Breakaway hits in this regard include Super Mario 64, one of the first games to make the leap to three-dimensions. Also with Nintendo, we can think of the unique “Wii Remote” (a controller with a built-in optical sensor) as revolutionizing the relationships between video games and bodies. In any case, each video game is constructed from an uneven assemblage of old and new components. Linked to this idea of change and development is the process of “coding” as the method of structuring the entire video game world. This is the final assemblage, and one of the most important component parts of any video game; the underlying software code. The programming of the video game world effects practically everything, from the realism of the expressions depicted by on-screen characters to the amount of freedom available in creating game space. DeLanda (2006: 15) discussed genetic code and language as vehicles for synthesizing and coding the overall assemblage. However, we can also imagine software code as acting as both a limiting and enabling force. As technological assemblages have developed in sites around the world, the code used by designers has become more complex and advanced, with pushes towards adaptive Artificial Intelligence (Spronck, Ponsen, SprinkhuizenKuyper, & Postma, 2006). Games that “learn” from character behavior add to the immersion and realism the player experiences. The difference between Pacman and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is worlds apart. From rat-infested dungeons to

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enchanted forests, Oblivion rejoices in a radically open and rhizomatic network of spatialities enabled by its software code. Equally impressive, each Oblivion nonplayer character (NPC) is programmed with a unique set of needs and wants, giving rise to over 1000 personalities. Contextualized Artificial Intelligence allows the many actions and events within virtual space to converge in creative and complex ways. Gavin Carter, producer of Oblivion, talks about their revolutionary “Radiant AI:” The “Radiant” part of the title refers to the way a character’s awareness isn’t strictly limited to a few hard-scripted objects or activities. It radiates out into the surrounding environment and beyond. They can choose to interact with anything they come into contact with based on parameters we set up when we create them. This includes having conversations with one another, sitting down and reading books, buying food and supplies from shops, farming, exploring, engaging in combat with creatures or one another, and a wide range of other activities.

In summary, we need to think of video games as types of worlds produced by the coming-together of a multitude of assemblages. In thinking of the worldy character of video games our attention seamlessly slips between the “real” and the “virtual,” or the material and the representational. Components are always-already bound together in the appearance and logic of a particular world. As Klastrup (2009) adds: “Worldness in general seems to be the sum of our experiences within the framework provided by the gameworld . . . of a fictional universe that you can actually inhabit and share with others, and of our experiences with it as particular game design, which both enables and restricts our possibilities of performing and interacting in and with the world.” And the geography of virtual worlds, like a distorted diorama, always reflects our social, cultural, and ideological imaginaries right back at us (Hayot & Wesp, 2009a).

11.7 Conclusion It should now be clear that video games are massively engineered projects that defy reductive analyses. They have fundamentally changed the way we interact with the world, technology, and each other. Millions of people are playing thousands of games across hundreds of online worlds at any given time. Virtual communities are gossiping, arguing, battling and joking in clans and guilds across a labyrinth network of servers and cables; each player paying their monthly subscription fee to remain denizens of these digital universes. The video game industry is a sprawling behemoth that generates incomes for ICT graduates in Santa Monica as well as gold farmers in China. Upon trying to find a “center” to video games, we soon discover that they are acentered assemblages built from a variety of component parts, both material and representational. Indeed, what is equally interesting are the ways that video games are always in a state of transformation. Not only is the relationship between player and game an unpredictable topology, but online worlds in particular are contingent upon the social interaction internal to their virtual universes. Without this social interaction subscriber numbers and therefore subscriber

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fees would dwindle. In this sense, the player is much more than an end-user or passive consumer, but an active producer of capital in a continually transforming online world (Humphreys, 2009). In recognition of this, future virtual worlds need to move towards securing an integrative and democratic space for play. Video games are fundamentally open assemblages defined by their relations of exteriority. Open to capital, open to ideology, open to social interaction, and open to a range of other components they are nonlinear systems plugged into a host of changing multiplicities. It is no exaggeration to call video games megaengineered projects. They are worlds without ends, domains without borders and rhizomes entwined with bodies, discourses, and the fabric of the Earth. As Hayot and Wesp (2009b) summarize: “. . .virtual worlds exert powerful effects on the ‘real’ world, producing among other things, shifts in capital and the development of markets to trade it in, the filing of lawsuits regarding the distribution of property or of virtual violence, and changes in the languages spoken by their users, to name only a few of the ways the virtual world has fed back into the real.” The continual bleed between the real and the virtual is likely to produce ever more hybrid worlds as corporate interests proliferate, economic activity accelerates, and the war machine dominates. But as active producers of these digital universes, the “game over” screen is far from inevitable for social and political justice. Whether resisting the military entertainment complex or racist and sexist representations, the first step is always the disassembly of a commodity that has always been more than meets the thumbs.

References America’s Army. (2009). Features. Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://www.americasarmy.com/ aa/intel/features.php BBC News. (2007). Cost headache for game developers. Retrieved July 7, 2009, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7151961.stm Bryce, J., & Rutter, J. (2003). The gendering of computer gaming: Experience and space. In S. Fleming & I. Jones (Eds.), Leisure cultures: Investigations in sport, media and technology (pp. 3–22). Brighton: University of Brighton, Leisure Studies. Burgess, M. C. R., Stermer, S. P., & Burgess, S. R. (2007). Sex, lies, and video games: The portrayal of male and female characters on video game covers. Sex Roles, 57(5–6), 419–433. Cassell, J., & Jenkins, H. (Eds.). (1998). From Barbie to mortal kombat: Gender and computer games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DeLanda, M. (2006). A New philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Entertainment Software Association. (2009a). Economic data. Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://www.theesa.com/facts/econdata.asp Entertainment Software Association. (2009b). Game player data. Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://www.theesa.com/facts/gameplayer.asp Frasca, G. (1999). Ludology meets narratology: Similitude and differences between (video)games and narrative. Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://www.ludology.org/articles/ludology.htm Halter, E. (2006). From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and video games. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.

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Hayes, E. (2007). Morrowind. Gendered identities at play: Case studies of two women playing. Games and Culture, 2(1), 23–48. Hayot, E. (2009). Interview with Chris Lena. Game Studies, 9(1). Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles/interview_lena Hayot, E., & Wesp, E. (2009a). Towards a critical aesthetic of virtual-world geographies. Game Studies, 9(1). Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles/ hayot_wesp_space Hayot, E., & Wesp, E. (2009b). Special issue – EQ: 10 years later. Game Studies, 9(1). Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles/hayot_wesp Heeks, R. (2008). Current analysis and future research agenda on “Gold Farming:” RealWorld production in developing countries for the virtual economies of online games. Development Informatics Group, Institute for Development Policy and Management. Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/wp/ di/documents/di_wp32.pdf Höglund, J. (2008). Electronic empire: Orientalism revisited in the military shooterr. Game Studies, 8(1). Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://gamestudies.org/0801/articles/hoeglund Humphreys, S. (2009). Norrath: New forms, old institutions. Game Studies, 9(1). Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles/humphreys Jansz, J., & Tanis, M. (2007). Appeal of playing online first person shooter games. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 10, 133–136. Johns, J. (2006). Video games production networks: Value capture, power relations and embeddedness. Journal of Economic Geography, 6(2), 151–180. Klastrup, L. (2009). The Worldness of EverQuest: Exploring a 21st century fiction. Game Studies, 9(1). Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles/klastrup Kutner, L., & Olson, C. K. (2008). Grand theft childhood: The surprising truth about violent video games and what parents can do. New York: Simon & Schuster. Krzywinska, T. (2006). Blood scythes, festivals, quests, and backstories: World creation and rhetorics of myth in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture, 1(4), 383–396. Lastowka, G. (2009). Planes of power: EverQuest as text, game and community. Game Studies, 9(1). Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles/lastowka Leonard, D. (2004). Unsettling the military entertainment complex: Video games and a pedagogy of peace. SIMILE: Studies In Media & Information Literacy Education, 4(4), 1–8. Lovink, G. (2005). Talking race and cyberspace – An interview with Lisa Nakamura. Frontiers – A Journal of Women Studies, 26, 60–65. Malaby T. (2006). Parlaying value: Capital in and beyond virtual worlds. Games and Culture, 1(2), 141–162. Nelson, M. R., Yaros, R. A., & Keum, H. (2006). Examining the influence of telepresence on spectator and player processing of real and fictitious brands in a computer game. Journal of Advertising, 35(4), 87–99. Ouellette, M. A. (2008). “I hope you never see another day like this”: Pedagogy & allegory in “Post 9/11” video games. Game Studies, 8(1). Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http:// gamestudies.org/0801/articles/ouellette_m Royse, P., Lee, J., Undrahbyan, B., Hopson, M., & Consalvo, M. (2007). Women and games: Technologies of the gendered self. New Media and Society, 19, 555–576. Sample, M. L. (2008). Virtual torture: Videogames and the war on terror. Game Studies, 8(2). Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://gamestudies.org/0802/articles/sample Shaw, I. G. R., & Warf, B. (2009). Worlds of affect: Virtual geographies of video games. Environment and Planning A, 41, 1332–1343. Smith, J. H. (2007). Tragedies of the ludic commons – understanding cooperation in multiplayer games. Game Studies, 7(1). Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://gamestudies.org/ 0701/articles/smith Spronck, P., Ponsen, M., Sprinkhuizen-Kuyper, I., & Postma, E. (2006). Adaptive game AI with dynamic scripting. Machine Learning, 63(3), 217–248.

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Chapter 12

GPS Collars in Studies of Cattle Movement: Cases of Northeast Namibia and North Finland Katja Polojärvi, Alfred Colpaert, Kenneth Matengu, and Jouko Kumpula

12.1 Introduction The deployment of the US Global Positioning System can be seen as a mega-engineering project in itself. This GPS system consists of 24 satellites and has been operational since 1978; in 1984 the system has been open for civilian use. Spin off from this new technology has been a whole industry based upon GPS-navigation. This together with the advances in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software has created industries based upon location based knowledge. We can give exact locations to any object, person or process on the surface of the earth, enabling us to produce real time spatial databases. How to incorporate traditional and indigenous knowledge into GIS-data is a fascinating problem. People’s memory of time and place is not exact, but there are markers in space and time which can be used to relate indigenous knowledge with more exact forms of data. Allowing for traditional forms of land use in a world dominated by other more advanced and intensive forms of land use is probably a very demanding task. There will be a need to integrate traditional knowledge with exact data on land use, wildlife, conservation, environment and management. This is definitely an important issue in engineering earth and the environment. Animal behavior and habitat use have been studied by direct observation and radio telemetry. Both methods are labor intensive and time consuming. These studies are very sensitive to factors like number of animals tracked and the length of tracking time, both of which are often reduced by the amount of available resources (Resources Information Standards Committee, 1998). Satellite tracking systems like Argos are available for the long range tracking of migratory animals, however, the cost is considerable. The development of the Global Positioning System (GPS) with global coverage and accuracy of up to 15 m (49.2 ft) has provided a cost effective way to monitor animals on a regional scale. At present researchers have a range of telemetry options available for animals ranging from fish and marine mammal to K. Polojärvi (B) School of Renewable Natural Resources, Oulu University of Applied Sciences, Oulu, Finland e-mail: [email protected]

S.D. Brunn (ed.), Engineering Earth, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4_12,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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reptiles, birds and terrestrial mammals. These options include a variety of methods for data collection and storage/transmission, ranging from VHF radio-telemetry to Argos satellite tracking and GPS collars with built in GSM-data transmission. This chapter presents two case studies using GPS collar tracking domestic (bovine cattle in Namibia) and semidomestic (reindeer in Northern-Finland). The case studies show the merits and drawbacks of GPS collar tracking in two very different regions and testing the equipment under very different climate regimes (cold/hot, wet/dry).

12.2 GPS Collars in Animal Tracking Global Positioning System (GPS) telemetry is a widely used method in studies of animal movement, habitat use and resource selection. The method has also been used in monitoring semi-domestic reindeer (Kumpula & Colpaert 2007; Kumpula, Colpaert, & Anttonen, 2007) and domestic cattle grazing (e.g. Agouridis et al., 2004; Bailey, Keil, & Rittenhouse, 2004; Turner, Udal, Larson, & Shearer, 2000). GPS collars have many benefits in studies of animal movement: the collars enable tracking of an individual animal over a long period of time and automatically record geographical position at predefined time intervals. However, GPS collars are expensive and malfunction or total failure of some devices is unavoidable. Aim of the GPS tracking is to produce reliable and accurate data about the movements of an animal. However, various environmental factors influence the availability, quality and strength of satellite signals received by a GPS collar, all potentially leading often to unsuccessful fix attempts and increased positional errors. Terrain obstructions (Cain, Krausman, Jansen, & Morgart, 2005; D’Eon, Serrouya, Smith, & Kochanny, 2002; Lewis, Rachlow, Garton, & Vierling, 2007) and vegetation characteristics such as canopy cover and tree height (Agouridis et al., 2004; DeCesare, Squires, & Kolbe, 2005; Di Orio, Callas, & Schaefer, 2003; Frair et al., 2004; Hansen & Riggs, 2008; Lewis et al., 2007) are additional examples of environmental factors that may interfere with the connections between satellites and GPS receivers. Systematic failure in fix attempts and the inaccuracy of positions also have an influence on the analyses of animal locations and movements (e.g. Frair et al., 2004; Jerde & Visscher, 2005).

12.2.1 Case Study A: GPS Tracking of Domestic Bovine Cattle in East Caprivi, Northeast Namibia During 2006 and 2007, we collected GPS data to study bovine cattle grazing and movement patterns in East Caprivi, Northeast Namibia. The study area is the Salambala conservancy and the floodplains of the Zambezi River and its tributary, the Chobe River (Fig. 12.1). The area is characterized by a flat floodplain, about 900 m above sea level (2950 ft). The climate has a dry and a rainy season, at the end of which the area is affected by sometimes severe flooding of the Zambezi River. The

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Fig. 12.1 Location of study area, cattle enclosures and tracking data

Fig. 12.2 Typical livestock enclosure, often called a “kraal.” (Photo: Katja Polojärvi)

population of East Caprivi is dependent upon small scale farming and cattle breeding in a fragile environment. Cattle are owned by extended families, which may live in a village near the grazing area or elsewhere. The cattle are kept overnight in enclosures and are herded during daytime on grazing grounds around the village (Figs. 12.2 and 12.3). The cattle a family owns can be seen as a “savings account,” from which animals are taken to market to provide cash when needed. Local land use for farming, cattle

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Fig. 12.3 Cattle grazing on the Zambezi/Chobe floodplain. (Photo: Katja Polojärvi)

breeding, tourism and conservancy is also becoming more intensive, a development which creates tensions in the traditional tribal land management and has negative effects on the size and quality of pasturelands. An aim of the cattle tracking study is to produce information about the extent of the grazing areas, including the daily movement, and the grazing pattern of the cattle. GPS collar data combined with pasture maps based on satellite image classification and GIS, also enable one to identify both overgrazed and underused grazing areas. The information about the grazing patterns will be combined with results of a study of indigenous knowledge and social structures in land use decision making. During 2006 and 2007 a total 14 Televilt Tellus Basic 5H2D v2.0 (store onboard) GPS collars (Televilt/Followit Lindesberg Ab, Sweden) were attached to bovine cattle (Caprivi Sanga) in ten villages of East Caprivi (Fig. 12.4). The GPS collars tracked the cattle and recorded their location at 1 h intervals. The collars were retrieved after a 1 year tracking period. The downloaded data files have hourly recorded information about the location of the animal. In addition to the date, time, and geographic coordinates, the collars also record the following information (Televilt, 2006): • • • •

Time (s) the GPS receiver has used to obtain the fix. Number of the satellites used to obtain the fix. Altitude (m) when at least four satellites are available. 2D3D: the obtained fixes are three-dimensional when the collar has contact with four or more satellites. Otherwise the obtained fixes are two-dimensional.

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Fig. 12.4 Bull fitted with GPS collar. (Photo: Katja Polojärvi)

• DOP: dilution of precision is a measure of the quality of the GPS data being received from the satellites. • FOM: figure of merit values indicates the best accuracy achievable from the satellites being tracked. • Temperature (C◦ ) inside the main housing at the time the position was obtained. • X,Y: The activity level that is measured as a certain change in collar position during the time the collar has been used to obtain the fix. Tracking period and amount of data varied due to several technical reasons. Seven collars were lost, destroyed completely or had serious malfunctions. Seven collars with the longest operation periods had recorded location data from 3 months to almost 1 year (Table 12.1). Locations obtained in the night-time, when the cattle are gathered inside the livestock enclosures, revealed that a significant proportion of the locations were inaccurate. The fix rate of the collars was very good, varying from 93 to 99.6%, meaning that the GPS receivers worked very well when they were undamaged and correctly in place. Accuracy assessment derived from the enclosure data showed that about 8.5% of the fixes were inaccurate, 50% of these positions had a positional error below 21 m (69 ft), and 95% of all error was within 175 m (574 ft). We used data of seven GPS collars for accuracy assessment and testing of different data screening options as a way to reduce location error. Basic analysis showed that simple measures of accuracy like DOP and FOM alone are not sufficient to remove erroneous locations. We removed the locations with the following condition: 2D fix and DOP> 6 or 0 1050 m (3345 ft) or DOP≥ 10 or FOM≥ 10 or walking speed of the animal was over 4.5 km (2.8 mi/h). This

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Table 12.1 Number of successfully obtained fixes, fix rates (%) and operation periods of the GPS collars Operation period Collar 1

Village

Fixes

Fix rate %

Enclosure

From

To

Isuswa

5528

96.8

1A

1.7.2006 29.11.2006

20.8.2006 7.3.2007

1B

7.3.2007

4.6.2007

4 7

Ioma Lyalumba

2098 4868

96.8 95.9

4 7A 7B

2.7.2006 4.7.2006 23.8.2006

30.9.2006 23.8.2006 1.2.2007

9

Ivilivinzi

7778

97.0

9A 9B

6.7.2006 18.2.2007

18.2.2007 5.6.2007

Limai/Mutikitila

7053

90.3

12A 12B

7.1.2007 7.6.2007

1.6.2007 15.8.2007

12C

15.8.2007

4.12.2007

5.6.2007 4.6.2007

7.12.2007 7.12.2007

12

13 14

Mubbu Limai

3848 4344

86.4 97.1

13 14

data screening option was able to eliminate 75% of the most erroneous locations that were located more than 300 m (984 ft) from the livestock enclosures; it retained 97.2% of the locations that were correctly located inside the livestock enclosures. Before data screening, 95% of the night-time locations that were located outside the livestock enclosures were located 70–406 m (230–1332 ft) from the enclosures. The maximum error was over 10 km (6.2 mi). After data screening, 95% of the locations were 74–298 m (243–978 ft) from the enclosures; the maximum error was 4423 m (14,511 ft) (Polojärvi, Colpaert, & Matengu, 2009). The data showed that the daily movement was related to the advancement of the dry season. The herd starts from the cattle enclosure where they are kept for the night (around sunrise 5–7 AM GMT) and moves to the nearest pasture grounds, from there, returns to the enclosure before dark (4–6 PM GMT). The length of the average daily trips varies from 2 to 3 km (1.2–1.9 mi). Speed during grazing is about 1 km/h (0.6 mi/h), maximum speed was about 4.5 km/h (1.7 mph) (Fig. 12.5). When the grazing land becomes poorer, the length of the daily trips increases, until the herd is moved to a new enclosure in fresh grazing areas. It must be noted that the cattle are not grazing freely, but are guarded by herd boys (usually young boys from neighboring Zambia). The herd boys take the herd to the grazing grounds according to grazing conditions and seem to work without much interference by the owners of the cattle. Many farmers reported that they did not know how much distance their cattle travelled on a daily basis. Notwithstanding the fact that the cultural land

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Fig. 12.5 Tracking data from collar no. 9 during July–November 2006

administration system in the area of study is somewhat fuzzy (in the sense that traditional authorities in principle have the powers to dictate how the land and the benefits from the land are to be apportioned, they do not have the means to enforce prudent land management), data on the movement of cattle could facilitate the implementation of various instruments to enable animal husbandry to be economical. For instance, on one hand, when cattle movement data coming from GPS collars are analyzed in combination with key informant interviews of the farmers, it becomes clear that the current pasture “management” and livestock farming systems reflect in principle the social relationship between people concerning sharing of grazing land and the perceived administration protocols. The data can be utilized to devise a contextual system of management where greater emphasis would be placed on reducing distance traveled on a daily basis, which consequently can lead to increased mass (kg) and livestock productivity. On the other hand, these datasets can also be used to predict the interaction of cattle with wild animals such as buffalos and elephants, which may carry foot and mouth disease (FMD) and anthrax, respectively. GPS data, therefore, can be an essential tool for monitoring and mapping the movement of cattle and areas with frequent animal disease outbreaks.

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One of the main benefits of this research is that it provides data that agricultural extension officers and veterinarians can use to provide advice to cattle farmers. Unlike many other GIS applications which provide information about the geographical attributes of an area, the data recorded in this research also reflect the social relationships farmers have among themselves and between them and their land. The challenge to the study included the fact that the way grazing land rights are understood by the individuals is dependent on their own understanding of land administration, knowledge which is not written. In addition, the movement of cattle is not necessarily related to the palatability of the grass or the availability of grass. Instead, it may, as in some cases, be related to the choice of a herd boy. This finding poses a challenge because we are not interested in the movement of cattle per se, rather in the reason why the movement pattern is what it is. It would be possible to understand the cattle movement pattern better if the study is undertaken over a period of time, at least 5 years. It is worth remembering that data recorded in a communal land administration system have a social and cultural meaning and these meanings are based on accepted social norms and practices. The movement of cattle from the flood-prone areas to the hinterland is not entirely a choice of the owner. Instead, the choice is in fact linked to the social relationship of the owner and the area to which the livestock will be placed for periods of up to 6 months. It is not whether there are laid down rules, rather, it is a question of following the unwritten customs, in which concepts of social existence and dependence are grounded. Therefore GPS data should not be seen to be a mere indication of how and where the cattle move; it is also an impression of the rules of investments in the system, that is, the way the social system operates and the way the owners try to maintain control of grazing. In addition, cattle farming is not a purpose in itself; it is part of the broader socioeconomic system of land administration and property development that is normally seen as a way of strengthening the role of the communal farmers’ sustenance. Without this perspective cattle farming is lacking societal and legal meaning. Residents the study area emphasize that grazing can take place anywhere provided that it does not result in operational constraints on others. It would be interesting to try to use data on cattle movement and to relate it to grazing land administration and poverty reduction as well as to attitudes and sustainable agriculture. Also how can the GPS data be used to improve the land tenure security? And what influence does distance travelled play in the justification of land ownership?

12.2.2 Case Study B: Analyzing Pasture Use of Semidomestic Reindeer in Finnish Lapland with GPS Collar Tracking Well adapted to the Arctic climate, reindeer and caribou thrive in the harsh conditions of the circumpolar area. Reindeer and caribou utilize grasses, leaves and other green plants during the short Arctic summer and survive the harsh winter by digging for ground lichens. In forested areas also arboreal lichens can be part of their winter diet.

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In Finnish Lapland semidomesticated reindeer are owned by both Sami and Finnish herders. Reindeer herding is in the core of Sami tradition and has an important social and economic role in many peripheral areas in the north. Coniferous forests cover over two thirds of the reindeer herding area in Finland, and most of these areas are designated as commercial forests. Forest harvesting has gradually changed the composition and age structure of commercial forests especially during the past 50 years (Mattila, 1996; Tomppo & Henttonen, 1996). At the same time, the reindeer herding system in Finland had been intensifying the exploitation of the pastureland. Calf slaughtering, supplementary winter-feeding and anti-parasitic treatment of reindeer have made reindeer herds increasingly less vulnerable to natural population regulation mechanisms and enabled herders to maintain average reindeer densities at a level where winter pastures have gradually become overgrazed in many areas (Kojola & Helle, 1993; Kojola, Aikio, & Helle, 1993; Kojola, Helle, Niskanen, & Aikio, 1995; Kumpula, 2001; Kumpula, Colpaert, & Nieminen, 2000; Väre, Ohtonen, & Mikkola, 1996). The complicated process of deterioration and reduction of winter ranges made reindeer herding more dependent on supplementary winter-feeding, creating extra costs for the herders and reducing profit margins (Kumpula, 2001). Besides global climatic fluctuations (e.g. North Atlantic Oscillation and Arctic Oscillation), there are several geographical and local factors, such as altitude, exposition or vegetation patterns, which can affect snow conditions within a certain area (Hiemstra, Liston, & Reiners, 2002; Tappeiner, Tappeiner, Aschenwald, Tasser, & Ostendorf, 2001; Vajda, Venäläinen, Hänninen, & Sutinen, 2006). Large scale human operations, such as forest harvesting, may also affect snow conditions, especially in large felling areas where the forest canopy is considerably reduced (D’Eon, 2004; Eriksson, 1976; Kirchoff & Schoen, 1987; Koivusalo & Kokkonen, 2002). There is disagreement between the forest industry and reindeer herding, viz., how forestry operations, in fact, change the usability value and snow conditions of reindeer pastureland. Reindeer herders acknowledge that forest openings do not only destroy arboreal lichen pastures (old growth forests), but also reduce amount of terrestrial lichens and disturb the winter grazing of reindeer. Since felling residue covers the soil surface and snow conditions can become more difficult in felling areas than in untouched old growth forests. Besides these factors, forest openings and forest roads may split a continuous winter pasture areas which makes reindeer herding more difficult. On the other hand, forest thinning may improve growth conditions of terrestrial lichens since light increases on the bottom layer of vegetation. Also the amounts of hays and grasses may considerably increase in submesic forest openings after cutting, which then offers plenty of green fodder for reindeer. In order to clarify the effects of forest management and snow conditions on the winter grazing value of pastureland we studied pasture use by reindeer in two reindeer herding districts located in the northern boreal forest area of Finland. The studied questions were: 1. Do reindeer prefer or avoid different kinds of forest habitats during different seasons?

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2. Are old growth forests still as important for reindeer and reindeer herding during winter as many herders emphasize? 3. Do human perturbations such the constructions of roads and power lines on pastureland cause disturbance for reindeer? 4. How do snow conditions vary within a rugged pine forest landscape utilized by forest industry? 5. What are the relative effects of local factors (effects of elevation, slope aspect, and forest age structure) on snow conditions compared to interannual weather variation? 6. Do snow conditions affect pasture selection by reindeer during winter in a pine forest landscape? From December 1999 to November 2002, we tracked 29 female reindeer in the Ivalo herding district using GPS collars produced by VECTRONIC Aerospace GmbH in Germany (model types GPS 2000 and GPS PLUS) (Fig. 12.6). The collar weight varied between 0.55 and 0.7 kg (1.2–1.5 pounds) depending on the model. The collars were programmed to measure the location of a reindeer with an interval of 8 h. We assumed that this interval was suitable for data collection on the basis of mobility of reindeer as well as the battery capacity of GPS collars. The data were stored in the GPS memory and downloaded after retrieval of the collars. Due to problems in GPS engineering, primarily reduced battery life, the total amount of locations obtained with a GPS collar varied from 32 to 1075 locations. The oldest types of our collars were programmed to indicate the accuracy of each location only as validated or invalidated, meaning that at least five satellites were available and the DOP value was below ten. For the study, we used only observations with a validated

Fig. 12.6 During 2002–2005 altogether 40 female reindeer were tracked by GPS collars in the Oraniemi reindeer herding district, Middle-Lapland. (Photo: Dr. Jouko Kumpula)

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Fig. 12.7 All locations of GPS-tracked female reindeer (n = 29) from 1999 to 2002 (10,981 locations) in the Ivalo reindeer herding district and classified into three seasonal periods

status. During the entire study period we received a total of 10,977 valid locations (Fig. 12.7). During the years 2002–2005 we tracked 40 female reindeer in the Oraniemi district using both GPS PLUS and GSM GPS-PLUS collars. The GSM-GPS models send the data to a base station over the mobile telephone network using SMS messages. When the animals roamed in areas outside the network, locations were stored on board and sent when the collar was able to contact the network again. We used the same 8 h interval between fixes as before in order to extend battery life. The fix rate of the newer collars was higher and we obtained over 30,000 locations. Inaccurate locations and also locations (DOP > 10 and < 5 satellites) situated inside corrals and feeding places or their vicinity were removed. After that 22,845 locations remained and these were divided into four groups according to the main seasons. It seems that during our study the accuracy and working reliability of the collars increased as the model types developed. The theoretical battery life of these collars is over 1 year, but due to the harsh winter conditions, collars had problems and in the worst cases functioned only two weeks; the best worked well over 1 year.

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The tracking data were integrated in our GIS system together with other relevant data like DEM, roads and other topographical data, forest stand data, and a satellite image derived pasture map. The pasture map was produced by a semisupervised maximum likelihood classifier from Landsat TM, ETM and Aster images. The pasture selection by reindeer was analysed using the two level Compositional Analysis (CA) where preference of habitats in different seasonal periods was first analysed in the selection of home range area followed by use within this home range, respectively. In this analysis we compared random vs. non-random pasture use and testing avoidance/attraction of different pasture types. In the Ivalo district, which is located in the pine forest area, the reindeer preferred old growth forest (both lichen and hay dominated) and avoided felling areas and linear infrastructure (forest roads and power lines) in the selection and use of their wintering areas. Old growth pine forest had a high preference value especially in late winter. However, during early winter season, when snow conditions were still relatively easy, the study reindeer in the Ivalo district also used sapling stands and young cultivation forests (Kumpula et al., 2007). In the Oraniemi district which is located in the spruce forest area and where old growth forests are more fragmented than in the Ivalo district, the reindeer did not show a clear preference to old growth forests when selecting winter home range area. However, when using late winter home range areas reindeer clearly preferred old spruce forests and avoided young and dense mixed forests. Use of both lichen and hay dominated felling and sapling stand areas were also relatively high in winter home range areas. In late winter reindeer were also attracted to new logging sites to forage arboreal lichens from crown and branches of felled trees (Kumpula, Colpaert, & Tanskanen, 2008). Interannual weather variation mostly affected the depth, density and hardness of snow in the Ivalo herding district. At the forest landscape level, snow depth and density increased with altitude. The thinnest and deepest snow cover occurred on western and northern slopes, respectively. In contrast, forest harvesting did not seem to affect snow conditions. From spring to autumn, reindeer mainly used higher altitude pastures. In early and mid-winter, when snow conditions were easy or moderate, reindeer still preferred higher altitudes, but in late winter when snow conditions and food accession were at their most difficult, they preferred lower altitudes (Fig. 12.8) (Kumpula & Colpaert, 2007). The net energy-balancing hypothesis relating total energy profits and expenditures could primarily explain habitat selection by the study reindeer during winter in these intensively grazed and logged forest areas. In these areas reindeer clearly have a deficit of energy-rich lichens in winter. In our study areas, the availability of both terrestrial and arboreal lichens was best in old growth forests and, therefore, reindeer preferred these forests especially in late winter when grazing conditions were most difficult. In general, it seems also that low elevation forestland has a high winter grazing value for reindeer; however, these same areas are also intensively used by forest industry. This contradiction may become even more problematic in the future, since we assume that especially the use of high elevation forestland pastures may become more difficult for reindeer if global climatic change leads to an increase in winter precipitation.

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Fig. 12.8 Ten months GPS-track of a reindeer in the Ivalo district

On the basis of our results it is obvious that maintaining a sufficient amount of old growth forest and minimizing linear infrastructure (roads, power lines, snowmobile tracks etc.) in wintering areas of reindeer considerably improves the suitability of these ranges for reindeer herding. However, recent reindeer pasture inventories shows that a great deal of the mature and old growth forest in both of the study districts have been harvested during the period from the beginning of 1970s to the beginning of 2000s. At the same time, lichen pastures have deteriorated markedly mainly due to reindeer grazing. One of the most important targets for reindeer herding, especially in the northern parts of Finland should be a herding system relying only on natural pastures. This, however, would mean the need for a drastic improvement of winter pastures. To improve winter pastures cooperation between all forms of land use is necessary, forestry management practices have to adjusted, pressure of tourism has to be regulated, but also reindeer herding practices have to evolve. It is clear, that changes in pasture environment of reindeer herding should be understood and accepted as large scale and gradual environmental changes, which are the result of the interaction between geographical and geological conditions, climate and different forms of land use.

12.3 Discussion The GPS system provides new possibilities for the study of both wildlife and free roaming cattle. Although the first GPS collars were heavy and had engineering problems the present devices are reliable and can be adapted to any type of animal. For research purposes it is highly recommended to conduct a thorough data accuracy assessment, as positional error can exceed the nominal ±15 m (49 ft). The use of

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differential corrections methods could improve the accuracy to the sub-meter level. Data can be downloaded using VHF-radio or a mobile telephone network (satellite or land based). GPS collars can also be fitted to collect other environmental data, such as temperature, movement, air pressure etc. It could also be possible to equip collars with cameras, microphones and medical monitoring devices. The present cost of GPS collar equipment ranging from US$ 2000–3000 is still too high for commercial use. A reduction of both the prices and the size of the devices would make it possible for the individual cattle owner to track the whereabouts of his animals, simply by checking his mobile telephone or computer. Comparable devices are already widely in use to track hunting dogs, where a GPS collar with GSM connections transfers data to the hunter who can follow his dog in real time on a map in his GSM-telephone (Tracker Oy, 2009). Other possible developments of the GPS collar devices could be the use of solar panels to extend battery life, or creating local area networks of small cheap devices to monitor large herds of cattle, keeping track of every individual animal, and using only a few more expensive hubs to relay the data to the owners’ computer or mobile device.

References Agouridis, C. T., Stombaugh, T. S., Workman, S. R., Koostra, B. K., Edwards, D. R., & Vanzant, E. S. (2004). Suitability of a GPS collar for grazing studies. American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 47, 1321–1329. Bailey, D. W., Keil, M. R., & Rittenhouse, L. R. (2004). Research observation: Daily movement patterns of hill climbing and bottom dwelling cows. Journal of Range Management, 57, 20–28. Cain, J. W., III, Krausman, P. R., Jansen, B. D., & Morgart, J. R. (2005). Influence of topography and GPS fix interval on GPS collar performance. Wildlife Society Bulletin, 33, 926–934. DeCesare, N. J., Squires, J. R., & Kolbe, J. A. (2005). Effect of forest canopy on GPS-based movement data. Wildlife Society Bulletin, 33, 935–941. D’Eon, R. G., Serrouya, R., Smith, G., & Kochanny, C. O. (2002). GPS radiotelemetry error and bias in mountainous terrain. Wildlife Society Bulletin, 30, 430–439. D’Eon, R. G. (2004). Snow depth as a function of canopy cover and other site attributes in a forestland ungulate winter ranges in southeast British Columbia. BC Journal of Ecosystems and Management, Research Report, 3(2), 1–9. Di Orio, A. P., Callas, R., & Schaefer, R. J. (2003). Performance of two GPS telemetry collars under different habitat conditions. Wildlife Society Bulletin, 31, 372–379. Eriksson, O. (1976). Snöförhållandenas inverkan på renbetningen. Meddelanden från Växtbiologiska institutionen, Uppsala 1976:2, 19pp. and 2 app. Frair, J. L., Nielsen, S. E., Merrill, E. H., Lele, S. R., Boyce, M. S., Munro, R. H. M., et al. (2004). Removing GPS collar bias in habitat selection studies. Journal of Applied Ecology, 41, 201–212. Hiemstra, C. A., Liston, G. E., & Reiners, W. A. (2002). Snow redistribution by wind and interactions with vegetation at upper treeline in the Medicine Bow Mountains, Wyoming, U.S.A. Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research, 34(3), 262–273. Hansen, M. C., & Riggs, R. A. (2008). Accuracy, precision, and observation rates of global positioning system telemetry collars. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 72, 518–526. Jerde, C. L., & Visscher, D. R. (2005). GPS measurement error influences on movement model parameterization. Ecological Applications, 15, 806–810.

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Kirchoff, M. D., & Schoen, J. W. (1987). Forest cover and snow: Implications for deer habitat in south-east Alaska. Journal of Wildlife Management, 51, 28–33. Kojola, I., & Helle, T. (1993). Regional differences in density dependent mortality and reproduction in Finnish reindeer. Rangifer, 13, 33–38. Kojola, I., Aikio, P., & Helle, T. (1993). Influences of natural food resources on reindeer husbandry in northern Lapland. Research Institute of Northern Finland, Research Report, 116, 1–39. (In Finnish with English abstract). Kojola, I., Helle, T., Niskanen, M., & Aikio, P. (1995). Effects of lichen biomass on winter diet, body mass and reproduction of semi-domesticated reindeer Rangifer t. tarandus in Finland. Wildlife Biology, 1, 33–38. Koivusalo, H., & Kokkonen, T. (2002). Snow processes in a forest clearing and in a coniferous forest. Journal of Hydrology, 262, 145–164. Kumpula, J. (2001). Productivity of the semi-domesticated reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus L.) stock and carrying capacity of pastures in Finland during 1960–1990’s. Acta Universitatis Ouluensis, A, 375. Kumpula, J., Colpaert, A., & Nieminen, M. (2000). Condition, potential recovery rate and productivity of lichen (Cladina spp.) ranges in the Finnish reindeer management area. Arctic, 53, 152–160. Kumpula, J., Colpaert, A., & Anttonen, M. (2007). Does forest harvesting and linear infrastructure change the usability value of pastureland for semi-domesticated reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus). Annales Zoologici Fennici, 44, 161–178. Kumpula, J., & Colpaert, A. (2007). Snow conditions and usability value of pastureland for semidomesticated reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) in northern boreal forest area. Rangifer, 27, 25–39. Kumpula, J., Colpaert, A., & Tanskanen, A. (2008). Porojen laidunten valinta muuttuneessa metsäja maisemarakenteessa Keski-Lapissa (In Finnish with English summary: Pasture selection by semi-domesticated reindeer in the changed forest and landscape structure of central Lapland). Suomen Riista, 54, 69–82. Lewis, J. S., Rachlow, J. L., Garton, E. O., & Vierling, L. A. (2007). Effects of habitat on GPS collar performance: Using data screening to reduce location error. Journal of Applied Ecology, 44, 663–671. Mattila, E. (1996). Porojen talvilaitumet Suomen poronhoitoalueen etelä- ja keskiosissa 1990luvun alussa. Folia Forestalia, 4, 337–357. Polojärvi, K., Colpaert, C., & Matengu, K. (2009). Data screening and accuracy assessment of GPS collar tracking data of bovine cattle. Manuscript. Resources Information Standards Committee. (1998). Wildlife Radio-telemetry, Standards for Components of British Columbia’s Biodiversity, No. 5, Version 2.0. Retrieved June 22, 2009, from http://ilmbwww.gov.bc.ca/risc/pubs/tebiodiv/wildliferadio/rtelml20-10.htm Tappeiner, U., Tappeiner, G., Aschenwald, J., Tasser, E., & Ostendorf, B. (2001). GIS-based modelling of spatial pattern of snow cover duration in an alpine area. Ecological Modelling, 138, 265–275. Tomppo, E., & Henttonen, H. (1996). Suomen metsävarat 1989–1994 ja niiden muutokset vuodesta 1951 lähtien. Metsätilastotiedote, 354, 1–18. Televilt (2006). Tellus GPS System. User Manual, 7 April 2006. Followit Lindesberg AB (former Televilt, TVP Positioning AB), Sweden. Tracker Oy. (2009). Retrieved July 6, 2009, from http://www.tracker.fi/webshop/index.php?pPath= 1&language=en Turner, L. W., Udal, M. C., Larson, B. T., & Shearer, S. A. (2000). Monitoring cattle behaviour and pasture use with GPS and GIS. Canadian Journal of Animal Science, 80, 405–413. Vajda, A., Venäläinen, A., Hänninen, P., & Sutinen, R. (2006). Effect of vegetation on snow cover at the northern timberline: A case study in Finnish Lapland. Silva Fennica, 40(2), 195–207. Väre, H., Ohtonen, R., & Mikkola, K. (1996). The effect and extent of heavy grazing by reindeer in oligotrophic pine heaths in northern Fennoscandia. Ecography, 19, 245–253.

Chapter 13

Engineering Cattle for Dairy Development in Rural India Pratyusha Basu

India’s Green Revolution1 has attracted much attention in studies of the social and environmental repercussions of technological innovations. Its consequences for both society and nature have been demonstrated, not only in terms of increased food production, but also in terms of the loss of diversity of crop breeds, inability to maintain the profitability of small and medium land holdings, displacement of agricultural labor, and loss of community-based, and often more sustainable, agricultural practices and forms of knowledge linked to them (Baker & Jewitt, 2007; Roy, 2007; Shiva, 1991). Less highlighted in such studies are changes in animal husbandry that have accompanied the Green Revolution, these being especially pertinent in the context of India given the continuing use of animal power in agricultural operations (Chakravarti, 1985). The upgrading of cattle and buffalo breeds, in fact, has been a central aim of India’s dairy development program (Rao, Venkatasubramanian, & De Wit, 1995), whose designation as the “White Revolution” very deliberately evokes comparisons with the Green Revolution (George, 1985). This chapter focuses on the engineering of new cattle breeds for higher milk productivity in India to understand how new technologies have to fit into existing social and environmental landscapes in India as much as they seek to transform them. More specifically, it shows how the upgradation of existing dairy cattle, through the use of artificial insemination techniques to produce crossbreds between European dairy breeds (Jersey and Holstein-Friesian) and indigenous Zebu varieties, reflects both the modification of local systems of production in accordance with national and international designs for dairy development as well as the dependence of development outcomes on contextual constructions of rural work. In the process, crossbred cows draw attention to the complicated meanings of engineering since their dissemination is involved with wider histories of colonial and postcolonial development as well as the role of household-level gender relations in the shaping of rural livelihoods. In India, new cattle breeds have the potential to disturb

P. Basu (B) Department of Geography, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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existing articulations between agriculture and dairying, leading to an imposition of the values of dairy development even as farmers assign different and wider meanings to cattle. Diverse linkages between science, technology, and society are thus implicated in dairy development revealing the extent to which meanings of engineering emerge in implementation. By juxtaposing the meanings of crossbred and indigenous cattle in India, this chapter aims to highlight the complexities of the engineering of rural natures and extend current understandings of megaengineering in three ways. First, dairy development provides a means to rethink the connection usually made between the scale of the engineering intervention and its consequences. Studies of environmental transformations have usually focused on how megaengineering projects, from large dams to superhighways, have radically altered existing ecosystems and social relations dependent on them. Given that dairy development in India is focused on cooperatives organized around village level producers, it is not a large project that reaches into smaller places, but instead has served to knit together a number of small producers to build collective strength (Kurien, 1997). Yet, village-based cooperative dairying does not simply turn out to be the opposite of megaengineering. Rather, through the promotion of improved cattle breeds, the collective structure has been utilized to extend the reach of development planning and build economies of scale that are key to capitalist accumulation. India’s dairy development program is thus an opportunity to reflect on how seemingly small-scale development interventions are transformed by their technological accompaniments into the very megascale structures that were sought to be opposed in the initial stages of their conceptualization. Second, dairy development enables a link between the extraordinary aspects of engineering and the everyday activities that underpin this extraordinariness. India’s dairy program highlights the participation of women in dairying as part of its selfrepresentation as a program that empowers marginalized social groups. Yet, the processes through which women’s labor becomes available for dairy development are rarely highlighted, even as women’s labor is a crucial component of the ability of rural households to incorporate dairy cattle in their everyday routines (ESCAP, 1981). The link between new forms of engineering and existing social relations can thus be followed through a focus on dairy development, pointing to the ways in which megaengineering is produced not just through official acts of development, but also through everyday acts of production and reproduction within local contexts (Agarwal, 1985). Third, dairy development demonstrates the ways in which megaengineering projects do not embed themselves in a pristine landscape, but encounter earlier forms of engineering, in the process further heightening the changes unleashed by new technologies (Arnold & Guha, 1995). The maintenance of dairy cattle, for instance, is dependent on access to agricultural resources, and the intensification of agricultural operations as a consequence of the Green Revolution has the potential to both impede as well as enable this access. The precise manner in which Green and White Revolution technologies intersect with one another is thus a significant part of the explanation for the adoption of crossbred cows. A historical approach in this way becomes key to understanding the impacts of mega-engineering, so that

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instead of isolating various innovations, their interactions with one another need to be considered. As prelude to the specific discussion of dairy development, the next section locates existing understandings of the utilization and manipulation of animals within broader understandings of the engineering of nature through colonial power relations and industrial production. This is followed by an examination of policies related to the adoption of European dairy breeds within national dairy development in order to reflect on the equivocal support for crossbreeding with foreign breeds within national planning. The chapter then delves into relationships between crossbred cows and local agricultural practices in order to outline how changes in the breeding of cattle require changes in locally prevalent economic and social meanings of cattle. In the process, the dairy development program’s turn towards strict separations between agricultural and dairying economies can be clarified, as well as the reasons for such separations not being wholly acceptable within local contexts. Crossbred cattle, however, do not only reflect the consequences of engineering, but also become key to understanding how engineering draws strength from already existing household level social relations on the one hand, and physical infrastructures on the other, and these aspects are followed in the remainder of the chapter. Overall, the aim is to understand the forms and outcomes of megaengineering projects in terms of their contextual reconstructions and not merely as manifestations of the power of technical expertise.

13.1 Animal Natures and Human Engineering: From Colonial Histories to Contemporary Industrialization The study of human-environment relationships has recently been reinvigorated by interdisciplinary approaches to the meanings of “nature,” moving from a long standing focus on scientific measurements and regional descriptions towards analyses that situate nature within historical and cultural frames of meaning. Environmental history has been useful in extending such understandings by relating colonial power relations and contemporary landscapes through notions of ecological imperialism, thus tracing the current distributions of plants and animals to environmental exchanges set in motion by European voyages of exploration, and intensified through the reshaping of landscapes to suit colonial commercial and political interests (Crosby, 1986; Grove, Damodaran, & Sangwan, 1998). Focusing on more recent forms of industrialization and commodification of nature, scholars across various disciplines have drawn attention to scientific endeavors that seek to match the rhythms of nature to the continuous need for monetary profits, leading to an intensive manipulation of natural properties which often blurs the boundaries between human and social natures (Castree, 2005). Alongside, cultural studies of nature have culminated in understandings of society that do not solely privilege human endeavor, since contemporary landscapes are not completely saturated with human presence but are also crucially dependent on the harnessing of the power and properties of animals and plants (Anderson, 2003).

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The most striking studies on the engineering of nature have been provided by historical analysis of the construction of large scale water control projects in India and the U.S. As Worster (1985) has argued in the context of water control in the U.S. West, American projects sought from the start to imitate British colonial projects in India and Egypt, and hence were indelibly linked to imperialist strategies. This desire to control nature could be fulfilled only through a corresponding control over society, and large scale manipulation of water served mainly to concentrate the ability to distribute natural resources within the confines of agencies linked to the state. The link between environmental control and social control is thus a crucial aspect of understanding the implications of megaengineering projects. Since contemporary development in India has proceeded through a firm embrace of modern forms of agriculture and industry, including large scale water control projects, heavy industrialization, and an overall emphasis on adopting new forms of science and technology, colonial projects of environmental and social manipulation can be viewed as continuing into the postcolonial context (D’Souza, 2006). Gilmartin (1995), however, has argued that large scale projects had contradictory meanings within colonial India. On the one hand, they justified control over Indian society in terms of the colonial regime’s ability to implement large scale manipulations of nature; on the other, environmental changes consequent to large scale projects led to the formation of new social identities that threatened to elude the control of colonial authorities. This chapter seeks to add complexity to the position that nature cannot be modified without transforming the social itself by arguing that the relative flexibility of the social is also key to enabling the engineering of nature. In the case of crossbred cows, the possibility of drawing on existing gender divisions of labor becomes crucial to enabling the acceptance of improved dairy breeds. Yet, the objective here is not to downplay or nuance the power of engineering, as much as to highlight the complications that are introduced into discussions of human-nature relationships when the object of engineering is situated at the boundaries between the social and the natural (Mitchell, 2002). Criticisms of technological transformations have often led to calls for a return to traditional forms of nature-based livelihoods and an emphasis on the ways in which local communities continue to maintain more sustainable agrarian traditions in the face of change (Shiva, 1988). Crossbred cows, since they explicitly require an incorporation of European breeds, are especially susceptible to this form of argumentation. Given that India’s dairy program favors intermixing of cattle breeds and not substitution of one by the other, it can be argued that the program anticipates possible attacks on use of foreign breeds. It is also clear, however, that some segments of rural India have not wholly rejected modern forms of either agriculture or dairying as evidenced by the spread of Green Revolution technologies and dairy cooperatives. In his study of the Green Revolution, Gupta (1998) shows the ways in which modern forms of agriculture have become key aspects of contemporary rural identity, so that the technologies of the Green Revolution articulate with existing forms of agricultural and ecological knowledge. The need therefore is to steer a course between pragmatic and critical evaluations of development in order to reflect on the ways in which the clearing of space for new forms of engineering is both

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a local and a global process. In the case of the adoption of crossbred cows, this requires an understanding of the ways in which the science of breeding through artificial insemination changes the very meanings of cattle, but also fits into the ways in which rural producers are reworking their identities in the face of access to Western knowledge and potential participation in global markets. In terms of livestock development, the manipulation of the bodies of chicken to produce an entity that is solely devoted to meat production has been the subject of much critical analysis (Boyd and Watts, 1997; Dixon, 2003). Here the focus is on problems associated with industrializing the chicken, for instance, the susceptibility to disease within chicken coops which are tackled through antibiotics that are potentially harmful to human systems. This has also led to reflections on whether the industrialized chicken should be viewed as a completely new form of animal, given the ways in which it has been bred purely to enhance its commercial meanings. The wider social structures within which the industrial production of chicken has exponentially grown also draws attention to problems with contract farming and the complete takeover of the chicken commodity chain by agribusiness firms. While the Indian crossbred cow may not be as industrialized as the American chicken, the desire to transform a traditional animal into a commercial entity focused exclusively on milk productivity can also be followed through the development of the crossbred cow. New forms of the engineering of rural natures can thus be situated within longer histories of colonialism, continuing moves towards the deepening of industrial systems of production, and advanced forms of manipulation of nature that are promising to become even more prevalent in the future. Alongside, engineering produces new modes of social control, but is also likely to be reshaped within the social context towards which it is targeted leading to the emergence of new social identities. Before we embark on examining these new forms of control and resistance, the next section follows the history of dairy development in order to draw out the meanings of crossbred cows within the wider context of centralized planning in India.

13.2 Rural Dairying and National Development in India The trajectory of development in India can be traced through the central government’s Five-Year Plans (Planning Commission, 2009), which combine a focus on sectoral allocation of funds with policies to alleviate regional inequalities. Within these Five-Year Plans, a continuous interest in cattle development can be clearly discerned, along with a constant wavering across various Plan periods regarding the best locations for the commercialization of animal products and the kinds of animal species that should be promoted (Chakravarti, 1985). In the early period of planning, in the 1950s, the emphasis was on locating dairy enterprises within cities or close to cities in order to serve urban consumers. The establishment in 1959 of the Delhi Milk Scheme (DMS) designed to serve consumers in India’s capital is one

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prominent example of the focus on urban milk producers, which was sought to be extended over time to other urban areas. Improving the quality of dairy animals, however, was viewed as best undertaken within rural areas, as exemplified by the Key Village Scheme (KVS). At that time, dual purpose cattle breeds, those which could be utilized for both draft and dairying purposes, were promoted as best suited to the needs of Indian farmers. In the 1960s, the KVS was supplemented by the Intensive Cattle Development Project (ICDP) which specifically sought to improve indigenous breeds of dairy cattle and buffaloes, and resembled in its area-specific approach the Intensive Agricultural District Program (IADP) geared towards the diffusion of high-yielding seed varieties. By the 1960s, crossbreeding with high-yielding dairy cattle of European origin made an appearance in Plan documents. The extent to which this introduction of crossbred cattle responded to the needs of Indian farmers or merely reflected the technological biases of international development has become one of the central debates in evaluations of India’s dairy development program. This shift towards increasing the productivity of dairy cattle was simultaneously accompanied by a revamping of the institutional structure of dairying in India, exemplified by the substitution of an urban, or at least suburban, model of dairying with a national dairying model focused on the formation of rural producer cooperatives. The formulation of a national dairy model can thus be viewed as providing a stable framework for the diffusion of crossbred cows. The task of replicating cooperative dairying throughout rural India was entrusted to the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) established in the small town of Anand in the state of Gujarat in 1965. This decision to locate the NDDB in Anand was deliberate, since the dairy cooperatives to be replicated were modeled on the Kheda District Cooperative Milk Producers Union (KDCMPU) which served villages in central Gujarat’s Anand and Kheda districts (Anand district was previously part of Kheda district and became a separate entity in 1997). The KDCMPU itself was the outcome of a struggle launched in 1946 by farmers from villages around Anand. Protesting the control of milk marketing by Polson, a private dairy company favored by the British colonial regime, Anand’s farmers soon won the right to organize milk production and marketing around their own cooperatives. This struggle also entailed opposition to small-scale milk traders, thus becoming a larger movement for farmer-control over the milk business. The subsequent success of the KDCMPU was underlined by the popularity of its products, sold under the brand name Amul, within urban markets. Such popularity could partly be linked to a highly visible advertising campaign as well as to the cooperative’s ability to gain access to the metropolitan market of Mumbai (then Bombay). Thus, the institutionalization of the Anand model via the NDDB meant that a situated success story was sought to be extended across space, and a local movement was subsumed into the wider landscape of national development. The NDDB’s program of replication, dubbed “Operation Flood,” was officially launched in 1970 and combined the social justice agenda of cooperative dairying, based on serving small farmers and alleviating rural poverty, with an emphasis on the expertise of engineers and managers seeking to meet the needs of dairy plants

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Fig. 13.1 Schematic representation of the Anand model of dairy development

and capture a larger share of the urban market. At the core of the Anand model of dairying were rural producer cooperatives linked to collection of milk at the village level and processing and marketing of milk at the district level. The dairy development program drew on this to build a three-tier institutional structure connecting village-level cooperatives, district-level unions, and state-level federations (Fig. 13.1). While strongly supported by the state, the NDDB was a parastatal organization, and thus a semblance of independence from state control in favor of farmer control was a significant aspect of its institutional ethos. The other prominent aspect of the program was the linking of rural producers to urban consumers, so that the Anand model was based on enhancing milk production in rural areas and milk consumption in urban areas. While this meant that urban dairying was officially discouraged under the Anand model, program officials insisted that rural consumption of milk was not correspondingly depressed as a consequence of the focus on urban markets. The emphasis on urban consumers however has remained a much criticized aspect of the program (George, 1985). Funding to replicate village-level cooperatives across rural India was to a large extent provided by the European Economic Community (EEC) and the World Bank, which further solidified the value of dairy cooperatives within national development. In 1969, the EEC, via the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), had sought to provide excess dairy products as food aid to India, a move which had the potential to undercut Indian dairy production. The NDDB was instrumental in ensuring that proceeds from sales of EEC dairy products were channeled into the replication of cooperative dairying, so that EEC aid promoted the national dairy development program, instead of competing against it for urban consumers.

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At around the same time, India’s dairy program began to promote dairy production techniques prevalent within advanced dairying countries, most evident in the shift towards cattle breeds that were exclusively geared towards dairying as opposed to the dual purpose breeds more popular in India. Crossbreeding with exotic breeds was explicitly mentioned as an option for the improvement of dairy cattle in the Third Plan, 1961–1966 (Planning Commission, 2009). The World Bank, which funded the replication of cooperative dairying in three states in India from 1974 to 1996, was also supportive of the move towards crossbred cows. Thus, in Bankled evaluations of state-level cooperative initiatives, the extent of acceptance of crossbred cows became a key factor, feeding into a larger emphasis on the commercialization of cooperative dairying services, including veterinary support, artificial insemination, and transportation (Candler & Kumar, 1998; Mergos & Slade, 1987). Critics have argued that the adoption of new dairy technologies was driven by the alliance between Western donors and national development officials rather than by the needs of rural people (Baviskar & George, 1988; Baviskar & Terhal, 1990; Doornbos, van Dorsten, Mitra, & Terhal, 1990). The promotion of crossbred cows came under special attack since dairy farmers, in Anand and across many parts of rural India, utilized buffaloes as dairy animals. Thus, the coincidence between the 1960s–1970s turn towards crossbreeding with exotic breeds and the utilization of international funding for Operation Flood was viewed as the loss of local control. An activist campaign launched in 1985 in the Netherlands to prevent the Dutch government from promoting crossbreeding programs in India provides evidence of the wider opposition that accompanied the shift towards European dairy breeds (ICN, 1985). However, even as crossbreeding appeared in India’s plan documents around the time of Operation Flood, there is a longer history of crossbreeding within India. In the early 1900s during British colonial rule, military dairy farms had been sites for experiments with crossbreeding between exotic and indigenous cattle breeds (Banerjee, 1994). By the 1960s, the Green Revolution had enabled new forms of breeding and higher productivity to be situated within a wider framework of utilizing technological advances to promote rural development. Moreover, the first act of the farmers of Anand had been to hire a U.S. trained engineer, Verghese Kurien, to manage their dairy operations, which seemed to indicate a desire to benefit from new dairy technologies and expertise. It must also be noted that crossbreeding policies from the beginning sought to maintain exotic content at a level of 5/8th, so that the aim was not to produce a purebred exotic dairy cow, but to enable sufficient mixing so that the new form of cattle was suited both to higher productivity as well as climatic conditions in India (Tandon, 1951). Thus crossbred cattle, including European crossbreds, cannot be automatically considered to be either foreign to Indian dairying contexts or completely unacceptable to farmers. The larger issue in the debate over crossbreeding, however, is the ways in which new technologies prevent wider forms of participation in dairying. In other words, how do crossbred cows fit into existing class and gender divisions in rural India? Will the avowed objective of cooperative dairying to serve the interests of small

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producers become lost in the desire to improve the productivity of dairy cattle? This becomes an especially urgent question since the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s, impelled in immediate terms by a balance of payments crisis, but more broadly precipitated by pressures from both international development agencies and domestic industrial interests (Pedersen, 2000). For state-led dairying, which had been protected from foreign competition since the 1950s in order to ensure the growth of the cooperative sector, liberalization has meant a loss of privilege within the national landscape of development as well as a potential loss of rural producers to private dairy companies. While the full impacts of dairy liberalization and consequent privatization have yet to be experienced by cooperatives, it is likely that a greater emphasis on productivity and profits as opposed to serving small dairy producers will lead to spiraling pressures on farmers to adopt more technology-intensive forms of dairying (Rajaram, 1996; Sharma & Gulati, 2003; Singh, Coelli, & Fleming, 2001; Vyas, 2002). Crossbred cows are thus likely to become even more central to future forms of dairying than they are currently. As can be seen in Fig. 13.2, milk production in India has registered a substantial increase from the 1950s onwards. Thus, the 17 million tons of milk produced in 1950–1951 increased to 80.6 million tons by 2000–2001. In fact, the rate of increase shows a marked rise between 1980–1981 and 2000–2001, with a relative change of 155% across this time period. Two econometric studies that seek to explain this increase provide insights into processes of milk production in India. According to Munshi and Parikh (1994), the rise in milk production in India can be explained by an increase in number of cooperatives, as opposed to direct technical inputs which in their study is measured by increase in the use of cattle feed. They attribute this

Milk Production (million tons)

120

100 80

60

40 20

0 1950–1951 1960–19611968–1969 1980–1981 1990–19912000–2001 2009–2010 *

Fig. 13.2 Total milk production in India, 1950–2010 (in million tons). (∗ Figures for 2009–2010 are estimated) (Source: Dairy India 2007: 102)

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finding to the fact that “the cooperative system may serve as a channel for the dissemination of information, facilitating a broad learning process in the industry, as well as provide an infrastructure base for the adoption of new technology” (p. 222). Candler and Kumar (1998), in a report published under the auspices of the World Bank, attribute increased milk production to technological progress. Since prices paid to dairy farmers have only marginally increased over the period of the World Bank’s funding of cooperative dairying, rise in milk production shows that farmers have been able and willing to produce larger quantities of milk without stimulation from market prices. In both studies, the cooperative dairy program thus becomes key to enabling increased milk production. The number of dairy cooperative societies shows a marked increase from the 1980s, which is a decade after replication of rural dairy cooperatives through Operation Flood was launched, to the mid-2000s (Dairy India, 2007: 116).2 The significance of rural cooperatives in milk production however has to be juxtaposed with the continuing predominance of the unorganized sector in milk marketing. According to Dairy India (2007), 98% of total milk production in India occurred among rural producers in 2005. Out of this production, approximately equal amounts of milk were retained for consumption within rural areas and sent on to be marketed to urban consumers. But only 9% of the milk available for marketing was controlled by cooperative and public dairies compared with 36% of the total production being handled by the private sector. This difference has been explained in terms of continuing allegiances by rural producers to private traders who often set up personal relationships of financial and social support that cannot always be replicated by dairy cooperatives (Hiremath, Singh, & Mergos, 1997). In terms of dairy animals, the relative utilization of cows and buffaloes for dairying varies regionally across India, both in terms of urban-rural divisions and in terms of state-wise distribution. Overall, as shown in Fig. 13.3, cattle exceed buffaloes in terms of total numbers, yet in terms of rates of growth, cattle numbers have steadily declined from 1982 to 2003, while buffaloes show an increase over the same time period. Table 13.1 shows a comparison of the rate of change in numbers of cattle and buffaloes between urban and rural India. It becomes clear here that rates of change differ by type of cattle, so that crossbred cattle have registered an increase across both urban and rural contexts, while non-crossbred cattle show a decrease, especially in rural contexts. Buffaloes, on the other hand, have grown in number between 1992 and 2003, especially in urban areas. The loss of cattle and increase in number of buffaloes has been taken to imply the decreasing use of cattle as draft animals with a corresponding increase in dairy animals, especially buffaloes. The increase in crossbred cows reflects a similar turn towards dairy animals. Milk production by species also shows regional variations in India. About 17– 18% of total milk production is by crossbred cows, while 54–55% is produced by buffaloes (Table 13.2). As can be seen in Fig. 13.4, states in northern and southern India show the highest production of milk in terms of absolute numbers. Yet, when Fig. 13.4 is compared to Fig. 13.5, it becomes clear that the share of crossbred cows in milk production is not very high. Thus, milk production by crossbred

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250,000

Cattle

Buffalo

Number of dairy animals

200,000

150,000

100,000

50,000

1982

1987

1992

1997

2003

Fig. 13.3 Comparison of numbers of cattle and buffaloes, 1982–2003. (Source: Dairy India, 2007: 111)

Table 13.1 Change in rural-urban distribution of cattle and buffaloes, 1992–2003

1992

2003

Change (1992–2003)

Crossbred cows Non-crossbred cows Buffaloes Crossbred cows Non-crossbred cows Buffaloes Crossbred cows Non-crossbred cows Buffaloes

Rural

Urban

Total

13,462 182,425 79,915 21,937 153,714 91,930 62.95% –15.74% 15.03%

1,753 6,944 4,291 2,750 6,780 5,993 56.87% −2.36% 39.66%

15,215 189,369 84,206 24,686 160,495 97,922 62.25% −15.25% 16.29%

cows approaches relatively appreciable levels mainly within states in south and northeastern India. One possible explanation for the higher adoption of crossbred cows in southern India is a shift away from mixed agro-dairy production to pure dairy production which enables the shift to crossbred dairy cows (Nair, 1990a). This explanation could also hold for states of northeastern India. Additionally, northeastern states produce relatively low levels of buffalo milk so that the percentage of milk produced by crossbred cows counts for a larger proportion of total milk produced, and have also been the target of the Integrated Dairy Development Plan (IDDP)

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Table 13.2 Proportion of total milk produced (in million tons) by cattle and buffaloes, 1995–2004 1995–1996 Cattle Crossbred cows Non-crossbred cows Buffaloes Total milk production

1999–2000

2003–2004

13.6 (17.4%) 19.0 (24.3%) 42.3 (54.0%) 78.3 (100.0%)

15.6 (18.0%) 19.4 (22.4%) 48.0 (55.3%) 86.7 (100.0%)

30.0 (45.3%)

32.6 (52.0%) 66.2 (100.0%)

Dairy India (2007: 102, 109)

Fig. 13.4 Total milk production from cattle and buffaloes, 2003–2004 (in thousand tons). (Source: Dairy India, 2007: 109)

which focused on improving dairy production in non-Operation Flood, hilly, and tribal districts and states. Given the current distribution of crossbred cows, there are two possible trajectories in terms of future diffusion. In one scenario, India’s northern states which comprise the center of its dairy economy could also begin moving towards commercial dairy production and hence towards the adoption of crossbred cows. At the other extreme, the adoption of crossbred cows could continue to show a marked southern bias leading to a division between northern and southern India, with the former continuing to be dependent on buffalo-based dairying and the latter moving further towards crossbred cow dairying. The most recent Eleventh Five-Year Plan, 2007–2012 (Planning Commission, 2009) shows that the emphasis on crossbred cows is likely to be extended into the future. Thus, the Plan mentions the continuation of a program which focuses on “genetic up gradation of indigenous

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Fig. 13.5 Proportion of total milk production from crossbred cows, 2003–2004. (Source: Dairy India, 2007: 109)

cattle and buffaloes, development and conservation of important indigenous breeds and [the evolution of] . . . sustainable breeding policy” (Vol. 3: 11). The juxtaposition of “up gradation” with “conservation” can be viewed as consistent with the more critical approach towards “indiscriminate” crossbreeding with exotic breeds in the Tenth Plan, 2002–2007 (Planning Commission, 2009). Thus, the Eleventh Plan mentions the need to diffuse artificial insemination services to upgrade cattle breeds, but does not specify if the upgradation necessarily involves crossbreeding with European dairy breeds. It is highly likely however that the emphasis on the inculcation of the characteristics of foreign breeds will continue despite this silence. As will be examined in the next section, the meanings of crossbred dairy cows differ substantially from existing values of cattle in rural India. Such differences highlight the ways in which the engineering of dairy cattle also necessitates an appropriation and transformation of the social relations that underpin and continue to characterize rural, agricultural livelihoods.

13.3 Old and New Meanings of Cows: Labor Value and Cash Value3 While official policies and their outcomes portray an equivocal relationship with the potential of European dairy breeds, the reasons for the uneven adoption of crossbred cows become more clarified in terms of local agricultural practices. Generally speaking, farming systems in India can be considered mixed in two ways.

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First, agriculture largely combines subsistence and commercial cultivation, especially since the majority of landholdings continue to be small in size (Das, 2007). Second, in most farm households, dairying operations are conducted in conjunction with agriculture, so that agricultural resources subsidize the maintenance of dairy animals. The introduction of crossbred cows geared exclusively towards milk production for the market works against both forms of mixed farming. There are two aspects, therefore, to dairy development based on crossbred cows. In terms of the commercial-subsistence combination, crossbred cows entail a dependence on specialized inputs which increase the costs associated with maintaining them. In terms of the agriculture-dairying linkage, crossbred cows do not fit into existing agrarian environments and comprise a separate dairy economy. These two aspects of crossbred cows will be examined in this section (Fig. 13.6). Juxtaposing technologies promoted by the agricultural Green Revolution and dairying White Revolution, George (1990) points out the ways in which they combine to diminish actually existing synergies between agriculture and dairying. To begin with, the hybrid crop varieties promoted under the Green Revolution are unpalatable to cattle and hence cannot be used as fodder. This breaks the link between crop residues and dairy animals and ensures that households become dependent on buying cattle feed. Alongside, crossbred cattle promoted by the dairy development program cannot be used as draft animals, even as farmers continue to be dependent on animal power for their agricultural operations. Mismatches between new seeds and cattle and existing forms of agriculture and dairying thus mean that new technologies require a change in the conduct of rural livelihoods (Nair, 1990a).

Fig. 13.6 Crossbred cow in village in Gujarat. (Source: Author)

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The most important transformation here is in terms of dependence on humped Zebu bullocks. As the Fourth Plan, 1969–1974 (Planning Commission, 2009) describes it, “the rate of progress in this respect [adoption of crossbred cows] will, however, depend upon the degree of the farmers’ acceptance of cross-bred humpless animals as working stock” (Chapter 8, Section 10). In India, bullocks continue to be used for agricultural tasks, like plowing, planting, and weeding, as well as for transport. The ability to depend on animal power becomes even more crucial given the fuel costs associated with mechanization, costs that even relatively well-to-do farmers seek to avoid. In the season of rains, cattle also become the more dependable mode of transport, better able to negotiate unpaved roads than mechanized transport. Since Zebu bullocks are bred for physical strength, they are more suitable for draft labor than the dairy crossbreds. As can be seen in the poster promoting crossbred cows (Fig. 13.7), it is their use as draft animals that is actually illustrated which suggests that the dairy program is seeking to counter existing criticisms of crossbred cows. The unwillingness to shift to crossbred cows for dairying purposes, however, is not linked only to the use of Zebu bullocks for draft purposes, but also arises due to a preference for water buffaloes as dairy animals. Even as the use of cattle and buffaloes varies across India in keeping with climatic regimes and regional traditions of agriculture, the maintenance of a separation between buffalo-based dairy economies and cow-based draft economies is a significant aspect of agrarian livelihoods in particular rural contexts. A cultural preference for buffalo’s milk due to its higher fat content underlies the preference for buffaloes as dairy animals. Given that crossbred cows provide neither bullocks suitable for agricultural labor, nor milk that

Fig. 13.7 Poster promoting Jersey and Holstein-Friesian crossbred cows as “true friends of farmers”. (Photograph obtained from Indore Milk Union, Madhya Pradesh)

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conforms to local uses, their value for local agriculture and dairying is often difficult to establish. Lack of knowledge of crossbreds is another significant factor in their unsuitability for local agriculture. Zebu bullocks can be bought and sold at local cattle markets, but given that crossbred cows are not part of local economies, the ability to find buyers for them is uncertain. Moreover, knowledge related to diseases and treatments in Zebu cattle is usually available locally. The maintenance of crossbred cows, on the other hand, requires access to specialized veterinary knowledge. Similarly, access to artificial insemination materials and techniques is provided by the dairy program, and breeding can no longer be undertaken on the basis of village-level knowledge and resources. Crossbred cows therefore are dependent on services provided by the cooperative, and the resultant shift in control over dairying to sites and experts outside the village highlights the foreignness of crossbred cows and makes village-level dairying a matter of gaining access to the largesse of development officials. As can be seen in the poster promoting artificially inseminated cattle, the service provider is dressed differently from the farmer and the incorporation of the motorcycle of the service provider further underlines his outsider status (Fig. 13.8). In the context of the village, however, it is local dairy cooperative employees who are trained in artificial insemination (Fig. 13.9), both bringing specialized knowledge within the purview of the village but also setting the stage for possible monopolization of cattle-related knowledge within the realm of the cooperative.

Fig. 13.8 Portion of poster promoting artificial insemination of cattle. (Photograph obtained from Indore Milk Union, Madhya Pradesh)

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Fig. 13.9 Artificial insemination station in village in Madhya Pradesh. (Source: Author)

Besides veterinary and insemination services the dairy cooperative is also a source for cattle feed. The shift from local sources of fodder to prepared cattle feed is imperative to maintaining the higher yields of crossbred cattle, and to ensure year-round nutrition in the presence of seasonal variations in access to green fodder (Nair, 1990b). Yet, to buy cattle feed is also to add to the costs of crossbred cows, and these costs become burdensome in a context where cattle and buffaloes have traditionally been fed on weeds and post-harvest residues, as much as on specially planted fodder crops. The system of dependence between agricultural crops and dairy animals is thus truncated by cooperative dairying when the aim of the program is higher milk yields and not household-level self-sufficiency. An important aspect of the feeding of dairy animals is linked to grazing. What distinguishes crossbred cattle from Zebu cattle and buffaloes is that crossbreds have to be stall fed even when they are not pregnant or lactating. The usual practice in rural India is to graze cattle and buffaloes on one’s own fields or on commonly owned grazing land. Since labor requirements for grazing are much lower than for stall feeding, crossbred cows also stretch household labor availability. Further, not only does fodder have to be brought to crossbred cows, their dung also has to be carried to agricultural fields. Grazing has the added advantage of spreading animal manure on agricultural fields, and preventing excess accumulation near cattle sheds. In many ways, then, the restriction of crossbred cows to the space of the cattle shed

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changes the geographies of dairying and dairy-related labor, and these changes may not be feasible for, nor acceptable to, all rural households. Without doubt, however, the output of crossbred cows far surpasses that of local breeds of cows and buffaloes. The higher yield of crossbred cows becomes even more advantageous due to its lack of seasonality. For dairy plants, therefore, crossbred cows ensure that milk procurement can better approach milk processing capacity. However, while the quantity of milk produced by crossbreds is high, its fat content is much lower than buffalo milk. Given that milk is paid on the basis of both quantity and fat content at the village cooperative, buffaloes are often viewed as more economically advantageous. The tradeoff between the higher quantity of milk produced by crossbred cows and the higher fat content of buffalo milk is further resolved in terms of the latter when the size of the dairy herd is small, and given that higher production in crossbreds is also linked to higher costs in terms of feed and veterinary services. In such predominantly economic discussions of the differences between Zebu cows, crossbred cows, and buffaloes, religious values attached to cows within Hinduism do not directly intervene. Yet, to the extent that the slaughter of cattle and buffaloes is not mentioned within the dairy development program as a way to augment the financial value of dairy animals, the program adheres to popular Hindu norms. While there were some attempts to officially ban the slaughter of cows in India, no actual law has been passed to this effect at the level of the central government (Noronha, 1994), except to the extent that states have the freedom to make their own laws regarding cattle slaughter and transport of cattle across state lines is often illegal (Krishnakumar, 2003). The use of buffaloes as dairy animals could be a consequence of this animal being relatively less sacred than the cow, so that less productive animals can be more easily disposed. There has been no study as yet of this issue, or of the extent to which the sacred meanings of Zebu cattle are transferred to crossbred cows, though there is no indication that this is not happening. In some ways then, the commercialization of dairying, but not meat production, both conforms to hegemonic Hindu principles as well as maintains a secular aura since the program emphasizes productivity without bringing in religious ideals. Overall, commercial dairy development in India is partially stymied by the fact that cattle and buffaloes are valued in India for their labor power as well as for the cash value of their milk. To the extent that profits from dairying are not the main consideration in terms of local participation in cooperative dairying, as much as the utilization of already existing agricultural outputs, the higher yield of crossbred cows is often not sufficient to propel local farmers towards adopting crossbred cows. Moreover, rural India continues to be characterized by small farmers who own very few dairy animals, so that the higher costs associated with crossbred cows are not feasible for the bulk of its population, unless these costs are subsidized by cooperative dairying. The dairy program was established to ensure that small milk producers have access to milk markets, so that the shift towards greater commercialization signified by improved breeds does not conform to the original model. Since crossbred cows are purely oriented towards the needs of commercial dairying, with cash incomes juxtaposed against higher expenses, they do not fit into rural systems

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that work through subsidizing dairying by connecting it to one’s own agricultural fields.

13.4 Linking New Technologies to Household Work: Gendered Meanings of Crossbred Cows4 The link between crossbred cows and agriculture is not the only factor that shapes their adoption. What is also a crucial component is the labor associated with maintaining crossbred cows, labor that is viewed as being principally provided by women. In other words, the gap between existing agricultural practices and crossbred cows is often filled in through women’s work, so that the gender division of agricultural and dairying tasks enables the adoption of crossbred cows by rural households. In an early discussion of dairy development, a UN conference which focused on women and dairying (ESCAP, 1981), feminist scholars had argued that the adoption of both hybrid seeds in the Green Revolution and crossbred cows in the White Revolution is dependent on the inclusion of women in development. Critics of the dairy development program, however, have argued that the program has achieved exactly the opposite—by taking over processing and marketing tasks previously performed by women, cooperative dairying in fact has reduced women’s control over household-level dairying and hence disregarded their dairying knowledge (George, 1985). Yet, this does not mean that women’s work within cooperative dairying has decreased. In fact, studies of the amount of labor expended on household dairying have shown that dairy development has increased women’s work burdens and thus is dependent on the exploitation of women’s household labor (Mies, 1986; Mitra, 1987). Even as criticisms of the mode of women’s incorporation into dairy development are valid, it is also worth reflecting on why women continue to contribute their labor to dairy development despite both increased responsibilities for work and loss of control over dairying knowledge. In Candler and Kumar’s (1998) evaluation of India’s dairy development program, they argue that dairying work is preferred by women since it can be conducted at home and is more remunerative than agriculture. In contrast, feminist scholars have argued that women’s participation has to be viewed as a pragmatic strategy—in the absence of other avenues of employment, cooperative dairying becomes a valuable option for women (Sharma & Vanjani, 1993). This is not to argue that women’s work is freely chosen by them, or that women’s household-level work is not determined by patriarchal power, but that the gender division of labor is a historically contingent outcome and women’s connections with dairy development are likely to change over time. Thus, declining returns from Green Revolution agriculture especially on small pieces of agricultural land, as well as the need for access to ready cash in an increasingly monetized everyday economy, have to be considered as the larger factors shaping women’s dairying work. Currently, the crisis facing rural India makes steady income from dairying, in conjunction with the ability to subsidize dairying costs through access to some amount of land, an attractive option for households and for the women within them.

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In the case of crossbred cows, the availability of women’s labor becomes especially crucial since stall-feeding has to be regularly undertaken. Women’s work, either in terms of weeding or the actual cutting of fodder, bridges the distance between cattle sheds and agricultural fields. The immobility of crossbred dairy cattle is thus countered by the mobility of women’s work. It is also worth noting that women’s dairying enables the drawing of value from small land holdings, which though not useful for agriculture can continue to function as sources of fodder. The withdrawal of women from agricultural work, in other words, does not result in a loss of connection with agricultural fields to the extent that women are involved in stall-feeding cattle. Milking is also strongly viewed as women’s work in many parts of rural India (Fig. 13.10). Yet, the higher yield of crossbred cows means that women’s and men’s labor has to be pooled within households to ensure timely milking. This sharing of work supports the notion that commercial dairy development in fact paves the way for the entry of men into the domain of women’s work, and could possibly result in a takeover by men of women’s options for income generation. Given this, local discourses which represent the work of dairying as women’s work could in fact be strategies to ensure women’s access to dairying income. The gender division of responsibilities for animals is also a major part of the explanation for why crossbred cows become linked to women’s work. Thus, the care and use of bullocks is men’s responsibility, and women do not participate in

Fig. 13.10 Milking crossbred cow in village in Gujarat. (Source: Author)

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the draft cattle economy. Given that crossbred cows do not have any draft uses, their suitability as women’s cattle is further enhanced. Alongside, to the extent that draft cattle are replaced by mechanized vehicles and implements for plowing, irrigation, weeding, and harvesting, a large part of milk production becomes available for sale, being no longer required to nourish calves, so that the separation between men’s work and dairying becomes even more pronounced. Yet, even as crossbred cows have been fitted into women’s work routines to counter the decline in agricultural incomes, it is also clear that women are not thereby provided with specialized knowledge related to the crossbred cow economy or cooperative management. Thus, the breeding of crossbreds is dependent on artificial insemination provided by the cooperative, the health of crossbreds is addressed on the basis of specialized veterinary knowledge, and the processing and marketing of milk occurs outside the village. A deskilling in relation to dairy animals is thus installed through the cooperative, and it is likely that the link between crossbred cows and higher incomes from dairying is emphasized in order to represent the loss of men’s and women’s knowledge as the economic empowerment of women. An even more glaring gap between genders is in terms of responsibilities for buying and selling crossbred cows. Thus, as a crossbred cow market begins to emerge, it will also be dominated by men, in similar fashion to Zebu cattle and buffalo markets. The participation of women occurs therefore only in the context of the milk economy; women’s responsibilities for crossbred cows do not extend beyond the cattle shed. From this perspective, crossbred cows maintain, even enhance, the power of scientists, engineers, and managers as well as of men in rural contexts, and women’s key role in dairying tasks does not translate into participation within or control over wider animal economies. The exclusion of women is also expressed in their absence from village-level cooperative boards. Even though, this has been sought to be corrected through the reservation of a certain number of seats for women, village-level administration of cooperatives continues to be in the hands of men, with women remaining absent from decision-making within the cooperative body. More recently, the political exclusion of women has been addressed through the formation of women-only cooperatives, and while these are probably more reflective of how dairying work is conducted within rural spaces, it is not clear if they will ensure women’s participation in wider village-level politics. There is a danger therefore that the link between crossbred cows and women will ensure that women continued to be burdened with the task of ensuring outcomes desired by the dairy development program, without gaining any appreciable political or economic power. The dairy program overtly links ability to profit from crossbred cows to women’s willingness to maintain greater numbers of cattle, without regard to the economic and environmental constraints under which farming households operate, and without considering the ways in which the link between women and dairying builds on gender inequalities that exist within households and in development planning. More recently, women are being exhorted to ensure the quality of milk thus leading to the representation of hygienic milk production as part of women’s larger responsibility for the maintenance of domestic cleanliness.

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Here again, instead of including women in the construction of strategies to counter competition from private dairies and the wider consequences of neoliberalization for agricultural livelihoods, competitiveness is sought to be ensured through an intensification of women’s responsibilities. Overall, crossbred cows have to fit into gender divisions of agricultural and dairying tasks, which are already being modified due to the declining efficacy of Green Revolution technologies and the global competitions being faced by India’s agricultural sector. Given the new forms and increased amounts of labor that have to be devoted to crossbred cows, women have become crucial to subsidizing the costs of dairy labor. Newly engineered cattle breeds are therefore dependent on householdlevel distributions of agricultural and dairying tasks, and women’s work especially becomes key to the unfolding of dairy development in rural contexts.

13.5 Colonial Traces in Flows of Milk: The Physical Infrastructure of Dairy Development The megaengineering of India’s dairy sector is not restricted only to the body of the crossbred cow and attendant social transformations. Alongside, the wider physical infrastructure required for crossbred cow dairy economies is dependent on advances in transportation and refrigeration technologies. One major reason for the small town of Anand becoming the hub of India’s dairy development program is its links to rail networks that knit together and underpin the development of India’s metropolitan centers. In 1946, when the dairy development program was first being established, Anand was already part of a railway route constructed by the colonial British government as part of wider rail building initiatives, and dairy officials have highlighted the role played by long-distance rail networks in ensuring that Anand’s cooperatives could access a larger milkshed. As comparative studies have shown, the success of Anand’s dairy body, Amul, contrasts with the relative lack of success of milk production and marketing in other parts of India where the Anand model of cooperative dairying was replicated (Basu, 2009b; Mascarenhas, 1988), and transport networks are part of the explanation for this difference. In the postcolonial period, the ability of the state of Gujarat to invest in infrastructural development has further enhanced the efficacy of Anand’s cooperatives in coping with higher quantities of milk production. Thus, the quality of roads in the state ensures that transportation of milk occurs in a timely fashion and access to regular electric supply has enabled milk refrigeration facilities and automated machines for milk measurement to be installed within villages. Without access to such facilities, the cooperative system would not be able to cope with highly productive cattle. States within which infrastructure is relatively underdeveloped thus often show a lesser degree of success in cooperative dairying. Another problem that follows transportation networks in India is that they are geared towards connecting rural resources to urban consumption. This link is especially true of rail networks which were built within a colonial regime that sought to

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draw natural resources away from the interior of India towards port cities, and the contemporary transport of milk has conformed to this metropolitan bias. Thus, dairy development has not inaugurated a new geography of resource flow, but has ensured that milk flows conform to pre-existing colonial geographies of transportation. The engineering of new cattle breeds thereby becomes located within previous engineering designs, so that megaengineering projects build on one another, often exacerbating the social problems that accompanied previous technological designs. As technologies cascade after one another, transport, refrigeration, processing, and breeding technologies are currently being enhanced by new information technologies. While the link between dairy development and information technologies is viewed as enabling further access by dairy farmers to knowledge regarding modern dairying techniques and the possibility of export to global markets, they also ensure that the dairy program promotes an intensely technological form of cooperative dairying that may not be feasible for all small producers and rural places. The ways in which competition between the cooperative program and private dairy companies will exacerbate the technological gap between dairying geared towards small producers and dairying geared towards productive cattle has to also be considered in the evaluation of new engineering designs. The turn towards crossbred cows is thus dependent on physical infrastructures that can cope with higher production, so that crossbred cows draw our attention to the wider histories of megaengineering within which new dairying technologies need to be located. In the process, dairy development becomes linked, not only to patriarchal power, as mentioned in the previous section, but also reflects traces of colonial power.

13.6 Conclusion: The Social Bases of Megaengineering This chapter has located megaengineering not just within the characteristics of the actual technological innovation itself, in this case the body of crossbred dairy cattle, but also in the gendered social relations and colonial physical infrastructures that enable the new technology to make place for itself in local contexts. Overall, it can be argued that the logic of higher production through crossbred cows, the engineering logic, turns out to be very different from the logic of mixed, small-scale farming, in which dairying is a synergistic activity and not separate from agriculture. Crossbred cows thus enable us to make three observations about megaengineering. First, India’s dairy development program provides a means to understand how megaengineering operates under the cover of policies aimed at promoting the smallscale dairy producer. Moreover, while the crossbreeding program is an attempt to ensure that pure European breeds are not unleashed on the village, crossbred cows continue to have far ranging impacts in terms of agriculture, changing connections between agricultural and dairying operations into separations between the two. The consequences for local breeds of cattle and buffaloes are likely to be deleterious. As

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agricultural options continue to decline, small farmers are likely to be further compelled to turn towards a crossbred cow economy that links them to the development program and loses its links to local contexts. Second, dairy development shows how spectacular leaps in dairy engineering are ultimately dependent on their being fitted into the daily routines of gendered work within rural households. Thus, the process of converting crossbred cows to cash is smoothed by household-level gender divisions between agricultural and dairying tasks, with women’s responsibilities for crossbred cows ostensibly chosen by them in a context where avenues to employment are becoming scarce, but also implemented under the shadow of patriarchal power. The engineering of dairy cattle is thus dependent on the spatial and social meanings of gender identities in rural India. Finally, the effects of megaengineering projects are not linked solely to their own composition and characteristics, but are also built on interactions with past engineering initiatives. The higher milk of crossbred cows has to be efficiently transported and processed, and depends on the quality of already existing road and electric supply networks. In this way, the outcomes of dairy development become partly reflective of past colonial and contemporary inequalities in levels of economic development across India. More broadly, the meanings of megaengineering projects have to be situated at the intersections of technological, social, and environmental changes in order to grasp the complexities associated with their unfolding. Acknowledgements Thanks to Stanley Brunn for extending the invitation to participate in this volume, and for his valuable and constructive comments towards revising the chapter. Thanks are also due to Jayajit Chakraborty for assistance with improving the tables and figures. This chapter is partly based on fieldwork that was supported by an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council (with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-0000280).

Notes 1. The Green Revolution in India was inaugurated in the late 1960s and dominated into the early 1980s (Eleventh Five-Year Plan, 2007–2012, Vol. 3: 4 in Planning Commission 2009).Principal technologies of the Green Revolution include high-yielding seeds, increased dependence on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, access to large irrigation projects, and shifts towards mechanization (Byres, 1981; Glaeser, 1987; Harriss, 1982, 1972). 2. Dairy India is the authoritative source of information on India’s public and private dairy institutions, providing both longitudinal data as well as current information on technologies and policies related to dairying. One of the sources utilized by Dairy India is the Census of Livestock, which has been conducted in India since the 1920s at five-year intervals. The counting of livestock by breeds, however, was not undertaken till the 2003 Census of Livestock, which is also the latest Census for which data are currently available. 3. The discussion in this section is partly based on dissertation-related fieldwork conducted in two villages in India over 2000–2001. Data were collected through household surveys, open-ended interviews, and participant observation. Results of the ethnographic study are available in Basu (2009a).

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4. The discussion in this section is also partly based on dissertation-related fieldwork conducted in two villages in India over 2000–2001. More specific considerations of the links between gender and dairy development are available in Basu (2009b, 2006, 2005).

References Agarwal, B. (1985). Women and technological change in agriculture: The Asian and African experience. In I. Ahmed (Ed.), Technology and rural women: Conceptual and empirical issues (pp. 67–153). London: George Allen and Unwin. Anderson, K. (2003). White natures: Sydney’s Royal Agricultural Show in post-humanist perspective. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, 28(4), 422–441. Arnold, D., & Guha, R. (Eds.). (1995). Nature, culture, imperialism: Essays on the environmental history of South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Baker, K., & Jewitt, S. (2007). Evaluating 35 years of Green Revolution technology in villages of Bulandshahr district, Western UP, North India. Journal of Development Studies, 43(2), 312–339. Banerjee, A. (1994). Dairying systems in India. World Animal Review. Rome: Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). 79(2). Retrieved February 9, 2009, from http://www.fao.org/ag/AGa/AGAP/WAR/warall/t3080b/t3080b07.htm Basu, P. (2005). Separating women’s empowerment from dairy development in Madhya Pradesh, India. Papers of the Applied Geography Conferences, 28, 1–10. Basu, P. (2006). The gender of successful development: Women’s words and dairying work in Gujarat, India. International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, 1(1), 61–68. Basu, P. (2009a). Success and failure of crossbred cows in India: A place-based approach to rural development. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(4), 746–766. Basu, P. (2009b). Villages, women and the success of dairy cooperatives in India: Making place for rural development. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. Baviskar, B. S., & George, S. (1988). Development and controversy: National Dairy Development Board. Economic and Political Weekly, 23(13), A35–A43. Baviskar, B. S., & Terhal, P. (1990). Internal constraints and external dependence: The EEC and Operation Flood. In M. Doornbos & K. N. Nair (Eds.), Resources, institutions and strategies: Operation Flood and Indian dairying (pp. 339–355). Delhi: Newbury Park, CA; London: Sage. Boyd, W., & Watts, M. (1997). Agro-industrial just-in-time: The chicken industry and postwar American capitalism. In D. G. Goodman & M. Watts (Eds.), Globalizing food: Agrarian questions and global restructuring (pp. 192–225). London: Routledge. Byres, T. J. (1981). The new technology, class formation and class action in the Indian countryside. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 8(4), 405–454. Candler, W., & Kumar, N. (1998). The dairy revolution: The impact of dairy development in India and the World Bank’s contribution. Washington, DC: World Bank. Castree, N. (2005). Nature. New York: Routledge. Chakravarti, A. K. (1985). Cattle development problems and programs in India: A regional analysis. GeoJournal, 10(1): 21–45. Crosby, A. (1986). Ecological imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dairy India Yearbook. (2007). Dairy India 2007. New Delhi: Dairy India Yearbook. Das, D. (2007). Persistence of small-scale, family farms in India: A note. Journal of Internationl Trade and Economic Development, 16(3), 401–410. Dixon, J. (2003). The changing chicken: Chooks, cooks and culinary culture. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Doornbos, M. van Dorsten, F., Mitra, M., & Terhal, P. (1990). Dairy aid and development: India’s Operation Flood. London: Sage. D’Souza, R. (2006). Drowned and dammed: Colonial capitalism and flood control in Eastern India. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Planning Commission, Government of India. (2009). 5 Year Plans. http://planningcommission. Retrieved February 6, 2009, from nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/welcome.html. . Rajaram, N. (1996). The impact of liberalization on village milk cooperatives: A sociological study of Kheda district. In R. Rajogopalan (Ed.), Rediscovering cooperation: Volume 3, Cooperatives in the emerging context (pp. 158–175). Anand, India: Institute of Rural Management (IRMA). Rao, S., Venkatasubramanian, V., & De Wit, J. (1995). Consequences of crossbreeding programme in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 30(39), A112–A116. Roy, T. (2007). A delayed revolution: Environment and agrarian change in India. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 23(2), 239–250. Sharma, M., & Vanjani, U. (1993). When more means less: Assessing the impact of dairy ‘development’ on the lives and health of women in rural Rajasthan (India). Social Science and Medicine, 37(11), 1377–1389. Sharma, V., & Gulati, A. (2003). Trade liberalization, market reforms and competitiveness of Indian dairy sector. Discussion Paper No. 61, Markets, Trade and Institutions Division. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. Shiva, V. (1988). Staying alive: Women, ecology and development in India. Delhi: Kali for Women. Shiva, V. (1991). The violence of the Green Revolution: Ecological degradation and political conflict in Punjab. London; New York: Zed Books. Singh, S., Coelli, T., & Fleming, E. (2001). Performance of dairy plants in the cooperative and private sectors in India. Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 72(4), 453–479. Tandon, O. B. (1951). Differences in milk production and in age at first calving among Indian and crossbred dairy cattle in India. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Iowa State College, Ames, IA. Vyas, V. S. (2002). Changing contours of Indian agriculture. In R. Mohan (Ed.), Facets of the Indian economy (pp. 185–214). Delhi: Oxford University Press. Worster, D. (1985). Rivers of empire: Water, aridity, and the growth of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 14

Social Responses to Crop Biotechnology: Bt Cotton Cultivation in Gujarat, India Esha Shah

14.1 Introduction Unlike many other large scale engineering projects, the size of technology in genetically modified (GM) crop biotechnology is miniscule. What makes crop biotechnology a megaengineering project is its spread. According to one survey (James, 2008), the genetically modified seeds were grown in 6 countries in 1996 – the first year of commercialization, which has increased to 13 in 2001, to 18 in 2003, and 25 in 2008. Genetically modified soybean, maize, and cotton constitute substantial part of this spread. Other crops such as canola, squash, alfalfa, papaya, and sugarbeet have been mainly introduced in the U.S. whereas tomato, poplar, petunia, and sweet pepper in China. Recently, genetically modified brinjal (aubergine) is under discussion for the commercial release in India. More than 85% GM crops have been bred for tolerance to specific herbicide and insecticides but almost all the rest are insect resistant varieties. These crops contain the genes controlling the production of a natural insecticide, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which acts specifically on Lepidoptera groups of pests. The current debates on genetically modified crop-biotechnology are often twodimensional, pitching benefits against risks, and proponents against opponents (Stone 2002). Most arguments for and against transgenics are about their outcomes and impacts, whether on farmers, on health and the environment, or on economic performance (Narayanamoorthy & Kalamkar, 2006; Peshin, Dhawan, Vatta, & Singh, 2007; Qaim, 2003; Qaim & Janvry, 2005; Qaim & Zilberman, 2003; Ramanjaneyulu & Kurunganti, 2006; Sahai, 2002; Sahai & Rahman, 2003; Sahai & Rehman, 2004). I contend that framing the debate in terms of “back-end risk and impact assessment” is insufficient to evaluate the appropriateness or the social desirability of genetically-engineered crop technology. Instead my aim is to assess the “front-end issues” such as the social and political context of technological E. Shah (B) Department of Technology and Society Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Maastricht, Grote Gracht 90-92, 6211 SZ, Maastricht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

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choice (Scoones, 2003). I first review social response and performance of genetically modified Bt cotton in several parts of the world and then explores, through an anthropological and historical approach, the social context of the choice of Bt cotton seeds in the western Indian state of Gujarat. More specifically, following four sets of questions are explored. 1. Which farmers in various parts of the world are cultivating geneticallyengineered cotton seeds and why? What is the social response and context of Bt cultivation in different parts of the world? 2. Discussing specifically the case of Gujarat, how have agrarian relations and access to land, water, and labor impinged upon the cultivation of Bt cotton and the multiplication of Bt seeds? 3. Arguing that cotton cultivation has become increasingly risky and uncertain in current times, how have farmers from Gujarat dealt with various forms of uncertainity? 4. Why have farmers from Gujarat popularly adopted Bt seeds, and specifically how has this global technology and knowledge become locally appropriated, modified and exchanged? Ultimately, I seek to explain the cultural, productive, environmental, and cognitive context within which cotton growing farmers in Gujarat adopt, develop and diffuse genetically-engineered crop biotechnology.

14.2 Social Responses to Crop Biotechnology There are only a few studies that have systematically explored the spread of crop biotechnology among different sections of peasantry (cf. Stone, 2007). Who among farmers make a choice of biotechnology and why is a question that has not yet been extensively researched. Based on the available literature, I attempt in this section to provide an overview of GM adoption in some of the major GM cultivating countries. I should note that this survey is by no means exhaustive. According to one argument the GM crops commercially grown today have been designed for production in regions that already support highly capitalized agroindustry (Tripp, 2001). For instance, the powerful sugarcane producer cooperative in Brazil opted for GMOs to decrease overall pesticide use and maintain production levels, but the association of Western Bahian Farmers and Irrigators, the powerful farmers’ group in Brazil’s dynamic soybean production regions, explicitly stated its opposition to GM crops (Jepson, 2002). Although at some point GM soya was smuggled across the border from Argentina and used extensively by the large-scale commercial farmers in Brazil (Scoones, 2008). The anti-GM position of the Western Bahain Farmers and Irrigators association, it is argued, may have co-opted the European “green” argument in which different kinds of commercial interests seems to be playing a dominant role. Brazil ships over 80% of its annual soybean exports

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and 68% of its annual soybean meals export to European markets. It was estimated that Brazil’s monopoly over non-GM soybean products for the captive European market that prefers non-GM (green) soya benefitted Brazilian traders US$20 per metric ton more compared to Argentina’s GM soybean products (Jepson, 2002). The contrasting positions on GM of sugarcane and soybean growers in Brazil might have been predominantly driven by the common goal of commercial interests. In South Africa, similarly large commercial interests have been the strong advocates of GM maize. They sought to reduce cost of production in response to progressive reduction in farm subsidies given to the white commercial farm sector (Scoones, 2008). What is the small holders’ response to GM crops? The results of a two year survey of smallholders in Makhathini Flats, KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa showed that farmers who adopted Bt cotton in 1999–2000 had higher yields, lower chemical costs, and higher gross margins (Thirtle, Beyers, Ismael, & Piesse, 2003). However, cotton accounts for only about 1% of the total South African agricultural production and small holders form a very low percentage of total cotton producers. Makhathini Flats was a special case as it was a large smallholder development scheme that was created as a showpiece for the international community. As a result, the Makhathini Flats had experimental farm and extension service that was far better than in other areas. Their services would have contributed substantially towards success of Bt cotton among smallholders. Only in India and China, GM crops are primarily smallholder crops where they were adopted on a massive scale even before the regulatory release. The rest of this chapter discusses the case of smallholder adoption of GM cotton in western Indian state of Gujarat to argue that GM seeds were rarely easily afforded by poorer and subsistence oriented farmers. In fact cotton was grown only by landed farmers with easy access to water. The case of China is particularly interesting as the three year survey of Bt cotton adoption in 2000–2001 showed that millions of small holders have been able to increase yield per hectare. It is crucial to point out that these benefits have been accompanied by commercialization of cotton markets in China since the late 1990s. Before 2000, most cotton was purchased by the state owned cotton and jute corporation in 1999 at a price fixed by the government. Since 2000, cotton prices were allowed to be fluctuated with market conditions and cotton mills were allowed to buy cotton directly from growers (Pray, Ma, Huang, & Qiao, 2001). These market friendly developments were crucial for the success of Bt cotton among smallholders.

14.3 Popularity of Bt Cotton: Case of Gujarat Thousands of farmers in India adopting and actively modifying patented Bt cotton seeds provides an additional edge to the debate on the social, economic and environmental appropriateness of genetically engineered crop biotechnology. Bt seeds were supplied by a local seed company called Navbharat in the western Indian state of Gujarat at least 3 years before Monsanto-patented Bt seeds were officially released by the Indian government in 2002. Since then, farmers have produced a number of

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local brands of Bt seeds by crossing Bt-containing seeds with existing hybrid cotton varieties. These locally produced seeds, including Navbharat seeds, were initially declared illegal. Yielding to pressure from farmers, they are now allowed to be sold inside Gujarat. Locally produced seeds are also popularly believed to be performing better than the government approved Monsanto seeds in Gujarat (Bunsha, 2001; David & Sai, 2002; Sahai & Rahman, 2003; Sahai & Rehman, 2004; Shah, 2005).1 Given this popularity, the Indian government has now officially released 39 different varieties of Bt seeds, including a second generation of Bt seeds with Cry 1 AB gene (popularly known as Cry II gene). A third generation of Bt seeds with Cry III gene is widely speculated. The popularity of Bt seeds among Gujarat farmers gives an additional edge to debates about genetically-modified crops in general, and Bt cotton in particular. Those who celebrate biotechnology, however, often go beyond such impact assessment debates to take a moral position. Thousands of farmers actively appropriating, adopting, and modifying genetically-engineered cotton seeds is not only declared a “success” of the technology.2 Rather it is also linked to an argument that the choice of genetically-engineered seeds should ultimately be left to the farmers themselves. A case such as Gujarat is thus viewed as an undisputable sign of social acceptability and a technological triumph of genetic modification (Taverne, 2005, 2007). Both the tropes, that is, “Bt works” and “it is ultimately farmers’ choice,” are eventually escalated into an argument for the inevitability of genetic modification in crop biotechnology. I wish to challenge the framing of debates on crop-biotechnology in terms of “impact assessment” or “success or failure.” To evaluate the social desirability of technological choice, I consider socio-anthropologically the cultural, productive, environmental, and cognitive contexts within which the cotton growing farmers in Gujarat adopt, develop and diffuse genetically-engineered crop biotechnology. I show that crop biotechnology represents a technological culture with a specific value framework which is endorsed commonly by both multinational companies and certain cotton growing farmers in Gujarat. The cultivation and multiplication of Bt seeds owe their popularity to the fact that genetically modified seed technology did not make any paradigmatic change in the agricultural practices and agrarian relations shaped by the Green Revolution, which has privileged and consolidated the social power of resource rich farmers. Bt cotton’s success is thus part of the successful reproduction of these cotton-growing farmers’ historically acquired and culturally consolidated ability to perform with the technology. Thus the appropriateness or social desirability of crop biotechnology should be understood within a wider frame encompassing technological culture and its democratization (which would also entail democratization of social and agrarian relations), rather than considering the issue in the narrow framework of impact or economic performance of the biotechnology itself. This central concept of technological culture is briefly considered in the next section, before explaining the methodology and findings of the anthropological study in Gujarat.

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14.4 Engineering the Earth: Explaining Technological Culture The social, political, environmental, and economic impact of large scale engineering projects are causes of major concern in the recent debates on climate change or discourses on development. This volume aims to engage with one of the most pertinent paradoxes of our times. That is, while debates on climate change and changing discourses on development have on the one hand challenged science and technology-based notions of social and economic progress, on the other hand a plethora of megaengineering projects continue to radically transform the social and natural fabric of our surroundings. This chapter does not intend to solve the paradox, but engages with it by drawing insights from philosophical and sociological discussions on technological culture. Various philosophers and scholars have adopted the notion of technological culture to explain the ways in which characteristic traits of our society have become pervasively technological, including the ways in which science and technology become enabling framework that shape collective activities and societal choices over time. Below is a brief discussion on the various interpretations of concept of technological culture and the way it has been incorporated into social responses to crop biotechnology. In the classical philosophy of technology the theme of modern culture becoming technological was central. In the accounts of Heidegger, Ellul, Mumford and some scholars of the critical school such as Marcuse and Adorno, technology reduces human beings to what Hiedegger called “technicised animals.” These works variously critiqued total domination by technological society, reducing human beings to one dimensional man. Such classical philosophy provided a powerful critique of technology-society relationships but in an over-deterministic fashion and by interpreting technology and culture as opposed to each other. In contrast, an emerging focus on technological culture in science and technology studies (STS) emphasises the interplay between technology and culture and even erases the difference by merging the two entities into one. Technological culture in STS is variously interpreted to mean that the characteristic traits of our society are pervasively technological, that is, considering technology as our culture; understanding science and technology from a cultural perspective; presenting technology as a material culture embedded in social processes, and/or acknowledging the fact that the technological and social are inseparable (see Bijker, 2005; Castells, 2000). There also exist other interpretations. Invoking Wittgenstein and discussing information society, Scott Lash philosophically interrogates technological forms of life to mean ways of life, or modes of doing thing, that is, culture in an everyday sense. In line with classical philosophers, Lash is also interested in exploring what happens when forms of life go technological, suggesting that we then make sense of the world only through technological systems (Lash, 2001). These theories of technological culture, however, remain overarching and societal in both classical and contemporary philosophy and even in science and technology studies. A societal analysis of technological culture tends to develop dystopian and apocalyptic overtones as in classical philosophy. In contrast, empirically rich

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micro-studies of the interplay of technology and culture often lack any meaningful critique of broader directions of technological change (see Keulartz, Schermer, Korthals, & Swierstra, 2004). None of the entities referred here – society, culture and technology – is monolithic, and ideally the term technological culture may signify not just one but many cultures. Thus, the questions is whether different technologies have different cultural connotations? The discussion on the emergence of technological trajectories or paradigms not only includes social and political contexts both at micro (agency) and macro (structural) levels, but also represent the values, interests, ethics, and choices of those who hold social power and who make technological choices (Russell, 1999). A technological paradigm for Russell is thus not only a new solution to a techno-scientific problem but also an enabling framework that shapes collective activities and the choices of individual actors over time. In STS, what are discussed are not only how technological paradigms/trajectories establish their own momentum, but also how they persist in the global economy over long periods of time (Russell, 1999). Russell’s evaluative concept of technological paradigm is further sharpened here by borrowing from Richards (2004). Richards begins, like Russell, with a Kuhnian concept of “paradigm,” viz., the constellation of ideas, values, and techniques that define the course and nature of technological practice. He calls this “culture” based on an interpretation of Durkhemian sociological theory (Richards, 2004). According to Richards, each technological culture has a specific history, collective representation, material framework, shared values and organizational modalities (Richards, 2004). While Russell emphasises the forces of global political economy and social power, he also imparts greater agency to history, representation, values, ethics, and frameworks. The difference between Russell and Richards is the location from which the change is viewed: political economy or culture. Accordingly, the technological culture of genetically-modified crop biotechnology is critically examined below is with respect to the role of history, political economy, sets of ideas, beliefs, values and attitudes, and the responses and perceptions of those who make technological choices. This reworked notion not only places genetically modified seed technology in the context of global and local political economy, but also provides an opportunity to evaluate how its perceptive and material frameworks configure and constitute the actions of the agents who design and use the technology.

14.5 Methodology A word on methodology is pertinent. The chapter represents an outcome of close ethnographic engagement with a number of actors associated with Bt cotton in Gujarat. These include cotton cultivating and seed plotting farmers, marketing agents, shop owners, seed company owners and employers, owners and employers of seed testing laboratories, office bearers of the cotton-growing farmers’ front organization Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU), and activists of child and migrant labor welfare associations in south Rajasthan and north Gujarat.

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The specific case study is focused on the area around Manasa town of Gandhinagar district. Manasa occupies a unique position in Bt cotton cultivation in Gujarat as it is a hub of both seed multiplication and cotton cultivation activities. Most of the seed companies in Gujarat are located close to Manasa, while it has a vibrant market of agricultural products, including a huge cotton market. The industrial enclave where seed companies are located is a hub of everyday discussion about Bt seed multiplication and cotton cultivation. Manasa’s cotton seed and product market is supplied through surrounding villages where cotton is a mainstay of agricultural activities. The town thus provides a unique entry point to understand both seed multiplication and cotton cultivation culture which other regions in Gujarat do not provide. My field work was carried out in two parts. I first visited Gujarat in JanuaryFebruary 2005, when illegal seeds were being fiercely debated. In January 2005 the cotton had recently arrived in the market. So had the seeds; they were being sorted and packed. I again visited Gujarat in April 2007 when a new season of cotton cultivation was being readied, and when seeds were being sold, bought, and debated. In both periods, the focus of my study was not cotton fields as such, but on the various spaces where actors assemble to perform their cotton related activities. In addition to engaging with cotton market and seed companies in Manasa, I conducted group meetings with farmers from 10 villages in Gandhinagar district, most of these I visited and revisited in 2005 and 2007. I met my respondents – farmers, seed agents, shop owners and market agents – in their regular haunts, at markets, shops and the offices and shops of cooperative societies. My approach was to engage with them in a group, to begin by asking simple questions about Bt cotton, and then to engage in serious discussion, with an idea to debate and provoke. In Gujarat, each village usually has two or three different types of cooperative society. In some villages I started a discussion impromptu with already present farmers at one of the offices or shops of the cooperative society. At other times I asked a known farmer to invite other cotton growing farmers, and at yet others for discussions. I had discussions with both individual key farmers or BKU leaders. The gatherings usually included 7–12 farmers present, but sometimes 20–25 farmers participated at some point. The discussions usually lasted for an hour or two, while several of the most vibrant discussions lasted into an entire evening. Through these ethnographic methods, the study has thus focused on the cotton enclave of Manasa but has also mapped farmers’ perceptions and practices across a wider spectrum of villages.

14.6 The Technological Culture of Biotechnology and the Agency of Global Crop-biotechnology found its roots in Gujarat by way of the successful crosspollination of two separate parental lines of Bt seeds, viz., the Bt male line genetically modified by global multinational companies such as Monsanto and a female line originated from distinctly local hybrid cotton varieties.3 The genetically-modified seed technology has a crucial implication for Monsanto which has pivotally shaped the technological culture in Gujarat. Bt technology is

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different from its predecessor, hybrid seed technology, in one important way. Two distinct parental lines are needed to produce hybrid seeds; only the breeder who has those two parental lines can produce hybrids. Replanting or self-multiplying saved seeds will not grow into a crop resembling the previous hybrid plant but rather perform in an irregular and unpredictable way. Hybrids thus force farmers to buy new seeds every season from the seed companies. The technology of hybrids thus is nontextually scripted to have a built-in patent. In contradistinction, Bt cotton varieties are produced by crossing a genetically modified male line with a hybrid female line. Once the gene is inserted, the Bt male lines can be replicated well by controlled self-pollination. Farmers thus have access to both parental lines needed to produce hybrid Bt seeds. That means that genetically-modified crop biotechnology does not have the built-in patent. It therefore requires an external regulatory system to protect the market-interest of the seed companies. This crucial (lack of) script of genetically-modified seed technology has triggered a labyrinth of discussions and controversies all over the world around the issues related to the nature of patents and regulatory systems. A technological script could have made these “textual instructions” for ordering and guarding moral or ethical behavior redundant, as it was in the case of hybrid seed technology (Shah, 2003). This non-scripting of genetically-modified technology has given birth to Gujarat’s own “Robin Hood,” a fond media ascription for Dr. D. B. Desai, the executive director of Navbharat Seeds Company. Navbharat first produced N-151 seeds by crossing a Monsanto designed Bt male line with the GujCot 8 female line. Owing to the non-scripting of the genetically-modified Bt male line, only a handful of seeds was technologically needed for the massive expansion of cultivation of locally produced Bt seeds in Gujarat. Tracing the genealogy of N-151 is less important for this paper; the more important question is to understand what makes the global and local cross pollinate for the biotechnology to find its roots (Shah, 2008).

14.7 The Technological Culture of Bt Cotton in Gujarat 14.7.1 Who can Grow Cotton in Gujarat? Succeeding the green revolution, the technological culture of crop biotechnology has flourished in Gujarat at the interface of the “nature of work” and the “work of nature” including both nature’s subsidy and nature’s unpredictability (Gidwani, 2001).4 I argue here that nature’s agency makes cotton cultivation a risky and uncertain enterprise, to the extent that the nature of work needed to compensate could potentially be afforded only by those who have the necessary cultural capacity, both social and material. The technological culture of crop biotechnology in Gujarat is thus chosen, shaped, and perpetuated by those who hold social power. Cotton is one of the oldest crops cultivated in Gujarat, grown for centuries and especially since colonial times. The native variety of cotton (called Desi) was largely grown in Gujarat before the American variety was introduced in the late 18th and

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the early 19th centuries. It is a well known chapter in the history of cotton that the American varieties had longer filaments and hence were more suited to the machinery in Europe and they were encouraged by the British even though American cotton was highly susceptible to pest attack compared to Desi varieties (Prasad, 1999). However, it was only in the 1960s and 1970s with the introduction of the green revolution that the hybrid varieties developed from the American family (hirsutums) of cotton made pure Desi (arboreum and herbaceum) varieties uneconomical and obsolete due to their unresponsiveness to fertilizers. The transition from Desi to American cotton has proven disastrous for the balance of organisms in the local environment. With the American cotton came American Bollworm, whose menace became rampant after hybridization and the large scale introduction of pesticides. The history of cotton cultivation in Gujarat is replete with cotton varieties appearing and disappearing at high speed mainly in order to compensate, among other things for pest attack and so keep yields high. Since the 1970s, several hybrid varieties have been introduced mainly to improve crop yield, which many farmers claim would slack after cultivation for 5–7 years. A hybrid variety called GujCot 4 or H-4 (popularly known among farmers as Sankar 4 – Sankar literally means hybrid) was introduced in the early 1970s. It gave, as farmers described, bumper yields, but was not preferred because of its long duration. Meanwhile, a short term variety GujCot 8 (Sankar 8) was introduced, which could be reaped in 4 months time (instead of the 6 month duration of Sankar 4) making it possible to cultivate 3 crops a year or to cultivate one more food crop after the harvest of cotton. GujCot 8 however became heavily infested with pests, and was also susceptible to early dropping. It was followed by GujCot 9 and 10. “And so it goes on,” my informant farmers optimistically concluded. Even after the introduction of GujCot 8 and 9, the short term variety of GujCot 8 remained popular until the late 1990s when it was repeatedly and massively attacked by American Bollworms. The series of hybrid seeds was also accompanied by the introduction of a series of new pesticides. At the heart of the technological culture of the green revolution is such a continuous interplay between the artefacts, new cotton varieties and pesticides, and nature’s agency, that is, worms. Throughout the history of cotton hybridization, pests showed the capacity to develop resistance within a few years. In fact, a leading entomologist argues that pest resistance increased with the increased consumption of pesticides (Kranthi, 2005). The cotton plant has been infested by various types of pest throughout the last 150 years. The entomology of cotton pests has shown their highly dynamic nature; several pests have become major from being minor and vice versa. Although at present, the most devastating pest is American Bollworm (Heliothis and Helicoverpa armigera), others have dominated at different times, including tobacco caterpillar (Spodoptera litura), whitefly (Bemisia tabaci), pink bollworm (Pectinophora gossypiella) and spotted bollworm (Earias vitella) (Shetty, 2004). It is widely reported that the threat of American Bollworms reached catastrophic level in the late 1990s causing several farmers in Andhra Pradesh and Punjab to take their lives (Prasad, 1999; Bose, 2000). Some farmers in Gujarat have used a cocktail of pesticides to control different types of pest and have even targeted pests at different

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stages of development, but often with no result. Usually 10–12 sprayings and a maximum of 15 sprayings of pesticides are recommended, but farmers claim that since 1996 pests seem not affected even after 30 sprayings a season. This has been corroborated by reports from other parts of the country (Shetty, 2004). By the mid to late 1990s, pesticides started to account for 40–50% or even more of the total cost of cotton production. The new brands of pesticides have become exorbitantly costly even for wealthy farmers. Moreover, nearly half of the country’s total pesticide consumption is said to be used for the protection of cotton (Editorial, 2001). In fact, pests have not just become resistant to pesticides, but have been mounting militant resurgence (technically known as abnormal increases in pest populations), requiring even stronger pesticides. Worms are one type of actors in nature’s drama. Access to land and water also crucially shape the nature of work. To a large extent, access to land in Gujarat is historically determined. Due to the historical advantage received during the colonial period, the Patels are now economically and socially a dominant agrarian caste in Gujarat.5 Even after a socially significant trend of migration to the U.S. and U.K., cotton cultivation still remains an important identity marker for the Patel community. While access to land is historically determined, access to water in north and central Gujarat where cotton is a dominant cash crop is determined through control over tubewell technology. Hardiman shows how the history of ground water extraction has favoured capital-rich farmers. Although the British considered cotton as a non-irrigated crop, Hardiman argues that in the past cotton was always watered with wells to raise the yield (Hardiman, 1998). Current varieties of cotton also need at least 8–15 irrigations for good yield. A large part of mainland and north Gujarat, the cotton growing tract, has an arid and semi-arid climate; surface irrigation concentrated in southern Gujarat is dependent on ground water (Prakash, 2005). The British policy on ground water extraction was so designed that only wealthier cultivators could afford to dig a well in the first place, and then pay the exorbitant taxes levied on it. Later, the policy gave tax exemptions to deeper wells; this policy also favored capital-rich farmers who could afford to dig deeper (Hardiman, 1998). Prakash (2005) takes Hardiman’s argument further to show that the current scenario also favors the wealthier sections of agrarian society in access to ground water. The dominant mode of access is currently through shared ownership of tubewells. In Prakash’s study village, Patels own 53% of the total village land and 67% of the tube wells (Prakash 2005). Although a majority of Patel farmers in Prakash’s study village fall into the categories of marginal, small and medium farmers, their capital share in tube wells (65–67% of the total number of tube wells in the village) give them a much larger share of the ground water now available at more than 1000 ft (305 m). Prakash further shows that the water market that enabled non-tube well owners to access ground water in the past has declined since the late 1990s as a result of electricity supply failures. When water is insufficient even for the shareholders of tube wells, there is little left to sell it to the non-shareholders. No ownership of water sources thus means no cotton cultivation.

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The risks involved in cotton cultivation due to nature’s agency, pests and water, are thus substantial, and in need of considerable social and material resources to be mitigated. The past historical policies and culture of the green revolution have thus pivotally configured social relations of power, and thereby the cotton cultivation capabilities.

14.7.2 Cognitive Aspects of Technological Culture of Crop Biotechnology Farmers’ perceptions and practices have mutually shaped each other and the technological culture of Bt cultivation. As cotton growing farmers counteract the double attack of nature, viz., rapidly resistance-developing pests and a rapidly declining water table. Thus farmers’ perceptions shape agrarian practices. Such agrarian practices and perceptions in turn further shape access to natural resources and determine who cultivates cotton and who does not. The Patel farmers have been able to retain their hold on cotton cultivation through three key means: (1) access to labor surpluses, (2) a well developed social network that also functions as both a credit and knowledge network, and (3) diversification of livelihoods through migration first to east Africa and now to Britain and the U.S. The outmigration of the Patel community is not discussed in detail here, but see Rutten and Patel (2002) for a detailed discussion. Access to labor and social networks are discussed below. Gandhinagar has long been a key district for the plotting, exchange, and selling of hybrid cotton seeds, and now also for Bt seeds. This exchange takes place through two main channels. Firstly, many seed companies (of which there are about 500 in Gujarat) give contracts to farmers to multiply seeds.6 Many of the seeds thus bought back by the seed companies are sold to other parts of India (currently and illegally). A sizable number of Punjabi farmers visit seed companies located in the Gandhinagar district in the months of April and May to purchase Bt seeds. One seed company owner speculated that 70% of the seeds purchased by the seed companies are sold to other parts of India and only 30% are diverted to the local Gujarat market. Informally, I was told that a considerable part of the seeds thus sold outside of Gujarat are generation F2, that is, they are also mixed with other spurious material. Cotton-growing farmers from Gujarat are not among the important clientele of the seed companies. In Gandhinagar district, much of the seed multiplication and selling for local consumption is done by farmers themselves. Cotton growing farmers in Gujarat have developed a number of new varieties by crossing the Bt gene-inserted male line (with Cry 1 AC gene and later Cry II gene released by Monsanto-Mahyco) with a number of local hybrid female lines. The first such experiment was reportedly conducted by the CEO of Navbharat company, Dr. D. B. Desai, when he crossed the Bt male produced by Monsanto with the GujCot 8 female line to produce a progeny that is resistant to a number of pests including American and spotted and pink Bollworms. At the same time it is suitable for local agro-climatic conditions. Dr. D. B. Desai is often described as a genius breeder, including by a leading entomologist Dr. K. Kranthi at Central Institute of

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Cotton Research at Nagpur, India. Without access to any institutional knowledge on breeding, farmers in Gujarat have now crossed 60–70 different varieties with the Bt male line (first containing Cry I and later Cry II genes) to produce Bt seeds with varied sets of locally suitable traits. Farmers have even attempted to cross Bt male with Bt female to produce ultimate Bt progeny, and have experimented with crossing Cry I gene lines with Cry II gene lines. These locally produced Bt varieties are then declared as “indigenous” (swadeshi) Bt. Local knowledge about seed crossing has gained significant ground through constant experimentation over the last 5 years. For these experimentations, social networks function as conduits for the exchange of knowledge. It is part of the common repository of popular knowledge that for producing new seeds, the Bt male parental line is essential but not the key. Rather it is the female parental line that determines the performance and stability of the new seeds in the specific agroecological conditions in Gujarat. Following D. B. Desai’s experiment, Bt male was popularly crossed with the female of GujCot 8 for a couple of years. Popularly known as generic N-151, this cross is still commonly cultivated, but also discredited in some circles for its short staple length, for small boll size, and for causing difficulty in harvesting. Subsequent crosses with Vikram 5 and GujCot 4 are preferred for their long staple length and large boll size despite their long duration. Currently, different territories are divided among different crosses: Farmers in Punjab and north Gujarat tend to prefer Vikram 5 and GujCot 8, whereas GujCot 4 is popular in Maharashtra and Saurashtra. What usually takes several years for breeders to achieve in a controlled environment, cotton-growing farmers in Gujarat have achieved through experimentation in a few seasons. This rapid multiplication and experimentation has largely been possible because of access to cheap and skilled labour. Seed plotting of hybrid varieties is traditionally and widely carried out in central and north Guajarat. For the seed plotting, seasonally migrating Adivasi laborers and now young female and child labourers are preferred, a legacy of the green revolution. Adivasis entered the settled village agrarian economy more prominently from the 1970s, especially after the intensification of agriculture linked to the green revolution (Patel, 1992). Adivasis now perform a variety of seasonal agricultural tasks. The easy availability of migrant labor from south Rajasthan helps consolidate highly commercialised and intensive agriculture in the north and central Gujarat. This practice has made it possible for cotton-growing farmers to invest in the development of stable and well performing Bt seeds in relatively short periods of time. The social spread of Bt cotton is thus yet another legacy of green revolution-shaped agrarian relations. The social relations of power also configure social networks and social relations of knowledge exchange. Locally multiplied seeds are diffused through existing channels in social networks which also traditionally function as credit channels. During my discussions, farmers repeatedly invoked the channels of trustworthiness and known people through which all transactions for the sale and purchase of seeds happen. That the seller does not go out looking for buyers, but the buyers come looking for a known and trusted seller, is the operating philosophy that seems to underlie the market of locally multiplied seeds. Questions such as “where do you buy your seeds from?” and “whom do you sell your seeds to?” were uniformly answered

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“to and from known and trusted people”. To be known is a pre-requisite to be trusted and to be known largely means to come from the same caste group and social network. One farmer explained the logic of cotton cultivation and market as “je vyapari chhe te ja agent cche ane te ja khedut cche” (the merchant, agent and farmer mean all the same). This aphorism accurately represents an overlapping of agrarian and market relations which are primarily caste relations with respect to cotton. The merchants and agents dealing with the marketing of cotton and farmers growing cotton not only overlap each other’s space professionally, but also share caste and kinship relations. Being trusted and known in the community thus goes far in generating not only a creditworthy market reputation, but also an acceptable social identity with further bearing upon marriage and other customs. Markets thus function not through impersonal contractual relations, but through relations of kin and caste. In the absence of an open market space when locally multiplied seeds were declared illegal, and when the market is saturated with spurious and F2 and F3 seeds, this social/credit/market network is the only trustworthy conduit for the exchange of locally multiplied Bt seeds. This social/credit network in the service of diffusion of Bt seeds seems to be thriving on an effervescent sense of solidarity and communitarianism, sustained through a common language of representation and understanding. It was no surprise that many cotton-growing farmers in the periphery of 50 km (31 mi) spoke the same language with the same idiom and expressed similar opinions. Such social solidarity is also manifested in the way cotton-growing farmers perceive the possible implications of widespread Bt cultivation on the environment and accordingly develop agricultural practices. In terms of the efficient utilization of land and water, the resource rich farmers follow various practices. It has been commonly acknowledged that the cultivation of Bt cotton extracts substantial nutrition from the soil and that continuous cultivation for 4–5 years is likely to leave the soil unfit for any other cultivation. Farmers compensate the loss of soil nutrition by rotating cotton with wheat and pulses. Approximately four tractor loads of green manure are ploughed into the field after each crop of cotton, and in addition, a crop of wheat or pulse is cultivated on the same piece to allow the green manure to weather sufficiently. Only in the third season is cotton cultivated again on the same piece of land. This means that for the continuous cultivation of at least a few acres of cotton to maintain a profitable standing in the market, a cotton-growing farmer needs to be holding 7–8 bigha of land (1 bigha = 0.6 acres) – one more reason why only land rich farmers in Gujarat grow cotton profitably. That Bt cotton needs more water than hybrid varieties is also commonly acknowledged. Many farmers acknowledged that when hybrid cotton seeds need water once in 15–17 days, Cry I and II seeds should be watered once in 10–12 or even 5–7 days. Ground water in central and north Gujarat is now mined to a depth of 1000 ft (305 m) and pumps have to be fitted at 600 ft (183 m) to gain sufficient pressure. In cotton-growing farmers’ view, ground water would be unpalatable with a very high fluoride content should levels plummet below 1200 ft (459 m), yet many speculate that this will happen within 5 years. One farmer described the water conserved at 1200 ft as five generations’ old water. “In a decade we have consumed thousand years’ old water” was how one of the farmers dramatically described the state of ground water consumption and its relationship with cotton.

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14.8 Conclusion In this paper, I address the central paradox of this volume, that is, the contrasting way in which the megaengineering projects continue to dominate our social and environmental surroundings and the way in which these are accompanied by discourses on climate change, environmental degradation, and negative social impact. I do so by explaining the way in which the technological culture underlying one of the most discussed and opposed megaengineering projects – genetically modified crop biotechnology – frame and configure actors’ rationality. A few observations based on the discussion on cultural, cognitive, and productive aspects of the spread of GM cotton in the western Indian state of Gujarat are summarized below that I wish would throw some light on why and how megaengineering projects find global and local acceptance. First, the preceding discussion makes it clear that the knowledge development pertaining to Bt cotton technology in the globalized world has been multipolar. The cross-pollination of the global and local components have enabled Bt cotton to find its roots in Gujarat soil. Thus, multiple global and local actors have joined hands in developing and diffusing the knowledge on Bt cotton seeds. However, multipolarity of knowledge generation does not necessarily entail technological multiculturalism as the case of Bt technology explains. Neither does it ensure automatic democratization as a result of involvement of the political agency of the local. Multipolar development and diffusion of knowledge and local political agency can co-exist with monoculturalism of technology. The popularity of Bt cultivation in Gujarat shows the triumph of a technology supported by both global and local elites (Shah, 2005). Secondly, I suggest that while the communicative rationality of the public sphere is “textually” debating the good and bad of genetic engineering, the technological culture, with its non-textually inscribed rationality, is ideologically conditioning and shaping the direction of action. Genetically-modified crop technology, that is, its rationality inscribed with ideas, values, perceptions, practices, and frameworks – belongs to the technological culture of the green revolution. This technological culture promoted and consolidated the interests of a historically advantaged group of farmers with access to land, water and labor by shaping their perceptions and agrarian practices. The resource rich farmers on the forefront of cotton cultivation in Gujarat have experimented with genetically-modified technology owning to their green revolution-determined access to skilled and cheap tribal, migrant, child and female labor from south Rajasthan. The knowledge generated through these experimentations has been diffused and consolidated through caste-based social and market networks. The social power of cotton farmers in Gujarat has constituted and configured the technological culture of crop biotechnology by responding collectively to the risk and uncertainty of nature’s agency with the social organization of work and technology and by buttressing it through cognitive solidarity. Thirdly, and lastly, the answer to the question of why Bt seeds are popular among farmers and why other technological options to deal with insects are not popularly

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adopted has only partially to do with the traits of the technological artefact as such. The choice of technology is hardly about “what works and what does not work.” Purely going by traits, a number of technological options would have been possible to solve the pest problems of cotton. Technological rationality in that sense is indeterminate until it is inserted into social space. In this sense, the success of Bt is a performance. It is a core argument of this paper that the artifact is just one component in the success of technological performance. Bt cotton’s success belongs to the successful reproduction of the cotton-growing farmers’ historically acquired and culturally consolidated ability to perform with the technology. This successful performance is not only social but also collective and historical. This centrality challenges the notion of a smart, rational farmer taking a correct decision in favor of his/her private and largely economic interests. Bt may not have given the same performance in Andhra Pradesh and Vidarbha region of Maharashtra where the technological culture may not combine comparable historical and social resources. But I argue that the enabling conditions for social and environmental learning involve a combination of a range of social, historical, and technological factors, which are culturally linked to reproduce a successful agricultural performance. The absence of such technological culture can result in the lack of such performance, even when the artefact in question is same.

Notes 1. According to the Gujarat agricultural department’s data, although the area under cotton in Gujarat marginally grew from 1.615 million ha in 2000–2001 to 1.628 million ha in 2003–2004, both total production and yield more than tripled in 2003–2004. The production increased from 1161 thousand bags in 2000–2001 to 5400 thousand bags in 2004–2005 and yield increased from 122 to 483 kg/ha (Mehta & Patel, 2004). However, these claims, especially of the yield difference between the local and officially released seeds, are contested. For example, a survey of 363 farmers in Gujarat reported that the officially released Monsantopatented Bt seeds gave the highest yield (Gupta & Chandak, 2004). Others attribute the increase in yield to good rainfall since 2001 (Sahai & Rehman, 2004). What is being claimed widely is that locally multiplied seeds, first generic Navbharat and later other locally multiplied varieties, have been cultivated in 60–80% of the total area under cotton in Gujarat since 2000–2001. I do not intend to take a conclusive side in this dichotomised debate. I provide these figures merely to give a flavor of the ongoing debate. 2. Ranjana Smetacek, the Director of Corporate Affairs of India, Monsanto, expressed similar views speaking at the Development Studies Association’s conference on science, technology, development organized at University of Sussex, 18–20 September 2007. It is also referred to by Stone (2007). 3. The separate and monolithic spaces of global and local are increasingly challenged in social sciences. Responding to a closely intertwined interplay between global and local spaces, some scholars instead prefer to use the term glocal. In contradistinction, I have retained the separate identities of global and local precisely to understand the culture of interplay between them. 4. Gidwani employs these mechanisms to account for agrarian change that combines pure determinism and pure contingency variances of history of agrarian change. Unfortunately, Gidwani’s mechanisms have a prominent space for nature, but technology appears peripherally in his conception. He has subsumed all aspects belonging to the physical landscape under the category of “nature” and thus has obliterated the role of technology to transform nature through work.

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5. During the colonial period, the Kanabis (a peasant caste/community of sedentary cultivators), as against Kolis (shifting cultivators) were elevated into a category of landowners called Patidars. Through changes in the land tenure system during the colonial period, Kanabis encroached upon the land until then cultivated by Kolis and tribals. Since the early to mid 19th century Kanabis, who were eventually re-caste into Patel, ascended in economic and political power. “Patel” was originally a title given to a village officer in charge of tax collection and law and order, but it was now adopted by all members of the Kanabi alia Patidar caste/community. For further discussion (see Rutten & Patel, 2002; Gidwani, 2001; Shah & Rutten, 2002) 6. The two types of seeds known as foundation seeds, 240 g of Bt male and 600 g of hybrid female (usually GujCot 8), are supplied for one acre. One acre can produce anywhere between 100 and 300 kg of seeds. Seeds are planated in May or June and after usually 45–60 days hand-crossing starts, which continues until 120 days.

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Part III

Agriculture, Fishing and Mining Projects

Chapter 15

Turning the Soviet Union into Iowa: The Virgin Lands Program in the Soviet Union William C. Rowe

The virgin lands program was one vast epic. – Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev (2006)

On September 23, 1959, much of the world’s press rather bemusedly turned their attention towards Coon Rapids, Iowa. The occasion for this unusual notice was the arrival of Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Soviet Union, at the farm of Roswell and Elizabeth Garst who had invited him for what he stated to be “the most important event” of his scheduled tour of the U.S. (Khrushchev, 1974). Accompanying him on this stopover were Soviet and American officials as well as over 600 members of the press (Fig. 15.1). That the leader of a superpower should pay so much attention to an ordinary farm in rural Iowa (and not be a U.S. presidential candidate) while on a visit to the country with which he was so much at odds and with whom he subsequently would create one of the greatest crises in modern history with the Cuban Missile Crisis, is almost not credible 50 years later. And yet, he was there to discuss agricultural practices, especially pertaining to corn, with Mr. Garst and see firsthand a profitable, if capitalist, farm. The genesis of this trip lay not only with Khrushchev’s agrarian childhood in rural Russia, but more importantly with the implementation of his extraordinarily ambitious agricultural program in 1953 in what is today Kazakhstan and southwestern Siberia known generally as the “Virgin Lands” project. Monumental in scale and breathtaking in scope, it was indeed an epic undertaking, and although it was successful in its initiation, it would ultimately end up as one of the crucial issues that led to Khrushchev’s ouster. However, in 1959, the project was going well and Khrushchev was firmly in power and hoping to expand the project into an overall reorganization of spatial cropping patterns. To do this, he felt he needed to understand Iowa, particularly in how the near monocrop nature of that state could aid him in expanding not only grains, but also beef, pork, and milk products. Because there was no vocal dissent in the Soviet Union, Soviet officials never publicly questioned W.C. Rowe (B) Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA e-mail: [email protected]

S.D. Brunn (ed.), Engineering Earth, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4_15,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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Fig. 15.1 Khrushchev visiting the farm of Iowa farmers Roswell and Elizabeth Garst, September 1959. (Source: www.coonrapidsiowa.info/html/roswell_garst.html@usg)

the wisdom of trying to copy a unique situation in an area with a wildly variant climate. This consideration, along with the expression of Soviet leadership through autocracy, makes it difficult to write of this project as simply a megaengineering project when it is in fact a project inimically tied to one man, his administration, and to his doctrinaire belief in the importance of self-reliance, especially in food production, in the face of increasing tensions with the West. Therefore, consideration will be given to the agricultural situation of the area subsumed under the Virgin Lands Program before, during, and after Khrushchev’s years in power.

15.1 Agriculture Prior to 1953 Russia, from the time of Ivan the Terrible in the fifteenth century, began to expand at the expense of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and had roughly reached the borders of what would become the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The conquest of Kazakhstan, the most northerly area where the Russian encroachment began, was incremental in the beginning, but full-scale attacks on the region began in 1857. Ultimately, this culminated in the invasion and annexation of the Khanate of Qoqand and the creation of vassal states in the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva. The primary reason for this expansion was for colonial gain, but there was also a great deal of paranoia about a renewed invasion of Turkic or Mongol people from the east and concern about

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potential expansionist policies of England from their colonial holdings in India. In 1873, the “Great Game,” as the English called it, between Great Britain and Russia was heating up, and after much anxiety about each others’ intentions (especially in the English press), both sides agreed in principle that the line between the British sphere of influence (Afghanistan) and the Russian would be roughly the course of the Amu Darya, although the Russians pushed well south of this in western Central Asia. The Russian administrative presence in these newly acquired lands at first changed little, as even in areas annexed outright by Russia, the lives of the people in many aspects remained remarkably the same. However, this was not to remain the case for long as events in European Russia would soon cause the settlement of what is now northern Kazakhstan by Russian peasants. The crucial event was the emancipation of the serfs by Tsar Alexander II in 1861 at which time some three-fourths of peasants were controlled by the landowning class (in all some 20,000,000 people). The government allotted holdings to these peasants of only 27 acres (10.9 ha) on average while “state peasants,” or “free rural inhabitants” located mostly in Siberia and northern Russia, fared somewhat better, but on more marginal lands. This situation, along with high payments for the land, caused many peasant families to consider settling east of the Ural Mountains on recently acquired land in the steppe region. In the area of what would become Kazakhstan, the government originally allotted each male settler roughly 81 acres (32.7 ha), but later reduced it to 45 acres (18.2 ha), which, given the irrigation possibilities, they deemed enough for a family. While the situation in the western lands might work for perhaps one or two generations, the choice for many of the descendents of these peasants who had inherited only a small portion of their father’s land was to emigrate to these new lands or to give up farming completely and move to the city. The government in St. Petersburg encouraged resettlement on a large scale because of joint fears that a larger scale movement of peasants into the city would foment unrest as well as a desire to keep native Central Asians from taking all the best land as nomadic and semi-nomadic Uzbeks began to settle on unused lands under the more peaceful conditions provided by the Russian army. It has been estimated that over 1.5 million settlers in just two decades received land in the north and east districts, constituting forty percent of the population in what is now Kazakhstan by 1911. This is further reflected in the number of acres/hectares brought under grain production in Siberia and the Kazakh steppe, which had been dominated previously by nomadic and semi-nomadic Kazakhs. In 1905 there were approximately 17 million acres (6.88 million ha) in grain cultivation; however, by 1913 over 29 million acres (11.7 million ha) were sown. This naturally brought the Muslim population into closer contact and sometimes conflict with both new settlers and the foreign government, conflict that turned into open revolt on several occasions and which required the Russian military to send troops to protect the settlers (Becker, 1988; Hedlund, 1984; Lowe, 2002; Pierce, 1960; Sokol, 1954; Taaffe, 1962; Taubman, 2003; Timoshenko, 1932; Volin, 1970; Wheeler, 1974). When the tsarist government fell after the October Revolution in 1917, agricultural land owned by landowners, monasteries, and the Imperial family were

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redistributed to peasants, which in many cases translated into increased land holdings. However, overall production fell as the most efficient units in the system had been the larger estates, so that now Russia was dependent for its food supply on small landowners with small amounts of marketable surpluses and antiquated methods of farming. It must be noted that this was not true in all areas although it benefited later Soviet policymakers to make such generalities in their publications. The Lenin administration, therefore, began a move towards collectivization, but this movement was met by violence on the part of the peasantry that devolved into a situation where many peasants only planted enough for their own needs since the government would confiscate the rest. This caused a major famine in Russia in 1921–1922 (grain production was at only 64.5% of the 1913 total and external trade was near collapse) that affected some 25 million people. With continued peasant unrest and famine as well as the need to build the economy after the Civil War, the Lenin administration was forced to abandon what he now called “War Communism” and enact the New Economic Policy that, among other provisions, advocated peasant agriculture and allowed peasants to sell their surplus grain privately. Although qualitatively this policy made the situation the same economically as before the revolution, quantitatively the number of people able to participate in the plan was considerably higher. With this plan in place by 1926, production had nearly reached the level of the pre-World War I years in wheat, rye, and oats when grains covered nearly 90% of all sown area (Table 15.1). However, the government did not let the market decide the price of grain and other crops and throughout the years of the New Economic Policy, the government was continuously confronted with frequently unstable and insufficient amounts (Davies, 1998; Figes, 2001; Frumkin, 1926; Goncharov & Lyniakov, 1967; Hedlund, 1984; Khrushchev, 2006; Laird, 1982; Lenin, 1962; Lowe, 2002; Schiller, 1954; Sotsialisticheskoe Stroitel’stvo SSSR, 1934; Volin, 1970; Waldron, 1997; Wheatcraft, 1991). After the death of Lenin in 1924, Joseph Stalin began to consolidate his hold on the government and by 1928 his government had decided to discard the New

Table 15.1 Grain production in the Soviet Union – 1922–1926 (in millions of pounds)

Year

Wheat

Rye

Oats

1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933

23,368.8 27,072.5 28,814.1 45,811.6 53,880.4 47,509.1 48,435.1 41,622.8 59,347.8 48,479.2 44,643.2 61,133.6

40,057.6 43,607.0 41,512.6 50,154.7 52,160.8 53,285.2 42,548.8 44,885.7 52,028.6 48,479.2 48,545.3 53,329.3

17,173.8 18,408.4 19,620.9 25,397.0 32,716.3 28,902.3 36,331.8 34,700.4 36,640.5 24,162.4 24,779.7 33,972.9

Adapted from Sotsialisticheskoe Stroitel’stvo SSSR (1934)

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Economic Policy and its conciliatory overtures to the peasantry. They then began a massive push towards the collectivization of agricultural lands and herds and away from private land holdings held by conservative peasants, a move that provoked widespread violence and crises (Clark, 1977; Heinzen, 2004; Stalin, 1949). Not only was this push seen as theoretically important in the creation of a communist state, but also it underpinned the ideological framework that would be the hallmark of Soviet social engineering in the countryside. Prior to this time, nearly all rural laborers were classified as “peasants”. Although Mikhail Kalinin, Chairman of the All-Union Executive Committee from 1919 to 1938 was fond of joking that workers and peasants are equally important to the Soviet state by comparing one to the left leg and one to the right leg and asking which a person would rather do without, the Soviet system, especially under Stalin’s government, was to be set up as one of “workers”. Thus collectivization was an attempt to create proto industrial workers out of farm laborers and peasants and to eliminate political opposition from this very conservative class throughout the former Soviet Union (Clark, 1977; Goncharov & Lyniakov, 1967). In this way, Soviet theoreticians placed their focus on a political identity rather than a personal identity that viewed peasants as mired in a “ ‘culturalist’ attachment to locality” (Kitching, 1998). Karl Marx directly addressed this crucial point in the transformation of society in his “Konspekt von Bakunins Buch Staatlichkeit und Anarchie”: Where they (peasants) have not disappeared and have not been replaced by agricultural day laborers as in England, the following may happen there: either they prevent or bring about the downfall of every workers’ revolution, as they have done before in France; or else the proletariat . . . must, as the government, take the measures needed to allow the peasant to directly improve is condition, to win him over to the revolution; these measures contain the nucleus that will facilitate the transition from the previous ownership of land to collective ownership . . . (Marx, 1962: 630–633).

Once peasants were transformed into workers, differences between urban and rural people could be eliminated (or at least lessened) and the idea of a “workers’ paradise” could be brought more fully to fruition. For this society to be engineered, the state would have to collectivize all private plots of land. Thus, Joseph Stalin set this out in his book Building Collective Farms: All boundary strips dividing the land holdings of the members of the artels [collective farms] shall be abolished and all plots of land thrown into one large area of land to be used collectively by the artel (Stalin, 1931: 166).

The process of collectivization where the number of collective farms went from roughly 33,300 in 1928 to 242,400 in 1938, caused production to plummet, especially after the final push for collectivization in 1930. It was not until 1933 that grain production reached the levels of the New Economic Policy (see Table 15.1) and not until 1937 that agriculture in the USSR regained the levels it had in 1913 (Jackson, 1980; Nove, 1992; Sotsialisticheskoe Stroitel’stvo SSSR, 1934; Sotsialisticheskoe Stroitel’stvo, 1939).

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Though collectivization resulted in hardship among the settled peoples of the USSR, it was, if possible, worse for the Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads where the government found itself forced to sedentarize them if they were to effectively collectivize their herds. In a 17 November 1929 plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the transition from nomadic or semi-nomadic to a settled economy would play “a decisive role in effecting a rise in the material and cultural level of the masses and drawing them into socialist construction” (McNeal, 1974: 36). This situation was not accepted by the majority of the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz and they focused their resistance on either slaughtering the herds outright, or driving them into Afghanistan or China. This exodus, along with a collectivization push that had an avowed goal of opening up more land to grain production at the expense of grazing lands, was done in a haphazard way with many of the new collective farms lacking such basics as adequate forage and water. That most of the animals in these collective farms died is not surprising, nor is the widespread famine this situation caused especially during the first winter after the policy was promulgated. Demographers have estimated that nearly one million people died in the ensuing famine that followed collectivization and it would be 1939 before they reattained the population figures of 1926. In terms of animal statistics, the number of sheep shrank from 21.9 to 1.7 million and the number of cattle shrank from 7.4 to 1.6 million between 1929, the year Stalin advocated “The Year of the Great Turn” (Olcott, 1981) and 1933. As quickly as 1930 it became apparent that this policy was exceedingly ambitious causing the Stalinist government to reverse the policy and slow down the collectivization push, which instead of being completed at the latest in spring 1932 reached 95% completion by the end of 1933. However, precollectivization sheep and cattle numbers were not attained until the 1960s after much of the Kazakh population had been resettled onto marginal agricultural lands intended for grain production under the Virgin Lands program (Matley, 1989; Nove, 1992; Olcott, 1981; Stiefel, 1977; Tursunbaev, 1967; Wheeler, 1966).

15.2 Khrushchev and the Virgin Lands To Westerners it is difficult to think of Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev outside of the lens of three famous events. First was his famous address to ambassadors at the Polish embassy in Moscow in 1956 where a phrase about the West was famously translated as “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” Second, the shoe-banging episode at the United Nations in 1960, when the head of the Philippine delegation charged the Soviet leadership with implied hypocrisy in light of Khrushchev’s concern over Western imperialism after the Soviet Union had de facto taken over Eastern Europe. Third, especially for Americans, was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which brought the two superpowers perilously close to war. However, Khrushchev himself wanted to be remembered as a reformer and it is clear, both from his memoirs and from the volume of writing that has been published both during and after his premiership that agricultural reform was of great consequence

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to him. The centerpiece of this legacy would become one of the greatest agricultural engineering feats of all time, the Virgin Lands program. Khrushchev was born on 15 April 1894, in the small agricultural village of Kalinovka in southwestern Russia, near the Ukrainian border. He would stay there, off and on until the age of fourteen when he joined his father in the mining town of Yuzovka, where working and living conditions, according to biographer William Taubman, “were the stuff of which anticapitalist tracts were made” (Taubman, 2003: 31). Khrushchev would stay there until 1917, where he at first tended cattle and sheep, but later apprenticing to a metal fitter. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 (a year after it had gained power). From then, he worked his way up the ranks, first in a stint as Party Secretary at the Donetsk Mining Technical College, then in July 1925, he became party boss of the Petrovo-Marinsky District in southern Ukraine. From there his career skyrocketed over the next decade as he made his way into Stalin’s inner circle – and an even greater feat – managed to survive there until Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953. The void left by Stalin’s death was at first filled by four figures: Khrushchev, Georgi Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Lavrenty Beria. By 1957, however, Beria had been executed, Malenkov demoted, Molotov disgraced, and Khrushchev, through “Machiavellian” means, stood triumphant at the pinnacle of power in the Soviet Union (Taubman, 2003). Considering his early life, it is not surprising that once in power Khrushchev would turn his attention to agriculture and the need to expand agricultural lands in an effort to raise the standard of living throughout the Soviet Union. Indeed, one of the foremost authorities on Russian agriculture, Lazar Volin, claimed “It may be fairly said that Russia was never ruled, in modern times at any rate, by one so steeped and interested in agriculture as Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev” (Volin, 1970: 331). When Khrushchev rose to the height of Soviet power, issues ranging from the destruction of lands in World War II, during which time agricultural production had fallen by a third that triggered a famine in 1947, to the Stalinist government’s unwillingness to bring new land under cultivation, there was also continued emphasis on funding industrial capacity (20 billion rubles allotted) over agricultural production (2.7 billion rubles allotted) in the first post-war, five-year plan, caused the Soviet Union to have trouble in meeting its peoples’ basic dietary needs. This led Khrushchev to indict Stalin over his apparent lack of attention to agricultural production (among numerous other accusations) and his use of agriculture to finance industry. Although apparently sincere, this stance could also have been to highlight his own extraordinary interest in that realm (Clark, 1977; Davies, 1998; Khrushchev, 2006; Nove, 1959; Sel’skoe Khoziaistvo SSSR, 1960; Shaffer, 1977; Smith, 1987; Volin, 1970). Khrushchev began discussing the possibilities of opening new extensive farming areas to cultivation in early 1953, just after the death of Stalin. However, it was not until 1954 that he began to turn these thoughts into action. In his early months in power especially, Khrushchev, who at the time was First Secretary, did not make any grand announcements himself or lay the groundwork politically for them to happen. That task belonged to the aforementioned Georgi Malenkov, the then premier of the Soviet Union, who could take the fall if the program turned out

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ill conceived. Malenkov began to lay out a plan that would steer the country away from the “superindustrialization” of the Stalin years to a period that would better address the needs of the Soviet people (although he would later be accused of trying to push this agenda too far and would leave in official disgrace). The impetus to strengthen agriculture was found in the percentage of rural to urban migration in the time since the New Economic Policy. In 1926, 82.1% of the population was rural; however, in 1956, 56.6% was rural. This new urbanization, along with population growth from 147 million in 1926 to 209 million in 1959, clearly required increased productivity, especially in grain production either by extending the land sown or intensifying already sown areas. Khrushchev came out clearly in favor of the former idea and coupled it with a need to increase the material goods available to the people (Clark, 1977; Evans, 1984; Johnson, Breimyer, Heisig, Kirkbride, & Volin, 1959; Nove, 1992). He was thus often quoted as saying, “Communist society cannot be built without an abundance of grain, meat, milk, butter, vegetables, and other agricultural products” (Khrushchev, 1962: 77). Where agricultural production was to be expanded was another matter. Although from a perspective of sheer size, it would appear that augmenting agricultural land in the former Soviet Union would not constitute a problem, as the country was over 8.6 million sq. mi. (22.27 million sq. km); however climate plays a confining role to agricultural expansion. Most of the area of the Russian Republic east of the Ural Mountains is subarctic or tundra except for the area north of Kazakhstan, which is humid continental. Kazakhstan is almost equally divided between mid-latitude desert and mid-latitude steppe, the latter in the north and east of the country. Therefore, a belt of potential productivity existed along the Kazakh/Russian border that bends south in Kazakhstan along the Chinese border towards Kyrgyzstan. It became clear early in Khrushchev’s agricultural campaign that one of the primary locations for this intended expansion would be this “virgin” steppe environment between the Russian and Kazakh Republics (Fig. 15.2). It must be noted however that “virgin” is something of a misnomer here as this new program did not inaugurate just unused land, but also land that had been overused in previous years and had been left fallow for some time. Another common misconception was that there had been no activity here under previous administrations. In fact, Stalin’s government added 56 million acres (22.6 million ha) to the 63 million acres (25.5 million ha) already sown east of the Urals. Therefore, most of the best land had already been designated for agriculture and during the previous ninety years had been settled by first Russian peasants, then Russian agricultural workers. Khrushchev’s goal with the Virgin Lands project was at first to add nearly one-third more land (32 million acres or 12.9 million ha) in what were deemed more marginal areas, but by 1962 a drive to nearly double the 1953 amount in the eastern regions was enacted by the government (Clark, 1977; Timoshenko, 1932; Volin, 1970). This rapid expansion did not go unopposed. In the rhetoric used by Khrushchev to disgrace both Malenkov (who especially had favored intensification of agriculture on existing lands) and Molotov, he cited them as part of an “anti-party” group that opposed the progress exemplified by this project. The key issues seemed to hinge

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Fig. 15.2 Central Asian agricultural land use map illustrating the major area of the Virgin Lands Project. (Source: Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University)

upon a two-sided argument, one side political and the other climatologic. With the first, it was difficult for those who opposed the project to believe that if this land were of such potential value, why had it not been opened before? The second was meant to answer the first: because the areas in question were marginal and precipitation amounts rarely exceeded 16 in (40.6 cm) and more commonly were closer to 10 in (25.4 cm). Compounding this were the further problems of the northerly situation of the land as well as that of high winds that had the potential to turn the whole region into a second Dust Bowl if a prolonged drought were to hit. To put this proposal into relative geographic perspective, the land dedicated to the Virgin Lands Project is on the same latitude as North Dakota, itself a grain-growing area yet one with less variability in its precipitation. Add to this picture is the issue of the whole region becoming a monocrop of spring wheat, a condition that encourages the spread of weeds and damaging insects and creates a greatly expanded need for both insecticides and herbicides. For this reason it seemed apparent to

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Malenkov and Molotov why no one had tried to turn the area wholesale into agricultural production in the past. Crop yields therefore would be unpredictable from year to year with the potential for major losses of both grain and soil. Unpredictability, however, is not something that could be tolerated within the highly quantified realm of Soviet economic planning and its five-year plans, which called for firm quota assignments. Khrushchev eventually would use this recalcitrance against both, but in the meantime, the foundations needed to be laid (Johnson et al., 1959; Linden, 1966; Timoshenko, 1932; Volin, 1970). Under Stalin, agricultural infrastructure upgrades came partly from federal expenditures and loans but more importantly from income garnered from a collective farm’s surplus. This position was the first change that Khrushchev’s government reversed. Capital investment would now come directly from the government, a fact that can be seen in the first 4 years after Stalin’s death. In 1953, the state invested 985 million rubles; however in 1957, it invested 2.7 billion rubles or nearly tripling the amount and by 1964 (Khrushchev’s last year in power) was investing 5.78 billion rubles. However, imbedded in these figures are the enormous capital outlays by the Soviet government to cover the Virgin Lands Program, with the key years of investment in the Virgin Lands being 1954 and 1955. In these years, total investment in agriculture increased in 1954 to 1.79 billion rubles, nearly doubling the amount from 1953, and in 1955 to 2.2 billion rubles, an increase of a further 21%, a trend that would continue over the Khrushchev years with the exception of 1959–1960 (Table 15.2). At a smaller scale, the gross investment per acre of sown land rose dramatically from 3.2 rubles in 1953 to 7.6 rubles by 1958. Coupled with this was a six-fold increase in procurement prices for grain and lowered taxes. Such expenditures, however, mask the sheer amount spent on the Virgin Lands and infers (as it was not extolled in official publications) a stagnation of economic input (Hedlund, 1984; Kapital’noe Stroitel’stvo, 1961; Narodnoe Khoziaistvo, 1965; Volin, 1970).

Table 15.2 Gross state investment in agriculture 1953–1963 (in millions of rubles) Year

“Productive” investment

“Unproductive” investment

Total investment

1953 1954 1955 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963

881 1,536 1,992 2,118 2,343 2,279 2,021 2,471 2,984 3,386

104 256 273 291 360 404 474 590 743 794

985 1,792 2,265 2,409 2,703 2,683 2,495 3,061 3,727 4,180

Adapted from Kapital’noe Stroitel’stvo (1961); Narodnoe Khoziaistvo (1964); Volin (1970)

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These numbers, of course, represent only the capital outlay by the Soviet government. To expand agriculture on such a massive scale, you also need human resources. In this objective Khrushchev largely appealed to the Komsomol or Young Communist League to mobilize for agricultural work (Fig. 15.3). For this enterprise, over 300,000 volunteers from the Komsomol (most coming only on a temporary basis) along with 50,000 tractors set out in 1954 for the borderlands on either side of the Kazakh/Russian border. These volunteers came from the heavily populated western region of Russia and Ukraine and had grown up on collective farms and were eager to prove themselves outside of their home districts. Most were young and, according to Leonid Brezhnev (who had been promoted to First Secretary of Kazakhstan and head of the program by Khrushchev), “out for adventure” (Brezhnev, 1978: 77). The initial problem was that the volunteers were overwhelmingly male, but soon each district began a systematic push to lure more females to the region. Volunteers came from all over the Soviet Union, but especially from Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia. Hundreds of new state farms with a few collective farms were organized under quite primitive conditions (Fig. 15.4) and that summer they began the plowing (Fig. 15.5). New roads, bridges, grain elevators, hospitals, schools, storehouses and a myriad of other buildings had to be constructed on very short notice and with limited skilled labor. Consequently, less land was actually sown in 1954 than 1953 because of the need to organize the program and begin the plowing; however, in 1955, 32 million new acres (12.95 million ha) were sown (Fig. 15.6). It was unfortunate for Khrushchev that this proved to be one of the dry years on the steppe and much of the crop was lost and many of the volunteers lost heart and returned west. Some of this feeling can be attributed to the fact that very few of the volunteers new anything about dry lands agriculture and did not yet have enough

Fig. 15.3 Volunteers in the virgin lands. (Source: Brezhnev, 1978)

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Fig. 15.4 Constructing outdoor stoves in the virgin lands. (Source: Brezhnev, 1978)

Fig. 15.5 The first furrows in the virgin lands. (Source: Brezhnev, 1978)

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Fig. 15.6 Plowing in the virgin lands. (Source: Brezhnev, 1978)

machinery and infrastructure to fully undertake the job. Yields dropped from 380 to 180 kg/acre and the total harvest for the Virgin Lands dropped 9.5 million tons from 37.5 million tons the previous year. The criticism that began at the advent of the program began to grow and Khrushchev’s position was becoming precarious, yet he was determined to see the project to full fruition and in 1956, he caught a major break. Already reeling from the crisis in Hungary, he could not withstand another crisis with the Virgin Lands Program. However, the rains came in abundance in 1956, and the harvest proved to be a bumper one with yields averaging 440 kg/acre, a figure that surpassed those in Ukraine and older agricultural areas in Russia for the year and provided the Soviet Union with its largest grain harvest in its history (Fig. 15.7). Granted, this harvest had as much to do with the high natural fertility and untapped nutrients in the soil as with the abundant rain in the spring; however, it was trumpeted as a major achievement in Soviet know-how. This victory sealed Malenkov and Molotov’s downfall and Khrushchev went on a long tour of the region with Brezhnev, now promoted to the Central Committee in advance of the successful harvest. Brezhnev probably left just in time. Had he been there to mark the very successful harvest, it is unlikely that Khrushchev would have brought him to Moscow since the success of the program was deemed so important and subsequent bad harvests could have tarnished his rising star. As such, he was neither mired in the Virgin Lands’ early success nor in its later problems (Brezhnev, 1978; Craumer, 1990; Khrushchev, 1970; McCauley, 1976; Medvedev, 1987; Volin, 1970).

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Fig. 15.7 Wheat fields in the virgin lands. (Source: Photo Collection of Paul English, Department of Geography, University of Texas)

Khrushchev now could turn fully to a directive interrelated with the Virgin Lands Program concerning traditional agricultural lands in western Soviet lands. Although, as mentioned before, investment in traditionally productive agricultural areas in the west did stagnate as all financial and technical assistance was directed towards the east, it should not imply that these areas were ignored. Quite the opposite in the case, as Khrushchev had shown enthusiasm for expanding corn production in his earliest years in power by calling in a speech for an Iowa-style corn belt in Russia and subsequently increasing the number of acres sown in Ukraine and western Russia to 44 million in 1955, a four-fold increase over the previous year. But as with the Virgin Lands Program, this program was just the beginning and these areas were to become the new centerpiece for putting into practice the knowledge he had gained from his trip to Iowa, a trip set in motion by his 1955 speech. Subsequently, in the next year after his trip, Khrushchev increased the amount of corn for all usages (though mostly for fodder) again to 69.6 million acres (28.17 million ha) and raised it again to 91.7 million acres (37.1 million ha) in 1962 in order to raise the amount of meat, milk, and butter from a concomitant increase in cattle and pigs. Khrushchev felt that the implementation of this phase of his agricultural reorganization would be the final phase that would allow the Soviet Union to catch up in terms of production with the United States (Filtzer, 1993; Karcz, 1979; McCauley, 1976; Medvedev & Medvedev, 1976; Smith, 1987; Volin, 1970).

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15.3 Problems on the Horizon In analyzing the 7 years between 1957 and 1963, both climatic variability and the nature of planning the program come into focus. The year 1957 did not prove to be a very productive year, but the years 1958–1960 were very respectable with yields averaging 340 kg/acre, although it must be noted that the harvest in 1959 was affected by an early frost, another indication of the potentially catastrophic variations in weather conditions in the region. By 1960, however, Khrushchev’s vision seemed to be coming true. Grain yields had increased and, with the new emphasis on corn and fodder in the western lands, the number of cattle had increased by over 15% and the number of pigs by over 35%. Consequently, the amount of beef produced increased by nearly 25%, from 5.8 to 7.7 million tons, and the amount of milk by nearly 38%, from 36.5 to 58.7 million tons between the years 1953 and 1958. With these impressive figures and with such obvious success, overall agricultural investment would trend downward from the height of the initial Khrushchev years when it reached 17.6% in 1956 to 14.2% in 1960 (Smith, 1987). This economic trend proved unfortunate as the variations in precipitation and crop timing would be felt keenly by the drought during the subsequent 3 years which culminated in a catastrophic harvest in 1963 when the yields returned to approximately 180 kg/acre. In that year, the apocalyptic fears of drought and erosion voiced behind the scenes became reality. Over 40% of the arable land of the Virgin Lands area is prone to wind erosion and in 1963 dust storms proved so bad that millions of tons of soil hid the sun for days on end and in some cases the quantity of soil removed was so great it caused the underlying bedrock to begin to show. This problem is one that continues to haunt Kazakhstan particularly as is shown in Fig. 15.8 where the capital city of Astana is nearly obliterated from sight by a major dust storm sweeping off what had been the virgin lands area (Hahn, 1972; Medvedev & Medvedev, 1976; Volin, 1970). Unfortunately for Khrushchev the variability of the weather was only one of the problems he now faced. For all the capital investment and imaginative expansion, appropriate expenditures in machinery and other necessary sectors did not follow suit. According to Khrushchev, 2.7 million tractors were needed (Khrushchev, 1962), yet by 1962 there were less than half that many available. Similar numbers can be found for combines, trucks used for agricultural purposes, and spare parts for existing machinery. Production therefore never matched planned agricultural expansion and what was produced went to the Virgin Lands. The situation was far worse in older agricultural areas of the USSR as they continued to have to use ever-older machinery that required frequent maintenance that further reduced efficiency Also, for such a dry area, little was invested in irrigation; only 10% was irrigated in 1963 (Volin, 1970). A further problem that evolved by 1963 was the consequences of Khrushchev’s pressure for large quotas from this new land. As mentioned earlier, the new soils produced well in the early years; however, the workers were not allowed to offset production on the new land with fallow years to any large extent due to the political mandate from the Kremlin that it was “wasteful”. The amount of land in fallow decreased from 18.9% of all arable land in 1954 to 2.8% in 1963, a figure that is

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Fig. 15.8 Dust storm in Astana. (Source: www.FunontheNet.in)

rendered even smaller in actual area by the large quantity of land that was added in the intervening years. This scenario became further complicated by the soils in the region having a relatively low nitrogen count, a problem found in over half of the arable land in the former Soviet Union. Even faced with this knowledge, fertilizer use was low in the former Soviet Union except for in cotton production in Central Asia. Agricultural workers could therefore not just simply add more fertilizer to the fields as little additional output of fertilizers by the Soviet chemical industry was ordered until after the beginning of the drought in 1961 when production in nitrogen rose 5.66 million metric tons to 10.2 million metric tons in 1964. Even if the agricultural workers could have just added fertilizer, the monocrop nature of the enterprise over such an extensive amount of land, rather than the mixed agriculture such land required, caused an infestation of weeds. Weeds again called for an order for an increase in herbicides to combat them coming in the same period in 1962 where it barely registered 28% of the amount used in the U.S. for the same year (Craumer, 1990; Evans, 1984; Khrushchev, 1962; Medvedev, 1987; Narodnoe Khoziaistvo, 1965; Zemskii, 1959).

15.4 Khrushchev’s Fall from Power The combination of a 3-year drought, poor planning for agricultural infrastructure, and a disastrous harvest caused the Virgin Lands Project to become the center of attention to those around Khrushchev who stood to gain from his ouster. Although

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declining yields in the Virgin Lands was not the sole reason for Khrushchev’s fall from power, it was still a very decisive part in his removal and “retirement.” That there was a movement against him and the Virgin Lands Program was apparent from 1 March 1964 when a letter was printed in Izvestia (and hence from the government) that “professed disgust with those unpatriotic souls who spread tales about the bad harvest, food shortages, and the failures in the Virgin Lands” (Hyland & Shryock, 1968). That such a letter appeared publically essentially acknowledged that there was a problem and the people who had cautioned against such a dramatic expansion in croplands had made a point. It also implied that there existed a group that tried to tie these deficiencies to Khrushchev himself. It would not be until October, however, while Khrushchev vacationed on the Black Sea coast, that the shock of his removal would occur. It was shocking in that he did not realize it was coming and that it was carried out so thoroughly that by the time he arrived back in Moscow, the only remaining detail was Khrushchev’s actual resignation on October 14. Brezhnev took over as First Secretary of the Communist Party and because he had participated so willingly in Khrushchev’s government and agricultural plans, there was little of the usual condemnation of policy or of Khrushchev himself, simply that he had retired due to “ill health.” It was rumored that Khrushchev’s last plea before being stripped of all titles was to be given the position of Minister of Agriculture, so great was his desire to continue overseeing his beloved Virgin Lands. In this request he was denied and in this regard it is ironic that 1964 proved to be a bumper crop in the Virgin Lands (Filtzer, 1993; Hyland & Shryock, 1968; Medvedev & Medvedev, 1976). After Khrushchev’s fall, the reactions against both the Virgin Lands and his spatial crop organization were swift. Because of redirected investment, the Virgin Lands had an overall effect on agriculture throughout the Soviet Union. In real numbers, Virgin Lands wheat cost more than double that of grain grown in Ukraine or the northern Caucasus in most years. Therefore, the immediate and practical result was the cessation of adding new land to cultivation as a means of expanding agricultural output, an issue especially important to powerful administrators in western Russia and Belorussia who felt that their areas had been particularly slighted monetarily in order to maximize investments in the Virgin Lands. Next, the new government dramatically lowered Khrushchev’s favored crops, especially corn, although it would be “rehabilitated” in 1969 after dust storms killed many of the winter crops in Ukraine. The amount of fallow land was also expanded. The Soviet Union would continue to experience severe droughts in over 60% of the country’s territory while at the same time that area normally accounts for approximately 75% of grain deliveries (Davies, 1998; Hahn, 1972; Morozov, 1977). Roswell Garst had warned Khrushchev that this undertaking could not be done without a concomitant outlay in fertilizer, machinery, irrigation, pesticides, and herbicides. However, Soviet industry capacity, especially the chemical and machinery industries, did not expand at the same rate as the focus was so much on the immediate expansion of land usage. Even so, the engineering feat that was the Virgin Lands Project cannot be considered ultimately as a complete failure. Because of Khrushchev’s emphasis on agriculture, more investment was poured into this sector

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and the standard of living across the Soviet Union rose both during and after his administration. Agriculture stopped just being the cash cow of the Soviet economy and real investment continued, albeit in fits and starts, throughout the subsequent decades. Agricultural production grew during this period, especially in wheat, and three-quarters of the increase came directly from the Virgin Lands, which amounted to between 46% (1961) and 68% (1956) of total procurements of wheat during the Khrushchev years (Narodnoe Khoziaistvo, 1961, Taubman, 2003). The ultimate failure of Khrushchev’s dream was in his boasting that the Soviet Union could reach agricultural parity with the U.S. through the Virgin Lands Project. This Cold War attempt to present all aspects of communist economy and life as superior to that of its capitalist nemesis was doomed by the three-pronged problem of variations in weather, lack of sustained investment, and a near megalomaniacal drive to show that good communists could always overcome bad nature regardless of inappropriate agricultural crops and methods used on fragile soils and environments without a parallel increase in machines and infrastructure. Further, this situation was compounded by the very nature of centralized planning and collectivization. There were no “farmers” as such in the Soviet Union, only laborers; therefore, the only incentive was to meet the quotas and demands of the Khrushchev administration, which did not take into account either the health of the land or give any material encouragement to give the laborers the enticement to maximize the potential of the project. The Virgin Lands Project, therefore, fell victim to the ideological way in which communism had been interpreted in the Soviet Union and to the visionary, if erratic, dream of one man to completely reorganize agriculture in the largest country in the world and to blanket the Kazakh steppe in wheat for its people.

References Becker, S. (1988). Russia’s Central Asian empire, 1885–1917. In M. Rywkin (Ed.), Russian colonial expansion to 1917 (pp. 235–256). London: Mansell Publishing Limited. Brezhnev, L. (1978). The virgin Lands. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Clark, M. G. (1977). Soviet agricultural policy. In H. G. Shaffer (Ed.), Soviet agriculture: An assessment of its contributions to economic development (pp. 1–55). New York: Praeger. Craumer, P. (1990). Trends in Soviet dryland farming and soil conservation practices with comparison to North Americandevelopments. In K. R. Gray (Ed.), Soviet agriculture: Comparative perspectives (pp. 176–194). Ames: Iowa State University Press. Davies, R. W. (1998). Soviet economic development from Lenin to Khrushchev. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, A., Jr. (1984). Changes in the Soviet model of rural transformation. In R. C. Stuart (Ed.), The Soviet rural economy (pp. 143–148). Totowa: Rowman & Allanheld. Figes, O. (2001). Peasant Russia, civil war: The Volga countryside in rebellion, 1917–1921. London: Phoenix. Filtzer, D. (1993). The Khrushchev era: De-Stalinisation and the limits of reform in the USSR, 1953–1964. Houndmills: MacMillan Press Ltd. Frumkin, M. I. (1926). Narodnoe Khoziaistvo Vneshniaia Torgovlia SSSR. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo. Goncharov, A., & Lyniakov, P. (1967). V. I. Lenin i Krest’ianstvo. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury.

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Hahn, W. G. (1972). The politics of Soviet agriculture: 1960–1970. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Hedlund, S. (1984). Crisis in Soviet agriculture. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Heinzen, J. W. (2004). Inventing a Soviet countryside: State power and the transformation of rural Russia, 1917–1929. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hyland, W., & Shryock, R. W. (1968). The fall of Khrushchev. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. Jackson, W. A. D. (1980). The Soviet Union. In G. A. Klee (Ed.), World systems of traditional resource management (pp. 131–164). London: Edward Arnold. Johnson, S. E., Breimyer, H. F., Heisig, C. P., Kirkbride, J. W., & Volin, L. (1959). Economic aspects of Soviet agriculture. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Kapital’noe Stroitel’stvo v SSSR: Statisticheskii Sbornik. (1961). Moscow: Gosstatizdat. Karcz, J. F. (1979). The economics of Soviet agriculture: Selected papers. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Khrushchev, N. S. (1962). Stroitel’stvo Kommunizma v SSSR i Rasvitie Sel’skogo Khoziaistva, Volume I. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Isdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury. Khrushchev. N. S. (1970). Khrushchev remembers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Khrushchev, N. S. (1974). Khrushchev remembers: The last testament. S. Talbott (Ed., & Trans.). Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Khrushchev, N. S. (2006). Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume 2 reformer (1945–1964). S. Khrushchev (Ed.). University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Kitching, G. (1998). The revenge of the peasant? The collapse of large-scale Russian agriculture and the role of the peasant “private plot” in that collapse, 1991–97. Journal of Peasant Studies, 26(1), 43–81. Laird, R. D. (1982). Soviet agricultural and peasant affairs. Westport: Greenwood Press (Slavic Studies Series – 1). Lenin, V. I. (1962). Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii (Vol. 32). Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury. Linden, C. A. (1966). Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership: 1957–1964. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Lowe, N. (2002). Mastering twentieth-century Russian history. New York: Palgrave. Marx, K. (1962). Konspekt von Bakunins Buch “Staatlichkeit und Anarchie”. In Werke, Band 18. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Matley, I. M. (1989). Agricultural development. In E. Allworth (Ed.), Central Asia: A century of Russian rule (pp. 266–308). Durham: Duke University Press. McCauley, M. (1976). Khrushchev and the development of Soviet agriculture: The Virgin Land programme 1953–1964. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc. McNeal, R. H. (Ed.). (1974). On the results and coming tasks of kolkhoz construction. In Resolutions and decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Volume 3: The Stalin years: 1929–1953 (pp. 28–38). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Medvedev, R. A., & Medvedev, Z. A. (1976). Khrushchev: The years in power. New York: Columbia University Press. Medvedev, Z. A. (1987). Soviet agriculture. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Morozov, V. A. (1977). Soviet agriculture. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Narodnoe Khoziaistvo SSSR v 1960 godu: Statisticheskii Ezhegodnik. (1961). Moscow: Gosstatizdat. Narodnoe Khoziaistvo SSSR v 1964 godu: Statisticheskii Ezhegodnik. (1965). Moscow: Gosstatizdat. Nove, A. (1959). Soviet agricultural practices and prospects. Oxford: St. Antony’s Papers on Soviet Affairs. Nove, A. (1992). An economic history of the U.S.S.R.: 1917–1991 (3rd ed.). London: Penguin Books. Olcott, M. B. (1981). The collectivization drive in Kazakhstan. The Russian Review, 40, 122–142. Pierce, R. A. (1960). Russian Central Asia, 1867–1917. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Schiller, O. (1954). Die Landwirtschaft der Sowjetunion 1917–1953. Tübingen: Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Osteuropaforschung. Sel’skoe Khoziaistvo SSSR, Statisticheskii Sbornik. (1960). Moscow: Gosstatizdat. Shaffer, H. G. (1977). Soviet agriculture: Success or failure? In H. G. Shaffer (Ed.), Soviet agriculture: An assessment of its contributions to economic development (pp. 56–105). New York: Praeger Publishers. Smith, G. A. E. (1987). Agriculture. In M. McCauley (Ed.) Khrushchev and Khrushchevism (pp. 95–117). Houndmills: The MacMillan Press Ltd. Sokol, E. D. (1954). The revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia. Series 71, Number 1 of The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Sotsialisticheskoe Stroitel’stvo SSSR. (1934). Moscow: Tsunkhu Gosplana SSSR, Soyuzorduchet. Sotsialisticheskoe Stroitel’stvo Sel’skoe Khoziaistvo SSSR. (1939). Moscow: Gosplanizdat. Stalin, J. (1931). Building collective farms. New York: Workers’ Library Publishers. Stalin, J. (1949). Sochineniia, Volume 12, April 1929–June 1930. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury. Stiefel, M. M. (1977). Séminaire sur le nomadisme en Asie centrale: Afghanistan, Iran, URSS. Berne: Commission Nationale Suisse pour L’UNESCO. Taaffe, R. N. (1962). Transportation and regional specialization: The examples of Soviet Central Asia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 52(1), 80–98. Taubman, W. (2003). Khrushchev: The man and his era. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Timoshenko, V. P. (1932). Agricultural Russia and the wheat problem. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Tursunbaev, A. B. (1967). Kollektivizatsia Sel’skoe Khoziaistvo Kazakhstana. Alma Ata: Institut Istorii Partii. Volin, L. (1970). A century of Russian agriculture: From Alexander II to Khrushchev. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Waldron, .P. (1997). The end of imperial Russia: 1865–1917. London: St. Martin’s Press. Wheatcraft, S. G. (1991). Agriculture. In R. W. Davies (Ed.), From Tsarism to the New Economic policy: Continuity and change in the economy of the USSR (pp. 79–103). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wheeler, G. (1966). The peoples of Soviet Central Asia. London: The Bodley Head Ltd. Wheeler, G. (1974). Russian conquest and colonization of Central Asia. In T. Hunczak (Ed.), Russian imperialism from Ivan the Great to the revolution (pp. 264–298). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Zemskii, P. M. (1959). Razvitie i razmeshchenie Zemledeiia. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo.

Chapter 16

The Megaengineering of Ocean Fisheries: A Century of Expansion and Rapidly Closing Frontiers Maarten Bavinck

16.1 Introduction The industrialization of the world’s oceans (Smith, 2000, 2004a, 2004b), otherwise known as the blue revolution,1 took place in a little over a century and has spread to include various economic sectors, including capture fishing.2 Capture fishing is one of the oldest livelihoods in human existence (Von Brandt, 1984), but has recently undergone a tremendous transformation. Uneven as it has been, and taking place in fits and starts, the blue revolution has evolved from myriad centers. It has only been partly blueprinted, or engineered, and technology was only one of its components. Still the process as it has unfolded over the globe has identical features. It is to a tracing of the contours of this global event that this paper is devoted. Most contemporary readers are aware that the revolution in fishing has now reached, or surpassed, its environmental limits. Scientists warn us that a growing proportion of world’s fish stocks are overfished and depleted (FAO, 2009) and that we are fishing down the food web (Pauly, Christensen, Dalsgaard, Froese, & Torrers, 1998). The consequence, some would argue, is that by 2048 all fish stocks will have been exhausted, bringing commercial fishing to a full stop (Worm, Barbier, Beaumont, & Duffy, 2006). The collapsed cod fisheries of the Great Banks have thereby paved the way for a far greater tragedy that will unfold in the years to come. From a more positive side, the World Bank (2008) points out that, with adequate reform, the fisheries will give us access to “sunken billions” of economic benefit. Whether the fisheries managers of today have developed appropriate toolkits to avert the ecological crisis remains to be seen. Fisheries governance is still a new concept (Kooiman, Bavinck, Jentoft, & Pullin, 2005) and still very much in its development. The new mindset, however, should not detract attention from the amplitude and forcefulness of transformation during the 20th century, nor from the fact that technical innovations regarding fishing are proceeding on a daily basis. The blue

M. Bavinck (B) Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development; Centre for Maritime Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] S.D. Brunn (ed.), Engineering Earth, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4_16,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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revolution, in other words, has not been terminated but continues below the water line. The first section below sketches the blue revolution as it has taken place in fisheries around the world. It is followed by elaborations of the transformation process in two important fishing regions: the west coast of North America and Southeast Asia. In doing so, I rely on two historical works: McEvoy’s (1986) study of Californian fisheries, and Butler’s (2004) synthesis on history of Southeast Asian fisheries. Both regions are known for the quality of their fishing grounds as well as the productiveness of their fisheries. The Californian case illustrates the process of fisheries development which commenced around the turn of the 19th century in temperate waters, while Southeast Asian fisheries are indicative of the process which started in the tropics almost fifty years later. Attention then shifts to the technology which underlay both blue revolutions. Special consideration is given to the “roving bandits” (Berkes, Hughes, & Steneck, 2006), viz., the distant water fleets which emerged in the 1950s and contribute in no small measure to the fishing pressure. The last section considers the impacts of industrialization and looks ahead to the near future.

16.2 Revolution in World Fisheries Smith (2000, 2004a, 2004b) presents the transformation of world fisheries as part of a larger movement from traditional to industrial society, which commenced around 1780 in Europe but obviously has earlier roots. This societal movement possessed material, economic and social dimensions. Major technological change came to affect fisheries in the late 19th century, based first on the coming of steam then, early in the 20th century the internal combustion engine. These advances greatly increased accessibility to fishing grounds and the power of fishing gear. On the shore side the advent of refrigeration, the auction system, and fast and efficient rail and road transport facilitated the development of markets and thus greatly increased production. (Smith, 2000: 20)

The technical development of fisheries in Europe, North America and select other parts of the world took wing in the decades before WWII and resulted in a dramatic improvement of the efficiency of fishing operations. A similar process was initiated following the war in the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa. Governments, assisted by recently established international bodies, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), took up the cause of fisheries modernization with fervor, following the pattern laid out earlier in the west. This implied the development of modern fisheries and the large scale construction of infrastructure such as harbors and refrigeration facilities. A whole set of other technical changes, some smaller, some larger, have occurred in parallel. The improvement of fishing technology was based on a positive assessment of the oceans’ potential, and a blind eye to its long-term limitations. McEvoy (1986)

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gives the example of W.M. Chapman, a biologist who was highly influential in the development of policy for marine resources in the U.S. in the post-WWII period. Chapman, according to McEvoy (1986: 190), “firmly believed that the ocean had vast, untouched reserves of food and that U.S. entrepreneurs had a mission to develop those resources for the benefit of mankind.” I have come across similar views in policy documents related to the blue revolution in India (Bavinck, 2001). In the first instance these optimists appeared of course to be right. For indeed, the quantities of seafood brought to the shore increased by leaps and bound, as data from the post-WWII period illustrates (Fig. 16.1). The world’s fish harvests have increased almost fivefold. For countries that engaged in the first phase of the blue revolution, growth had actually started much earlier. McEvoy (1986: 126) thus estimates that while the fishing population of California remained roughly stable in the period 1899–1925, catches increased ten times. The revolution in fishing technology was accompanied by large scale changes in the organization of harvesting, along lines alternatively referred to as modernism, globalization or Fordism (Armitage & Johnson, 2006; Chuenpagdee et al., 2005). Fordism describes a system of production based on product standardization, decomposition of the production process, technological intensity, relatively inflexible production designs and large production volumes (Harvey, 1989, in Chuenpagdee et al., 2005). It has been applied most to industrial fisheries, and least to small scale fishing. Meanwhile, seafood markets expanded and globalized as preservation technology and transportation improved. Delgado, Wada, Rosegrant, Meijer, and Ahmed (2003) point out that this was paralleled by rising consumer demand and a long and virtually uninterrupted increase of prices. Figure 16.2 provides an indication of price trends in the U.S., which is one of the world’s major markets. The result of all these market changes is that, at the beginning of the 21st century, fish is one of the world’s most traded agricultural commodities (World Bank, 2008).

Fig. 16.1 World production capture fisheries 1950–2008. (FAO, 2009)

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Fig. 16.2 Trends in U.S. real price indexes for fish and seafood products 1947–2006. (World Bank, 2008)

Economically speaking, the 20th century can therefore be typified as the “golden age” not only for Southeast Asian fisheries (Butler, 2004: 292), but for fisheries worldwide. Rather than being associated with poverty (Béné, 2003), fisheries have been a source of great economic wealth, attracting fortune-seekers of various type and capacities. But in every transformation of such proportions, there are winners and losers, and fisheries has seen its share of social differentiation. The biggest loser is of course the environment: many fisheries are currently believed to be severely overexploited (Fig. 16.3). Fisheries are variously classified. Johnson, Bavinck, and Veitayaki (2005; see also Johnson, 2006) make a thoughtful review of the literature, suggesting a division into small-scale, industrial, and intermediate fisheries. Each of these fishing types in principle exploits different parts of oceanic space; small scale fishers relying on inshore waters, small industrial fishermen on offshore areas, and industrial vessels on distant waters. The regular incidence of conflict between fishermen of various technology types points out, however, that there are spatial areas of overlap and contestation (Bavinck, 2005; Platteau, 1989). FAO (2007) calculates that the world fishing fleet currently consists of approximately 4 million vessels, one third of which are decked.3 Most of the other two-thirds are presumably small scale craft. The decked vessels, of various types, tonnage and power, are generally motorized, while this is the case with only a third

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Fig. 16.3 State of world marine fishery resources. (Source: FAO, 2005)

of the undecked vessels. Trawlers are estimated to make up approximately 40% of the aggregate tonnage of the world fishing fleet (Valdemarsen, 2001: 636). All these fishing vessels are operated by approximately 35 million full-time fishermen, the large majority of whom live in Asia and in Africa (FAO, 2007). Statistics demonstrate that while the number of capture fishers in Europe and North America is declining, their numbers continue to increase steadily in other parts of the world (FAO, 1999). Contrary to popular assumption, oceanic space is not evenly fished. This is partly a result of physical and ecological characteristics, and partly because of human geography and technological reach. Biomass is generally concentrated along continental shelves; locations of oceanic upwelling constitute particularly fertile fishing grounds. Historically, however, these could not all be effectively fished. It was only as technology developed that fishing effort expanded geographically. Smith (1994, 1991) provides a typology of fishing regions in relation to urbanization, and distinguishes three types of seas: urban seas, rural seas and wilderness seas, each with its own set of uses. The first adjoin large ports and built-up areas: here fishing competes with many other intense uses of sea space. Rural seas are characterized by less intensive and slightly different use patterns, while wilderness seas are sparsely used at all. Although Smith makes no mention hereof in his discussion of this typology, it coincides more or less with the regions or dimensions of contemporary oceanic law: urban seas are located in territorial waters (86◦ F), three o’clock afternoon water vapor pressure is 1,500 mm/year in the north (Fig. 89.5 for monthly evaporation rates). For an average value of 1,250 mm/year, one finds q(evap,1) = 0.396 ∗ 10−7 m3 /m2 /s. One assumes that: Qsw = zQevap

(89.13)

where z is a fraction (z = 1 means that the water flow rate coming from the ocean equals the evaporated water flow rate). Our first proposal consists of a floating lid made from thin polyethylene sheeting, like the “bubble-wrap” used by shipping industry packagers, with 100% water imperviousness. It can be manufactured as modules, “carpets” of 100−1,000 m2 of very low density material with tougher plastic margins (frame), which can be assembled together with clips and tethered to the seabed. Rainwater accumulating atop the

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Fig. 89.5 Eyre North and South monthly evaporation rates

mat is allowed to drain through small holes so that the lid stays afloat. The lid covers 60−75% of the lake surface, leaving a couple of kilometers off the shores open. This greatly reduces adverse ecological and aesthetical impact, however important ecological concerns will remain and require further studies. Evaporation consists of precious freshwater, so preventing it is a main part of this proposal. It goes along with albedo enhancing on large scale which is benefic for the climate. Most researchers agree that water evaporated from the Eyre region, even if the Lake would be filled, is lost and does not induce climatic changes and precipitations on target areas. If the cost per square meter is not kept down by ingenious design and maybe on-site production, the total cost may well become outlandish. While the lid itself can be very light and cheap (cents per m2 ), the frame adds to the module cost. Also, installing them may be a logistic nightmare. We adopt ccover,1 = 1 USD/m2 , where ccover,1 is covering cost per unit surface area. This means that covering the lake is by far the most expensive part of the project, not only as investment, but also in terms of maintenance. We mention that there are also other means to cover the body of liquid, namely, floating white plastic balls. The material costs will be about the same as the sheeting but deployment will be much easier. But, hollow balls will be much more affected by wind than rim-anchored flat plastic sheeting; they can also pile up on the shoreline. Then, they have to be returned to the water’s surface by diligent macroproject caretakers. Since we will be using a lot of plastic, the bulk manufacturing costs should be low since bidding will offer the prospect of worldwide suppliers. While the sheeting is impermeable and causes 100% seawater retention (zero evaporation) the floating balls will (theoretically) cause ∼70% seawater retention.

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89.4 Investment Costs For each of these macro-engineered components (i.e., covering the lake, ducts and pumping) there are two obvious associated costs: • Costs of construction (investments). They are proportional with the main extensive quantity of each component. These costs refer to covering the surface xSlake of the lake, building the duct Spencer Gulf-Lake Eyre, including the pumps and the PV cells (this cost is a function of Lduct , Hduct , Dduct , Qsw , material of the duct). • Costs of operation and maintenance. They are proportional with the main extensive quantity of each component. They are related to seawater pumping and maintenance of the floating covering system. The duct cost increases by increasing the pipe diameter, as expected. Obviously, it depends on the tensioned duct material, with composed fabric the least expensive solution. The same feature exhibits the cost of installing the duct, but in this case the dependence on duct diameter is weaker. The cost of the pumps comprising the pumping installation decreases by enlarging. However, it is obvious that the larger contribution to the macroproject cost is provided by covering Lake Eyre. The cost of the duct, the PV cells and of the electric pumps enabling steady seawater shifting, are estimated. The cost cduct of the conducting tube is given by: cduct = cduct,1 Lduct

(89.14)

where cduct,1 is the cost of a unit length of duct. Similarly, the cost of installing the tube, cinst,duct is given by: cinst,duct = cinst,duct,1 Lduct

(89.15)

where cinst,duct,1 is the cost of installing a unit length of duct. The unitary costs depend, of course, on various factors, such as the duct diameter Dduct as well as the material of the duct. The cost of the pumping installation, Cpump , is obtained from: Cpump = Ppump cpump,1

(89.16)

where cpump,1 is the cost a pump of unit power. The cost cPV of the PV cells is obtained from the cost per Watt of the PV cells, c(PV,W) , and the total installed power: cPV = cPV,W PPV

(89.17)

Today, PV cell prices are about 3.0 USD/W for thin film cells (η∼0.08), and 4.8 USD/W for monocrystaline cells (η ∼ 0.12 − 0.15).

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Component

Cost/Unit

Units

Fabric Duct D = 9 m 900 USD/m

360,000 m

Installation Pumps PV Plant Lidding 60%

360,000 m 204,000 kW 204,000 kW 6000 km2

400 USD/m 800 USD/KW 4800 USD/KW 1.0 USD/m2

Total MUSD 324

144 163 980 6000

Totals One complete pumping unit for 1 km3 /year: 1611 MUSD

6000 MUSD

To evaluate the financial magnitude of partially covering Lake Eyre we have to calculate: ccover = xSlake ccover,1

(89.18)

An estimation of the investment costs is summed in Table 89.3. We also estimate that the pumping systems will be largely maintenance-free (cost ∼ 2% /year), but the floating lid will require higher maintenance (cost ∼ 10% /year). In order to effectively raise water levels and transform Lake Eyre from ephemeral to permanent, more (3−5) such pumping units have to be installed, raising the total cost of the project to 12−14 GUSD and maintenance costs to about 0.8 GUSD/year. Finally, note that the computations reported here are very rough and in actual practice the costs of the macro-project may be higher.

89.5 Seawater Irrigation Macroproject In what follows, some considerations on biosaline agriculture are now addressed. While we do not expect that this sector alone will make for the huge costs of this macroeconomic project, it is a good example of an activity enabled by this project, with potential to enhance the economic viability of the region. Biosaline irrigation requires no special equipment. Existing test farms have tried either flood irrigation of large basins or broadcast seawater (Glenn, Brown, & O’Leary, 1988). Seawater agriculture needs ~35% more irrigation fluid when crops are grown using seawater than conventional crops using freshwater. The main problem is that the land evaporates sweet water and the land’s soil salinity will increase year by year. However, generally, there are no insurmountable macroengineering problems associated with biosaline agriculture (Ozturk, Waisel, Khan, & Gork, 2006). Input values were suggested from the Project Ras al-Zawr (located in Saudi Arabia, north of Jubail on the Persian Gulf) where Salicornia bigelovii is cultivated (SaudiAramCo, 2007). There, computer-controlled pivot-irrigation arms sprayed seawater sucked in by three diesel pumps at a rate exceeding 28 m3 /min each unit watering a 50 ha (20.2 acres) circle. It took 6.5 h for the arms to complete one circuit. From these data one easily finds that qw,1 = 0.0093 ·10−4 m3 /(m2 s).

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The irrigation installation cost cirrig is, of course, proportional with the irrigated land surface: cirrig = Sirrig cirrig,1 (89.19) where cirrig,1 is the cost of irrigating a unit surface of cultivated crops. Depending on the crops, cirrig,1 ranges from 200 to 2,000 USD/acre (Farm Management, 2007) (one acre equals about 4,048 m2 ). Here we accept 750 USD/acre which then yields cirrig,1 = 0.185 USD/m2 . The annual maintenance cost for the irrigation installation, cirrig,maint,1 is cirrig,main,1 = firrig,maint cirrig (89.20) where firrig,maint is a given fraction. Here firrig,main = 0.05 has been adopted. The yearly maintenance cost firrig,main for the time period t of the irrigation installation is: cirrig,maint = cirrig,maint,1 (t/365·24·3600)

(89.21)

The cost associated to the irrigation installation, ctot,irrig , after the time period ctot,irrig = cirrig + cirrig,maint

(89.22)

The economic gain per year from the crops irrigated with seawater, girrig,year , is given by girrig,year = Sirrig girrig,1

(89.23)

where girrig,1 is the economic gain per unit surface of cultivated crops, per year. The economic gain after the time period t from the cultivated crops, girrig is given by girrig = girrig,1 (t/365·24·3600)

(89.24)

During 6 years of field trials in Mexico, Salicornia bigelovii produced an average annual crop of 1.7 kg/m2 of total biomass and 0.2 kg/m2 of oilseed (Imaz, Gay, Friedmann, & Goldberg, 1998). It is expected that the benefit consists of food products like cooking oil and “sea asparagus”, a delicacy that sells in Europe for USD 40/kg. In calculations, we considered as possible sale products: oil (0.75 USD/kg) and sea asparagus (40 USD/kg) but only results for this last (more advantageous economically) product are given here. In the two cases, girrig,1 is evaluated to about 0.15 USD/m2 and 8 USD/m2 , respectively.

89.6 Ecological, Cultural and Social Consequences This paper focuses mainly on technical and economical aspects. Ecological, cultural and social consequences of the macroproject (both positive and negative) have not been fully considered. To provide a perspective, a few considerations are presented next.

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An important problem is that, with continuous seawater imported from the Indian Ocean, the salinity of Eyre Lake will increase year by year. A rather similar problem occurs in case of closed seas, such as the Caspian Sea. But this large body of water has a rather constant salinity because it fills up by fresh river water. The difference is that in case of Lake Eyre, one has an anthropogenic salinization of an episodic inland body of brackish water (Williams, 2001). The accumulation of salt and its effects on Lake Eyre have to be examined and solutions proposed to diminish the consequences have to be proposed. For example, an artificial evaporative southern gulf of the ESR might be created, playing the same role that Kara-Bogaz Gol does for the Caspian Sea. In this way, the ESR’s salinity might be kept within reasonable limits. Also, a solution exists to extract freshwater from the Earth-atmosphere (Bolonkin, 2007). This freshwater might be used to decrease the seawater importation need. But the implementation of these (and other) solutions should be studied in much more detail. The present macroproject should be underpinned by an inter-basin freshwater transfer macroengineering plan renewal, viz., the diversion of Cooper Creek (Kingsford, Boulton, & Puckridge, 1998; Walker, Puckridge, & Blanch, 1997). Cooper Creek is one of the last “wild” (i.e. unregulated) river systems in Australia and is protected by the “Lake Eyre Basin Agreement.” But the valuable and infrequent river runoff may be used to dilute from time to time the Eyre Seawater Reservoir, replacing for time intervals the import of seawater. The potential inflow to Lake Eyre contributed by the Diamantina River must also be dealt with somehow. Given that these, and the other rivers that flow into Lake Eyre, have the potential to fill the lake in times of flood the diversion of these rivers would constitute a macroproject in itself. In addition to the large and irregular flood events that fill the lake, brackish water also covers half of the lake every three years and more than half the lake every ten years (Kingsford & Porter, 1993). All these aspects should be studied in detail and solutions to keep the salinity of ESR at a reasonable level should be proposed. Lake Eyre is not a heavily brackish lake and the land surrounding the present-day lake is not a barren desert. There are abundant plant and animal species established in this region. Indeed, Lake Eyre is one of Australia’s largest ephemeral wetlands and a major breeding ground for water-birds. When Lake Eyre floods it supports great numbers of birds, fish and invertebrates. Kingsford and Porter (1993) estimate more than 100,000 water-birds use the lake while Roshier, Robertson, Kingsford, and Green (2001) allege the Lake Eyre Basin has the highest habitat availability for water-birds in Australia, with interconnected wetlands providing broad pathways to the wetter regions of currently drought-stricken southeastern Australia. Also, unpredictable rainfalls produce regions that support a high diversity and abundance of wildlife (Stafford Smith, & Morton, 1990). This macroproject could, no doubt, disturb the extant Lake Eyre Basin ecosystem. Lake Eyre acts as an ephemeral breeding ground for numerous bird species; covering any part of it with floating material could upset this activity, even if, as proposed, the lid will not come close to the shores. Varying Lake Eyre’s salinity, water composition, O2 content, could have adverse effects too.

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Australia is a highly urbanized country and more than 50% of Australians live within 10 km (6.2 mi) of the world ocean (Chen & McAneney, 2006). In southern Australia, South Australia is classified as mostly “remote”, “other regionalrural” and “small regional” in terms of human settlement characteristics. Only Adelaide is a “large city” (Rofe & Oakley, 2006). The desert surrounding Lake Eyre is a region of very low population density and with a low future population growth projection (Taylor, 2003); human demographic projections are unlikely to change radically. It is preferable that development occur only after the Eyre Seawater Reservoir is emplaced and indisputably proven to be a benefic solution by computer modeling (Dean, Flowerdew, Lawrence, & Eckermann, 2006). Provision for no or insignificant cultural heritage damage to take place ought to be assured. Also, the capping of Lake Eyre would have consequences on the aesthetics of the landscape which is a tourist attraction. The lake is protected as a National Park. How groundwater flow beneath Lake Eyre might be changed by ESR’s presence should also be studied, even if no important negative effects are expected (Holzbecher, 2005). There is a possibility the topography and soils will endure some landscape contamination during emergencies. Design solutions should be proposed to ensure that the visual impact to be tolerable as the hoses/pipelines/tubes can be camouflaged, that the region’s groundwater and surface waters won’t be polluted, that air quality may improve (less blowing dust), that noise from enclosed electric pumps won’t provide a nuisance to anyone, and that construction wastes will be removed and/or discretely entombed. In addition, further research is necessary on the macro-project’s possible effects on flora and fauna, groundwater, water and soil salinity and aesthetic and cultural values. A useful initial reference along this line is Williams (2002). There are many benefits of the macroproject such as provision of photovoltaic energy, potential human settlement in the region, and increased areas for grazing stock. Also, there would be immeasurable economic gains stemming from the removal of dry land as a source of dust storms (Shao, Leys, McTainsh, & Tews, 2007) – it would be immersed by imported seawater – and locally enhanced rainfall will help curtail/diminish such damaging weather events in the region. All of these should be studied in much more detail. A full-of-water Lake Eyre may change the surrounding climate around, making it more favorable for human settlements. Such a change has been studied with rather disappointing preliminary conclusions; it remains under public debate (Hope & Neville, 2004). We have shown that biosaline agriculture in the ESR region might be profitable. However, a much smaller scale experiment closer to the coast (even at the scale of single landholder) might be more appropriate before undertaking an ESR macroproject. Indeed, this experiment would eliminate the costs of both ducted pipelines to the lake and costs of transporting the produce from such a remote region. Also, it is obvious that sea asparagus gains its high price per kilogram from the fact that it is somewhat of a “novelty” product; the mass production of sea asparagus could lower the prices. These aspects should be studied, too.

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89.7 Conclusions The present work proposes a macroengineering project, aimed at stimulating economic activity and human settlement in the Lake Eyre Basin. This territory, belonging to South Australia, often described as picturesque, is semiarid and practically unsettled. Historically, human settlement in the region was dependent on traditional agriculture as a basis, eventually followed by urbanization and industrial activities. In the past 150 years, a number of proposals were made, but none convinced or demonstrated the possibility of improving local arid conditions of inland central Australia. It may be that the chronic lack of freshwater and salt-ridden soils in the Lake Eyre Basin do not allow for the traditional agriculture economy. But, during the early 21st century, it may opportune to change this previous paradigm. The all-important quantity in this new macroengineering thinking is energy, instead of rich soils and precipitation. The Lake Eyre Basin is suitable for clean, large scale photovoltaic energy production. Large quantities of seawater can be transported without losses on the ground, using large, cheap tension textile tubes. Saltwater from the Indian Ocean can be pumped for input into Lake Eyre, which can be used as seawater reservoir for biosaline agriculture on its encircling shore. Increasing and stabilizing the level of the lake is of crucial importance in the macroproject. For this, apart from the relatively modest saltwater additional input, evaporation from the lake has to be reduced; the only means to perform this is by liding the lake with a floating, impervious, plastic mat (or, alternatively, with buoyant white hollow plastic balls). The exact composition and desired optical properties (reflectance) of this cap remain to be seen. Suppressing evaporation of the freshwater/brackish water is an important factor designed to raise the level of the lake and has the beneficial consequence of preventing salt concentration. In a first stage, in the period of raising levels, salinity is expected even to decrease. A crude economic cost estimate is included in this paper. We do believe that all the methods and elements presented in this article work, but using them together may even have a synergic effect. However, further research is necessary to provide a broader perspective on both the benefits and the negative consequences of this specific macroproject. The main lines of future research are briefly described in the section entitled Ecological, Cultural and Social Consequences.

References Allan, G. L., Banens, B., & Fielder S. (2001). Developing commercial inland saline aquaculture in Australia: Part 2. Resource inventory and assessment. (FRDC Project No. 98/335; NSW Fisheries Final Report Series, No. 31, 62–63). Badescu, V. (2006). Simple optimization procedure for silicon-based solar cell interconnection in a series-parallel PV module. Energy Conversion and Management, 47, 1146–1158. Badescu, V., Cathcart, R. B., & Schuiling, R. D. (Eds.). (2006). Macro-Engineering. A challenge for the future (Vol. 54). Dordrecht: Springer, Water Science and Technology Library. Boia, L. (2005). The weather in the imagination. Chicago, IL: Reaktion Books.

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Bolonkin, A. (2007). Extraction of freshwater and energy from attmosphere. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0704/0704.2571.pdf Chen, K., & McAneney, J. (2006). High-resolution estimates of Australia’s coastal population, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L16601. Dean, S. M., Flowerdew, J., Lawrence, B., & Eckermann, S. (2006). Parameterization of orographic cloud dynamics in a GCM. Climatic Dynamics, 28, 581–597. DeVogel, S. B., Mageeb, J. W., Manleya, W. F., & Millerc, G. H. (2004). A GIS-based reconstruction of late Quaternary paleohydrology: Lake Eyre, air central Australia. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Paleoecology, 204, 1–13. DESERTEC. (2008). DESERTEC – Australia Clean power from deserts. Retrieved November 23, 2008, from http://www.trec.net.au Farm Management. (2007). Retrieved October 10, 2007, from http://www.cook.rutgers. edu/~farmmgmt/ne-budgets/methodology.html Fleming, M. (1995). Australian water resources are different. Australian Science, 16, 8–10. Gaskill, A., & Reese, C. E. (2008). Global albedo enhancement project. Retrieved November 23, 2008, from http://www.global-warming-geo-engineering.org/Albedo-Enhancement/ Introduction/Disadvantages/ag3.html Ghassemi, F., & White, I. (2006). Inter-Basin water transfer: Case studies from Australia, United States, Canada, China and India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, L. M. (2006). Valuing water: Variability and the Lake Eyre basin, central Australia. Australian Geographer, 37, 73–85. Glenn, E. P., Brown, J. J., & O’Leary, J. W. (1988). Irrigating crops with seawater. Scientific American, 279, 76–81. Holzbecher, E. (2005). Groundwater flow pattern in the vicinity of a salt lake. Hydrobiologia, 552, 233. Hope, P. K., & Neville, N. (2004). The rainfall response to permanent inland water in Australia. Australian Meteorological Magazine, 53, 251–262. Imaz, M., Gay, C., Friedmann, R., & Goldberg, B. (1998). Mexico joins the venture: Joint implementation and greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Berkeley, CA: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Environmental Energy Technologies Division, paper LBNL-4200. (Work supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency through the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE AC03 76SF00098). Kingsford, R. (2006) Ecology of desert rivers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kingsford, R., Boulton, A. J., & Puckridge, J. M. (1998). Challenges in managing dry land rivers crossing political boundaries: lessons from Cooper Creek and the Paroo River, Central Australia. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Systems, 8, 361. Kingsford R. T., & Porter, J. L. (1993). Waterbirds of Lake Eyre, Australia. Biological Conservation, 65, 141–151. Kurokawa, K. (2006). Energy from the desert: Practical proposals for very large scale photovoltaic systems. London: Earthscan. McMahon, T. A., Murphy, R., Little, P., Costelloe, J. F., Peel, M. C., Chiew, F. S. H., et al. (2005). Hydrology of Lake Eyre Basin. Melbourne, VIC: University of Melbourne and Sinclair Knight Merz, Malvern Victoria: Australia. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Ozturk, M., Waisel, Y., Khan, M. A., & Gork, G. (2006). Biosaline agriculture and salinity tolerance in plants. Basel: Birkhauser. Pigram, J. (2006). Australia’s water resources: from use to management. Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing. Rofe, M. W., & Oakley, S. (2006). Constructing the Port: External perceptions and interventions in the making of place in Port Adelaide, South Australia. Geographical Research, 44, 272–284. Roshier, D. A., Robertson, A. I., Kingsford, R. T., & Green, D. G. (2001). Continental-scale interactions with temporary resources may explain the paradox of large populations of desert waterbirds in Australia. Landscape Ecology, 16, 547–556.

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SaudiAramCo. (2007). Retrieved October 10, 2007, from http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/ issue/199406/samphire-from.sea.to.shining.seed.htm Shao, Y., Leys, J. F., McTainsh, G. H., & Tews, K. (2007) Numerical simulation of the October 2002 dust event in Australia. Journal of Geophysical Research, 112, D08207. Sohn, E. (2007). The big dry. Science News, 172, 266. Solar Irradiation Database. (2007). Retrieved October 10, 2007, from http://energy.caeds. eng.uml.edu/fpdb/Irrdata.asp Stafford Smith, D. M., & Morton S. R. (1990). A framework for the ecology of arid Australia. Journal of Arid Environments, 18, 255–278. Taylor, J. (2003). Population futures in the Australian desert. Australian Geographer, 34, 355–370. Walker, K. F., Puckridge, J. T., & Blanch, S. J. (1997). Irrigation development on Cooper Creek, Central Australia: Prospects for a regulated economy in a boom-and-bust ecology, Aquatic Conservation; Marine and Freshwater Systems, 7, 63. Williams, W. D. (2001). Anthropogenic salinization of inland waters. Hydrobiologia, 466, 329. Williams, W. D. (2002). Environmental threats to salt lakes and the likely status of inland saline ecosystems in 2025. Environmental Conservation, 29, 154–167.

Part XI

Dams

Chapter 90

Mega-Hydroelectric Power Generation on the Yangtze River: The Three Gorges Dam Stuart A. Harris

90.1 Introduction Arguably the most aggressive and important development of the late 20th and the first part of the 21st century is the Three Gorges Dam in the People’s Republic of China. It represents a major stepping stone in the industrialization of China and has the potential to bring a more comfortable life to millions of people, but at considerable cost to many others (International Rivers Network, 2003; Shen, 1998). It has also resulted in a vast change in the landscape along a considerable portion of one of the world’s three longest rivers (Dai, 1994; Pomfret, 2001). There are enormous environmental risks and consequences which have engendered a substantial amount of debate, both in China and in the rest of the world. This paper will summarize the main issues in the debate.

90.2 The Physical Setting The People’s Republic of China controls one of the four largest land areas in the world. It lies in eastern Asia and is bounded on its north side by the cold Taiga forests of Siberia and on the south by the northern slopes of the Himalayan mountain chain (Fig. 90.1). The western part is arid while the eastern side experiences Monsoon rains and occasional typhoons. Unfortunately, the precipitation is seasonal and highly variable from year to year. Topographically, it consists of a succession of step-like surfaces, the highest one being the Tibetan Plateau at 5,000 m (16.404 ft) elevation. All these plateaus have mountain chains rising above the general ground surface. Since the Indian Plate is still advancing northwards under the Asian Plate, surfaces such as the Tibetan Plateau, together with the various mountain ranges on them are still rising, accompanied by frequent major earthquakes.

S.A. Harris (B) Department of Geography, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N4, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

S.D. Brunn (ed.), Engineering Earth, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4_90,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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Fig. 90.1 Circular map with China highlighted

The third longest river in the world, the Yangtze, has its headwaters on the Plateau, and flows eastwards for 6,720 km (3,964 mi) to the East China Sea across the wetter, eastern side of China, cutting spectacular gorges through the outer margins of the succession of mountains located on the lower surfaces. The river developed when the floor of the former Tethys Sea became dry land in the area now called Tibet. The Yangtze has sufficient erosive power to have been able to cut down through the rising mountains crossing its path, so producing a succession of spectacular gorges, i.e., it is an antecedent stream. When it reaches the 200 m (656 ft) surface, it has an annual volume of 451 billion cubic meters from a drainage area of one million km2 (386,130 mi2 ). There it has cut an open valley in granite bedrock in the mountain range at the front of the terrace, producing good conditions for building a dam. Below this point, the river enters its flood plain, and flows some 1,500 km (932 mi) to the East China Sea. Under natural conditions this broad coastal plain is periodically subject to serious flooding. The river enters the sea at Shanghai, which is the most important port in China, analogous to New Orleans on the Mississippi delta. The river has been navigable from there to a point 2,620 km (1,628 mi) inland, while small junks and rafts can navigate even further inland for 8 months of the year. The limitations to increased navigation are not merely the gorges, but include the precipitation regimes along the river. There can be catastrophic precipitation in any of the three main zones, viz., the upper Yangtze, the middle reaches, or on the

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coastal lowland, resulting in major downstream flooding. There can also be major droughts, e.g., in early 2008, when there was too little water in the river on the coastal lowland, so that boats were left stranded along the river banks and farmers lacked the water to irrigate their rice crops (Watts ,2008). In 1342 A.D., the Yangtze River in Jiangzu Province ran dry, with the river bed being exposed for a day. This was repeated on 13 January 1954 (Australian Chinese Daily Magazine, 2007). On the other hand, in 1954, 193,000 km3 (47.75 million acres) of land were flooded, and 18,884,000 people had to be evacuated from Wuhan (population 8 million people) and the surrounding area for more than three months. At least 33,169 people drowned and the Jingguang Railway was out of service for over 100 days (China Culture Mall Trading Group, Inc., 2007). Wuhan, some 900 km (560 mi) inland, is the area in which Chinese agriculture began in Neolithic times, 4,000–10,000 years ago, at the junction of the Han and Yangtze rivers (Ren, 1996). This area represents some of the most fertile land in a country where less than 10% of the land is suitable for intensive agriculture. Wuhan was the capital during the first two Chinese dynasties, before the center of political power moved north.

90.3 History of the Project When Sun Yat-Sen began the revolutionary movement in Wuhan, he realized the potential value of harnessing the Yangtze River, and in 1919 proposed that a dam be built (China Culture Mall Trading Group, Inc., 2007). In 1932 preliminary work was commenced on plans for building a dam by the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. The Japanese captured the region in 1939 and produced the Otani plan. After their defeat, the Chinese continued work with the aid of the US Bureau of Reclamation (Jones & Freeman, 2008). Mao Zedong rhapsodized about the dam in a poem, but economic problems prevented its progress. Li Peng restarted design work in the 1980s and finally in 1992 the construction of the dam was approved by the National People’s Congress, despite a record number of absentee members. This was probably in response to the environmental and other concerns raised by many people. Actual construction was started on 14 December1994 (Allin, 2004).

90.4 The Three Gorges Dam This is the largest hydroelectric project in the world, with a generating capacity projected to be 22,500 megawatts when it becomes fully operational in 2011. It will have 34 generators, of which 32 are main generators with an output of 700 MW. The other two are power plant generators producing 50 MW. The dam is located at Sandouping, Yichang, in Hubei Province, and will hold back 39.3 km3 of water (Fig. 90.2). The dam is 2,335 m (7,661 ft) in length, 101 m (331 ft) high, and has a thickness of 115 m (377 ft) at the base, tapering to 40 m

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Fig. 90.2 Oblique map of the Yangtze River

(131 ft) at the top. It is constructed of reinforced concrete and is designed to withstand earthquakes of up to 7.0 on the Richter scale. In addition, there are locks designed to allow the passage of freighters of up to 10,000 tons. The impounded water forms a lake extending almost 900 km (559 mi) upstream that can be seen from space, like the Great Wall of China (Fig. 90.3). It is also regarded as a symbol of the capability of the present-day People’s Republic of China.

90.5 Economics The lower inflation rate in China since 1994 has allowed the cost to be reduced from 203.9 billion Yuan to about 180 billion Yuan or $US 25 billion (China Three Gorges Project Corporation, 2006, 2007). This cost is expected to be recovered when the electricity output reaches 1000 TWh at a selling price of 250 billion Yuan ($US 30 billion), estimated to occur in about 10 years after the dam reaches full operation in 2011 (China Culture Mall Trading Group, Inc., 2007). Interim funding comes from the Three Gorges Dam Construction Fund, the World Bank, revenue from the Gezhouba Dam which was built first, policy loans from the China Development Bank, loans from commercial banks around the world, corporate bonds, and revenue from the electrical power already being generated. Every province receiving power from the project must pay an additional charge of 7.00 Yuan ($US 0.88) per MWh. All other provinces except Tibet have to pay a tax of 4.00 Yuan ($US 0.50) per MWh (China Three Gorges Project Corporation, 2003). As of 1 July 2008, the Three Gorges Dam Project had already generated over 235 TWh of electricity (Table 1 from Xinhua News Agency, 2007-12-08).

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Fig. 90.3 Satellite photos of the Yangtze River dam site: (a) 1987, (b) 2006. (Source: EarthObservatory.NASA.gov/Newsroom/NewImages, accessed Oct 7, 2008)

Presumably when the debts are paid off, the Three Gorges Dam Project will generate funds that can be used by the China Three Gorges Project Corporation for new projects or to reduce energy costs in China.

90.6 Benefits: Real or Projected Apart from the nationalistic pride involved in building the largest hydroelectric dam in the world, there are a number of real or probable benefits from the construction. These are outlined below.

90.6.1 Provision of Clean Energy As has been widely discussed before and during the 9th Olympic Games in Beijing, air pollution is a major problem in eastern China. The major source of energy for heating buildings has traditionally been coal. It took 366 g of coal to generate 1 kWh

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of electricity in 2006 (National Development and Reform Commission of China, 2007). It is argued that the electricity from the project will replace coal consumption by 31 million tons per year, potentially cutting the emission of greenhouse gases by 100 million tons (Carbonplanet, 2006). In addition, burning coal discharges millions of tons of dust, 1 million tons of sulfur dioxide, 370 thousand tons of nitric oxide, 10 thousand tons of carbon monoxide and a considerable amount of mercury into the atmosphere (China Three Gorges Project Corporation, 2006). However, this reduction assumes no growth in use of energy in the region, which is unlikely. The migration of peasants to the cities in search of work and a better life, coupled with the rapid growth in the industrial sector seem likely to increase energy consumption in the future. The advent of numerous cars replacing bicycles on the streets of the cities, coupled with the rapid industrial growth has been making air quality an even worse problem. The provision of large quantities of electricity to at least part of the main industrial area of the country must slow the increase in air pollution in that region. It is likely that most of the electricity will be used in the Yangtze industrial corridor since too much energy is lost in the transmission lines if it is transported to distant locations. However, because there are at least 8,000 chemical plants along the lower Yangtze River, it cannot result in a complete clean-up of the air in the region.

90.6.2 Navigation The dam affects the type of shipping along the Yangtze. Previously, only vessels smaller than 1,500 tons capacity could travel beyond the dam site due to the gorges, and then only for 8 months of the year. Raising the water level behind the dam and installing ship locks capable of lifting ships up to 10,000 tons will make yearround navigation possible for larger vessels on the lower 660 km (410 mi) of the impounded lake. This improvement is expected to increase the river shipping from 10 million tons to 100 million tons per year. Cost of shipping is projected to decrease by 30–37% (China Economic Review, 2007). So far, the freight capacity of the river has increased six times and the cost of shipping has decreased by 25%. Completion of the ship lift system in 2014 should improve the situation, although the ship lift may be down-sized to one that has a 3,000 ton capacity (Three Gorges Probe, 2005). It will also encourage industrial development along the river above the dam.

90.6.3 Flood Control and Drought Relief This could be the most significant potential function of the dam if it is allowed to take on this role as well as generation of electricity. The storage capacity of the dam is 22 billion m3 (18 million acre ft). It has the potential of being used for flood control to protect the area downstream. There would have to be some modification to the electricity production at times, but downstream are the cities of Wuhan, Nanjing and Shanghai. In addition, the area along the river represents a large area of some

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of China’s most productive farmland, as well as the industrial heartland of China. Until now, the lower Yangtze River has flooded between once in 10 years and once in 100 years. The expectation is that the dam would minimize the effect of the next major flood (China Culture Mall Trading Group, Inc., 2007), presumably referring to those floods originating in the upper or middle reaches of the Yangtze River. As noted above, there can also be major droughts along the lower Yangtze River such as in the early months of 2008. The dam has the potential to alleviate this problem if suitably modified, and it is doubtful if this would seriously reduce the electricity production. Thus far, this aspect of the potential use of the dam does not seem to have been taken into account by the Three Gorges Dam Corporation.

90.6.4 Reforestation The Chinese government has been pressured into reducing deforestation in the area upstream of the dam in order to protect against erosion and siltation. FAO has suggested that the Asia-Pacific region should gain about 6,000 km2 (2,317 mi2 ) of forest in 2008, compared with 13,000 km2 (5,020 mi2 ) net loss of forest each year during the 1990s. The terrible floods in 1988 convinced the government that it needed to restore the former forests of the middle Yangtze area, and it is this memory that has turned around the net forest cover equation for the region (China Economic Review, 2007).

90.6.5 Waste Management The construction of the dam has been accompanied by the completion of many waste treatment plants in the large conurbation and hinterland of Chongqing. Previously, effluent was discharged into the river without treatment, and obviously, the 900 km (559 mi) long lake would become a gigantic sewage pond if steps were not taken to remedy the situation. The Ministry of Environmental Protection of the People’s Republic of China reported that over 50 waste water treatment plans had been built by April 2007, with a total capacity of 1.84 million tons per day. This has resulted in about 65% of the waste water being treated before entering the reservoir. In addition, about 32 landfill sites have been developed which can handle 7664.5 tons of solid waste per day (Wikipedia, 2008).

90.6.6 Water Diversion In 2000 China announced plans to divert water from the Yangtze River to the Huang He. This river often dries up due to overuse since it supplies water to Beijing, Tianjin, etc., in the northern part of the region. At least two routes are possible, the easterly one using sections of the Grand Canal to provide water to Tianjin and a central one connecting the Han to the Huang He. These diversions are expected to be

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completed in about a decade. A third, western route is planned, but is not projected to be completed for 50 years.

90.6.7 Accumulation of Funds After about 10 years, the cost of the project should be paid off and the revenue generated in future years should provide a significant accumulation of funds after operating and maintenance costs have been covered. Whether the present surtax paid by the Provinces will be removed is unknown, but regardless of this, the Three Gorges Dam Corporation will be building a very large bank balance, similar to the national oil company, Gasprom, in Russia. This can then be used to finance other projects.

90.7 Problems: Real or Suggested There was widespread criticism of the project, both in China and abroad, which started long before the project was approved. The following appear to be the main items that have provoked the concerns.

90.7.1 Relocation of the Former Residents of the Valley A major requirement of the project was the removal of the local residents from the valley upstream of the dam. In the 1990s, it was estimated that 1,130,000 people would lose their homes and farms. It has subsequently been reported that at least 1.4 million people were actually moved, including residents of many riverside towns (Xinhua News Agency, 2008). About 140,000 residents were moved out of Hubei Province to the surrounding areas while the rest have relocated in the Province. The main relocation was completed by 22 July 2008, but on 11 October 2007, the Chinese state media announced that an additional 4 million people will be encouraged to move from their homes near the dam to the Chongqing metropolitan area by the year 2020 (BBC News, 2007-10-12; Jiang Yuxia, 2007; Wang Hongjiang, 2007). This relocation is at least partly related to slope instability which was increased by the new water levels as discussed below. The relocation was difficult for the affected people who lost their homes and had to find new land or jobs elsewhere. Some young people found work on the tour boats run by the State Tourist Bureau, taking foreigners on a tour of the area above and below the dam, but for most, it meant leaving the area in which their family had lived and survived for centuries. The Government sent tax money to be given to the displaced people, but there are accusations that the tax money disappeared after it reached the local government officials, so the displaced people received no financial assistance (Becker, 2000; Julie Chao, 2001-05-15). The intent had been to pay the relocated people 50 Yuan (approximately $US 7) a month to aid in their settling into a new life.

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90.7.2 Effect on Local Culture and Aesthetic Values The former river level has been raised over 100m above the dam, flooding about 1300 archaeological sites (Debatty, 2007-12-09). The appearance of the valley has been changed and many undiscovered sites will have been inundated. Where possible, cultural and historic relicts have been moved to higher ground, but many, e.g., the famous “hanging coffins” in the Shen Nong Gorge are part of the landscape disappearing beneath the waters (Hogan, 2008). This is the land of the Ba, an ancient people who settled in the region over 3,000 years ago (Kleeman, 1998). They buried their dead in coffins in caves high above the river. As noted above, the construction of the dam has caused many newer settlers to leave their familiar surroundings and cultures to move to unfamiliar areas where they must start their life anew.

90.7.3 Sedimentation Inevitably, there will be deposition of large quantities of silt in the form of a delta at the head of the impoundment, brought down from the upstream reaches of the Yangtze, though it is claimed that this will be reduced by the construction of other smaller dams upstream (Wikipedia, 2008). Whether this is true remains to be seen. Deforestation of the slopes has been reduced from about 20% in 1950 to about 10% in 2008 (Qing, 1997). Current conditions indicate that 80% of the slopes along the river are yielding about 40 million tons of sediment that is washed down slope into the lake each year. It has been suggested that the people relocated along the lake will cause additional deforestation and erosion as they commence intensive agriculture in former forests. An additional problem is that the higher water levels in the valley will result in higher levels of the water table in the surrounding areas. Already, one village has had to be evacuated because of the development of large cracks as large blocks of land start to slide into the lake (Xinhua News Agency, 2007-5-09). Undoubtedly, this will prove to be an ongoing problem. In 2001 the Changjiang Water Resources Commission identified 1320 zones along the lake with a potential risk of landslides. Of these 760 are expected to become active (Probe International, 12-27-2007). Excessive sedimentation in the artificial lake could block the sluice gates which can cause failure of the dam. This happened in the case of the Banqiao Dam in 1975 that resulted in the failure of another 61 dams downstream. Over 20,000 people were drowned. In the case of the Three Gorges Dam, failure would not trigger failure of other dams, but the tremendous volume of water released would undoubtedly devastate the countryside and cities downstream.. Some hydrologists think that there would be less silt deposition down-stream of the Three Gorges Dam (Winchester, 2008). They argue that this will make the river banks below the dam more vulnerable to failure and flooding. It is also suggested that the large quantities of silt carried past Shanghai strengthen its foundations, and the postulated reduction in sediment will make the city vulnerable to serious flooding.

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90.7.4 Tectonics The dam will impound a very long lake that crosses several mountain ranges which are still rising. If a severe earthquake occurred under the lake, it could produce waves of water that could overtop the dam and cause severe devastation downstream. This has happened in Chile and could even result in failure of the dam. When the crust of the Earth is loaded with extra weight, isostacy causes a sinking of that part of the crust to compensate for the change. The result may be downward bending of the rocks under the weight (Walcott, 1970). Where the underlying rocks are brittle and faulted, movement may also cause induced earthquakes as the rocks slide along planes of weakness. This is believed to have occurred in the case of the Boulder Dam in the western United States (University of Alaska, Fairbanks, n.d.), and is suspected of causing the 12 May 2008 Sichuan earthquake (Probe International, 6-05-2008).

90.7.5 Pollution Although there has been great progress in building waste water treatment plants, there is still a great deal of pollution of the impounded waters. Since the lake waters are not moving and the water will remain behind the dam for a considerable period of time before passing through the turbines, the lake is likely to become a giant sewage pond unless attention is paid to this being done. The building of new chemical plants and other industrial developments above the dam will tend to make matters worse. Another environmental hazard consists of the toxins contained in over 1,600 factories and mines that have been flooded by the impoundment (PBS, n.d.). Whether the Chinese can control the build-up of contaminants in the lake remains to be seen. The dam also reduces the ability of the river to flush out the humanmade contaminants below the impoundment. Over 1 billion tons of wastewater are discharged into the river each year in the lower Yangtze River, so the pollution levels are predicted to rise. For the current level of pollution, the cost of reclamation is estimated to cost 2.8 billion Yuan to clean this part of the river (Qing, 1997).

90.7.6 Biodiversity The contaminants in the Yangtze River are already blamed for the great decrease in numbers of the Yangtze River porpoise (Nature, 2008). The numbers have been decreasing at the rate of 7.3% per year and it is believed that it will soon become extinct. Mammals accumulate various chemical contaminants such as PCB’s in their organs, which appear to be the reason at least for their decline. Likewise, the Yangtze River dolphin has now been declared officially extinct (Sample, 2007; Turvey, 2007), partly due to the indiscriminate and often illegal fishing practices of dragging longlines of unbaited hooks through their habitat. Several other endemic aquatic species are believed to be becoming extinct, e.g., the Chinese Sturgeon (King 2007) and the Yangtze giant soft-shelled turtle (Yardley, 2008). The Chinese alligator and the Chinese paddlefish are critically endangered.

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Fig. 90.4 Map of Three Gorges Dam site features. (Source: Shen and Xie 2004) (For color figure see online version)

During the previous few millennia of human occupation of the Lower Yangtze River area, the original terrestrial vegetation has largely been cleared to provide land for intensive cultivation. As a result, we do not really know what species were present in its original state. Until about 1960 the aquatic fauna was varied and included the above-mentioned species in reasonable numbers. Since then, a combination of industrialization and greater affluence of many local Chinese has resulted in a great increase in the use of power boats for fishing. These developments, coupled with the growth of 9,000 chemical plants along the river banks and the resulting increased pollution, appear to be dooming the aquatic fauna to extinction unless there are drastic changes. Protected parks and natural reserves are needed to protect fragile habitats and threatened ecosystems (Fig. 90.4) (Shen & Xie, 2004).

90.7.7 National Security Concerns The Three Gorges Dam represents an obvious potential target for terrorists. This was pointed out to the US Congress by the US Department of Defense, who regarded it as a potential target for Taiwanese terrorists in the case of a Chinese invasion of that Territory (US Department of Defense, 2004). The Chinese media responded angrily, with General Lui Yuan of the People’s Liberation Army being quoted as saying that the People’s Republic of China would be “seriously on guard against threats from Taiwan independence Terrorists” (BBC News, 2004-09-14).

90.8 Conclusions There have to be sweeping changes whenever a large population of people living in a limited area wish to change their way of life from poor peasants to a western life style. The resulting consumer society requires good income and a plentiful supply of

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electrical power. The latter generally comes at the expense of the landscape, while the former involves industrialization with all its consequences. The industrial revolution in China is taking place at a tremendous rate and the Lower Yangtze valley is the leader of the change. Obviously, there is much to be gained by the Chinese people if the developments are successful. However there are also some very negative consequences to be overcome. In the worst case scenario, the dam might give way and cause the world’s greatest loss of human lives, together with the crippling of the Chinese industrial machine. How the future will unfold remains to be seen, but the Chinese government regards the potential advantages as outweighing the disadvantages.

References Allin, S. R. F. (2004). An examination of China’s Three Gorges Dam project based on the Framework Presented in the Report of The World Commission on Dams. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-12142004Australian Chinese Daily Magazine. (2007). See page 140 of the 986th edition, published on 18th August, 2007. BBC News (2004-09-14). Troops sent to protect China dam. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3654772.stm 125131/unrestricted/ SA11in_090304.pdf BBC News. (2007-10-12). Millions forced out by China dam. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7042660.stm Becker, J. (2000). Dam official flees with $930 million. South China Morning Post, May 3rd, 2000. Carbonplanet. (2006). Greenhouse gas emissions by country. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.carbonplanet.com/home/country_emissions.php China Culture Mall Trading Group, Inc. (2007). The Three Gorges Dam. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.chinaculturemall.com/Crafts/article.aspx?id=2530 [in Chinese]. China Economic Review. (2007). Yangtze as a vital logistics aid. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/logistics/?cat=88 [in Chinese]. China Three Gorges Project Corporation. (2003). The Three Gorges Dam. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.ctgcp..com.cn/sx/sxgczds.php?mClassld=015004 [in Chinese]. China Three Gorges Project Corporation. (2006). Brief explanation of TGP. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.ctgcp.com.cn/sxsln/index.php [in Chinese]. China Three Gorges Project Corporation. (2007). The Three Gorges Dam. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.ctgcp.com.cn/sx/sxgczds.php?ClassId=015004 [in Chinese]. Dai, Q. (Ed.). (1994). Yangtze! Yangtze! Debate over the Three Gorges Project. Toronto: Earthscan. Debatty, G. (2007-12-09). Flotsam, jetsam and the Three Gorges Dam. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007682.html Hogan, C. M. (2008). Shen Nong hanging coffins. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=17946 International Rivers Network. (2003). Human rights dammed off at Three Gorges. Berkley, California. Jiang Y, (2007). China warns of environmental “catastrophe” from Three Gorges dam. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-09-26/ content_6864252.htm Jones, W. C., & Freeman, M. (2008). Three Gorges Dam: The TVA on the Yangtze River. Washington, DC: Schiller Institute. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www. schillerinstitute.org/economy/phys_econ/phys_econ_3_gorges.html

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Julie C. (2001-05-15). Relocation for the giant dam inflames Chinese peasants. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1925172.stm King, M. (2007). Another extinction for the Chinese Yangtze River? August 16th, 2007. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/ecology/another-extinctionfor-the-Chinese-Yangtze-River? Kleeman, T. F. (1998). Great perfection: religion and ethnicity in a Chinese MillennialKingdom. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. National Development and Reform Commission of China. (2007). The Three Gorges Dam. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/zjgx/t20070307_120213.htm PBS. (n.d.). Great Wall across the Yangtze. Environmental concerns. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.pbs.org/itvs/greatwall/controversy3.html Pomfret, J. (2001). China’s giant dam faces huge problems. The Washington Post, 7 January. Probe International (2007-12-27). Three Gorges landslide threat forces villagers to flee. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.eprf.ca/pi/index.cfm?DSP=content& ContentID=17487 Probe International (2008-6-05). Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www. probeinternational.org/catalog/content_fullstory.php?content. Qing, D, (1997). The River Dragon has come! The Three Gorges Dam and the fate of China’s Yangtze River and its people. East Gate Book. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Ren, S. (1996). Several major achievements in early Neolithic China, ca. 5000 BC. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://http-server.carlton.ca/~bgordon/Rice/papers/REN96.htm Sample, I. (2007). Yangtze river dolphin driven to extinction. The Guardian, Wednesday August 8th, 2007. Shen, D. (1998). New study forecasts Three Gorges resettlement disaster. World Rivers Review, 13(2), 4–6. Shen, G., & Xie, Z. (2004). Three Gorges Project: Chance and challenge. Science, 304(20 April), 681. Three Gorges Probe. (2005). Ship lift work to begin at Three Gorges site. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://threegorgesprobe.org/tgp/index.cfm?DSP=content&ContentID=12712. University of Alaska, Fairbanks, (n.d.). Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF7/739. html US Department of Defense. (2004). Annual report on the military power of the People’s Republic of China. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.defenselink. mil/pubs/d20040528PRC.pdf Walcott, R. I. (1970). Isostatic response to loading of the crust in Canada. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 7, 716–726. Wang, H. (2007). Millions more face relocation from Three Gorges reservoir area. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-10-11/ content_6864252.htm Watts, J. (2008). Outlook grim for Asia’s longest river. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://www.the age.com.au/news/world/outlook-grim-for asias-longest river. Wikipedia. (2008). Three Gorges Dam. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved August 20, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges _Dam Winchester, S. (2008). The river at the center of the World: A journey up the Yangtze and back in Chinese Time. Henry Holt and Co. Xinhua News Agency. (2007-05-09). Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://news. xinhuanet.com/newscentre/content [in Chinese]. Xinhua News Agency. (2007-12-08). Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://:hinaneast:xinhuanet.com/jszb/2007-12/08/content_11882715.htm [in Chinese]. Xinhua News Agency. (2008-07-22). Last town was relocated. Retrieved January 21st and 25th, from http://news.xinhuanet.com/newscentre/2008-07-22/content_8750426.htm [in Chinese]. Yardley, J. (2008). Future of Giant Turtle still uncertain. The New York Times, 9th October, 2008; 7th October, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/world/asia/08turtle.html

Chapter 91

Demographic Impacts of the Three Gorges Dam Yan Tan and Graeme Hugo

91.1 The Scale of Human Displacement The Three Gorges project (TGP) on the Yangtze River in China has three major purposes: flood control, hydropower generation, and navigation improvement. The latest survey of the affected population, land, infrastructure and other assets in the Three Gorges reservoir area was conducted by the Changjiang Water and Resources Commission (CWRC) in 1991–1992. The inventory of flooding losses in the survey reports that at the normal pool level of 175 m (574 ft) at the completion of the dam in 2009, the reservoir will stretch 660 km (373 mi) long and average 1.1 km (.68 mi) wide, encompassing a total area of 1,084 km2 (415 mi2 ) (CWRC, 1993). The reservoir will inundate 24,500 ha (60,539 acres) of cultivated land and orchards, and about 35 km2 (93.8 mi2 ) of residential areas and 824 km (512 mi) of roads. The affected area encompasses 20 cities and counties, 116 towns, 356 communes, and 1,711 villages in Chongqing municipality and Hubei province. Moreover, 1,599 factories and mining industries will be submerged, and 846,200 persons will be directly affected by the project. These people are referred to as the “directly affected population” people whose housing will be submerged. Taking into account the indirectly affected population, natural growth of population and growth of population caused by other factors, the ultimate number of people to be displaced was estimated to be some 1.2 million (CWRC, 1997). Among the “directly affected population,” some 350,000 are rural residents; while 496,200 are urban residents. They were planned to resettle in new cities and towns and engage in their original occupations. Although rural people to be displaced account for only 41.4% of the total, the problems associated with their resettlement are much greater than those associated with resettlement of urban residents. One of the greatest difficulties facing them is how to secure land or seek employment opportunities to compensate for their losses of farmland, housing and other assets, and to help them reconstruct a livelihood after removal.

Y. Tan (B) National Institute of Labour Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

S.D. Brunn (ed.), Engineering Earth, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4_91,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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Fig. 91.1 The Three Gorges reservoir area. Note: Source: Adapted from the Resettlement Bureau of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee (TGPCC) of the State Council, China; Resettlement Planning Map of the Three Gorges Reservoir Area, 1997. “A” shows the two sections that comprise the Three Gorges reservoir area is: the Chongqing section and Hubei section. “B” illustrates the sites of cities and counties before and after inundation in the reservoir area

The Three Gorges dam is situated at the lower section of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. Due to its vast size and also for ease of project management, the Three Gorges reservoir area is divided into two sections, the Chongqing reservoir section and the Hubei reservoir section, on the basis of flooding status, the numbers of people to be displaced, and the responsibilities and administrations dealing with displacement and resettlement (Fig. 91.1). The Chongqing reservoir section is the area with the larger proportion of farmland to be inundated and population to be displaced. It makes up some 80% of the flooding losses and migrants to be relocated. The latest estimate of the number of people to be displaced in the Chongqing reservoir section is 1.138 million. Principal causal factors for the increased number of migrants include: natural growth of the population over the 17-year dam construction period, increasing fertility rates in the reservoir area, and inflows of people due to marriage. The government of China has committed itself to be fully responsible for the TGP resettlement. The optimal goal of TGP displacement and resettlement is “moving out people, keeping a stable society, and helping migrants to become wealthy gradually.” The process of TGP resettlement runs concurrently with the dam construction stages (Table 91.1). By the end of December 2007, the number of people