How To: Re-Imagine City Life
“In the city, water and soil have entered a different circuit, defined by a commanding human-centered view of reality.”
On a cold morning in late February, I am walking along Canal Street toward Hudson River Park. The atmosphere is moist, the wind is crisp, and the sky is gray. Layers of thin, foggy clouds cover the top of the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan. My face has gathered delicate droplets of water floating in the air. I see traces of the snow that fell during the night melting on the streets, forming white islands on the sidewalks and pavement. Clouds, snow, and rain — three states of water — bathe the city landscape, turning surfaces reflective. When I look at the puddles, the city appears upside down: They depict its cracked, fragmented mirror image. I see a sliver of the water cycle of a life-giving zone.
Getting to the railing of Hudson River Park next to the esplanade of the river waters, I think of the landscape north in the Hudson River Valley. There, water slides through the vegetation, collecting nutrients, infiltrating through the ground, evaporating up into the sky, and continuing its sinuous path through streams, rivers, and seawater, carrying the new elements collected through the underground soil. On its way to the rock layer, water regenerates the earth, taking in minerals that enrich the water bodies — as long as they do not encounter human deposits of foreign substances in the terrain. Bacteria, archaebacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms make rocks into soil,¹ contributing to the lively nature of the earth. In a mechanical and chemical exchange at a nanoscale level, water modifies minerals to form new ones — soil is made by the action of water.
In the wildest areas of the Hudson River, as water makes the earth alive, so do animals and insects wandering around: birds, butterflies and moths, reptiles and amphibians, beavers, squirrels, raccoons, and deer are moving the ground, leaves, and sticks, making their nests, giving birth, transporting pollen and so forth. Plants, trees, weeds, and bushes gather the atmospheric moisture, rain, snow, and sunlight, redistributing particles collected from the ground in their trunks and leaves. Flora and fauna act as an interface between the atmosphere and the soil: they “remove bio-essential elements from the soil solution, use them in metabolic processes, store them in tissue, and return them to the soil via litterfall, root decay, and decomposition.”²
In the city, water and soil have entered a different circuit, defined by a commanding human-centered view of reality.
In contrast, in Manhattan, the whole city sits on a platform of gray infrastructure on re-engineered land to accommodate fantastical human habitats. Here, water collected on the streets slips towards destinations of an underground architecture, which man has built to channel it at will. On its way, water will mingle with an array of detritus and debris that only a chemist could identify. In this island, water cannot mix with the deep soil to complete the water cycle. Transplanted soil is what we see almost everywhere. It is not deep soil and is no longer the continuum it was supposed to be. As we already know, humans have long been doing their thing: clearing forests, building houses, littering plastic, hunting, and reducing the spaces of freedom of the animal and insect kingdom. In the city, water and soil have entered a different circuit, defined by a commanding human-centered view of reality.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
- Read: Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel.
- Read: Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes, and Axelle Grégoire.
- Read: Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu by William Saunders.
- Zoom interview with Jérôme Gaillardet. 2023.
- Amundson, Ronald; Richter, Daniel D.; Humphreys, Geoff S.; Jobbágy, Esteban G.; Gaillardet, Jérôme. “Coupling between Biota and Earth Materials in the Critical Zone.” Elements. 3 (5). 2007.
