Noosphere (pronounced /ˈnoʊ.ɵsfɪər/; sometimes noösphere), according to the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, denotes the “sphere of human thought”. The word is derived from the Greek νοῦς (nous “mind“) + σφαῖρα (sphaira “sphere“), in lexical analogy to “atmosphere” and “biosphere“.
In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth and it includes all of the multiverse, after the geosphere(inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In contrast to the conceptions of the Gaia theorists, or the promoters of cyberspace, Vernadsky’s noosphere emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear processes, begins to create resources through the transmutation of elements. It is also currently being researched as part of the Princeton Global Consciousness Project.[1]
Yesterday, several news stories appeared regarding the placement, planning, and construction efforts for the rebuilding of shelter for the displaced Haitians. Common to the articles was the tension that exists between the need for immediate housing, what will happen as settlements become increasingly more defined as places, and the need for more permanent solutions with the upcoming hurricane season. (See: Miami Herald, NYT)
In the current paradigm, the top image shows what relief agencies are moving away from, and the bottom image shows what they are moving towards:
 © Ruth Fremson/The New York Times  © Ruth Fremson/The New York Times While the tents of the state apparatus are likely more durable, the essential schematic is unchanged, and the Haitians cease to have agency in the construction of their dwellings. Haitian families are often quite large, and extended relatives live together. The tents, being one size fits all solutions, do not recognize the socio-cultural demands of the population. Planning and design are effective and powerful when they address a need fit to a specific demand or problem, rather than applying a blanket application or solution. Efforts are being made to try and supply lumber and building materials, but these efforts are overshadowed by immediate needs, and the relative ease of dispatching tarps and tents. But I have veered somewhat off-course. Neither settlement paradigm has infrastructure – power, sanitation, water.
The NYT had an editorial on Jan. 31 that echoes Arch. for Humanity and some of the discussion on Wired’s excellent Haiti Rewired Ning network. All of the former sites, and I, recognize the need to create new spaces and address the infrastructural – the hard needs – of Haiti, with the critical attribute of working with Haitians, rather than throwing design at them. In my Core studio last semester, we were approached with the theoretical framework of thinking of design situations as an “opportunity-constraint” performance metric. InfraNet Lab has a short piece here that echo’s that sentiment. In both my education, and the InfraNet Lab piece, the need to extend and distance ourselves from a binary problem-solution metric is emphasized. This approach is critical to crisis situations, which have multi-variable complex dynamisms – social, cultural, infrastructural, weather, governmental, economic – factors that change daily. The idea that I would like to end on is that we as designers are talented at designing for the world that we have, designing for one second ago. Crisis design and meaningful design demands that we articulate the as-yet-unimagined, for the world that we do not yet have, and for the world that we want.
 Constant's New Babylon (L) and Buckminster Fuller & Geodesic Dome
The creation of temporary settlements, particularly for displaced persons, is a frequent one – but primarily for both governments and NGO’s seeking to create safe loci, with proper (albeit) minimal infrastructures and amenities, for a short period of time. The agencies that engage in this discourse are civil servants, engineers, and aid organizations.
The newly homeless of Haiti are going to be placed primarily in tents – tents which, come storm season, will do nothing to protect the displaced persons for the hurricanes and floods that plague the region in Spring and Summer. (See NYT). With the current homeless numbering possibly 1 million people – 1 in 9 – the need to establish real, semi-permanent shelter quickly is paramount. Tents are not the only solution however, and where the new shelters and communities are going to be established, as I have commented on previously, will create and enable the future of Haiti. Al Jareeza reports the following:
[Quoting Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive] “In 30 seconds, Haiti lost 60 per cent of its GDP…So we must decentralise.”
[US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton] said agriculture, which could act as a magnet back to the countryside, had not got the attention it deserved. “I was quite heartened to hear the prime minister say that … we should look at how we decentralise economic opportunity and work with the Haitian government and people to support resettlement.”
The decentralization of Haiti from the economic, governmental, and social capital of Port-au-Prince is inevitable. Haitian will settle in new communities across the country – agricultural (as the country reseats itself) – which will provide both a national economy, as well as provide for some level of self-sufficiency. These communities must be established with a (more) permanent and durable shelter than the tent, but rather a system of shelter that enables organic growth in a rooted place.
Landscape’s agency is a management position. Landscape, as a discipline, is capable of traversing civil, local, community, engineering, architectural, and governmental lines. Landscapes essential milieu is terrain – in a disaster situation, both stable and unstable territories with have to be negotiated; contaminated and toxic territories segregated, and eventually remediated. Nascent communities will have to be situated in accordance with the needs and desires of the populations, in the most advantageous locations to grow. An essential client relationship, with a dissolution of a hierarchy of knowledge – each will bring skill sets and rigor. Placement will not occur – it will be resolution. The placelessness of the campsite replaced with the site of home.
Landscape can facilitate the creation of not provincial farm encampments but instead utilizing the technologies outlined above (as an example) interconnected hybrid agricultural micro urbanities. City dwellers were displaced, and it is crucial for a nation to move forward that these city dwellers be placed into a context that facilitates the concentration of knowledge and resources that concentrated urbanities offer. It is not enough to resettle, but instead to push Haiti forward into its future.
 © Logan Abassi/MINUSTAH via Getty Images Aid continues to arrive in post-quake Haiti, and survivors, without homes, are seeking shelter. Currently, the dislocated and dispersed survivors are living in temporary makeshift tents, in the still unstable urban core / epicenter. Efforts are now being made to transport the survivors into new, temporary villages. The International Organization for Migration reports that 472,000 individuals are in the process of being relocated into villages out of the reported 1.5 million homeless. The IOM press release continues:
These settlements cannot be built overnight. There are standards that have to be designed by experts. There is the leveling of the land, procurement and delivery of tents, as well as water and sanitation.
How these new settlements are going to be located, where, why. How are design and infrastructure going to be created to support an entire new network of a country? Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity and the Open Architecture Network, has laid out a rough schematic for a time line of reconstruction here, and is partnering with several groups under the auspices of the Haiti Rebuilding Coalition. I think that Arch. for Humanity has a successful record of synthesizing local and international knowledge, incorporating the community, and establishing relationships. Open source work has also proved to be a successful strategy.
But. I do believe that this is essentially new territory – this is going to be a process of country building; and with regards to the equation of poverty, pre-existent infrastructure, earthquake, and displacement – a process of an unknown scale. It is crucial that landscape architects and urban designers and planners, become involved with this process as soon as possible.
I started this post with the discussion of shelter and settlements, and it is to that I will return. Temporary villages often become permanent settlements – layers of shelter, community and infrastructure become inextricable. The areas in yellow are “shantytowns”.
 Haiti Earthquake Fact Sheet, http://www.usaid.gov/helphaiti/ The decisions to move communities and establish settlements cannot be hasty, though the need to relocate is crucial. Quick decisions are going to occur with long-term ramifications for cities, boundaries, economies, and agriculture. It is crucial to establish a staging ground for appropriate and considered development to occur. The intervention of landscape architects and urban designers and planners is critical because the fabric of Haiti is going to change drastically, and an understanding of system-wide design must accompany the efforts of civil engineering.
As populations move outwards, into outlying regions, critical water, power, communication infrastructures must precede as well as develop alongside new communities. Individuals and organizations familiar with large-scale placement of development and place-making, who can work with the community structures that, for example, Arch. for Humanity has experience in creating, along with establishing new regimes of settlement. Malignant poverty, and the autonomous informal settlement patterns that it creates must be addressed. A decentralization is inevitable, as Port-au-Prince has been decimated. Haitians have the potential to redefine a large pattern of settlement essentially from ground-zero.
The informal settlement pattern of the Haitian impoverished can be realized as a mechanism and logic for growth. An intentional capitalization on the experience, resourcefulness, and knowledge of the population, combined with a reconceptualization of design and infrastructure, has the potential to revitalize Haiti in the medium to long term. Tactics must be articulated that lead to approaches that bridge the often linear nature of infrastructural and ecological engineering with the organic growth and construction practices of the displaced population. Tactics, as a set of operations, are mutable and dynamic processes, Here, these tactics need to result in a multifaceted and simultaneous regime of ongoing medical care, shelter and space making, and design infected infrastructural remediation.
And yes, I believe that this is on.
infrastructures, defense + military installations, New Babylon, eco-logics, smooth space, abandoned industrial sites + brownfields, instantaneous communication, nomadism, The Marin Headlands, apocalypse / collapse.
Although this is my first post, I will save introduction / exegesis / confession / apology for another time. I wanted to jump right into the pool in response to today’s post on the future of the reconstruction of Haiti and design professionals. As a current Masters of Landscape Architecture candidate at the Harvard GSD, I was amazed that the public voice of the ASLA listed organizations that are going to be / are involved in the Haitian reconstruction effort without as much as mentioning Landscape’s involvement. The organizations noted in the post are Architecture for Humanity, Article 25, the AIA, Emergency Architects, and the US GBC. While shelter may be the priority, these are likely going to be the organizations, along with the UN and governments, that decide, strategize, and plan the new Haiti.
The future, and the future agency, of landscape, depends on its practitioners to be the pioneers in leading massive reconstruction and planning such as these. But how can landscape react to an event in the immediate “now”? What are the efforts that landscape is capable of to assist in alleviating a disaster situation? How can landscape insert itself into the dialogue, and re-assume its crucial market share from engineers, architects, and planners?
I have been following news via internet and radio since the 7.0 Richter scale earthquake occurred, and while the current effort is orbitally focused around saving the few undiscovered victims who may still be alive, and centrally focused on disseminating aid and medial relief, there has been discussion about the future rebuilding of Haiti. The former Haiti, as noted in by Bryan Walsh in Time magazine here, had no building codes to speak of. Buildings were constructed with substandard materials. The Infrastructurist has a short piece about the Time article as well. Clearly there is a dire need to supply, require, and enforce the construction of structures to code, with appropriate materials. This is a given. Temporary as well as permanent shelter is a necessity, as even the buildings left standing are untrustworthy, especially w/r/t aftershocks (this morning, a 6.1 Richer occurred).
Walsh writes:
“At 7.0 on the Richter scale, the earthquake that hit Haiti on Jan. 12 was strong, but hardly record-breaking — very similar, in fact, to a 7.0 temblor that hit the San Francisco Bay area in 1989. But that’s where the similarities end. The 1989 San Francisco quake left up to 12,000 people homeless and killed 63. The 2010 Haiti quake, however, will likely make over a million people homeless, and its death toll could be 50,000 or much higher.
“The wealthy Bay Area, accustomed to seismological instability, had good — and enforced — building codes, and well-supplied emergency personnel capable of responding to the disaster immediately. Haiti, the poorest country in the western Hemisphere, had nothing — what building codes it had were unenforced, police and other emergency personnel were almost nonexistent and many of its people were already in ill health.”
What the Bay Area had, and has, is both money and infrastructure. Haiti had, and has, neither. Infrastructure is the most important, and often overlooked, aspect to a society that functions efficiently, dependably, and soundly. Infrastructure, however, is not an overnight process. While temporary buildings and hospitals can be set up in hours, and indeed, a niche market segment of architecture has fulfilled the demand for these spaces, infrastructure – energy, transportation, communication – is equally important to remediating the immediate effects of a disaster, as well as participating in the reconstruction process.
The infrastructure of Haiti before the earthquake was in dire straits. The CIA fact book gives us some statistical information – remedial telephone and cellular systems, little energy production compared to average per-capita demands, inadequate transportation and road systems. Post-quake, these systems are shells, slowing medical care, food, water, and movement. The participation of landscape in the project and process of infrastructural development, and indeed, the management and stratification of actors is necessary is landscape is not going to die. But these are medium to long term processes. Again, the question must be asked – how does landscape react in the now. How can landscape intervene in an ongoing crisis? What form can its humanitarian intervention take?
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process in progress // progress in process
Is: Middle Spaces is a project run by Rafi Ajl, a Masters of Landscape Architecture candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Currently centered in Cambridge MA.
rafi (@) middlespaces (.) net |
