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FULL MOON TONIGHT (CLOSEST TO EARTH THIS YEAR)
July 13, 2022
Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) by my house. I saw them in Rome, too. Despite their global reach, they feel synonymous with Atlantic coast summers to me.
I've been back in the U.S. for almost three weeks now, somehow, after spending a stupendous 40 days in Italia. I've got a lot I'd like to share from this trip, but as I am somehow still just getting my footing (a lot has happened since been back, too: One of my best friends got MARRIED in one of the funnest, heart-warmingest weddings ever, I visited my family in Cumberland, visited Baltimore, visited a friend in Concord and took a midnight dip in Walden Pond, hosted some friends on a crazy roadtrip to their new home in Seattle, and started a new job at the Yale Urban Design Workshop…to name a few!), Iso am using the excuse that I am still waiting on film to be developed to put down some of my thoughts on Italy next newsletter.
Still, I've got something else I am equally excited to share! I am writing a 6 part series for the esteemed MOLD Magazine! If you aren't familiar, MOLD is a print and online magazine focused on the intersection of food and design. (So, pretty up my alley). Thrilled to be working with them. Below is the introduction to my series as well as the first installment, an interview I did a few months back with my professor about the urbanism and food systems of the ancient cities of the Americas. Hope you enjoy, and talk more next month!
Still, I've got something else I am equally excited to share! I am writing a 6 part series for the esteemed MOLD Magazine! If you aren't familiar, MOLD is a print and online magazine focused on the intersection of food and design. (So, pretty up my alley). Thrilled to be working with them. Below is the introduction to my series as well as the first installment, an interview I did a few months back with my professor about the urbanism and food systems of the ancient cities of the Americas. Hope you enjoy, and talk more next month!
New Series for MOLD Magazine: Rural-Urban Systems
Originally published by MOLD on 6.8.2022
The past month I’ve been receiving a box delivery of groceries each week to my apartment, each pre-packaged into several “meal kits” with accompanying recipes. A service I would normally abhor (the amount of packaging is truly disturbing, I pride myself on my abilities in the kitchen, etc.), I was enticed by a referral for a free trial. Even more estranged from its origins than in the supermarket, it is a complete mystery as to where this food comes from before arriving at my door. Sometimes in unpacking the box, a red pepper or some fruit cradled in my hand, I try to picture the farmland where these vegetables were grown– perhaps in Mexico, maybe even further afield. Some imagined, rural landscape, tethered to my city apartment by the thousands of miles this little pepper has traveled.
But most of the time, I don’t think about it at all. For many of us, food production is understood to be a non-urban phenomenon– urban areas consume what rural areas produce, and the interaction between the two is limited primarily to this dynamic. We don’t see our food until it is on our plate or in our fridge. Our cities are anesthetized, severed from the terrain surrounding them which allows them to live. The other day, my girlfriend almost walked into an upscale salad shop, thinking it was a bank, so devoid it was of signs of real food.
Cities weren’t always so sanitized. In the late 1800s, cows roamed in Harlem. Roosters at a poultry supplier were waking Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village in 1963. As both an architectural designer and sometime farmer, I look for alternatives to our current model, and speculate on how we might design more holistic systems of city-building. What I continue to find in my research is that the prevailing theories of urbanism come up short. The globalized city is too often observed as standing alone– the glimmering metropolis on the horizon– humming with its self-created energy of life and movement. Rarely is the city transparent in its reliance on a vast web of externalized systems in the lands beyond its borders– systems that span the globe. As such, urbanism engages in a myopia, valuing the physical space of the city at the expense of the processes that are required to keep the city alive.
This has led me to try to approach these questions, not from the standpoint of the city, but from the rural. As Rem Koolhaus said ahead of his (questionably-vague, overambitious, and overwrought) exhibition and book, Countryside: “the countryside is where the radical changes are.” In my own work, I hope to explore the spaces beyond, but inexorably linked to, the city– the rural-urban fringe, exurbs, desakota, outskirts, hinterland, umland, the peri-urban, the countryside– to better understand the systems necessary for urban life, but from the outside looking in, so to speak, in the hopes of avoiding some of the pitfalls of contemporary urbanism.
In this six part series for MOLD, I will profile systems– food, waste, and everything between– which bridge the urban, the periurban, and the rural, from farming practices in pre-colonial America to present day composting, to complicate our understanding of the geography of our cities. And as we explore moments where the urban-rural divide is proven a false dichotomy, we might catch glimpses of a future city where ecology, agriculture, and habitation reach a symbiosis.
But most of the time, I don’t think about it at all. For many of us, food production is understood to be a non-urban phenomenon– urban areas consume what rural areas produce, and the interaction between the two is limited primarily to this dynamic. We don’t see our food until it is on our plate or in our fridge. Our cities are anesthetized, severed from the terrain surrounding them which allows them to live. The other day, my girlfriend almost walked into an upscale salad shop, thinking it was a bank, so devoid it was of signs of real food.
Cities weren’t always so sanitized. In the late 1800s, cows roamed in Harlem. Roosters at a poultry supplier were waking Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village in 1963. As both an architectural designer and sometime farmer, I look for alternatives to our current model, and speculate on how we might design more holistic systems of city-building. What I continue to find in my research is that the prevailing theories of urbanism come up short. The globalized city is too often observed as standing alone– the glimmering metropolis on the horizon– humming with its self-created energy of life and movement. Rarely is the city transparent in its reliance on a vast web of externalized systems in the lands beyond its borders– systems that span the globe. As such, urbanism engages in a myopia, valuing the physical space of the city at the expense of the processes that are required to keep the city alive.
This has led me to try to approach these questions, not from the standpoint of the city, but from the rural. As Rem Koolhaus said ahead of his (questionably-vague, overambitious, and overwrought) exhibition and book, Countryside: “the countryside is where the radical changes are.” In my own work, I hope to explore the spaces beyond, but inexorably linked to, the city– the rural-urban fringe, exurbs, desakota, outskirts, hinterland, umland, the peri-urban, the countryside– to better understand the systems necessary for urban life, but from the outside looking in, so to speak, in the hopes of avoiding some of the pitfalls of contemporary urbanism.
In this six part series for MOLD, I will profile systems– food, waste, and everything between– which bridge the urban, the periurban, and the rural, from farming practices in pre-colonial America to present day composting, to complicate our understanding of the geography of our cities. And as we explore moments where the urban-rural divide is proven a false dichotomy, we might catch glimpses of a future city where ecology, agriculture, and habitation reach a symbiosis.
“Territorial Cities of Pre-Columbian America: AN INTERVIEW WITH ARCHITECT AND URBAN HISTORIAN ANA MARÍA DURÁN CALISTO”
Illustration for the piece by Vanilla Chi for MOLD Magazine.
Originally published by MOLD on 6.8.2022
“Next morning, we came to a broad causeway and continued our march towards Iztapalapa. And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico, we were astounded. It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, seen or dreamed of before…large canoes could come into the garden from the lake through a channel they had cut, and their crews did not have to disembark. Everything was shining with lime and decorated with different kinds of stonework and paintings which were a marvel to gaze on…But today all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing is left standing.”
-Bernal Diaz del Castillo
Reading descriptions by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a conquistador in Cortés’ army who participated in the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlán and later documented his experiences1, it is impossible not to long for a glimpse of this dreamlike world that rivaled ancient Rome and Constantinople– and to mourn its destruction. Chasing this glimpse is, in part, the work of Ana María Durán Calisto’s Yale School of Architecture research course “Territorial Cities of Pre Columbian America.” Over the course of this semester, my classmates and I are attempting to visualize our research on one Native American city, leveraging our skills as designers to produce maps, plans, and diagrams.
Durán Calisto is an architect by trade, and her work centers around the history of urbanization in the Amazon basin. The intention of the seminar is to both build a more robust architectural accounting of pre-colonial urbanism in the Americas and for design students to learn from these urban ecologies as we seek to reestablish a sustainable relationship between human settlement and environment.
As I investigate rural-urban systems for MOLD over the coming months, a conversation with Durán Calisto about these profound (and prescient) American cities seemed like a fitting place to start. Below is our conversation, edited for length and clarity, in which we discuss her work, the course, and the design ingenuity within indigenous cities of the Americas.
Ben Derlan:
In this 6 part series, I am attempting to trace the systems which connect our cities to the hinterland, urban to rural. I feel this tie is captured in the title of the class “territorial cities.” How do you understand the territory in relation to the city?
Ana María Durán Calisto:
The relationship between the city and its hinterland is absolutely fundamental; there’s no city without the hinterland. To see what has happened with globalization is very disturbing. The natural relationship, if you wish, between the city and the hinterland that feeds it, that provides water, that provides fresh air, that provides so many resources for the well-being of the city has been disrupted. What happens now is that the hinterland of our cities is an ocean away, kilometers away, it is disjointed from the city. How can you take care of an American city’s hinterland if it’s in Indonesia, or the Amazon? It is very difficult. So that is one of the outcomes of globalization we are really going to have to tackle. How can you take care of that hinterland that is taking care of you?
BD:
In our course, we’ve spent the first few weeks studying the ontology of the city– how do we define a city. Perhaps to reaffirm that these pre-columbian cities were in fact, cities. Where does this doubt come from?
AMDC:
There’s always this doubt, which I have found fascinating because I have encountered it over and over again. Why is it that for the western ontology of the urban, these cities somehow don’t fully qualify, don’t fully fit the definition and expectations of what a city should be? That’s why we’re investigating (in class) how the west has defined terms like urbs, civitas, polis, communitas, and questioning the narrative of evolutionary, linear urban formation that we inherited from the Enlightenment and social darwinism. An assumption which, in a way, stagnated archeology in places like Amazonia for decades.
The prevailing narrative, since V.G. Childe, an archeologist writing in the early 1900s, stated that intensive agriculture precedes the emergence of cities. In Amazonia soils are very poor and very acidic. So Betty Meggers and the other archeologists first studying the region believed, if soils here are very poor, and incapable of supporting intensive agriculture, cities couldn’t have existed in the region. But this condition was based on a specific understanding of agriculture in the European or Mesopotamian style, not in terms of forest agriculture, polyculture or agro-ecological forest: the multi-species, highly biodiverse agricultural systems of Amazonia. So Amazonia has been sunken underneath all sorts of preconceptions about what agriculture is and how it looks and what urbanism is and how it looks. The widespread existence of terra preta and terra morena, fertile and anthropogenic soils, brought this hypothesis under scrutiny.
An important Amazonian archaeologist we spoke with last semester for this course, Clark Erickson, told us that “wherever you start carving the ground in Amazonia, you find ceramic shards.” It makes you wonder about the myth of the “pristine forest." He said that he still has yet to find it, because every site he had visited personally had delivered some sign of human occupation.
Continue reading the interview at MOLD Magazine.
-Bernal Diaz del Castillo
Reading descriptions by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a conquistador in Cortés’ army who participated in the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlán and later documented his experiences1, it is impossible not to long for a glimpse of this dreamlike world that rivaled ancient Rome and Constantinople– and to mourn its destruction. Chasing this glimpse is, in part, the work of Ana María Durán Calisto’s Yale School of Architecture research course “Territorial Cities of Pre Columbian America.” Over the course of this semester, my classmates and I are attempting to visualize our research on one Native American city, leveraging our skills as designers to produce maps, plans, and diagrams.
Durán Calisto is an architect by trade, and her work centers around the history of urbanization in the Amazon basin. The intention of the seminar is to both build a more robust architectural accounting of pre-colonial urbanism in the Americas and for design students to learn from these urban ecologies as we seek to reestablish a sustainable relationship between human settlement and environment.
As I investigate rural-urban systems for MOLD over the coming months, a conversation with Durán Calisto about these profound (and prescient) American cities seemed like a fitting place to start. Below is our conversation, edited for length and clarity, in which we discuss her work, the course, and the design ingenuity within indigenous cities of the Americas.
Ben Derlan:
In this 6 part series, I am attempting to trace the systems which connect our cities to the hinterland, urban to rural. I feel this tie is captured in the title of the class “territorial cities.” How do you understand the territory in relation to the city?
Ana María Durán Calisto:
The relationship between the city and its hinterland is absolutely fundamental; there’s no city without the hinterland. To see what has happened with globalization is very disturbing. The natural relationship, if you wish, between the city and the hinterland that feeds it, that provides water, that provides fresh air, that provides so many resources for the well-being of the city has been disrupted. What happens now is that the hinterland of our cities is an ocean away, kilometers away, it is disjointed from the city. How can you take care of an American city’s hinterland if it’s in Indonesia, or the Amazon? It is very difficult. So that is one of the outcomes of globalization we are really going to have to tackle. How can you take care of that hinterland that is taking care of you?
BD:
In our course, we’ve spent the first few weeks studying the ontology of the city– how do we define a city. Perhaps to reaffirm that these pre-columbian cities were in fact, cities. Where does this doubt come from?
AMDC:
There’s always this doubt, which I have found fascinating because I have encountered it over and over again. Why is it that for the western ontology of the urban, these cities somehow don’t fully qualify, don’t fully fit the definition and expectations of what a city should be? That’s why we’re investigating (in class) how the west has defined terms like urbs, civitas, polis, communitas, and questioning the narrative of evolutionary, linear urban formation that we inherited from the Enlightenment and social darwinism. An assumption which, in a way, stagnated archeology in places like Amazonia for decades.
The prevailing narrative, since V.G. Childe, an archeologist writing in the early 1900s, stated that intensive agriculture precedes the emergence of cities. In Amazonia soils are very poor and very acidic. So Betty Meggers and the other archeologists first studying the region believed, if soils here are very poor, and incapable of supporting intensive agriculture, cities couldn’t have existed in the region. But this condition was based on a specific understanding of agriculture in the European or Mesopotamian style, not in terms of forest agriculture, polyculture or agro-ecological forest: the multi-species, highly biodiverse agricultural systems of Amazonia. So Amazonia has been sunken underneath all sorts of preconceptions about what agriculture is and how it looks and what urbanism is and how it looks. The widespread existence of terra preta and terra morena, fertile and anthropogenic soils, brought this hypothesis under scrutiny.
An important Amazonian archaeologist we spoke with last semester for this course, Clark Erickson, told us that “wherever you start carving the ground in Amazonia, you find ceramic shards.” It makes you wonder about the myth of the “pristine forest." He said that he still has yet to find it, because every site he had visited personally had delivered some sign of human occupation.
Continue reading the interview at MOLD Magazine.