American Dirt

Technically a hiatus.

2011-12-31T08:09:00.002-09:00

Happy New Year's wishes to all, though this blog ends the year on a bit of a sour note. My computer revived while in the States, but, now that I'm back in Afghanistan, it seems to have failed again--while another December blog post was in the process (among the only files that was not backed up). All my photos are also stored there, and while most are backed up as well, it is very difficult (and a bit risky) to manage external hard drives while working on shared computers over here.

Until I figure out what is wrong with this computer, or purchase a new one, I'm going to have to do the unthinkable and put this blog on hiatus. This could be only a matter of a few weeks, though it may also be a few months, since it's possible I'll be in Afghanistan that long and I don't want to bring a brand new computer into these living conditions. All is well otherwise, I wish you the best start to your 2012, and please stay tuned.

DUST: Bringing the basic training obstacle course inside the wire.

2011-12-24T06:47:00.004-09:00

The integration of pedestrian infrastructure into the expeditionary base environment in Afghanistan has proven far less contentious than one might expect. A culture that prioritizes short-term efficiency over long-term functionality (at least partially evidenced by my article on building code violations from nearly a year ago) would seemingly scrutinize exclusively on infrastructure that accommodates gargantuan armored vehicles that need to get around with as few obstructions as possible in order to complete their respective missions. But the fact remains that only a small fraction of the people use MRAPs, Humvees or the all-too-rare tanks to get around. A slightly larger fraction use Toyota trucks, but because most people enter and leave a base through from the air, the number of vehicles on base isn’t nearly great enough to accommodate everyone. Most people get around by foot.

While the infrastructure might not be as conducive to pedestrians or bicyclists as your average neighborhood in Portland, it’s not as bad as many bases on back on American home turf, which are consistently spread out across huge tracts of land, with huge standoff distances between buildings intended as a protective measure in case of a vehicular explosive attack. Afghan bases are typically densely settled, or, at the very least, most planners recognize the efficiency of clustering residential tents and ensconcing them within ample protective barriers. And while grade separated sidewalks are not too common— particularly at the smaller bases that usually have the shortest life span—the regulatory and operational culture recognizes pedestrians. Speed limits for vehicles are incredibly low, often only 20 kph (12 mph), with fines for violators. Many units require their personnel to wear reflector belts at all hours, just to keep them prepared if the sun sets when they are out. (Most bases are fairly dark, and some are completely blacked out for safety, so pedestrian visibility is critical.) American soldiers must wear helmets if they ride bicycles. The larger bases often devote their sprawling outskirts to storage and industry, so they must employ a shuttle system with various mapped stops for ease of getting across those vast distances. And some of the largest bases, such as Bagram Air Field, close off primary arterials at certain early hours in the morning to all vehicles to devote the road for running and PT (physical training). In a multinational base, the American penchant for order and enforcement promotes a higher standard for pedestrian safety for its soldiers than is evidenced by the more relaxed coalition forces of other countries: coalition forces do not live under a mandate for reflector belts, nor does it seem that speed limits apply (at least for the Germans). This dichotomy between US and Europeans proves ironic, since the Germans, Swedes, Croats, and Latvians are more likely to come from a pedestrian friendly, densely populated settlement pattern back home than the Americans, yet the American rules are superior at promoting safety for the numerous troops and civilians depending on boots and bikes.

In contrast with the regulatory environment, the road design in expeditionary bases isn’t always great: sidewalks are inconsistent, rights of way are narrow, turn radii don’t accommodate the really long vehicles, drainage (if it exists at all) usually consists of wide-open ditches along the verge. But pedestrians and vehicles coexist reasonably well, thanks to those vehicular speed restrictions and a culture of awareness among drivers and walkers, particularly visible among the Americans in the multinational-base in which I reside. I have yet to hear of an accident, which is always a good thing, but particularly so on a military base, because a collision between a person and an armored vehicle would almost certainly result in death. However, force protection requirements sometimes trump other safety considerations, so that the design of a compound simply accounts for defensive barriers in the event of an external attack, rather than thinking about pedestrian safety and explosive defenses as a comprehensive protection strategy. As a result, it is not so hard to find situations such as the one below:

The wall on the left consists of what the military simply calls “HESCO”, much to the advantage of the UK-based HESCO Bastion company that manufactures them. HESCO enjoys a virtual monopoly on this distinctive fortification, known generically as a gabion (its brand name is a Concertainer), which essentially consists of tall (approximately 8 feet) durable paper bags enclosed in a thick wire mesh and filled with a combination of soil and a concrete topping, intended to absorb much of the impact of high speed missiles or mortars without eliciting dangerous projectiles if the bags themselves explode. The helices of concertina wire that coil on the top help keep out intruders.

Anyone who has read more than one or two of my blog posts can guess what I’m identifying as the problem in that photo above: there is simply not enough room on the side of the road for people to walk safely. The scaling of the objects does not quite capture the problem, but this footprint in the dirt does a better job of it:

It’s narrow. During the day, this proves a minor annoyance which a person can at least in part avoid by walking on the other side of the street. The real threat is after dark, when neither side of the road is terribly appealing, since the darkness would obscure the obvious tripping hazard found in the open drainage ditch, only a few portions of which are covered and protected.

And the typical base in Afghanistan is shrouded in absolute darkness with few isolated exceptions—a particularly salient problem during the long winter nights. I’ll admit that I tend to sound the warning bell in situations like this far sooner than the average person would. So this design deserves a special mention because multiple colleagues have also pointed out the safety hazard this poses. Why did the original squadron build the HESCO wall so close to the street? No compound is so crowded that the construction team couldn’t afford to shift the barriers at least a few feet inward to make room for walkers, or a drainage ditch for that matter. Turning the corner at the next intersection and pivoting to the left, one can see that on the next perpendicular street, the gabion of HESCOs offer plenty of room for both pedestrians and a drainage ditch.

The photo merely depicts a different wall to the same compound, this time with ample room for drainage and pedestrians. This road segment, far closer to achieving a US model of a Complete Street, also features intermittent wooden bridges across the drainage ditches, prominently visible in the photo above on the opposite side of the street. At night, these bridges feature blinking LEDs that both manifest the bridges to pedestrians as well as identify the edge of the road to passing vehicles, so the drivers avoid hitting and destroying the wooden bridges or slipping into the adjacent drainage ditches.

A bit further down the road, one can witness a rare installation underway: sidewalks.

Until this newly laid segment, sidewalks were unheard of in the American portion of the base. Most of the smaller bases with populations under 10,000 (which is practically all of them) have no sidewalks whatsoever. Sidewalks are intermittent in the German portion of the base, as visible in the photo below:

But they aren’t everywhere in the German portion. About 500 feet down the same road, the configuration of the Relocatable Buildings (RLBs) is identical, but the street lacks sidewalks, bollards, or drainage ditches.

The Germans can be just as cavalier about accommodating pedestrians as the Americans have been. I scrutinized the German street design in greater detail in this earlier blog post).

The contrasting appearance between the various road segments identified in these photographs delineates a dichotomous approach to expeditionary base construction: permanent versus temporary. As the photos above indicate, German billeting is overwhelmingly permanent: the modular buildings sit in lengthy rows of two, unified by a central hallway, like a conventional double-loaded corridor hotel building. Some of the central offices and meeting spaces even use brick and mortar construction. By most regards, these buildings function at a higher standard of quality and durability, predicating upon the assumption that, since the German military purchased the land, it will maintain a presence at this base for the foreseeable future. Hungarians and Croats also appear to prefer the permanence of relocatable buildings. Conversely, at this same base, Americans use tents:

So do the Norwegians.

As do the Swedes, Finns, Latvians, Armenians, and Dutch. While I can’t vouch for the other Coalition Forces, I knew that the American mentality is that everything they construct should be capable of disassembly in 48 hours if necessary, leaving as little of a permanent footprint as possible.

I wouldn’t begin to assert that one approach is better than another—I’m not sufficiently informed on the long-term plans of Germans, Croats, Swedes, or even Americans for that matter. Permanent and temporary construction practices both have their merits. The average German base will, based on its construction materials, transition much more conveniently to eventual use by the Afghan National Army. The American bases won’t transition so easily, but if the priority is to get out and return to the land to the Afghans in a more fallow state, then clearly the non-permanent approach is wiser. My only concern comes in all the impervious surfaces used throughout the base—a topic which effectively concludes this rumination on pedestrian infrastructure.

It seems like a smart decision for the Americans to build a sidewalk along a stretch of road that hosts the American PX (Post Exchange, the closest thing to a big box store), a coffee shop, a Pizza Hut, a future Burger King, and, on the other side of the road, a USO Tent, post office, gym, finance office, chapel, and computer lab. It is undeniably the road segment in the American quarter with the highest amount of pedestrian traffic. But a concrete sidewalk is permanent. So are the drainage culverts, the basketball courts, and the foundations to all those tents. In short, the vertical element is what constitutes “temporary” in American expeditionary base construction: when we leave Afghanistan, it will look empty when standing on the ground staring at the horizon line, but peering downward from a helicopter will reveal a patchwork of pavement. How likely is it that the Americans, Swedes, Norwegians, et cetera will actually remove or destroy all that concrete—or, for that matter, the far vaster ocean of gravel that occupies most other unpaved, habitable portions of the base? Then again, even concrete pads and paved streets can prove a significant investment that would allow Afghans more freedom to build upward from an existing configuration. Concrete pads for temporary FEMA trailers in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina helped pave the way for the possibility of more permanent mobile home parks after the immediate need had subsided. Paved roads, drainage ditches, and sidewalks are amenities that much of Afghanistan does not enjoy, so although paved infrastructure forces future inhabitants into a certain configuration, it does provide provincial governments with infrastructure that they otherwise cannot always afford. A middle-of-the-road approach—combining permanent infrastructure with semi- or non-permanent structures—may prove the wisest compromise. Though I doubt that engineers at my compound will ever correct the mistake of building the HESCO gabion too close to the road and squeezing out the pedestrians, at least the potentiality for a correction remains in ways that wouldn’t if a permanent brick wall ran along the road instead of soil-filled bags. Like all other aspects of expeditionary base living, pedestrianism is malleable—precisely as it should be when tomorrow’s exigencies could require an immediate change in the urban form.

Technical tangles.

2011-11-29T08:47:00.003-09:00

This month has been a little arid in terms of posts, and some of it is due to workload, but a lot is just due to poorly functioning IT over here. Due most likely to an unusually cold, rainy and snowy November, we have had very inconsistent Internet access--usually less than half of a day. That has hindered my flexibility in getting the blog completed at a reasonable clip.

In addition, the battery to my personal computer just went dead, leaving me without any option for uploading some of my most recent photos. I will get this situation fixed so that I might be a bit more productive next month. And, since I will soon be ending this contract in Afghanistan, my blog will hopefully soon include some very recent photos and hopefully my postings to this blog will occur a little more frequently. As always, thanks so much for reading.

MONTAGE: Washing and cleansing every stain from the sin of neglect.

2011-11-26T18:26:00.011-09:00

This montage blog post pioneers an unusual organizational approach: the time elapse. During a six-month period in which I was living in the city of Baton Rouge, a particular edifice caught my attention: a stalled high-rise with its load-bearing walls fully complete but little else. All evidence suggested that its owners had abandoned it quite some time ago: graffiti slathered upon the lower levels, overgrown weeds, a makeshift chain-link fence installed to deter trespassers (unsuccessfully). Sadly, these sorts of structures are all too common in American downtowns after the housing bust that began around 2008: even some of the most successful ones have some weathered relic from an era of high demand for vertically oriented condominiums that has since retreated almost completely, along with the rest of the owner-occupied market. Fortunately, many of them have since gotten converted to apartments—a downgrade by most assessments, but better than sitting vacant for years. The building that caught my attention in Baton Rouge wasn't so lucky:

It could be anywhere—except that it looked like it had been abandoned far more than three years ago. And Baton Rouge’s downtown hadn't been enjoying a huge housing boom up until the bubble burst. Perhaps most importantly, this relic doesn't even sit downtown. It would have made sense if the developer put the kibosh on construction when he or she realized the real estate wasn’t as lucrative as initially expected, perhaps due to a surrounding area that was turning increasingly low-income. But that wasn’t the case here. This faceless golem stands in one of the most sought-after parts of Baton Rouge metro, just down the street from the Mall of Louisiana, the state’s largest and probably most successful megamall. It’s not far from the Highland Road corridor, where Baton Rouge’s stateliest homes preside over large lots. And, just a mile further south sits Perkins Rowe, a high-end lifestyle center with multi-family housing on the upper levels, an ambitious project that would probably have lower vacancy levels if it hadn’t opened at the peak of a recession. Either way, this building clearly struck me as an oddity. Why was it abandoned?

The answer: it was a casualty of one of the biggest televangelist scandals in history.

The 206,000 square foot building was intended as a dormitory for students attending the Jimmy Swaggart World Ministry Center. Reverend Jimmy Swaggart fell from grace after being caught at a motel outside of New Orleans with a prostitute in February of 1988; his widely publicized contretemps may not have toppled his empire, but it certainly stalled the growth of his once-burgeoning bible college. His very public, televised apology (without acknowledging what he had done) remains legendary; YouTube claims over 150,000 views. After the Swaggart sex scandal gained momentum, enrollment at what was then the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College plunged, and construction stopped at the dorm by 1989. Apparently many other plans for Swaggart’s campus stalled in the late 1980s, and a second time caught with his pants down in 1991 only further thwarted any chance for renewing construction as a dorm. However, this building most likely advanced much further in construction than anything else stalled by Swaggart Ministries after his 1989 scandal, and this first set of photos, from May of 2010, shows it at its bleakest. (While the rest of the campus appears fully operative twenty years later, it would appear from the above photo that many of the palm trees aren’t getting the care they need to fend off disease.)

For nearly two decades, a concrete shell sat there in lugubrious decay, even as the area around it boomed, culminating in the construction of the Mall of Louisiana in 1997. Finally, the abandoned shell caught the interest of a developer, who in 2007 hoped to begin rehabilitation of the structure to convert into a high-end hotel, but the real estate and financial market’s slump prolonged the delay. A somewhat recent Associated Press article that the developer ultimately scaled the project down from an initial $75 million proposal to a more modest $42.5 million: a 256-room hotel with conference rooms and a ballroom. Interestingly, the Louisiana Legislature applied Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to expedite the project, which uses the estimated future sales tax revenue to help finance a project that might otherwise lack either the equity it needs or is unable to secure an adequate loan. While this tactic is common throughout the US, governments normally apply it in economically disadvantaged areas—not directly across the street from a metro’s most successful shopping hub. The City of Baton Rouge also granted tax credits under the state’s restoration tax abatement program.

Though it lacks the materials, plumbing, wiring or mechanical engineering that would be most vulnerable to inclement weather or thieves, the cement skeleton still shows considerable wear and staining from elements.

Ten-foot tall chain-linked fences and threatening signs aren’t enough to deter the graffiti artists.

And many of the vandals made their way up to the top floor.

A return visit to the site a little over two months later (near the end of July 2010) revealed a surprising level of further deterioration and graffiti.

My one college course in materials science doesn’t provide me much illumination on why the concrete on the upper levels seems to be in much worse shape than closer to the ground, but it is obvious that these higher floors are deteriorating considerably. Could that have really happened so quickly since May?

It looks systematic, as though it involved a human hand, dismantling the top floors and working the way down. An orange outer fence on the front side (facing the principal arterial, Bluebonnet Boulevard) appears to have been installed much more recently and suggests the sort of deterrent used for construction projects.

At this point, without having read anything about plans for the site, I had drawn the conclusion that the building was getting demolished, an assumption substantiated by the presence of backhoes and other earth moving equipment.

And, at that point, my chronicle of this building seemed likely to come to its end; shortly thereafter I was reassigned another city. Thankfully, my ever-loyal blog-follower and South Louisiana native, Nici English, remained close to the Red Stick and was able to follow it over the ensuing months. With a sharper pair of eyes and an undoubtedly better camera, her professional approach picked up where I left off. (And I cannot help but offer a shameless promotion, since she more than deserves it: her personal site, Oak Tree Photography offers breathtaking black-and-whites of the built environment across a number of southern cities.)

The developer had clearly taken real initiative over the winter: by late February of 2011, the “Swaggart dorm”, as we call it, was taking on a new life, with the installation of what appears to be insulation.

Note that the developer has apparently deemed it unnecessary to remove the graffiti on the concrete at the ground level of the building.

A few weeks later, a sign offer promise of what is to come:

By late August, clad with what I strongly suspect is EIFS, the Renaissance Hotel is starting to establish its identity.

And, in mid October, the building opens to the public.

It appears that some of what I saw as deterioration on that top level was actually an alteration of the fenestration: hotel rooms generally emphasize larger windows than dorms. I’m not going to pick apart the architecture any more than to acknowledge that the huge “Renaissance” sign atop the roof manages to compensate for its dull typography by suggesting to me a throwback to the 1950s—a time when rooftop signs for hotels were commonplace, even though at that time the majority of Baton Rouge’s hotels would have likely been downtown and not off a major highway in suburbia (especially not on Bluebonnet Boulevard, which was nothing but countryside sixty years ago).

It was almost twenty-five years in the making, but now this plot of land has a structure worthy of its market value. In a less sour economy, this suburban arterial would probably see many more construction projects capitalizing on every developable square foot. As it is, the redevelopment of the Swaggart dorm represents an ostensible public-private partnership effort at revitalization, the heart of which remains a mystery. Did the area really have to depend on a TIF and tax credits to turn the blighted Swaggart dorm around? Perhaps I overstate the area’s desirability: if it were that lucrative, something would have been erected a long time ago. But the truth of the matter, I suspect, is that the area really is desirable, but a stalled mid-rise project throws a wrench into any other efforts. The cost of demolition before a developer can build may offset the area’s intrinsic market advantages. As mundane as this project may seem, it may have taken a shrewd developer with an eye for the building’s “physiognomy”—coupled with a city/state government willing to go to bat—in order to get anything off the ground. And at least the Renaissance Hotel seems to be taking care of its trees; something that will hopefully inspire Swaggart Ministries to do the same for its remaining share of the campus on this stretch of Bluebonnet Boulevard.

The college paints the town anything but red.

2011-10-30T04:24:00.002-08:00

The phrase infill development can loosely refer to a wide variety of approaches with the overriding aim of introducing (or reintroducing) a higher density of habitable buildings into a mature, already established built environment. In most cases, the surrounding infrastructure for an infill parcel has long been in place, the adjacent properties are at least partially if not completely built, and zoning regulations already encourage a particular kind of land use. Usually the infill target is a vacant lot, often which previously hosted a structure that has since been demolished. Sometimes the parcel was simply an inadequate size or an unusual shape, precluding it from getting developed to the same degree as its neighbors; other times the zoning is too stringent and prohibits what a developer may perceive to be the highest and best use of the land. But infill does not apply just to vacant parcels. The phrase “highest and best use” suggests some sort of intervention if property is perceived to be underutilized as well. For example, in successful town centers, high property value and high density of structures usually benefit from co-dependency when viewed through the lens of land economics. That is, because the cost of land in a sought-after downtown is high, it becomes far more prudent to build intensely in such a district, which usually results in vertical development, since that’s the only way to squeeze in lots of leasable area on a small parcel. The high concentration of economic activity in these clusters of towering structures downtown helps to attract other developers and further escalating demand for a finite stretch of land. The densest, most valuable urban real estate in the US has little room for one-story buildings like warehouses or most strip malls, and even lower tolerance for surface parking lots. Thus, the replacement of a parking lot, a squat relic from the industrial heyday, or a privately managed green space with a tall structure with the potential to generate greater revenue also constitutes infill development.

In principle, the typical infill project should serve as a win-win situation for both public and private interests: the developers get to build in a usually already desirable area without incurring much of the cost of infrastructure (since most of it has already been installed long ago); the public sector gets to add a more valuable piece of real estate into its tax rolls. Yet infill projects still tend to be highly controversial across much of the US, with adjacent property owners typically raising the loudest objections. Why would they fight a development that will most likely help sustain high property values in the area while further dispersing the tax burden across a greater number of owners? The problem is that infill indisputably adds density to the district, and Americans intrinsically distrust density. While such an assertion may seem to paint the populace with a brush that is both broad and steeped in vinegar, the evidence that Americans eschew density is everywhere, and I’m not intending this statement as a criticism. The majority of American cities—particularly the older, eastern ones that predate the automobile—have largely been shrinking for more than a half century. Though rural America has depopulated as well, it is not out of the farmers’ desire to move to the city; both rural and urban dwellers have fled en masse to the low density suburbs. The US has always boasted incredible stretches of sparsely inhabited land; even as the population exceeds 300 million, it can still make this claim. But by most other countries’ standards, even the cities themselves boast vast expanses with few or no people. American cities are, on average, among the least densely inhabited in the world. In many regards, it is an achievement: a product of such aggregate wealth that we can afford to live and function with great distances between one another. It is a triumph of self-actualization. But low density also undercuts the ability for cities, often limited in their capacity to grow through annexation, to continue to administer and function effectively when people demand to live far away from one another, often outside of the municipal boundaries altogether.

The result of this aversion to density is manifest in the numerous complaints and challenges to infill development. It will cause ungodly amounts of traffic in the area. It will spark an increase in crime. It will deprive the children of outdoor space in which to play. Many remonstrators have even claimed that it will lower property values. Though such a notion goes against the fundamental intent of infill, such objections may at a micro level (both spatially and temporally) be true: if the prevailing culture of the district is anti-density, the act of shoehorning density will only undercut the overall appeal of the area and may lower demand for property. (Then again, it could attract a new demographic specifically drawn to such density.) A trick of the trade among developers who work in already high density areas is that they must inflate the leasable area of a building beyond their goal for profitability, because they will always have to cut back the density when the neighbors raise objections through their council members. Thus, a developer seeking to build a six story building on a neglected parking lot in an a tightly-knit middle class neighborhood will likely initially propose eight or nine stories; otherwise, if he or she begins with a six-story proposal, the neighbors will probably try to whittle it down to only four.

I know next to nothing about the development history of the building from the photo below, taken during a brief visit to Blacksburg, Virginia last year. I don’t even recall enough of where it’s located to attempt any research.

But I can draw conclusions based on what I know about the surrounding area. Blacksburg is unquestionably a college town, hosting Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, better known as Virginia Tech, the largest and most recognized higher learning institution in the southwest of the state. With a population of around 42,600 (by the 2010 Census) and a university enrollment of over 30,000 there can be no doubt that Virginia Tech is the lifeblood of the city and region’s economy.

College towns are typically more amenable to densification of the built environment than other communities of similar size. And densification is exactly what it would appear this building has achieved, since it is obviously a newer structure than either of its neighbors; it was inserted in the vacant lot between them.

The sociological conditions here are simply suitable for infill: the large student population results in a significant constituency that will only live there for a limited time and does not usually concern itself with the long-term impacts of developmental changes, particularly if they occur outside the campus boundaries. Students are rarely homeowners in towns like Blacksburg. In addition, they are far less likely to be vehicle owners: while I saw plenty of cars clearly registered under University parking, the fact remains that, common to most campuses, a preponderance of students get around by foot or bicycle. A pedestrian dominated city is more likely to see further density as an asset (one additional building that is within walking distance), and the increased density is just as likely to attract bicycles and walkers as it is to attract cars.

I’m not entirely certain on the developmental aim of this building. The fenestration doesn’t make it a dead giveaway as an apartment on the upper two floors. Though that’s what I expect it to be, the building doesn’t advertise itself as apartments, which could have proven a mistake in a city filled with renters. Why be subtle about it in an area where apartments are rarely stigmatized? Conversely, the different pattern of windows, the wooden signage, and the shaded patio seating all suggest that the first floor hosts some other retail use. The one jarring feature of this structure is the fire escape:

Fitting it between the new building and the adjacent blue house was quite a challenge. As one of the earlier photos reveals, the eaves of the two structures are butting up against one another. The owners of this house next door would have had just cause to complain about a deteriorated view—if they cared enough. However, I would have guessed this blue house to be a subdivided apartment building, filled with not-too-particular students and run by a landlord who knows that his backpack toting clients are rarely all that choosy. Regardless, this jungle gym of a fire escape also provides an unusual backdrop for patio seating that isn’t likely to appeal to many; the umbrellas offering shade are probably unnecessary most of the time, since a patio wedged in like this won’t usually receive too much sunlight. Wouldn’t it have been better to flip the building 180 degrees, placing the patio and the fire escape next to the shorter, virtually windowless brick structure on the other side? Then again, the targeted student customer does not usually put much stock in aesthetics of living conditions; they have the rest of their lives to worry about that, most likely in another city.

It’s hard to imagine anyone falling in love with this building from an architectural standpoint, yet it manages to offer commercial and (presumably) residential space just a cartwheel away from the campus—in the middle of a block, of all things. By most metrics it would appear to be a successful infill development. It hosts a mix of uses and contributes to Blacksburg’s tax base. And while it is possible that the neighbors subjected it to greater design scrutiny than I’m assuming, one might guess how it would have turned out if a throng of adjacent property owners had nitpicked the original plans due to some of the weaknesses that I have pointed out. Infill might sprout up more easily in a fertile, permissive culture, but the result isn’t necessarily “highest and best” from a design standpoint. Those NIMBYs that developers and planners both like to castigate could very well have steered this project in a far more prudent direction for long-term viability, which is why the development world continues to pursue infill in fiercely protected urban historical districts that support high density, despite the inevitable “Think of the children!” opposition that it nearly always encounters.

Blotting out the by-line.

2011-10-22T10:40:00.004-08:00

Keeping the theme of gently altered signs, I offer a follow-up on the “Huge Condos” blog post from two months ago. Though not as funny as the advertisement in Dayton, this sign manifests a completely different kind of error in judgment pertaining to real estate. For developers with comparatively low dependency on equity partners, with a faith that the development will yield a desirable ROI, with a comfortable debt-to-equity ratio, and with the know-how to operate and maintain (or the capacity to forge a contract with a good management agency) over the ensuing years, it is likely that they will not be as eager to dispose of the property. In other words, the developers will retain title as the property is leased and occupied.

But what if business fortunes take a turn for the worse and they change their minds? In both good and bad economic climates, properties change hands, businesses fold or consolidate. The notion that a single entity will ever own a parcel in perpetuity is farfetched, which makes the decision displayed on this “cornerstone” plaque at a lifestyle center just outside of Montgomery, Alabama all the more bizarre:

Apparently two firms named Alfa and Jim Wilson & Associates, Inc. developed The Shoppes at East Chase. But they also had a bigger role in the past.

Spraypainted in a somewhat concealing black is the word “owner”, suggesting that this is no longer the case. One or both companies have divested themselves of the ownership role, and someone (the new owner presumably) took the most efficient approach possible to show it. But this action raises two further questions. First of all, why did the owner opt for such a chintzy method of indicating this? Up close, it’s not even effective: anyone with remotely decent vision can see the “owner” marginally obscured through black paint. Is it really that expensive to buy a new plaque? Wouldn’t it be worth it to clarify the key players in the development and management of this lifestyle center?

Second, and more importantly, wouldn’t the new owner (the Australian company Centro apparently) want to draw more attention to his or her name? This shopping node, while nowhere near as smartly designed as some new lifestyle centers in comparable southern state capitals such as Baton Rouge or Jackson (a topic I hope to explore at length in the future), still fits the mold for the retail typology that is most popular and successful these days. East Chase itself seems to be doing well enough, poor economy notwithstanding. At the time of my visit in the summer of 2010, it was probably 85 to 90% occupied. And it’s clearly the retail node in metro Montgomery with the healthiest potential. It sits squarely outside the city limits, in the eastern fringe which seems to be absorbing most of the suburban out-migration. Compare this to the more conventional, purely enclosed Eastdale Mall:

This mall, about two miles to the west and on the edge of the city limits, is doing fine from a superficial glance on a bustling Saturday night. All the department stores were occupied and most of the inline stores were filled as well. But many of the most lucrative tenants—middle to highbrow names like Hollister, Banana Republic, and Talbott’s—all fled the larger Eastdale Mall, presumably around 2002 when East Chase opened. The replacements at the older Eastdale are predominantly mom and pop stores, not the sort of thing a major mall seeks in order to ensure steady foot traffic. I’d be very surprised if, 16 months since taking these photos, the Eastdale Mall hasn’t demonstrated more visible signs of decline. Meanwhile, the next highest concentration of retail square footage in the Montgomery metro area is the Montgomery Mall, on the south side of town in the city limits.

And it’s dead, my friend.

Completely closed. It still appears well-maintained: no graffiti and very little litter, the landscaping is reasonably groomed, and the pavement on the parking lot is not too pockmarked yet. But this could be merely because the Montgomery Mall hasn’t been closed for long, and the shift of retail energy from within the city limits to the eastern suburbs is a gradual process.

But something about that palimpsest plaque at The Shoppes at East Chase is troubling. Perhaps it, too, was a temporary solution while a new sign was on order; I just happened to catch the man behind the curtain at the inopportune time. If not, though, and the spraypainted owner is there to stay, then it may be that something is amiss in terms the operations at this most promising of Montgomery’s retail nodes. After all, it struck me as a bit surprising that one of their big-box, “category killer” stores was vacant.

I presume this to have been a Staples, which was not a business known for shuttering a large number of its stores in 2010. The red of the company’s trademark façade may be the akin to the color of the herring I’m following, but the telltale signs of a struggling retail environment in an otherwise healthy metro (Montgomery is unquestionably the most prosperous area in Alabama’s largely impoverished Black Belt region) are the stuff that retail experts and developers use to determine where future expansion should take place. It could be that the nine-year-old East Chase is already past its prime, and another retail hub is in the works, even further out in the decentralized eastern suburbs. Maybe the developer would have enough confidence to hang on to the property a bit longer…or at least find a more adaptable plaque for display.

Drive-thru service...to (or at) your door.

2011-09-30T12:12:00.003-08:00

One of the most intense work months of my career has just come to an end, and it's been obvious that it has prevented me from devoting as much time and thought to my already meager average of two blog posts a month. And I conclude September with another short(ish) post on an observation I made during a visit to Chicago, just days before I left the country for this job in Afghanistan.

It's inevitable that trendy neighborhoods such as Lakeview, where I took the pictures from this series, will attract restaurants with an understanding of the pulse of urbanity. These shrewd entrepreneurs recognize that busy foot traffic on the sidewalks is not just free publicity but also an opportunity to expand their gross leasable area ever so slightly. For every party seeking a private meal in the restaurant's darkest, most anonymous corner, another will specifically stake out the extroverted front row seats, to increase the likelihood of chance encounters with friends from the neighborhood. It fits with the coveted lifestyle of the young professional as a Lakeview yuppie fits in the seat of a Volkswagen Jetta. And what better way to maximize the chance of lassoing passers-by into the coruscating dinner conversation than by getting them before they even make it into the door of the restaurant? Thus, witness the al fresco dining options.

If the sidewalk were broad and expansive, the owners of each restaurant could probably seek a permit for the city with much more artistic license—something that allowed a greater variety of seating arrangements, some waist-high partitions, maybe some tiki torches or other mood lighting at night, perhaps even a space for a roving musician. Obviously that's not likely to be the case on this street, where an restaurateur instead must take advantage of every square inch that he or she can get during Chicago's inevitably limited al fresco dining season; not much more than one-third of the year is warm enough. The outdoor dining configuration must fall within the allowable parameters set by the city, not to interfere with pedestrian accessibility or general safety.

But, judging from the photo of the streetscape here, the City of Chicago gives quite a bit of leeway for sidewalk amenities. It appears that these improvements, whether they include the setback for al fresco dining, or bike racks, or street trees, or potted plants—all of them can claim more than fifty percent of the width of the sidewalk—the total right of way. Pedestrians can't pass more than two shoulder-to-shoulder. Quite generous for the diners and restaurant owners, and my suspicion is that the city's planners conceived these dimensions with the hopes of further stimulating pedestrian vitality in the area by catering to them so much, then forcing them close together. The fence for the outdoor dining tables may not offer any visual privacy, which isn't a problem, since customers who would choose to eat here would have few qualms about being seen by as many people as possible. However, the fence does clearly demarcate a space which its users can clearly appropriate through the duration of the meal. And it provides an attractive mount for hanging plants and flowers. The restaurant's al fresco probably only caters to two deuces—just four people—but the owners prove that they value those potential customers by the amount they have invested towards gussying it up. The resulting arrangement seems to work for everyone: the business operators get to add a few more seats, the city gets the enhanced sense of pedestrian energy that drives up real estate (and, thus, tax revenue), the restaurant's patrons get all the seating options that they can hope for.

But one party still loses: the motorists.

For all they've been able to stuff onto the sidewalk, the interplay is problematic. The al freso diners could reach out and slap the car while remaining seated at their table. And while the driver may not have a problem with this arrangement, the passenger side sure gets a bum deal.

They're stuck. No real options if you park at this space. In this particular situation, the cars seem to fall last in the pecking order. For the militant urbanist, this isn't a problem, of course: cars are the problem, and we defenders of city living should never try to accommodate them at the expense of a healthy walking environment. After all, it's quite an improvement from the sidewalk fencing in downtown Chicago that I blogged about awhile ago, which clearly did nothing more than impede pedestrians' ability to cross the street on a particular side of the intersection.

But I'm not a militant urbanist, and I can recognize the need for a less lopsided arrangement. These images reveal a real predicament for a driver, and while this might seem like an isolated incident, I'd be be willing to bet the farm (or the entire slow food movement, in this case) that Lincoln Square, Lakeview, Lincoln Park, Roscoe Village, Wrigleyville, etc etc etc have plenty more examples where the the powers that be have rammed the puzzle pieces together. Cars park and the passenger can't get out because of an impediment on the sidewalk. The fact remains that this is on-street parking we're impinging upon here—the most spatially efficient kind, the easiest to integrate to a pedestrian/bicycle heavy environment, and, in many parts of Chicago, the only option on that block. Is it really in the best interest of the city to allow a streetscape improvement that effectively maims the adjacent parking spots? Sure, it won't affect the driver of the car featured in the above photos. But in a dense environment like Chicago, where parking is never that easy, cars are more likely to have a passenger (or two or three) than a typical vehicle seeking a parking space in a huge lot in suburban, car-friendly Schaumburg.

Thus, the conductor of this urban symphony failed to perceive all that forces that make the counterpoint here so delicate. I'm hardly pointing out a crisis here. It may never need intervention through new codes or revisions to the permitting process; let's hope it doesn't. The restaurant owners may soon discover the problem that these fences pose, and they may decide that it's better not to antagonize drivers seeking parking on the street right outside their window. But this arrangement demonstrates that pushing heavily in one ideological direction only results in the other agent responding with a push back, or even an antagonistic tug. Urban environments can be just as hostile to drivers as the suburbs are accused of being toward pedestrians. Streetscape improvements have the opportunity for enhancing value in a huge, largely successful metropolis just as much as they do in a neglected small town, but calibration with the scale, an awareness of the context, and a sensitivity to the consequences are all critical. This observation has about as much complexity as arguing that a dish can be seasoned too heavily, or, by contrast, it might not be seasoned enough—gosh, what an insight. Yet the most obvious juxtapositions often pass us right by, until, lo and behold, a passenger has to climb across the driver's seat to get out of the car. “Take that, Lexus-owning yuppies,” retorts the militant. “Even worse than a Jetta.” May the cooler heads prevail.

Modulars get modern.

2011-09-23T09:38:00.007-08:00

Work commitments yet again prevent me from devoting time to lengthy blog posts the way I often would like, but maybe this is a godsend for my readers. My previous post on condo(m)s in Dayton managed to arouse more interest than I’ve achieved in some time. One topic from which I have shied for the most part—probably more than necessary—is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Having lived in New Orleans at the time of the storm and a few years after, I have hundreds of personal photos, as well as more provided by some of my enthusiastic readers, which I included in a recent post featuring the Mississippi Coast. Considering the wealth of opportunity I have for featuring the Gulf Coast photographically, it’s time I explore what I know in depth while remaining sensitive to the swirl of emotions that surround this as-of-yet unsurpassed fiasco (at least in the US). And if I don’t have time to be as sensitive and nuanced as I would like, at least I can be brief.

For the vast majority of the US, the words “FEMA Trailer” conjure an image largely supplied through the extensive media coverage in the early years after the storm: a non-descript white RV that can easily hitch itself to a large vehicle. For the million or two in the Gulf Coast sitting directly within Hurricane Katrina’s path, a FEMA Trailer was just a part of daily life. They were everywhere. In metro New Orleans, you would have been hard pressed to find a street block without at least one perched in the driveway or front yard. Only a shut-in could claim not to see a trailer on a daily basis; a huge portion of the population lived in them, sometimes for years.

Many individuals suffered losses too catastrophic to justify simply “camping out” in their front yards as they repaired their homes. They had to move into “FEMA Villages”—essentially makeshift mobile home parks. These structures were a fair amount larger and less movable than a trailer. Though funded by the government (either leasing the land—or the trailer pads—from a private vendor, or buying it and installing all the infrastructure), the goal was always for these settlements to transition back to private operation, coincident with their residents rebuilding their homes or by moving permanently into these federal villages.

But both the Villages and the Trailers have had their ardent detractors. To many, they were ugly, soulless settlements, more poorly thought-out than New Orleans’ public housing (an achievement in itself) and distributed through an inefficient process. FEMA/Homeland Security built many Villages out of expediency, in places where the land was cheap or readily available, rather than being convenient as a temporary settlement for evacuees. Some of the trailers got lost in bureaucracy and sat languishing in fields in Arkansas, long enough that they could deteriorate. Other naysayers saw FEMA’s Individual Assistance process as a pseudo-solution that fostered long-term government dependency and opportunities for fraud. These critics noted the absence of clearly articulated plans for relocation or eviction after a deadline that the feds pushed back time and time again. The trailers, in turn, were often so flimsy that they’d succumb to the next major storm, resulting in further squandering of public dollars. And individuals on both sides of the political spectrum criticized the sudden public health/public relations debacle two years after the storm, when studies revealed that the levels of formaldehyde were enough to trigger serious and often dangerous respiratory allergic reactions.

Accompanying this pound of cure, however, was an ex-post-facto ounce of prevention. The seemingly sloppily administered government aid after Katrina elicited a variety of smaller, frequently for-profit initiatives attempting to rectify some of the problems posed by FEMA housing peppered liberally across the Gulf Coast by offering alternatives. Various companies attempted to tame Americans’ general aversion toward concrete as a primary construction material in housing, touting its resiliency and low cost of maintenance. Private consultants devised ways to engineer FEMA villages under neo-traditionalist principles so that the infrastructure installed could support desirable long-term mixed use developments vaguely akin to the much ballyhooed resort community of Seaside, Florida (popularized through the movie The Truman Show), after the trailers and mobile homes moved out. Neither of these proposals took off—in fact, they left such a meager ripple that most internet search engines would yield nothing. Slightly more successful—and a non-profit venture—were the aesthetic alternatives to FEMA trailers known as Katrina Cottages : cheery, affordable little structures built much more durably than typical mobile homes, intended to withstand strong winds, offer highly efficient storage as an antidote to small square footage (usually under 700), and in keeping with the architectural vernacular of New Orleans’ pastel single shotgun homes. One city in particular, Ocean Springs, Mississippi, pioneered the Katrina Cottage community by leasing a few acres adjacent to downtown to host a small cluster of these much heralded residential alternatives.

The Katrina Cottage was a drop in the bucket amidst the flood of federal housing assistance (an ill chosen pun, I know). It could hardly compete as anything more than a niche market when it had only a fraction of working capital of such juggernauts as FEMA and HUD. But Ocean Springs also hosts the innovative, privately initiated solution I saw last summer, five years after the storm, when most other affluent homeowners along the Gulf had either fully rebuilt or thrown in the towel completely. But this home just blocks away from the Mississippi coast was still undergoing repairs.

The glare from my car’s windshield doesn’t help things, but the configuration is the same one you might have seen on the Gulf Coast just two or three years earlier: a mobile home poised in the middle of the front yard, with the permanent home partially hidden behind it. Approaching it from the other direction better reveals the relationship between the two structures:

This home is close enough to the water that it clearly could be influenced by violent storm surge; it might even be vulnerable to an uncommonly strong tidal surge. The elevation of the foundation is probably nothing new—most houses nearby have been raised—but the length of the supportive piers is probably greater than before. The first of the two photos reveals that the garage was a conventional one, which, it would appear, the unusual elevation has now rendered useless as a carport. But the most notable feature here is that modular unit out front. By most judgments, it looks a far lot comfier, sturdier, and more attractive than a FEMA trailer. Could the homeowners have been inspired by what they saw elsewhere in Ocean Springs, through the winsome Katrina Cottages less than a mile away? I can’t help but think so. It’s highly likely the improvements to the main house no longer have anything to do with disaster recovery. After all, Katrina struck five years prior, and the deadline for Individual Assistance applications has long since expired. Still, the owner may have liked the approach of living off his or her infrastructure on personal property while making significant changes to the home. Those homeowners with the wherewithal for something nicer are likely to seek an upgrade from the spartan, formaldehyde-laced FEMA trailers. The result is a structure like this: still highly efficient but much easier on the eye, and probably more durable too. And it is likely far more movable than the average modular home.

The clichéd crisis/opportunity dichotomy can’t help but ring true. Not only does it take a cataclysmic event to shake the populace out of complacency (which is precisely what we had become in our relation to hurricane evacuation and general emergency preparedness prior to Katrina), but it takes further muddling through the solution to discover that a mitigating approach would have borne more utilitarian fruit in the long run. Although the median home size has shrunk over the past few years (for the first time in recorded US history), we aren’t yet exactly considering the Katrina Cottage, much less the modular home, as the typical piece of the American Dream. But we are coming closer to parity than ever seemed possible before the bubble burst. Average household sizes have been shrinking for decades: since more people live alone, it is probable that they will, at least in aggregate, demand less space. The Katrina Cottage or the smartly accoutered FEMA trailer may someday seem less like an idiosyncrasy and more like a brilliant act of foresight—a widely cheered solution within a persistently dour housing market.

One commodity still selling well after the real estate bubble burst.

2011-08-28T10:43:00.005-08:00

In this extended period of blogging dearth, it occurred to me that I’m long overdue for a certain type of article that I haven’t featured in awhile: the mini-post, or the snapshot. Time shortages during a busy period within our squadron make this seem like an opportune time for a quick read. Most of the time these easily digestible nuggets involve some signage that I found odd or amusing, and this one is no exception, taken over a year ago from the gentrifying urban neighborhood known as the Portland District in Dayton, Ohio:

We’re never too old for puerile humor, and it doesn’t require an eagle eye to figure out the way this sign provides an opportunity for a dirty pun-like transformation. The smudge between the O and the S on the second word suggests that some pranksters already attempted it, and the property owner addressed the indelicate phrase with white paint. But why leave so much space between these last two letters? It’s almost as though the creator of the sign was inviting someone to add the obligatory letter M at the end. A closer look reveals where the fault lies:

The portion of the white paint smudge that blocks the “valley” of the M ultimately conceals the sign’s original fallacy: an apostrophe. Years of English classes never taught me the appropriate name for this mechanics faux pas; only recently did I learn that the mistaken introduction of an apostrophe when a plural is indicated is called a greengrocer’s apostrophe. Wiktionary explains that t generally derives from ignorance of the use of an apostrophe, and in an urban environment with a high density of signs, one can rarely go a day without seeing it.

This use of a greengrocer’s apostrophe in Dayton only expanded the opportunity to transform the sign into the word teenagers think of when hear “condominium” or “condo”—it wouldn’t have been as easy to squeeze an M in there if the existing goof weren’t there and the proper space existed between the letters. Thus, an expensive sign has suffered a twofold desecration: first from the elementary mechanics error, and secondly from the vulgar vandal. Let it be a lesson for us all that not every word that ends in S needs an apostrophe before it. In fact, most don't!

And Buckeyes, I promise to portray Dayton in a more sophisticated light in the future.

Dressing the wounds with paint.

2011-08-21T11:29:00.004-08:00

My suspicion is that the majority of the readers here have at least a vague knowledge of the Broken Windows Theory, and how it can apply across a variety of social contexts. For the unacquainted, it’s simple: an inanimate object showing signs of neglect or a general lack of maintenance invites the further degeneration of its own physical condition, because the perpetrators causing further damage safely assume that the lack of stewardship will preclude any consequence to acts of vandalism. In short, if a building lets a single broken window remain unrepaired for long, in due time all the windows will end up broken. Shattering glass, is quick, easy, and usually anonymous; for those seeking a deviant outlet, it’s hard to think of a better option. Even graffiti—probably the next most popular means of exemplifying the Broken Window Theory—still requires the procurement of a certain object, the spray paint can, which investigators could easily trace to the perpetrator. Breaking a window can involve anything one finds on the ground. So in a structure perceived to be abandoned or long ignored, the windows are usually the first to go, then the graffiti artists tag it, and before long, thieves have most likely plundered it of all its copper.

Only a few large American cities are lacking in a certain district with a high concentration of abandoned structures. In some, the abandonment is relegated to the most disinvested areas; others are replete with them across the entire city limits. All too often, the diminished tax base that arises from a collection of unused buildings robs the city leaders of the best tools for tackling blight and abandonment, whether in the form of demolishing the most neglected buildings, restoring them, or—as is often the case—“securing” them by boarding up those windows. Plywood boards are frequently the first line of defense: they’re cheap, they effectively deter window breakers, and they pose a barrier for burglars. But they’re ugly, by most people’s perceptions. And they flag a structure as abandoned far more boldly than those without the boards; a building is obviously abandoned even from a distance if the windows are boarded, far more so even than if they’re uncovered and most are shattered.

And boarded windows essentially serve as a promotional canvas for graffiti artists. Already flagged as abandoned, the boards encourage those already enticed by delinquency to leave a mark on a hardened shell that is by this point reasonably impenetrable. A talented graffiti artist may create a breathtaking display on the side of the building, but the market tells us that graffito-strewn areas generally suffer far lower property values than those that lack it. (A more sociological assessment would surely reveal that it’s a chicken/egg dilemma, and the concomitant social problems in low income areas encourage abandonment and thus attract graffiti.) Regardless of the origins, securing vacant buildings with plywood may result in a stalemate: the boards amplify as many of the visual consequences of deviant behavior as they deflect.

Some communities have attempted other outlets at staving off blight by providing at least a rudimentary level of stewardship to their abandoned buildings beyond plywood. Camden, New Jersey is a city that, after decades of deindustrialization, has suffered far more disinvestment and abandonment than most, along with a heavily impoverished tax base that often stymies the City from being able to fund blight management. The image below reveals what I suspect is a civic-led initiative to mitigate the eyesore effect of those boards.

The photo comes from the neighborhood center of Fairview, the southernmost part of Camden. Three story multi-family housing surrounds a central park-like square in which I’m standing, flanked by first-floor retail at the corners (seen on the left in this photo). Despite the obvious signs of disinvestment, Fairview is still a curiosity in Camden: it was originally conceived in the 1910s as Yorkship Village, a carefully planned community of curvilinear streets, abundant shared green space, an inward-turning and self-sustaining neighborhood character, and a reasonable price range for its architecturally uniform rowhouses (and the occasional detached home). In short, it was a prototype for the Garden City, modeled after Ebenezer Howard’s conception that came to fruition in the form of Letchworth and Welwyn workers' communities in the UK just a few years prior. The Garden City movement never grew beyond a curious experiment on either side of the pond, but the surviving examples remain interesting footnotes to urban planners and scholars, while certain features to Garden Cities like Yorkship Village/Fairview have retained their cogency as manifested in the design of some suburban apartment blocks or Traditional Neighborhood Development (New Urbanist) projects across the country.

As Camden began sinking into a seemingly ineluctable economic decline caused by rapid deindustrialization in the mid-1900s, Fairview managed to hold its own for decades as a stable working class and lower middle class enclave. Cut off from the rest of the city by both an interstate highway and a creek, the only way for vehicles to reach Fairview was through the economically healthier city of Gloucester City to the south. As our tour guide told us from her experience growing up in the 1950s and 60s, it was like Mayberry—an analogy so popular that no further explanation is needed. Fortunes changed for Fairview in the 1980s, when the City of Camden built a bridge across the north branch of the Newton Creek, connecting it to the rest of the city. The City of Camden also absorbed Fairview into its school district. Previously, Fairview’s children had attended Gloucester City public schools; at the stroke of a pen, the city leadership shepherded Fairview’s student population into one of the worst performing districts in the state. The desirability of Fairview immediately plummeted—attributable more, I suspect, to the shifting school district than the construction of the bridge—and the community’s residents began selling their homes en masse. Within just a few years, this previously overwhelmingly white community with little poverty came to mirror the demographics and socioeconomics of the rest of Camden. The result is the same widespread abandonment visible throughout the rest of the city, seen in a photo below where I pivoted slightly to the right from the prior one:

Fairview remains one of highest-income census tracts in Camden, despite the fact that its socioeconomics place it significantly below the New Jersey average. A fair number of homes in Fairview may be boarded up, but few have been demolished. Virtually none are in danger of collapse. The same cannot be said of elsewhere in the city, which I featured in a blog post long ago. The rest of Camden ranks consistently as both the most crime-ridden and impoverished city in New Jersey as well as one of the worst in the country. Abandonment is everywhere; tall grass waves across the copious fields where much of the housing stock is already long abandoned.

These pictures are by now fairly old, taken about eight years ago. But Camden’s rank as a socioeconomic cellar dweller prevails. And though I haven’t visited Fairview in as many years, I suspect its status as Camden’s “healthiest” neighborhood endures as well. As superficial as it may seem, those painted boards on the first floor windows of the building at Fairview’s town center provide ample evidence: it’s the only place in a city replete with plywood where some agent has made the effort to spruce them up. It very well have been the Fairview Historic Society, the agency that provided us with a tour of the town and the anecdotes; it could have been a church group; it may be the product of an initiative from an independent activist. I don’t know what these buildings look like now, but at the time of these photos, the disinvestment in Fairview appeared far more recoverable than elsewhere in Camden: fewer broken windows, less graffiti, minimal structural compromise of the sort that would necessitate demolition. Though still distressed by most measurements, Fairview is indisputable less blighted than most of the rest of Camden. One could perhaps argue that Fairview declined much later than the rest of Camden; it’s still slightly better off and not yet visibly beyond hope of improvement, so of course the appearance is better. But abandonment can age structures remarkably quickly, and the twenty years or so that Fairview has ceased attracting middle class families is more than enough time for vandals to have broken the windows and plundered the interior piping. The painted boards here aren’t much. Many of them simply and crudely mimic what the windows would portray if the rooms inside still had inhabitants: flowers in vases, air conditioner window units, perched cats, people staring back out. But Fairview has a few more pairs of eyes and hands that are voluntarily keeping it afloat. Its unique configuration as a Garden City prototype may not have been enough to salvage it from its host municipality’s decline, but it would be hard to argue that it remains the neighborhood in Camden most likely to enjoy a renaissance.

One other city featured in this article that has attempted to minimize the impact of its abandonment through a brush and acrylics has fought back from a completely different hostile force—not deindustrialization, but the natural fury of a hurricane. Long Beach, Mississippi sits on the Gulf Coast, just east of the much larger and better-known cities of Gulfport and Biloxi. It has hosted a satellite campus of the University of Southern Mississippi, with a number of structures just feet from the beach.

The Category 3 & 4 winds and the storm surge induced by Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the Mississippi Coast, the other regional victim of a catastrophe in which New Orleans’ fate dominated international press coverage. The Gulf Coast didn’t marinate in floodwaters for weeks on end, the way New Orleans did; the overwhelming majority of the damage occurred overnight, so that recovery could begin within days. But the irrecoverable losses on the coast may actually be more severe: while many homes in New Orleans could be refurbished after they had been gutted and treated for mold, only foundations remained for a considerable number of Mississippi structures.

This Administration Building fared better than many other directly fronting the shore in Long Beach. Regardless of whether it is structurally intact, it is still standing. Though new buildings have risen since the storm, the majority of the Long Beach campus remains unrestored. Since this photo series was taken in June of this year, almost six years after Katrina—by veteran photographer Nici English—it is clear that the admin building has not been a demolition priority for the university. Plans to renovate it may be pending: though weathered looking, it does not show any indications that it is of eminent danger of collapse. And each one of the boards on the windows has a unique painting—though none are a surefire successor to Matisse, some show at least a moderately high level of skill and time commitment.

Similar to the apartment building in Camden where only the first-floor windowboards received artistic attention, only the front side of the USM Admin Building received a paint job; on one of the other sides, the windows are unsealed.

Like the building in Camden, few, if any, of the windows are broken—graffiti is nowhere to be seen. Long Beach is not an epicenter of deindustrialization the way Camden is, which means that the social ills that often elicit vandalism and other deviant behavior are not looming large in Long Beach the way they are in New Jersey’s poorest city. But graffiti can appear in a moderately unattended building in a cozy, affluent suburb just as easily as a community plagued by poverty or natural disaster; an intruder can break a window in an occupied house. But both criminal acts are more likely to occur on property that is unmonitored, even if only temporarily. The painting of boards on windows, though hardly a panacea to blight, provides a much-needed stamp of stewardship that may repel vandals from a building’s unbroken windows the way cedar repels moths from wool.

Drivable main streets, Part II: Concentrating the poverty.

2011-07-31T10:19:00.008-08:00

The previous post explored one of the most unusual examples of apparent grassroots historic preservation in an essentially rural setting that has succeeded in spite of itself. St. Francisville, Louisiana has no explicit town center, yet the low vacancy levels suggest that the few scattered commercial buildings command higher than average rents for a town of its size. The historic residences are scattered broadly across a large patch of land that is generally not conducive for tours by foot, yet tourists apparently come visit, attend the periodic festivals, pay to explore the homes, eat at the restaurants, and browse the antiques. It is a town that has made the most with what little it has in terms of a concentrated historic architectural vernacular. It's quite an achievement, when one considers the countless small towns across America with far more distinct centers that struggle to secure even a resale shop. What did St. Francisville get right that has evaded so many other communities? The best way to plunge further into this analysis is to compare it to another Louisiana town, Donaldsonville, that has experienced a radically different turn of events.

My apologies for forgetting to mention in the first half of this two-part post what proves to be the fulcrum to this comparison: the fact that both towns are emerging bedroom communities to Baton Rouge, the state of Louisiana's capital and second largest city. St. Francisville sits about 25 miles to the north of the metropolitan area; the other town, Donaldsonville is about 40 miles to the south (35 as the crow flies). The 15-mile difference may very well be enough to degrade the farther town's potential as a bedroom community, but that is surely not the only obstacle. Donaldsonville has almost five times the population of St. Francisville, a characteristic manifested by simply comparing the street configuration of the two towns.

Unlike St. Francisville, it looks much more like a conventional American town, with a pronounced grid that seems oriented toward a body of water. However, despite its considerably greater size, Donaldsonville lacks virtually any of the prosperity.

Available online history on Donaldsonville isn't as robust as St. Francisville; incidentally, one of the best descriptions comes from the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, a site which I briefly referenced when exploring the former Jewish community in Donaldsonville, among several other towns in the Deep South. The site Gonomad relates how this town, perched along a high point (not quite a bluff) opposite a bend in the Mississippi River, has generally avoided catastrophic flooding over the two centuries since its founding. According to the City of Donaldsonville's website, the municipality capitalized on its opportune intersection of the Mississippi and Bayou Lafourche, the latter of which extends southward toward Grand Isle and ultimately to the Gulf of Mexico. The settlement that birthed Donaldsonville is one of the earliest recorded in Louisiana, decades older than St. Francisville or Bayou Sara, originating with Acadians expelled from Canada and Spanish Isleños from the Canary Islands. Falling under both French and Spanish rule before American control with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the town was officially incorporated in 1806 after its founding by wealthy English landowner William Donaldson, at a time when a significant portion of the regional population was still Francophone. Donaldson aggressively pushed for his town to become the state's capital, and for a brief period of 1829 to 1831, he succeeded in steering the center of government away from New Orleans, even though Donaldsonville's population at the time was less than 500. Inevitably, the capital returned downriver to the larger, noisier city; Baton Rouge did not become Louisiana's capital until 1849. Nonetheless, Donaldsonville thrived in middle of the 19^th century as a critical trading hub along the Mississippi, attracting a number of settlers up to the point that it was nearly destroyed during the Civil War. Railway service passing through Donaldsonville from New Orleans in 1871 bolstered the town's recovery.

The twentieth century brought different fortunes to Donaldsonville. The historical trajectory gets a bit cloudy at this point, though a website on Ascension Parish (in which Donaldsonville rests) accounts the area's general dependence on agriculture as an economic mainstay, which shifted in the 1950s and 1960s due to technological advancements, the introduction of new industries (particularly petrochemical), the construction of the Sunshine Bridge across the Mississippi five miles downriver of Donaldsonville, and, perhaps most cataclysmic, the connection of Baton Rouge and New Orleans through Interstate 10. All of these influences collectively altered the focus of economic activity in Ascension Parish—increasingly away from Donaldsonville. A map of the parish helps to illustrate this phenomenon:

The outline of Ascenion Parish is traced in purple. As the map indicates, Donaldsonville is an anomaly: it rests on the opposite side of the Mississippi River from 90% of the land area. Interstate 10 cuts the parish in half, just skirting the only two other incorporated areas, Gonzales and Sorrento. Tracing the interstate's path to the northwest, it leads directly to the outskirts of Baton Rouge. And Ascension Parish is absorbing much of Baton Rouge's outward suburban growth: it has consistently been one of the two or three fastest growing parishes in the state (sometimes number one) and its approximately 38% growth rate between the 2000 and 2010 Census places it among the fastest growing parishes/counties in the country. Within Louisiana, it has among the lowest poverty rates, the highest median income, and some of the highest rated public schools. Ascension Parish is, in short, a community for those seeking proximity to the state's capital but away from Baton Rouge's congestion, crime, and middling school system. By and large, the parish is flourishing.

But Donaldsonville isn't enjoying any of it. Isolated from the rest of the parish, its population is stagnating or declining. The poverty rate was a staggering 34.8% in 2000, and the median income in 2000 was about $24,000, barely half of $44,000 of the parish as a whole. Until mid-century, the town represented the highest concentration of population in this otherwise agrarian parish, and it remains the parish seat. But the center of gravity shifted as suburbanites flocked to other side (the “East Bank”) of the Mississippi because this side contains one of the nation's largest east-west arterials, in the form of I-10. An increasing number of government services have oriented themselves toward Gonzales, which, aside from being the approximate center of the parish, is within a 20-minute drive to 90% of the parish's population. The Ascension Parish Chamber of Commerce is based in Gonzales; Donaldsonville, perhaps recognizing its disassociation from the rest of the parish, has its own. Gonzales and its purlieus have received the lion's share of commercial building permits, so it boasts far more shopping and services. Recent estimates suggest that it now has about 1,000 more people than Donaldsonville, while the areas immediately to its west—unincorporated communities like Prairieville, Geismar, and Dutchtown—are surging with affluent newcomers. The divide, as is often the case, manifests racial disparities: Donaldsonville is overwhelmingly (approximately 70%) African American, while the remainder of the parish is even more disproportionately white.

Clearly Donaldsonville has its share of challenges. But one thing it doesn't lack is an intact, walkable town center of historic structures. It has far more than Gonzales, while the unincorporated areas such as Prairieville lack any discernible old center whatsoever. Donaldsonville also has plenty of extant old commercial buildings that our small towns hinge upon in order to reinvent themselves--such as St. Francisville. Unfortunately, my photograph collection of Donaldsonville pales in comparison to its more prosperous counterpart, but the few that I have still effectively convey some of Donaldsonville's character. Incidentally, most of them come from a walking tour of the town's historic core.

Railroad Avenue, the town's historic main street, offers multiple blocks of street level retail in widely varying levels of economic health. The building to the right in the photo below hosts a small restaurant.

Louisiana Square, the central park abutting Railroad Avenue, may not seem lively in these photos, but it is surrounded by housing and commercial establishments that endow it with centrality and visibility that would make it an optimal site for a community gathering.

The blocks surrounding the park and Railroad Avenue are probably the most affluent in the town. The churches and homes enjoy a level of upkeep that bears a passing resemblance to a handsome nook in Uptown New Orleans.

Railroad Avenue offers a number of small businesses that clearly demonstrate that the town is trying to assert itself for leisure visits, no doubt targeting much the same demographic that frequents St. Francisville on the weekends. The Grapevine Cafe and Gallery has done well at its Railroad Avenue location for a decade, with owners who saw promise in the architectural character of a building that was in serious disrepair at the time. The Victorian on the Avenue is a bed and breakfast that, like so many bed and breakfasts across the country, took advantage of an old Victorian home with ample bedrooms in a pedestrian-scaled area by restoring it to its new purpose. Cabahanosse, a few blocks further down Railroad Avenue, offers a similar bed/breakfast experience in a restored wood-frame house that featured a general store below and family residence above. Just around the corner from Railroad Avenue on Claiborne Street, Lafitte's Landing may embody the genesis of Donaldsonville's protracted efforts to revitalize through diligent supporters: founded in 1978 by chef John Folse in a refurbished plantation, the restaurant helped bring south Louisiana's vernacular cuisine a worldwide audience. For decades it was among the most celebrated restaurants in the region. Though today it appears that Lafitte's Landing and the Bittersweet Plantation bed and breakfast are a private facility, only open to customers of Chef John Folse and Company's specialty line of desserts, the restaurant and its proprietor were instrumental in elevating Donaldsonville into the region's consciousness as more than just a struggling old river town.

I'm not particularly fond of cherry-picking individual businesses as a means of illustrating a broader socioeconomic trend: establishments such as the ones above come and go, and I could have just as easily picked four others to assert an entirely point regarding Donaldsonville's historic character. But I mention these in particular because their price points clearly do coincide with the expected offerings of a town with such low median incomes and such high poverty. Outside of Railroad Avenue and the central Louisiana Square, the prosperity of Donaldsonville almost immediately plummets.

The poorer districts within the town are characterized by abandonment and vacant lots where homes undoubtedly once stood.

I didn't feel comfortable taking photos while with a tour group in some of the most impoverished areas, but a simple visit to Google Streetview, particularly in the west side of town, will review the economic conditions in much of Donaldsonville.

The aforementioned businesses—the Grapevine, the Lafitte's Landing—obviously target an affluent demographic and would fit much better in a picturesque town unencumbered by the social disarray that has befallen Donaldsonville. In short, they'd work in St. Francisville—except that these meager photos demonstrate far more of a walkable street grid in Donaldsonville than one can ever hope to encounter in its more prosperous counterpart to the north. At 2.5 square miles, it’s not a large city; its 2000 population density of nearly 3000 people per square mile makes Donaldsonville city limits more densely populated than quite a few large American cities. St. Francisville’s incorporated area is almost as large but with a fraction of the population; the density in 2000 was only about 935 people per square mile. Donaldsonville evidently has its share of boosters: both the entrepreneurs who value the extensive array of historic buildings in close proximity to one another, as well as the customers who patronize their businesses. Like St. Francisville, it boasts a number of picturesque plantation homes, many in excellent condition, which could attract tourists. But these blandishments haven’t been enough to reinvent the place. The tour that elicited these photos didn't meander through Donaldsonville in order to soak in the atmosphere; we were there for a community outreach forum to help residents envision solutions for one of south Louisiana’s most distressed towns.

The maps and photos collectively demonstrate why St. Francisville and Donaldsonville serve as such interesting counterparts. The one with all the physical characteristics of quaint Americana in a condensed, navigable format continues to flounder. Conversely, a smattering of old buildings loosely linked into a rural hamlet by two highways achieves the reputation of one of the most desirable small towns in the state. The fundamental demographic differences between the two have received more than enough attention in this report. Other, smaller distinctions may also have a bearing: for example, while both towns are part of the Louisiana Main Street association, only St. Francisville appears to have its own active and organized operation. If the Donaldsonville Downtown Development District still exists, its website shows no indication, as it appears to be defunct. As mentioned earlier, St. Francisville also enjoys the benefit of being 15 miles nearer to Baton Rouge, the closest metropolitan area and an economic engine. Commute times from St. Francisville would inevitably be shorter than from Donaldsonville, so St. Francisville’s proximity gives it an added advantage as a bedroom community. In addition, the greater size of Donaldsonville results in a greater trade area, even if it’s considerably less affluent: Donaldsonville has attracted a Wal-Mart on its outer reaches, as well as some other big-box stores. St. Francisville is too small to lure most if not all of the national chains. While I maintain that Wal-Mart is not as huge of a detriment to Main Street’s prosperity as many claim, it does serve to bifurcate the retail activity in Donaldsonville—a problem St. Franicsville simply does not have to face. Unless a new vendor chooses to develop on raw land around St. Francisville, it will have to lease one of those few small commercial buildings; the town doesn’t have any strip malls. Lastly, St. Francisville has the benefit of a large annual event, the Audubon Pilgrimage, that elevates its awareness among the public in the region; Donaldsonville cannot claim an equivalent big-ticket item.

If the widely divergent trajectories of these two towns could be summarized by a single entity, it would have to involve collective human demand. The human capital that has animated St. Francisville into an unlikely leisure destination offers testament to how much people are willing to vote with their pocketbooks; this is hardly a profound insight. But Donaldsonville’s modest cosmetic improvements to the oldest districts in recent years have scarcely compensated for the net loss of the same capital: the majority of people leaving Donaldsonville these days are (if the community forum I attended last year offers any example) upwardly mobile African Americans who achieved the income level to seek greener pastures, leaving more of the disenfranchised minorities and well-meaning “artsy” entrepreneurs with money to burn, whose visions for improvement the town may not be adversarial but certainly do not coincide either. The characteristics that make St. Francisville seem nondescript and sprawling may very well be the lynchpin to its success at the expense of Donaldsonville: its lifeblood is in its role as a bedroom community, and St. Francisville simply offers the built environment that people seeking exurban living typically love: large plots of land, no traffic, economic homogeneity, minimal crime. A walkable historic main street like Donaldsonville’s Railroad Avenue is expendable. Even if Donaldsonville had a poverty rate under 5%, it may struggle to ignite as a genuinely attractive small town, because there simply aren’t enough people who want to live in houses so close to one another. (After all, if they truly desire walkability that much, why not move to New Orleans, or one of the older neighborhoods in Baton Rouge? For that matter, plenty of walkable urban inter-city neighborhoods continue to languish while the sprawling exurbs grow like a weed.) The low density that St. Francisville ostensibly had to overcome in order to metamorphose into a classic small town may ultimately approve its most sustaining selling point. Donaldsonville, conversely, may depend upon a more radical paradigm than just the John Folses and other first-generation urbanites who are attracted to its compact historic core. There are plenty of those around without Donaldsonville’s 35% poverty rate. This conclusion makes the prognosis seem bleak for Donaldsonville, but at least a few proprietors have had a decade or more of success with their restaurants/cafés/bed and breakfasts to prove otherwise. And if St. Francisville can do it, so can hundreds of other small communities facing their own distinct challenges.

Drivable Main Streets, Part I: Quaint, picturesque sprawl.

2011-07-18T10:39:00.008-08:00

Despite all hullabaloo raised by various talking heads on the dire state of small town America—and it is true that much of it continues to depopulate, as it has for the past fifty years—not all rural communities have fallen into ineluctable decline. And high hopes prevail for many of the others that seem as though their main streets have been massacred by Wal-Mart, or Food Land, or whatever the scapegoat appears to be for the Town of X. Most historians and social scientists persist in arguing that Wal-Mart has devastated the retail culture of rural America, and the snarky tone of my previous sentence should reveal my skepticism toward that truism. The fact remains that many small towns are populated by largely vacant old buildings, and yes, those buildings are increasingly falling into disrepair, and indeed, sometimes their deteriorated condition places them beyond the point of no return. But a town’s reinvention does not depend exclusively on the existing structures in the historic center: some have revitalized as tourist destinations despite losing a portion of the original structures to parking lots, but those parking lots prove essential to attract visitors who otherwise wouldn’t bite if they could find an easy place to stash their vehicle while they stroll the main street. Small towns are also just as amenable to infill development as gentrifying inner city neighborhoods in the big old metropolises. Relatively few have enjoyed the bounties of infill development, simply because real estate speculators see little incentive in terms of an adequate ROI in a depressed, isolated, rural community. But nothing about the existing built environment of an old downtown inherently precludes it from enjoying at least a chance of a renaissance.

I’m aware of no better proof that even the most unlikely small town can overcome the odds and revitalize than the hamlet of St. Francisville, Louisiana.

The truth is, I use the term “revitalize” hesitatingly, because I don’t really know if St. Francisville ever suffered disinvestment. It looks good: a number of impeccably maintained turn-of-the-century structures, green spaces under complete canopy by some mighty Southern live oak trees in bountiful health, fully occupied storefronts featuring art, antiques, confections, and restaurants that delicately straddle eclectic and unpretentious. The general upkeep of the town appears fantastic, except for one small problem: it doesn’t show much evidence at all that it’s a town. An unfamiliar motorist could pass through and just think that he or she stumbled across a mile-long stretch of particularly nice homes and a few mom-and-pops. I don’t want to suggest that “there is no there there” because, frankly, to many users of that phrase have corrupted it from Gertrude Stein's original intent, to apply loosely to any place that lacks “character”. And I simply don't feel that a truly characterless place exists. But St. Francisville certainly doesn't meet most of the standards of most historically significant small towns. Just try to find the center of St. Francisville through the street configuration on this map:

It looks like little more than the convergence of a few rural highways. No conventional street grid, no railway or train depot, no port along a river. And, from what it appears, no historic main street. As far as I could determine, the pictures below more or less encapsulate the downtown. The picture below features what I would presume to be the historic center of St. Francisville, at the convergence of the two primary streets, Commerce Street (State Route 3057) and Ferdinand Street:

It's hard to tell if this is a center, because a gas station and a Ford dealership hardly comprise the conventional center of a historic American town—at least not one that survived the wrecking ball. Yet one could hardly claim that the ravages of time have laid St. Francisville to waste; it has dozens of structures listed on the National Register of Historic Places . How did this unusually tightly-knit rural settlement get started?

According to the town's website, the bluffs around the area attracted Spanish settlers in the late 18^th century, where Capuchin monks used the high ground to build a monastery and cemetery at the site. Eventually the area developed into the district of Nueva Feliciana, the political capital of the Florida Parishes, which includes all the Louisiana parishes (counties) north of Lake Pontchartrain and east of the Mississippi River—the original westernmost reaches of the Florida territories. But it was not St. Francisville that initially flourished as the regional center; that role fell to Bayou Sara, a town resting below the bluffs along a similarly named waterway that helped it serve briefly as the most important Mississippi cotton port between New Orleans and Memphis. St. Francisville achieved greater prestige during the period in which the ownership of Florida Territories was ambiguous because British, French, Spanish, and American colonizers could not clarify the exact boundaries of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. The town served as the capital of the Republic of West Florida for a brief period in 1810 when British settlers in the area overthrew Spanish rule, until Americans claimed ownership of the land under the terms of the Louisiana Purchase. Meanwhile, Bayou Sara met its demise before the Civil War, succumbing to fires, repeated flooding and the ravages of the boll weevil. Virtually nothing survives today. But the expansive plantations and estates of St. Francisville, the town “two miles long and two yards wide”, prevailed throughout the 19^th century up to the present.

The configuration of buildings in St. Francisville demonstrates the appropriateness of the above nickname. The photograph below on Ferdinand Street reveals what is probably the highest density arrangement of structures in the entire town, and one of the only stretches where commercial buildings rest immediately adjacent to one another.

Step back further along that same road, and it hardly bears any evidence of a conventional small town American main street.

The buildings predominantly look more like converted private residences, rather than structures intended for commercial purposes. Most have front porches and a fenestration that promotes privacy, instead of expansive windows for the display of goods. The buildings on the other side of the street seem a bit more oriented toward retail.

It would appear that someone who has invested in St. Francisville took a Streetscape Improvements 101 course: aesthetic brick sidewalks, customized street markers, hanging wooden signs outside each storefront. More critical, though, is the general absence of setbacks; most of these buildings are built right up to the street. Scattered intermittently across this streetscape are buildings that have clearly always been oriented toward retail, in varying levels of upkeep:

I suppose the building below could have been a country inn at one time:

But next to most of these isolated structures are more buildings that clearly began as private residences. A few have most likely been retrofitted for commercial or retail use:

Still, something seems a bit fishy—something undermining the credibility of this main street. Look at the photos below, taken from a different stretch of the long artery that comprises most of the town, this time on the Commerce Street side of that one major intersection. Then compare them to some of the previous photographs.

Unlike some of the earlier streetscapes, the setbacks here are much larger. But common to both photos—virtually all the pictures so far, in fact—is the abundance of curb cuts. Gaps in the curb are essential for vehicular access, and all but a handful of the zero-setback structures have them. Curb cuts usually equate to driveways, and driveways suggest that many, if not most, of these buildings are oriented to allow for vehicles. And if the spacing between buildings is wide enough for driveways, or the setbacks allow for one or two off-street parking spaces in front, the buildings themselves almost definitely date from the 20^th century. Think back on a well preserved commercial main street or town square, like, for example the one in Brazil, Indiana that I featured in this blog many moons ago. The buildings sit right next to one another. No room for cars to park between or in front of buildings, because cars either didn’t exist yet, or they weren’t ubiquitous enough to justify dedicated off-street parking.

Like any picture-perfect vintage main street, St. Francisville has on-street parking, as evidenced by the photos. But it also has enough gaps between buildings, and between the road/sidewalk and the buildings, to allow for off-street parking as well, pushing the structures apart from one another and making the entire environment less conducive for walking as a means of getting around. These photos offer a reasonable amount of proof: they come from early evening on a Thursday night, and not a soul is outside. Sure, the antique stores would have closed, but not the cafes and restaurants. But here’s what the ostensible restaurant district of St. Francisville looks like:

The restaurants are doing fine. They’re open for business. They just have their own dedicated off-street parking and don’t require anyone to walk along St. Francisville’s sidewalks to get there. Nobody really needs to be outside. The handsome town park sits just as empty:

The real attraction of the town—the essence of its historic credentials and the bulk of the National Register properties—are the stately plantations and private residences that dot the outskirts of the town on Royal Street and Prosperity Street, sometimes almost a mile from the main intersection captured in so many of the above photos. These plantations and stately homes bring regional weekend visitors, which are most likely the real lifeblood of the town’s retail.

Most of these homes have signs indicating their age:

Yes, the sign to the right references Sotheby’s, the international realty company. Apparently the sellers of this house believe that they might be able to attract a foreign buyer.

Some of the structures appear to be old commercial buildings that have since been retrofitted to private residences, an inverse of what the earlier photographs on Ferdinand Street depicted.

An unusually large building to house a church office:

And this final building defies all conventions:

In terms of square footage, it is probably the single largest commercial structure in all of St. Francisville. Yet it sits far removed from the center of town, on what is otherwise a residential street. And most of these residential streets, while reasonably walkable, are hardly compact. (They have curb cuts too.)

Other residential nooks in St. Francisville reveal family-run businesses have wooden signs (advertising a bed and breakfast, in this case, I believe) but no sidewalks.

This is a city far easier explored by car than by foot. And, more importantly, it is one of the most unusual pastiches of antique, pseudo-antique, and conventional twentieth century. My own suspicions, judging from the unusual scattering of commercial structures from widely different time periods of construction, is that the town did go through periods of mild booms and busts, resulting in an uneven development process that never really asserts itself through a historic core. Essentially, it enjoyed incremental infill development before such a investors' approach had any conscious attempt at revitalization. The Wikipedia article on the city suggests that some of the old remnants of the ghost town on Bayou Sara were hauled up to the bluff in the early 20^th century and planted in St. Francisville. (That large brick two-story structure seems like the most likely candidate, if this story is legitimate.) Whatever the truth may be, St. Francisville is among the most rarefied small towns I’ve seen that still manages a certain cachet. My descriptions up to this point would no doubt suggest that I have a low opinion of the place, which is not true. I just find it quite surprising that it could retain a potent identity when it could easily have devolved into a humble rural intersection, barely more than Bayou Sara.

But what motivated people to let these homes survive, or to haul old buildings from Bayou Sara up the bluff so that they begin a second life? I have my suspicions as to why the residents of St. Francisville cared enough about their community to achieved what so few others have. But it is easier to explore this Francisville phenomenon in comparison to another Louisiana town not so far away, which I will do in the second half of this larger-than-expected blog post.

Taking the sewer less traveled.

2011-06-29T07:03:00.005-08:00

It probably doesn't seem like the most savory topic, and it's already my second blog post to reference the porcelain god. But wastewater removal is such a fundamental infrastructural component to sustaining dense developments that it is impossible to ignore or make light of it. For nascent settlements in resource-poor parts of the globe, it could just as easily be the critical prophylaxis against a cholera epidemic. As an instructor of mine once said from a class on housing in developing countries (in her thick Germanic accent): “It all comes down to where de shit flows.” Middle and upper income communities usually have sophisticated enough infrastructure that diverting the sewage away from housing is not a great concern; that process is already fully in place. Instead, wealthier countries can maximize the efficiency at which they convey effluent for treatment and dispersal. For this reason, I should not have been as surprised as I was when I first encountered this toilet at a latrine in central Afghanistan, taken (along with the three subsequent ones) by Beau Sheffer.

Nothing special, of course, though certainly spiffier looking than the rest of the latrine.

For those who have no basis of comparison—which, I suppose, is the majority of the civilian world—this latrine is pretty standard looking, in that it's somewhat tired and battle scarred (presumably only figuratively). My suspicion is that it is at least a decade old, with the predictable accumulation of graffiti over that duration of time. The frame of this modular sink/toilet unit has seen better days, but the toilets themselves are brand new.

The writing is too small to see, but tucked in the back of the seat is the brand name: American Standard. Timeless, renowned for its craftsmanship, and ubiquitous in both private residences and commercial restrooms across the nation. A truly classic toilet. It may have long ago surpassed its resilient top competitors, Kohler, Eljer, and my personal favorite, Bemis. But the operation of this latrine hardly complies with run-of-the-mill American Standard toilets. The clue should be the flush lever. Why is it green?

The symbol to the left of the green lever should provide a clue, but if it doesn’t, a sign on the wall above the toilet and shoulder-height explains more thoroughly.

These are dual-flush toilets, in which a push of the lever in a certain direction controls the amount of water flow used to flush the waste down. It appears the dual-flush apparatus comes courtesy of Sloan Valve, a company specializing in water-saving plumbing technology. As the diagram illustrates, an upward push of the lever releases a standard amount of water of 1.6 gallons per flush for solid waste, while a downward push initiates considerably lower flow, at less than 1.0 gpf, since far less is usually necessary for liquid waste. The intention through this innovation in toilets is to manage the minimum water level necessary to get everything down, thereby saving water for instances when the high consumption levels aren't necessary to elicit a good flush. Over the long-term, water consumption—and the ensuing utility bills—should be noticeably lower.

Dual-flush toilets have become particularly popular in parts of the world that struggle with continued water scarcity. Not surprisingly, Australia first introduced the technology over 30 years ago and has adapted to it more readily than just about anywhere else. Aside from the amount of water employed in a flush, the other large distinction between dual-flush toilets and conventional ones is the siphoning process. When a large volume of water enters the toilet bowl and overflows the exit pipe, it essentially creates a vacuum, which pulls the effluent down during the flush until air enters the process, thereby arresting the siphoning. (A likely more eloquently worded description of the process can be found here.) While standard toilets use this siphoning action, dual-flush toilets employ a larger trapway (the hole at the bottom of the bowl) and a wash-down flushing design that pushes waste down the drain. No siphoning action is involved, and the larger diameter trapway makes it easy for waste to exit the bowl without depending on such a large volume of water. (Discover Company provides a more detailed description.) Conventional toilets until recently have used as much as 5 gallons of water per flush—an incredible waste in any climate, but particularly profligate in a dry one, such as Australia or Afghanistan.

This plumbing innovation has not caught on in the United States until quite recently, so it was quite a surprise for me to find it in an austere military milieu, especially considering that the approach to potable drinking water across ISAF (International Security and Assistance Force) is through individually portioned plastic bottles, which scarcely ever get recycled—and only if the receptacles labeled “recyclables” actually live up to their claim. In short, Operation Enduring Freedom is not seeking ecologically sound solutions to drinking water provision. However, the US military has been far more conservative in its use of all other forms of water—for bathing, cooking, and flushing of toilets, so resource conservation is not entirely foreign. All personnel are encouraged in most instances to take “combat showers”—3 minutes or less—to deal with the finite supply of treated, unpurified water that comes out of the taps in latrines. And it appears that the newer toilets are increasingly adopting dual flush technology to conserve more water. Even if the primary source of drinking water depends heavily on non-biodegradable containers, at least the infrastructure for non-potable water emphasizes a certain moderation.

I have now seen dual-flush toilets more in Afghanistan than I have in the United States, where my only encounter has been in an academic institution—and just one building out of many within this institution. I'm confident there are certain settings in the US where they are widespread, and their prominence is only likely to grow as they assert themselves as a sine qua non within any green building initiative. The US Green Building Council has long included Water Efficiency as one of its fundamental categories for achieving LEED Certified status within New Construction and Major Renovations. The embedded prerequisite of Water Use Reduction mandates that structures will “employ strategies that in aggregate use 20% less water than the baseline calculated for the building”, which, according to the USGBC's standards, is 1.6 gpf for commercial toilets and 1.0 gpf for urinals—exactly on par with the target volumes in dual-flush toilets. Beyond this fundamental requirement, a developer/project manager can earn additional points within the Water Efficiency category through two more credit topics. The first applicable topic is WE-2, Innovative Wastewater Technologies, which recommends that potable water use for building sewage conveyance must be reduced 50% through high-efficiency or even dry fixtures (waterless urinals, composting toilet systems), as a means of earning these additional credits. The second topic is WE-3, Water Use Reduction, which more or less takes the standards from the original Water Efficiency prerequisite and awards additional credits if water consumption can be reduced even further from the baseline, from 30% up to 50%, again through toilets, urinals, faucets, showers, or spray valves. Achieving the 10 Water Efficiency points may be enough to distinguish a LEED Gold-rated building from a LEED Silver. Clearly toilets contribute enough to overall water efficiency to feature heavily in any dialogue on green engineering and construction.

While the USGBC has probably achieved more in elevating the status of dual-flush toilets in the United States, they remain at this point a relative obscurity, limited primarily to commercial construction from the past decade or so. Most Americans have no idea how they work or that such devices exist. While they obviously enjoy a higher profile in Australia or countries with a robust heritage of energy efficient construction (Germany always first comes to mind), some of my recent travels suggest it may have also caught on in the fast-developing world.

This toilet from a higher-end Italian restaurant in the Jumeirah Beach Resort district in Dubai, UAE may appear exactly as one would expect in such a milieu. Typical of toilets in this part of the world, it uses a button to operate the flush, contrary to the lever most commonly employed in the US. And judging from the design of the button, it's a dual flush:

Obviously the smaller button on the right corresponds to the lesser water flow.

A public restroom in Turkey employs a similar strategy for communicating the dual-flush technology. My apologies for the poor photo quality, but it should still be obvious that the smaller button on the right is intended to flush liquid waste.

Turkey is home to what is largely believed to be the oldest flush toilet system in the world, in the ancient Byzantine city of Ephesus, seen below.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Turks boast the latest in resource conserving plumbing infrastructure. Business owners throughout Turkey have in recent years engaged in a campaign to “modernize” restrooms away from the “squat” Turkish toilet, usually perceived as a cathole-in-the-ground and much maligned by Western visitors, despite its comparative simplicity, efficiency, and potentially superior sanitation. The interesting distinction about this toilet is that the structure that houses it is anything but new: it is the Pera Palace Hotel in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul, the definition of luxury for over 110 years, and allegedly where Agatha Christie devised one of her most celebrated mysteries, Murder on the Orient Express. An extensive renovation completed in 2010 most likely resulted in sleek new water-conserving toilets.

One remaining concern, however, distinguishes the American example in Afghanistan from the other countries and which the water conservation efficacy of these two dual flush toilets hinges upon: without an instructional sign, would the average user know how it works? I am not in a position to determine whether such toilets are commonplace in either of these two countries. I didn’t see too many other examples during these recent travels, though if I were to guess, I suspect dual-flush technology is far more common in the United Arab Emirates than in Turkey. Even if they are a sufficiently common occurrence that Turks and Emiratis know which button to push, it’s hard to imagine that too many foreign visitors would know how to react when confronted with both a small and large button, either in Dubai—where, on average, 80-90% of the population consists of expatriates, or this particular hotel in Istanbul, which targets moneyed foreign tourists, often from elsewhere in Europe or North America. And if these visitors use the buttons incorrectly out of ignorance, it would easily nullify any of the potential for resource conservation.

Thus, the real effectiveness of this campaign may boil down to semiotics. Just about any populist environmental initiative requires an outreach campaign to get people on board—the lack of basic communication would guarantee that even those with a genuine interest in conservation will remain in the dark. Dual-flush technology may currently be a pioneering effort in the US, the brains behind the toilet latrines in Afghanistan seem far better at gauging their potential user than the more elegant but less informative versions in UAE and Turkey. For the record, the one dual-flush toilet example I saw in the US also had an explanatory label.

Chances are strong that this blog post, which regards these dual-flushers as an obscure novelty, will seem quaint within five to ten years. Before long, water-efficient toilets will undoubtedly become widespread enough that Americans no longer depend on the signage to tell them how it works, which is already apparently the current condition in much of Australia (and most likely other countries as well). One day, the two buttons above the toilet—or the green up-down lever—will seem as natural and self-explanatory as the blue recycle bins with the Mobius Loop. However, we can never optimize resource conservation—it is a perpetual teleological process, raising the bar steadily over time. One can only anticipate that American Standard, or Bemis, or Sloan will devise a new machine in a few years to resolve the latest perceived inefficiency, and eventually that new device will supplant the dual-flush toilet, which will at that time seem archaic. Hopefully these innovators will be as savvy toward outreach and self-promotion as they are at engineering.

MONTAGE: Curbing destruction by rethreading the button.

2011-06-21T08:28:00.007-08:00

I'm back from a lengthy time away from Afghanistan and have been trying to plug away at another blog article that incorporates infrastructure from several different countries, as well as the implications on American energy efficiency. But, as is often the case, a shortage of good, specific photos has become my Achilles' heel. I will acquire the remaining photos that I need before too long, and that article is already more than halfway complete, but until then I offer a novelty for my blog: a montage in which I didn't take a single one of the many photographs. I must give heaps of credit to Nici English for providing me not only with the pics—taken hastily from her car through the driver's window, just as I would do—but also with the background information on a subtle but interesting subject: curb jumping.

Notice anything? I probably wouldn't have either. But our star photographer understands the trucking industry firsthand and can clearly spot what I would have completely ignored.

More than one vehicle has attempted to negotiate the turn into this Cracker Barrel outside Caseyville, Illinois, but it would take a heck of a heavy car—and a painfully inept driver—to cause the sort of skimming of the edge of the concrete that you see here. But for a trucker, it's much more understandable. The weight they support and the extensive spatial judgment that they require will inevitably result in some slip-ups. The truck parking in the background of the above photos indicates that the area consciously accommodates truckers; no doubt the property owner also expected the sharp turns would pose problems for some in the industry and paved a curb in order to minimize landscaping damage—which, in turn, results in a damaged curb.

Most corner-cutting and curbside damage comes from a single culprit: the inexperienced trucker, negotiating a space that is simply too small. Understandably, a trucker's ability to handle such a lengthy vehicle only grows through time and experience; more surprisingly, the vast majority of truckers do not last six months in the industry after an initial training. According to English, my online expert, even among the largest trucking companies (Swift, JB Hunt), it would be reasonable to assume that 50% of the drivers have less than half of a year of experience. The result? Lots of scratched curbs, stripped corners, and shredded landscaping.

Many property owners in high truck traffic areas have learned to anticipate these vehicular assaults on their pavement, grass, and landscaping; they have devised a sort of defense. Not surprisingly, a Motel 6, also in the Caseyville area, obviously has to contend with curb jumpers quite a bit.

Large rocks planted at the corner serve the same purpose that they do in residential neighborhoods—to deter motorists who make that turn carelessly. In some cases, these boulders do more than just preserve landscaping aesthetics; they save a valuable piece of infrastructure, such as the fire hydrant below.

The above photo shows the Motel 6 from a different angle—one with a visible drop yard for trailers in the background, which explains the need for such extensive fortification. On the other side of the street, the property owner has chosen a more aggressive—and, in my opinion, uglier—barrier for curb jumpers. They look like overturned bollards, and they seem to be safeguarding what is likely a fragile little wetland.

Not surprisingly, these rocks are particularly prominent at motels along highways that would prove popular destinations for truckers. Here's an installation near Grenada, Mississippi, where the more prominent positioning of the rocks suggests that they are not there just to deter curb-jumping but to alert truckers of a tight corner—which, I'll admit, pretty much amounts to the same thing semantically.

The absence of barriers can often prove more harmful than merely tearing up a patch of grass. A particularly clumsy trucker clocked this light post outside a Caseyville hotel while trying to turn a corner.

Viewed from a different angle, it is clear many other drivers scoured the grass along the curb before one took it an increment further.

Understandably, state and local governments have not improved every road in these often rural environments to the degree that it has a curb. The absence of one would make it difficult if not impossible for a trucker to notice when he or she has turned too sharply.

The example below, again from Caseyville, shows what appears to me like a more serious accident waiting to happen: a curbless street near a trailer drop yard, in which the drivers skimming over into the verge can come within a hair's breadth of clipping that thick yellow cable.

The cable could be stabilizing a number of tall objects—a power line among them. Bollards or rocks placed right along this curve would be a cheaper and most likely more effective solution than building a curb: the introduction of an unexpected obstacle is far more likely to attract attention than a continuous curb that a trucker could cross complacently.

Putting the alliteration aside (in a minute), the trucking technique that tries to terminate the tendency for curb jumping is known as button hooking. We've all seen it on the back of trailers: “Caution—this vehicle makes wide right turns.” The blog entry on Hub Pages by Omniscient Nomad illustrates this effectively:

As Omniscient Nomad explains, in Figure A, the driver did not allow himself or herself sufficient time and space to prepare for the right hand turn. In these instances, the fishtailing trailer may cross into three (if not all four) lanes in an intersection of two-way streets, forcing other drivers to back up to give enough room. Figure B shows a correct button hook, minimizing the likelihood of curbing or concurrent calamity by colliding with cars nearby.

The trucking industry may seem like it owns the road, but, as all of us have seen (even if we don't always notice) trucks are generally subject to many higher restrictions than conventional automobiles, whether it be through weigh stations, restricted tunnels, lower speed limits, or just outright prohibitions, such as this mildly ironic sign near Durant, Mississippi.

The owner of the gas station has determined the space is too constrained to allow for trucks—but not for livestock trailers, which are approximately half the length of a conventional 53-foot commercial trailer.

And another bit of near irony with trucks and signage rests outside Osceola, Arkansas:

Alas, it was a storm and not a curb jumper that took this one down. How do we know? The landscaping below it, while unkempt, is hardly mangled. Trucks are not exactly the most benign presence on America's roadways, but they would likely prove a lot more threatening if they could ascend, accelerate, maneuver, or halt with the same freedom and abandon as virtually every smaller vehicle can do. Rocks, curbs, and bollards are a modest remedy to a curbing problem that is equally modest, especially in light of trucks' capacity for both destruction and amazing productivity across American roadways. The gestures of trucks are big, so it is apt that something so comparatively simple could be explained metaphorically through a mere button.

Rest and Relaxation.

2011-05-21T19:48:00.002-08:00

I am away from Afghanistan and (perhaps even better) giving my laptop a rest for the next two weeks or so, for my first R&R/vacation since starting the job as a contract worker under the US Air Force. I will be traveling throughout the trip, and since I made the decision not to bind myself to the computer by leaving it back at the base, I will have limited access to American Dirt and the internet in general throughout this vacation. However, will resume posting when I return to Afghanistan in early June. To my loyal followers during what has been a very lean time these past seven months, thank you for your continued support.

DUST: Pedology 101, Part II – Just add water.

2011-05-09T07:46:00.013-08:00

In the first half of this post, I explored my limited familiarity of Afghanistan’s pedology—the physical characteristics of the soil that allow scientists to place regions into different taxonomies, governed at least in part by a variety of temperature and moisture regimes. Without using any more terms that strain my word processor’s spell check feature, I’ll focus this time on those physical properties from a more empirical angle. I have scores of pictures to show the vast array of characteristics that force us—at least here in Afghanistan—to be conscious always of the conditions of the ground we walk on. The analogies for Afghan soil are limitless: the oft-cited moon dust, talcum powder, Pixie Stix, cosmetics, beige cocaine, cement mix. Aside from the generally agreed-upon observation that the ground is quite soft to the touch whenever it’s dry, none of the descriptions are flattering. The mere tire tracks from a vehicle manifest the torripsamments with dunes condition; the treads of a tire don’t imprint themselves into Afghan soil; they just displace the powder together into little rounded piles. If people were to get their faces close to the ground and exhale heavily, those “dunes” would disperse.

As annoying as it may be to fend against the steady accumulation of dust/dirt particles indoors, at least it is generally harmless to wooden or plastic furniture. It poses a much more serious problem to the electronics needed for basic operations here.

I’ll admit that I’ve been remiss in cleaning my computer top, partly to make a point, so the environment in that photo above is a bit contrived. But imagine how long it would take to achieve this level of dust accumulation in most environments in the US. Here’s a co-worker’s desk:

And here is a more authentic depiction of dust patterns on a laptop that I use—one that I have cleaned with pressurized air about two weeks ago.

Compare the keys that are commonly used (most letters) with those that generally remain untouched (the function keys at the top row, or the letter Z) to see what even a couple days of accumulation can achieve. It has undeniably caused the demise of some expensive machinery, and I have no doubt that particles of soil effectively killed the camera I referenced in a recent post.

And yet these wearying images and descriptions are only indicative of the soil conditions in Afghanistan during the dry climate. When the soil is wet, which is often the case during the rainy season (running from late January to mid April), it offers an entirely different array of unpleasant burdens.

In early April, we received an early morning sprinkle over the course of maybe two or three hours, though never enough to justify an umbrella by most people’s standards. The photo above and several below demonstrate the aftermath. Sure, they're just puddles, but puddles wouldn’t typically form after a sprinkle, even accounting for the relative imperviousness of the gravel base. The conditions are far worse in other locations.

For the most part, the soil here does not support anything more than scrappy, intermittent herbs and grasses, which is the yin to this abiotic yang. If the earth grew more plants, their root systems would facilitate drainage, but since the soil’s percolation ability is poor—characteristic, no doubt, of the Psamment suborder mentioned earlier—most plants simply can’t grow. These helicopter views are poor quality, for which I apologize, but it still manifests the conditions in Afghanistan after a minor shower, which is generally all we get here:

It looks like a mud slide engulfed the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, but this just shows the typical conditions after rain—an endless sheet of beige slime, punctuated by occasional grasses (but only during the spring growing season). Viewed from the ground, the ponding is much worse in one of the lower points of Bear Village, the American Army compound at Camp Marmal:

The poor folks who live in these tents have to deal with days of standing water; it only diminishes through evaporation, and in the peak of the rainy season (which this year was February) minor sprinkles occur every few days. Although the rocks would seem to impede drainage, the gravel bed is the only preventative measure to keep pedestrians from slurping through ankle-deep mud. Witness these slippery stairs nearby:

And the conditions on the less heavily graveled side of that wall:

Puddles emerge after even the mildest of rains—and virtually all rains in Afghanistan are insignificant, yet they are hardly ever inconsequential: the mildest ones still take at least a full day to evaporate, remarkable given the arid nature of the climate through much of the year. Drainage simply does not occur to any measurable degree. Thus, the German engineers who first broke ground at Camp Marmal several years ago decided to build a full array of drainage ditches, partially visible in this earlier blog post, to prepare for no more than a half-dozen modest drizzles over a four-month rainy season in the late winter and early spring. The rest of the time, those ditches will sit idle.

Thus, the engineers and planners for this base had to invest in a drainage system to prepare for a situation that usually occurs no more than a half dozen times each year. And many years the rainy season passes by without a real thunderstorm. It seemed like 2011 was going to be one of those years, but around the 10^th of April, just days before the anticipated end of all measurable rain, Balkh province in Afghanistan got pummeled. Well, not really: the storm was no more than a half hour of moderate rain; not enough to make people in Louisiana open their umbrellas. But it was significant enough for this arid country. The immediate aftermath of a shower at this scale is predictable, given the conditions of the soil:

Ponding is especially problematic in the back of these tents, where the HVAC systems and circuit breakers rest. Fortunately it didn’t appear too bad this time:

But it was more than enough to fill those roadside drainage ditches:

And elsewhere, the water just sat in pools atop the nearly impermeable mud.

It turned out this was just the prelude to our apocalypse. About an hour later, as the sky was fully brightening, we encountered this unpleasantness:

Water had come surging down the mountainside, accumulating velocity and volume as gravity took its course, so that the landlocked tsunami forced its way through the opening formed by the base’s Commercial Entry Control Point (ECP), continuing on down what used to be a road—a paved one, mind you:

At the next major intersection, the low point formed by two streets allowed the water to disperse…

…right into our compound.

Sandbags worked as valiantly as possible, but they were no match for these water levels, some of which easily topped a foot in height. The sandbags on the closest side of this tent were completely submerged.

Here is the front of our row of tents, after the flood had peaked and begun to recede:

And the back, where it mercifully appears that the Environmental Control Units (ECUs) weren’t badly affected:

While our one-acre compound bore the brunt of the flooding because of our proximity to the Commercial ECP, other parts of the base felt the impact as well. The large drainage swale, empty 96% of the year, came close to topping over.

Fortunately the engineering for this swale is superior to that of these smaller channels, which exceeded their capacity, resulting in some minor water intrusion in the back portion of the American gym:

Though the channel below looks unremarkable as a static image, the water had crested above its banks just 30 minutes earlier, and the flow speed at the time of this photo was still so fast that a person falling in would likely result in a drowning.

And, of course, combining all that water with the infuriating Afghan soil results in one ubiquitous condition: ankle-deep mud. The photos below show the conditions the next day, approximately twenty-four hours after the rainshower:

And inside the tents, which, at the time of this photo, were in the process of being dismantled:

It’s hard to capture depth or thickness of such a large planar surface with a camera, but let it be known that if one’s boots were not tied tightly enough, the suction of that thick stew would easily pull them off. After wading through it for just a few minutes, a person would come out two inches taller, with newly formed platform shoes.

It took three twelve-hour days to restore most of our compound, which truthfully was probably not a long time considering the vast amount of work to be done. It could have been much worse: no tent received more than 16 inches of water and, most importantly, no one was hurt. But it remains a curiosity to most Americans that it happened at all. The rain volume, even for a largely arid environment, were not particularly severe, and yet it elicited flash flood conditions at the base. My suspicion is that the intensity of the rain was much greater in the nearby Hindu Kush mountains, which would help to explain the deceptively large surge that came barreling down the slope and hour later. The change in grade also undoubtedly intensified the velocity at which the water tumbled down. But the soil remains the key player; its imperviousness contributed to both the volume and the speed of the run-off. By no means does Camp Marmal have the greatest drainage infrastructure: as mentioned in a previous blog on cost-cutting measures at military outposts, it's hard to justify the steep expenditures for a top-of-the-line flood prevention system at a base which its creators never intended to be permanent. Nonetheless, one can only imagine what the permanent Afghan population has to contend with during the rainy season: according to a report on the province of Balkh released by the Afghanistan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, only 49% of the province's households have electricity, 31% have access to safe drinking water, and only 12% can access safe toilet facilities. Incidentally, Balkh's standard of living ranks much higher than most other provinces in the country, thanks to the presence of a large city such as Mazar-e-Sharif. Within the urbanized areas in and around this nation's fourth-largest city, the above statistics are superior: 95% of households have electricity, 67% have safe drinking water, and 15% have safe toilets. However, like most of Afghanistan, Balkh is significantly rural, and remote settlements lacking good infrastructure are abundant. If systems for providing water are scarce or poor quality, it is reasonable to suspect that water removal and drainage are also less than advanced. We've experienced what happens on base during a minor rainstorm. How do the Afghans manage?

The soil in Afghanistan is a palpable impediment to the nation's citizens' ability to attain a higher standard of living. Those who live in cities like Mazar-e-Sharif still sometimes maintain garden plots outside the urbanized areas; the aforementioned report reveals that 40% of households in Balkh province depend on agriculture as the primary source of income, either through direct cultivation or trade. The parched climate and friable soil results in a remarkably short growing season for most grasses, suitable for the nomadic ethnic Pashtuns known has Kuchis, but undeniably a challenge for more permanently settled populations. Though the cultivation and consolidation of food no longer precludes urbanization in most developed nations, it most likely plays a role in Afghanistan's ranking as one of the world's most rural countries, with only 23% of the population living in urbanized areas. The dust impedes operationality of electronics, making it an unlikely place to attract foreign technological investment, a barrier further exacerbated by the incredibly low literacy rate (less than 30%, and barely 10% for women). The filmy layer of soil makes routine living for outsiders unacquainted with these levels of dust—which includes practically everyone—a constant frustration. It's miserable in the dry season and impedes visibility enough to pose potential problems for air travel, while eclipsing those mountain views much of the time. A person is never far from a spectacular mountain range, but he or she can often only see it half the year, as indicated by the visibility rates in the chart below:

My experience of southern Afghanistan around Kandahar was that it was even worse than Mazar-e-Sharif. Down there, everyone I spoke to felt as though the hands need washing every five minutes. And, of course, the rains, as rare as they are, not only elicit pools of muddy water in the best of times and catastrophic flooding at the worst, they render many of the roadways impassable—a tremendous problem in a region where only 38% of the roads can handle car traffic in all seasons. A mud-filled unpaved road is unusable.

Is there a region in North America at all comparable to Afghanistan? A superficial research of climatological patterns—an admitted problem when I understand northern Afghanistan's climate far better than my native country—suggests to me some parts of the US might share at least remotely similar pedological characterstics. The temperature and rainfall data for Mazar-e-Sharif in the charts below, as well as the previous visibility chart, comes from the Joint Meteorological and Oceanographic Climatology Segment from the Department of Defense. (I wish I had included this material in Part I of this essay, when I referenced temperature and moisture regimes, but at least I've managed to integrate it to Part II before it goes to post.)

In the US, from the information I could determine, the region that most closely mimics Afghanistan's alternating mountain/desert plateau topography falls, not surprisingly, in the West. But much of the Rockies receive far more precipitation, or the temperatures are far more consistently warm or cool than the extremes that Afghanistan experiences. The best that I could determine is that northern and central Nevada—a virtually waterless region that includes only a half-dozen counties (Humboldt, Churchill, Pershing, Lander, Elko, Eureka, White Pine) but covers a significant land mass (about half of the state)—may have soil that most closely resembles that of Afghanistan, in terms of the moisture and temperature regimes. However, north-central Nevada does not exactly meet the war-torn southwest Asian country's demographics.

While Afghanistan has a land area comparable to and a population somewhat larger than the state of Texas, northern Nevada (approximately 55,000) is virtually uninhabited. The largest communities in this region, are Elko, Fallon, and Winnemucca, which only total approximately 30,000 people. The famed U.S. Route 50-- “the Loneliest Road in America”--bisects the region. If it were to quintuple in size, which is about what it would take to be comparable to Afghanistan, it would still have fewer than a half million people. Afghanistan, by contrast, has a landscape more austere and certainly just as rural, but it claims a population of nearly 30 million. Obviously the distinguishing factors between northern Nevada and Afghanistan—which include birth rates, colonization histories, stability of governments, sovereignty and enforceable boundaries, among other things—are complicated enough to generate an entirely different article. Suffice it to say, though, that population distribution in the US has proven that, given the choice, a significant portion of America has not found northern Nevada suitable or desirable for settlement, where as Afghanistan's similarly unforgiving landscape hosts more people than any US state but California.

The soil conditions in this war-torn, remote—yet hardly unpopulated—country are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of impediments to long-term prosperity. By many metrics, Afghanistan enjoyed a higher standard of living under monarchy in the 1960s and 1970s than it does today. The Soviet occupation throughout the 1980s fostered an additional soil condition that prove a bigger onus to Afghan quality of life than any dust piles or flash floods: the land mines buried within. The statistics for the country are grim. According to the 2010 Landmine Monitor, Afghanistan had the highest number of casualties in the world, at 859—over 20% of the world's total. It is one of the five most mine-enriched countries, with an estimated 10 million total, so that every square mile of the country averages 40. The popular site Listverse estimates that mines kill or maim an estimated 10 to 12 people every day in Afghanistan. Fortunately, the country also benefits from some of the most intensive mine clearance initiatives in the world: Landmine Monitor reports that it ranked top globally in 2009 and the square kilometers of mine area cleared there comprise nearly 30% of the global total. Nonetheless, land mines will inevitably impede any other form of investment, until they are eradicated, which could easily take decades—while assuming that no other events will throw the demining process off course, or, inshallah, foster a new reason for planting land mines. This article may depict the living conditions in Afghanistan as bleak, thanks to its infuriating soil. However, the relics of war—and land mines are hardly a relic since they perpetuate a culture of conflict-related casualties long after a treaty has been signed—transcend most if not all of the intrinsic pedalogic features. Who knows—after the nation is liberated from its broadly scattered landmine catastrophe, maybe that moon dust will seem like small potatoes.

DUST: Pedology 101, Part I - Worth a name change to http://dustafghanistana.blogspot.com?

2011-04-27T10:33:00.006-08:00

While topography can pose a variety of impediments to human settlements, we have attempted to overcome or at least tame most of them over the years. Whether it is overcoming the propensity for flooding in a mountain valley, dredging a swamp to capitalize upon a critical river arterial, or precariously perching a structure atop a precipice with high tendency for mudslides, architects and engineers (among others) have transcended the perceived limitations of this malleable earth to satisfy what often prove to be ephemeral demands for civilization, and what constitutes “ephemera” and “civilization” are so subjective that I withhold judgment as to whether we have domesticated our craggy wilderness. But we're strivers. And as a result, Homo sapiens are more broadly dispersed across various climates, ecosystems, and altitudes than just about any other member of the animal kingdom. Not all environments are equally suitable for habitation, though, as is inevitably proven by certain critical global nodes: the Yellow or Ganges River Valley, the Niger Delta, the broad coastal plain of Benelux and northern France, the northeastern Megalopolis sandwiched between the Atlantic coast and the most rugged of the Appalachians—all of these regions harbor far more condensed settlements than Siberia, central Asia, the Sahara Desert, Antarctica. And then, of course, vast stretches of land fall between these two density extremes, including my current home in northern Afghanistan. This landlocked nation in southwest Asia is neither small nor sparsely populated; though still incredibly rural, both the population and land area are comparable to that of the US state of Texas. (Texas is a bit larger and has about 10% fewer people; thus, Afghanistan is more densely populated.) But few people would manage to describe the prevailing environment in Afghanistan without using the word “harsh” before too long. The country juxtaposes some of the globe’s most rugged mountain ranges alongside arid plains that qualify as desert, even if the appearance isn't conventionally desertlike.

But little of it fits the most stereotypical depictions of deserts, particularly visible in the broadly Arab belt that stretches thousands of miles to the west of Afghanistan. It isn’t a desert, exactly—at least not one that I have seen, and the biggest distinguishing factor is the baffling, often infuriating soil conditions in the country. In the almost half of a year that I’ve lived here, I’ve visited bases in the south, the east, and—for the most part—the northern edge, and the soil all falls under a characteristic that people here routinely call “moon dust”.

With some geospatial data from the US Department of Agriculture, I was able to re-create a map of all the various soil regions of Afghanistan, with an inset traced in bright blue on the central portion of the Province of Balkh where I’m currently living:

The original USDA map upon which mine is based can be found here. It may be less accessible to begin this lengthy blog entry with the clinical description of the implications of Afghanistan's bizarre soil, but it helps to get the quantitative stuff and the hard science—or at least what little I know of it—out of the way so that I can back up the quantitative with far more expressive photos. Essentially, the Mazar-e-Sharif area falls under three fundamental soil regions:

torripsamments with dunes;
torriorthents with torrifluvents;
rocky land with torriorthents.

All three of these classifications fall under the mesic soil temperature regime, which implies a moderate mean temperature, though “moderate” is particularly misleading in a desert environment like Afghanistan. The soil earns this mesic quality primarily through the mutual nullification of relatively cold and extremely hot conditions, sometimes achieving both in a 24-hour-period as is reflected in the considerable differences in air temperature between day and night throughout the year. Thus, moderation in Afghanistan hardly suggests an arched or peaked bell curve when depicting temperatures; this isn't a Brazilian rainforest. The kurtosis on an annual probability distribution of temperatures in Afghanistan would be high, so the soil is exposed to scorching heat of 110°F (43.3°C) almost daily during the summer months, sometimes exceeding 120°F (49°C), while routinely dipping below freezing at night in the winter, while occasionally falling as low as 15°F (-9.4°C). Throughout the year the temperature fluctuates across more than forty degrees Fahrenheit over the course of a typical day—not exactly a suitable, lengthy growing season for too many plants.

So what happens to a soil in which climate extremes are the norm? The flora of Afghanistan doesn't just seem to lack diversity; it often seems to be missing altogether. The soil is devoid of visible life for much of the year, as this photo from just outside the wire can attest.

An etymology of those tongue-twisters used to describe the soil regions above can help shed some light on why the landscape is so austere. I’m no pedologist, so I have to work primarily by delving into the terminology through the resources I have at my disposal (such as pedosphere.com ), which are often only slightly less meager than my pre-existing knowledge. However, research allowed me to decipher the component parts of these cumbersome words, as well as how they relate precisely to the prevailing soil moisture and temperature regimes. Most of the aforementioned classifications fall into the most precise classification within the taxonomy: the great group, nestled within the suborder, which in turn is nestled within the order. Thus, it’s to easiest start the analysis with the least precise category and build from there.

Most great group classifications consist of compound words in which the second half is the suborder. Therefore, torripsamments with dunes (beige and white hatching on the map) belongs to the Psamments suborder, which in turn is one of five classifications in the Entisols order. According to the Cooperative Soil Survey, Entisols are relatively recently developed soils frequently found where alluvium is deposited after any major flood event in a floodplain, or areas where bedrock recently was exposed. Any of the soil suborders and great groups falling under Entisols should share a common characteristic of comparatively recent inception. The suborder of Psamments describes any Entisol with less than 35% rock fragments, characterized by loamy fine sand known for its friability. The torri- prefix featured in the suborder indicates that the moisture regime is aridic (torric), and the reference to dunes naturally implies that these powdery characteristics facilitate the formation of sand ridges, no doubt caused by the often powerful westerly winds.

The second classification, torriorthents with torrifluvents (orange on the map) straddles two suborders. The Fluvents suborder falls under the Entisols order as well, but unlike Psamments, Fluvents have no real lithic, densic (high enough density to inhibit plant roots except in cracks), or paralithic (rocky but with breaks and fissures) contact within 25 cm of the mineral soil surface. Thus, Fluvents are comparatively free of qualities that would inhibit plant growth and can be comparatively fertile if flood cycles do not coincide with cropping periods. They also must have a slope of less than 25 percent and a temperature regime that is either cryic (mean temperature lower than 8°C but no permafrost) or warmer. According to the Encyclopedia of Soil Science (Ed. Rattan Lal, 2006), Orthents are the most extensively occurring suborder among the Entisols. They defy attempts at scientific horizon development, due to their steep slopes, permanently situated non-weatherable materials, and high erosion rates, thus explaining their commonality in desert and mountainous environments. Since both Orthents and Fluvents both fall under the Entisol order, this classification would suggest an alternation of fertile and highly unstable soil in alternating patterns, both of which are young in their development.

The final classification, rocky land with torriorthents (brown on the map), again involves the Orthents suborder, which, in turn, falls within the Endisol order. The juxtaposition of rocky land with the Orthents indicates soil that engages with superficially exposed rocks at steep angles, suggesting both instability (propensity for erosion) and a low capacity to support plant life, both of which undoubtedly go hand-in-hand.

Sifting through the words that recur amongst these definitions, one can better assess the prevailing conditions around Afghanistan’s fourth largest city: arid, loamy, powdery, rocky, unstable. With the exception of the Fluvents suborder, very little of the soil characteristics would seem to support life, an assertion which boldly ventures into the other branch of soil science—that of edaphology, the direct relation between soils and the corresponding flora and fauna.

But rather than expound upon taxonomies of which I have only a passing familiarity, this essay will benefit far more through some real, empirical meat and potatoes: active descriptions and demonstrations of how Afghan soil operates among human systems, complete with vivid photographs. I commend those of you patient enough to wade through the science, as interesting as it may be to some, because the bulk of this analysis has far more to do with how we—Americans, Afghans, coalition forces—engage with the soil here.

Dry and easily airborne—such is the nature of Afghan soil. But those analogies scarcely account for the tremendous repercussions of building a temporary settlement such as a military base in an area where the soil is often loamy and friable. The dust is relentless, as demonstrated by the trees in the photo below from Bagram Air Field, one of the lushest parts of the country that I have seen:

I have no reason to believe these trees are anything but healthy, and yet, like all flora in this region, a sepia membrane dulls the green, making them appear sickly. And it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to speculate how easily the soil-powder makes its way indoors; the accumulation under this desk provides more than enough evidence:

If I were to demonstrate accumulation through a day by day progression, I'm sure it would render the conditions here even more vivid. But let it be known that what would pass for six months of undisturbed dust particles in temperate North American environments would only take about two weeks around Mazar-e-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan. In Kandahar and southern Afghanistan; it's even worse: less than a week to achieve the thick powder on all interior flat surfaces. Down there, the gritty feeling on the skin resumes just minutes after one washes his or her hands.

The second half of this lengthy essay will explore in much greater detail and with far better photographs the repercussions of life in a place where the soil makes things virtually unlivable. I don't intend to complain or turn it into a tirade; obviously we and almost 30 million Afghans have to make do with what we get. But as humans almost instinctively subjugate the lands around them, some settings clearly pose greater challenges, which certainly help to explain widely variable regional differences in economic development. With a series of images so closely chronologically tied as to almost serve as a flip-book, I hope to offer a taste of life amidst some of the globe's greatest hinterlands.

Tripping hazards.

2011-04-20T07:34:00.002-08:00

My apologies on having gone this long into the month of April without a single blog post. Make no mistake that I am working on one, though it demands a bit more research into soil science than I was initially expecting, and it will take some time. The fact that I have been recruited by the Germans to play organ for the Holy Week services also cuts significantly into my available evening free time. I am working on a post and will have it displayed as soon as possible.

On top of this, I have more lousy news: my trusty 4-megapixel camera seems to have bit the dust (literally). I am trying home remedies, but this little machine that has served me so well throughout most of the life of this blog is probably at its final days. If anyone has any recommendations for a moderately priced camera where the emphasis is less on quality of imagery and more on the machine's ability to withstand lots of abuse and a harsh climate, I'm all ears (and eyes). Thanks as always for reading.

The greasy spoon straddles the Pacific.

2011-03-31T10:49:00.006-08:00

As much as I’d like to commend the efforts of Lady Bird Johnson, I have to confess: I love billboards. Maybe I’ve spent too much time living in parts of the country where the landscapes offer relatively little variety, and the billboards help compensate for monotony. But I also love the flattest, most treeless stretches of the Midwest as much as New Hampshire’s White Mountains or Utah’s moonscape. When the topography is rugged, I like seeing where the billboard companies have coyly planted their signage on hillsides, in order to maximize visibility. Yes, I know, those tacky signs often mar the purity and majesty of their surroundings, but billboards routinely come and go, and the scar of chopped foliage needs continual maintenance to remain that way; trees will inevitably grow back when a billboard retires. Places that outlaw billboards—the entire state of Vermont comes to mind—often seem to be missing something, even for those who cherish what the state lacks. The absence of billboards is a low murmuring voice across the landscape forced permanently into mute, and perhaps that’s why I defend them: the connoted message of an unadorned environment where nature speaks differently to everyone combines with the (usually) unambiguous denotations of giant words on a sign. This dichotomy between the inferred (nature) and the declared (advertising/commerce) generates a skittish rhythm when traveling, a tense semantic energy that helps keep the drive from getting boring. Having no billboards sometimes seems as sterile as the scene from the movie Brazil where the landscape only consists of billboards. Vermont might be happy to squelch the homogenizing ambitions of Clear Channel and other corporations, but it also stifles a sort of folk culture generated by the advertisements for attractions and enterprises unique to an area. Federally funded highway signs can’t replace that vernacular. Ms. Lady Bird Johnson has plenty of successors, and I hope the battle against billboard blight continues, just as I wish for the companies to fight back. The push-and-pull between the two should help keep them both in check, while individual states can continue to let their constituents use their individual laboratories of democracy to decide what billboard quotient is right for them.

And, thankfully, most of the rest of this post’s analysis won’t be as academic as that first paragraph, because that opener is almost a non-sequitur. Perhaps it’s a good thing I come from a state that seems to like billboards as much as I do. As anyone knows who has driven through Indiana (which seems be just about everybody), it’s filled with them. The Crossroads of America—no wonder. In a given day, hundreds of thousands of eyes will glance at these massive roadside advertisements. So there’s no reason that the billboard below, from the stretch of I-65 between Indianapolis and Louisville, should stand out to its hundreds of thousands of viewers each day:

And, sure enough, it’s just an advertisement for a Motel 6, looking like any other. Except for that part about the Indian restaurant.

It doesn’t take a good pair of eyes to notice that, although the US has a sizable population that claims India as its country of origin, restaurants serving Indian food aren’t quite as commonplace as, say, Mexican or Chinese. You can expect to see Indian restaurants in affluent urban and suburban areas, downtowns of major cities, college towns, or neighborhoods with large concentrations of Indian immigrants—not off the side of a highway in rural Indiana. And not attached to a budget motel. It just hasn’t yet reached mainstream palates.

But that may only be indicative of a dormant trend. I investigated this particular motel/restaurant outside of the micropolitan area of Seymour, and I didn’t see any evidence of an Indian eatery from the outside appearance. I inquired with the manager on duty, and he said that the Indian restaurant had closed; in its place was a Mexican restaurant. So clearly this experiment in eclectic roadside cuisine failed. But I’m not convinced it was trying to appeal to the sort of traveler who typically patronizes Indian restaurants in fashionable areas of large cities or hip college towns. I think it was primarily attracting people who had grown up on the food—namely, Indian Americans and recent Indian immigrants.

I think two socioethnic phenomena are at play here in Seymour. No, this small southern Indiana city (pop. 18,000), though generally prosperous, is not suddenly attracting a large Indian immigrant community. I'd be surprised if there are more than two dozen persons of Indian descent in a thirty mile radius. But Seymour is a major pit stop for travelers, with an abundance of hotels, chain restaurants, and even an outlet mall (albeit not a very successful one). The concentration of hotels off the interstate should offer one clue: as I have noted in the past, the hotel industry has increasingly become dominated by Indian Americans, with nearly half of all hotels owned by persons of Indian descent, according to the Asian American Hotel Owners Association. While Indian ownership may still be uncommon among rural highway motels or downtown luxury suites, the budget franchise hotel—Sleep Inn, Days Inn, Super Eight, Motel 6—is dominated by Indian families, many of whom live on the premises. No doubt this Motel 6 in Seymour is within a stone's throw of another Indian-owned hotel, or two, or three. The entirety of the Indian population of Seymour may be tied to the hospitality industry.

But that doesn't explain the presence of an Indian restaurant, even if it's now defunct. The statistical odds that a traveler seeking lodgings in Seymour is an Indian American is still reasonably small, and you'd think that real estate around an interstate exit ramp would attract cuisine of a more common denominator. After all, most of the other restaurants you see around Seymour are the same ones you might find at any rural interstate exit in America: McDonald's, Arby's, Subway, Burger King. Even a Chipotle (Mexican) or Panda Express (Chinese) might be too eclectic. But the owner of this Indian restaurant/hotel clearly thought he or she had a large enough demographic from which to draw, perhaps through curiosity seekers that appreciate ethnic cuisine, or Indian American motorists.

As farfetched as it may seem, the Motel 6's proprietor took a reasonable gamble: not so far away, another roadside Indian restaurant is managing quite well. On the stretch of Interstate 70 in eastern Indiana, near the small town of Spiceland (about halfway between Indianapolis and Columbus OH), an Indian restaurant was fully operative when I visited in January of 2009. Apparently Taste of India/India Curry seems to have changed its name recently, but it was still in business as of last summer. It had the familiar smell of curry and various meats from the tandoor, but it didn't look like a plush Indian restaurant you might see in downtown Chicago, or the more middlebrow Indian offerings along Devon Avenue north of the city center. It didn't look like the sparsely decorated Indian restaurant you might see in a strip mall in the outskirts of Indianapolis, either. This Indian restaurant looked like a truck stop.

The above photo from the website Yelp makes it clearer: Taste of India really is a truck stop. And its principal clientele is truckers: Punjabi truckers. As referenced in the aforementioned blog post, a number of different immigrant groups have carved a niche within a certain profession. I have no doubt it started organically and grew from the first few successful entrepreneurs, but while many Indians from throughout this enormous polyglot eastern nation have cut their teeth in the hotel industry, Punjabi Indians—and Sikhs in particular—have made significant headway in trucking. The result, not so surprisingly, is a roadside economy that caters to a demographic that is only likely to grow in upcoming years—much the same way Indian-owned hotels have proliferated.

But this ethnic industry has left a visible fingerprint on the Midwest in more ways than just billboards. As itinerant as truckers may often be, they have to live somewhere, and it naturally follows that they would settle in cities with a robust logistics industry—more available jobs. Indianapolis in particular has asserted itself as a vast logistical hub, widely promoting its convergence of four interstate highways within the city limits. And, within the past decade, the very Middle American suburb of Greenwood, just south of Indianapolis, has become a bit of an enclave for Sikhs.

Two miles east of Greenwood’s main street, the suburbanization quickly reverts to cornfields, with newly emergent subdivisions interspersed between family farms. Although they are scattered across a number of new subdivisions in Greenwood, the Homecoming at University Park has attracted the highest concentration of Sikh families, outlined in purple on the map below:

Recent reports estimate that as many as 2500 Sikhs have moved to the southern suburbs of Indianapolis within the past five to seven years, often coming from California and attracted to Indiana by the low cost of housing and excellent school systems, among other things. It is possible that a particularly talented realtor who shares their cultural heritage has been instrumental in getting so many Sikh families to relocate; Ms. Siskand has retained on her website the Indianapolis Star article that first recognized the migration trends.

The attraction of Greenwood to Sikh families extends well beyond just the schools and housing, though. Notice that the Homecoming at University Park subdivision sits about a half mile east of Interstate 65. Immediately adjacent to the interstate—outlined in blue—the following businesses sprawl across former farmland.

This is one of many distribution centers in the Indianapolis metro, and one of the biggest in Greenwood. And there’s plenty of room for more:

Thus, the situation in Greenwood efficiently depicts a modern variant of the old work-home dichotomy, reconfigured at a lower density for the automobile age. As the pictures reveal, this layout isn’t really designed for walking to work, though there are quite a few sidewalks and the short distances would still make it feasible. And on the more urbanized western side of I-65, within the more established part of Greenwood city limits, tenants at the strip malls support this burgeoning demographic.

A mile north of these storefronts, just within the Indianapolis city limits, is a popular Indian restaurant, India Diner. And, since this is an ethnic group that largely defines itself by its shared religious background, it only follows that a house of worship would enter into the landscape. At the intersection of Graham Road and Allen Road (the red circle in the map) the local community has bought conventional private residence built in the 1980s and converted it into a gurdwara, the third Sikh house of worship in metro Indianapolis. The process of getting it approved by Greenwood Board of Zoning Appeals elicited a minor ripple a couple years ago, mostly because of fears of traffic along Graham, which at this point remains essentially a country road on the south side of its intersection with Allen Road. The BZA approved the request unanimously, no doubt taking into consideration the continued plans for the area to grow and urbanize, eventually necessitating an upgrade to Graham Road that will make the occasional traffic elicited by the gurdwara less of a problem.

While the Indian restaurant referenced in the Motel 6 billboard in Seymour is a thing of the past, I have no doubt that over time it will seem like less of a fluke, less a failed entrepreneurial endeavor, a one-shot deal. The successful Indian truck stop restaurant in Spiceland proves that such a seemingly unlikely venture can find a large enough clientele to succeed, even though the Indian population in rural Indiana will probably remain rarefied—isolated primarily to those economy hotels at the interstate exit ramp. Then again, like so many Indiana communities, Seymour, too, is home to a sizable logistical hub: a Wal-Mart distribution center stretches for what seems like miles on the other side of the interstate highway from the Motel 6. While it lacks the economic agglomeration power of a much larger city such as Indianapolis, Seymour does boast above-average representation in these two Indian dominated industries: trucking and hospitality. It may only be a matter of time before billboards advertising Indian truck stops are commonplace in Indiana (or elsewhere in the US), and it only foreshadows the steadily growing heterogeneity of the country that Indian cuisine may become as mainstream as it is in the UK—or as Chinese and Mexican already are. It would have been unthinkable to find these latter two cuisines fifty years anywhere outside of the largest American cities, and yet today a town can be a tenth the size of Seymour and still expect to have at least one of the two, if not both. Tandoori chicken may vie with country fried steak for trucker fare; they might even be served under the same roof.

When Disney's main street is the last man standing (without support).

2011-03-14T11:26:00.006-08:00

I was hoping at this point to begin a new article on the effect the climate has on the soil here in Afghanistan. Mid-March being the peak of the rainy season here, I figured I’d come up with some demonstrative photos and explore the ramifications that rain has on human habitations here. But so far, Mother Nature has thwarted my efforts: we’ve had nothing but unexpectedly warm, sunny, and dry weather this entire March so far, so I have no photos to offer as proof. I’m not yet concerned. We’re bound to encounter a thunderstorm eventually, here at the northern edge of the Hindu Kush mountain range. The rainy season doesn’t usually end until mid-April. And when we do get that rain, I promise I’ll deliver an article analyzing impacts of precipitation on Afghan soil. Try to contain your excitement.

In the meantime, I return to the States to visit a familiar topic: the “artificial” removal of the vast majority of a structure while preserving the façade. I use the word “artificial” with some hesitation—thus the quotes—because this act, usually (clumsily) called façadectomy, has become so commonplace that it’s almost a natural part of many re-emerging historic urban environments. In most instances, the façade is propped up while the developer builds something else behind it—usually an entirely different building with a floor plan that meets modern demands. Thus, the process is predicated upon the notion that everything about the structure is obsolete except the way the front of it engaged with its surroundings (i.e., the street and adjacent buildings). And in many cases, it is. The entire building would have met the wrecking ball otherwise; keeping the façade allows building and its immediate surroundings to retain a simulacrum of salvaged history. Preservationists usually frown at the façadectomy practice, no doubt because it taints the integrity of this discipline by implying that the veneer is what really matters. A façadectomy implies that the essence of the building—its ability to enclose specific human activities—is expendable, tossing most of the refinement of true preservation out the window and reducing it to a cosmetic exercise. Conversely, anyone preparing a rebuttal to a criticism of façadectomies would argue that the façade really is the most important aspect, while building interiors often undergo far more frequent surgeries over the life cycle of a building. Rare is the National Historic Landmark that enjoys preservation inside and out, so salvaging the just the façade—the one part that the vast majority of people will actually see—frequently succeeds as a cause célèbre in populist preservation. Thus, the “ectomies” continue.

But what happens when the developers salvage the façade, only to replace it with nothing? I first noted this occurrence early on in the life of this blog, when it took me by surprise on Memphis’ Beale Street. For several of the structures along this popular, touristy entertainment hub, the façades are all that survive. If a visitor passes through what used to be an entrance, he or she encounters a courtyard featuring a restaurant and bar.

But from the outside, it doesn't look remotely like a building: the girders supporting the structure make no attempt at subtlety; the masonry where the rest of the building was demolished is still jagged and irregular; the windows are just gaping apertures without glass. It looks like exactly what it is: a brick sheath suspended in an upright position. From a greater distance it's a bit more convincing, and it retains the essence of a contiguous street wall—the classic old-fashioned main street with a storefront at the ground level and apartments or offices on the floors above. As much as I hate sneering Disney analogies, the illusion Beale Street hopes to create is not unlike Disneyland's Main Street, which in itself is a specious paradigm since Disney's corridor owes its vibrancy to a captive audience and its imperviousness to conventional urban blight. Beale Street is vibrant too, no doubt due more to its loose alcohol than because it still harbors a genuine blues community, or many of the Street's actual buildings for that matter. From a distance, Beale Street looks like the real deal. But up close, it's like Pinocchio hoping to become a real boy (alas, another Disney analogy)—the semblance of a building that depends on a human presence to animate and legitimize it.

Keeping this in mind, I was less surprised when I encountered a similar practice in Mobile. Alabama’s southernmost big city, and probably the one with the most distinctive vernacular architecture, has an emergent entertainment corridor in the form of Dauphin Street, a remarkably long main street (over ten blocks) for a not-so-large city.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to determine whether the corridor is enjoying a rebirth or a decline. Vacancy was pretty high on a summer 2010 visit, with some surprising shuttered storefronts:

I know we’re long past the microbrew craze, but at least one should survive on the primary entertainment spine of a metro of over one quarter million. Mobile didn’t appear to have one in business. And the surest sign that Dauphin Street isn’t hot property is the presence of a storefront church:

I've blogged about this a ton in the past. If you see one of these, you can rest assured that the landlord is hard-up for any tenant and rents are low—especially in an area that most likely is trying to attract high-energy, revenue generating debauchery more than piety.

But I don’t want to knock the town when it’s down. Like much of the Gulf Coast, the Mobile area suffered significant losses from Hurricane Katrina, and some of the vacancies might be residual consequences. The fact remains that Dauphin Street almost exclusively features locally owned businesses, and the eyesores alternate in equal measure with streetscapes like this:

Or this:

Or this one:

The establishment in that last photo (probably a restaurant) may be out of business, but the building itself appears well-maintained. None of the grillwork on the balconies is rusted, so it probably hasn’t been shuttered for long. But a trick camera angle is the only thing retaining the duplicity here.
The surgery is much more obvious.

Like the building in Memphis’ Beale Street, it’s an old façade with girders holding it up. But it does show some critical differences. On Beale Street, the girders stood front and center, occupying part of the sidewalk. Here in Mobile, the supports are a bit more subtle because they sit in the back. But this façade also has something else supporting it; unlike Memphis, it’s more than a partition between the street and an open-air courtyard.
The lower level hosts genuine retail space. Whatever the tenant used to be, it was protected from the elements. The alleyway opening to the left of the facade shows how far back the structure extends, seen in the photo angling to the right of the alley:

The scarring of the masonry in both photos suggests that this alleyway underwent some heavy surgery as well in order to achieve its current condition. No doubt at some point in the distant past, this area had a roof. Another significant alteration is right there at the entrance.

Most likely the first floor hosted some large storefront windows flush with the façade, but now they are gated, and the physical entrance to the shelter is offset, allowing a sort of loggia for potential open-air seating—one more reason I think it was intended as a restaurant.

But the most invasive aspect of this façadectomy manifests itself when you crane your neck.

If it weren't for the installation of a new first floor, this building would look just as goofy as the one in Memphis: a decorative brick wall suspended high into the air. But thanks to the restaurant installation at the ground level and the concealment of the girders, it genuinely takes a keen eye to notice the illusion—quite a contrast from the far more obvious, contrived effort in Memphis. Preservationists may groan at the shallowness of either of these initiatives, but they still demonstrate a conscious attempt to retain at least part of the historic commercial character of their respective streets. In both cases, the owner of the property may be waiting until the market is right for a higher and better use. At that point, he or she could fill in the remaining void with a structure that matches the façade.

Filling in the void and completing the façadectomy would be much easier with Memphis. The Mobile example hints at something a bit more problematic and pervasive: many once-struggling commercial corridors are enjoying a revival through renewed populist appreciation in older architecture. But does this revival penetrate the entirety of the building? All to often, the first floor is the only thing capable of landing a tenant: the upper levels remain empty and sometimes quite decrepit. New Orleans' Royal Street in the French Quarter offers a great example, where the first floor is replete with active storefronts hosting often high-end art, antiques, and collectables. Yet even there, where retail space rents at high prices (for New Orleans' standards), the upper levels are frequently shuttered—a problem throughout much of the Quarter. The quaint ideal of retail on bottom and housing above is a concept we idealize but rarely embrace in actuality. Mixed-use seems great when someone else is creating the mixture. But the market demand for it—the best way to find an occupant for those other levels—is often miniscule.

This storefront on Mobile's Dauphin Street looked good enough for a restaurant, and in a better economic climate, it will probably find a new tenant. But the likelihood of demand escalating enough to justify building a structure for those other two floors is slim. In fact, a restaurant on the first floor may actually be a deterrent to transforming those upper levels into residential or office. Food handling is an extremely tough use to mix. Not too many people want the same smells wafting into their home or workspace every day from the restaurant below, no matter how good it may be. And even the best maintained of restaurants have a greater propensity for attracting vermin such as mice or roaches. Ask anyone who's lived next to a grocery store. Ask me.

In light of these undertakings in Memphis and now Mobile, it's hard to take a firm stand on façadectomies. Like it or not, they're part of a sub-practice within historic preservation, and they speak volumes about when the effort to salvage a structure aligns with demand—and when they clearly only generate dischord. We've already lost hundreds of buildings that intended to mix retail and residential throughout this country, and we'll lose many more in the future. Even if Dauphine and Beale Street become trendy entertainment destinations (the latter one already is), nothing suggests that main street architecture has more than a niche appeal—a antique collector's nostalgia. If anything else were the case, the majority of intact American main streets would be flourishing by now, but clearly they aren't. I still hold hope that we will witness the restoration of numerous other aging, pedestrian-scaled buildings in the decades to come, but not all will enjoy preservation from top to bottom, back to front. A flimsy brick wall surviving by braces may look ridiculous, but the care involved in trying to save it earns a distinctiveness all its own. And maybe these shells will find a new hermit crab to re-inhabit them, filling out the remaining three walls, then finding a tenant on those upper-level apartments who never grows tired of the southern barbecue smells simmering below.

DUST: Romancing the (war)zone.

2011-02-24T09:00:00.003-09:00

In search for an innovative blog topic, I’ve been sifting through my photo albums, new and old, in order to put my growing understanding of life in a conflict region's military base within the context of other atypical American settlements. It’s going to take some time to ponder over all this—not something I have much of these days. Until then, I have to offer a footnote blog entry as I work out something a bit more extensive.

Obviously these bases are, with occasional exceptions, austere, serious locations without a great deal of time or attention devoted to whimsy. So when one comes across something lighthearted, it offers a welcomed contrast, no matter how slight. I was waiting in line at for lunch at the DFAC (Dining Facility) at a place named after the Afghan “Deh Dadi”, pronounced exactly how it looks.

The lowest form of humor manages to transcend its origins, when the café itself consists of a series of windowless, conjoined tempera tents. The Merriam Webster's online definition for the original word is “affectedly refined in manners or tastes”, with an unknown origin—perhaps the archaic term lardy-dardy used to describe fops, but those terse, successive, mellifluous vowel-consonant combinations also suggest a Romance language origin. Regardless, the creators of this otherwise drab sign betrayed their own la-de-da intentions.

But the unintentional laughs are the ones that linger. And this other image definitely ranks among my favorite here on the base for its novelty. I was the first American that I know of to discover some of these curiosities, no doubt while trolling around for blog photos. According to some of the troops who have gone on more than one tour, this is the first time they’ve seen such a thing as well. Camp Nidaros, a Norwegian-run compound within the larger Camp Marmal, billets the Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Latvian contingents. And next to the residential tents—the bedrooms—sits the inevitable counterpart, the bathroom.

It’s a latrine, and latrines by definition host sinks, toilets, showers, or a combination of the three, all fit snugly within an 8' by 20' modular metal container. But never before have I seen one specifically devoted to diarrhea, as the red and white lettering warns in its British English spelling: "DIARRHOEA ONLY". I've always thought “latrine” to be a deceptive word, with a far prettier, lilting sound (French of course) that contrasts sharply with anything that goes on inside it. And how telling: already my second thumbnail blog entry focusing on gastrointestinal—how would you say?--irregularities. For the record, here’s the first.

It puts a whole new angle on the idea of latrine duty as a punishment.

MONTAGE: Fanning the flames of long-term neglect.

2011-02-13T08:06:00.007-09:00

It's been quite some time since I've featured a photo montage—a blog entry in which the presence of photos essentially dominates instead of text. But a recent occurrence in my home city of Indianapolis prompted me to recall some pictures I took well over a year ago that have suddenly become relevant again. Back then, I had hoped to create a montage of vacant, often blighted structures across the central part of the city that most likely would have undergone renovation by an ambitious developer riding the urban residential wave...except for the fact that both the zoning stipulations and the prevailing culture in the city overwhelmingly demand far more space for parking than these older urban structures are able to provide. And thus, buildings sit and rot.

Maybe someday I will still be able to create that photo montage, but it will have one less structure in my palette, due to a recent fire at the Chadwick building, just north of downtown on Pennsylvania and 10th Street. This structure, built during a pre-Depression rental boom in 1926, gradually devolved into budget studios as downtown Indianapolis began to decline in the 1950s. The Chadwick entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, and it sits in the historic St. Joseph neighborhood, just north of the official limits of the downtown Mile Square. Despite a downtown renewal that began in the mid-1990s, the Chadwick remained a housing choice of last resort, thanks in part to a negligent landlord who allowed the place to fall further into disrepair. It closed completely around the turn of this century and quickly became an eyesore in an otherwise steadily revitalizing area.

Most of my personal pictures of the Chadwick are fairly close-in, and are relatively few in number, so this will be a montage-lite. The best photo to demonstrate the massing of the Chadwick again comes directly from the Indianapolis Business Journal site, and is seen below, where the building to the left is a fully operational engineering firm.

As this picture demonstrates, the Chadwick sat tightly in its portion of the block, with no real setbacks or room for off-street parking. By today's standards, this might seems a bit like architectural irony, since the structure was meeting housing demand for the city's steadily growing automobile industry, but apparently automotive workers were not guaranteed to be car owners in 1926. (Or, at any rate, car owners were not plentiful enough to warrant dedicated off-street parking.) After all, at that point in time, they could have used the city's excellent transportation system to get to automotive jobs that most likely hugged the west side of the city—Indianapolis of the 1920s was “the Interurban Capital of the World”.

Those conditions don't prevail in today's environment, and this city, with one of the lowest funded public transportation systems in the country, depends overwhelmingly on the automobile. The results? Buildings like the Chadwick cannot find a buyer to redevelop them due to the unavailability of parking, and they quickly decay. Here before you are the pics I snapped back in the fall of 2009:

The façade wasn’t particularly distinctive by most measurements, but it reminds me of hundreds of similarly scaled buildings in Detroit, no doubt built in response to that city’s significantly larger 1920s automotive boom.

The building stretched all the way to its back alley, with a visibly contemporary structure immediately behind it.

In the back there was really no room for parking, which no doubt further deterred developers from having a go at it in what otherwise is an economically healthy area.

Buildings left vacant for a decade will inevitably host squatters and graffiti artists. Clearly some vandals left their mark on the adjacent Jarrett Engineering building as well—one of many reasons the latter building apparently posted a sign thanking the Indianapolis Fire Department for containing a blaze which could have spread far more unpredictably than the calculated wielding of a spray paint can.

One feature that has puzzled me has been why the north side of the building (away from the street and adjacent to the engineering firm’s building) used a different material for the third floor than the conventional brick seen everywhere else.

Could the Chadwick have been altered later in life in relation to some other, taller structure that used to abut it but has since been demolished?

Also notable is how much higher the basement of the structure was over the street level.

Most likely the building hosted garden apartments, but this elevation might have facilitated a slightly lower-cost introduction of enclosed basement parking in a potential redevelopment.

However, the structure would have required significant restorative work. Notice the visible cracks in the masonry at the southeast and southwest corners.

Maybe an architect could have assessed whether those cracks were the product of the missing supportive window frames (if they genuinely are missing due to the conflagrations of previous years), or whether more serious subsidence and foundational problems were the culprit.

But it doesn’t matter because the Chadwick Apartment building does not exist anymore. The urbanist blog Skyscraper City offers a heated discussion about the origins of the fire that felled the Chadwick. (Start with comment 3949 and scroll downward then read the next page; it gets feisty and fun.) The structure’s National Register status prevented the City from demolishing it, and despite the pesky issue of parking, hopes remained high that an enterprising developer would eventually see the potential for condos or yuppie apartments. But then the housing markets fizzled. A representative from the Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development assured me in a brief phone conversation that it wouldn’t be that hard for a developer to seek a variance. So how did the Chadwick meet its end—an out-of-control interior fire from homeless squatters, or an absentee property owner seeking a quick demolition?

The property will host a new development, most likely sooner rather than later. Many people on the aforementioned blogs prematurely bemoan the fact that it will lack the great urban massing that the Chadwick claimed, since virtually every multifamily unit in downtown Indianapolis needs off-street parking. I reserve judgment. The structure could just as easily have remained vacant for another decade, and it obviously would get only increasingly unattractive—and more costly to renovate. Despite its relative absence of a cited architectural heritage, Indianapolis—even just the St. Joseph Neighborhood alone—has other treasures far more worthy of a preservationist crusade. A hundred structures like the Chadwick have already faced the wrecking ball in Detroit; a structure like this coming down there might not even make news. A new montage awaits this parcel’s eventual redevelopment, and I will eventually complete the montage of salvageable Indianapolis urban beauties when I return the States.

DUST: The shoe may fit, but does the foot fit the stair?

2011-01-31T08:19:00.010-09:00

In planning, as in any undertaking, when a certain prevailing goal asserts itself as the principal one, other objectives and their respective goals all too frequently become subordinate—such is the nature of prioritization. A no-brainer. In a conflict zone, urgency often triumphs over pragmatism. In Afghanistan, a dozen different units can lay claim to territories within a nascent outpost base, each with widely varying intended uses for the land in order to meet their strategic component of the mission. Someone oversees the process to ensure that units are able to meet their needs without impinging upon the others, or violating the terms of any Land Use Agreements with the host nation’s government. However, all too often the hasty maneuvering elicits in some less than satisfactory configurations, such as a light industrial use occupying the exact center of a fortification, normally reserved for billeting (quartering of troops) and pedestrian-oriented uses. But the industry requires less manpower and a lot more land, so it receives the space early on in the development and subsequent residential quarters have to design around it. It’s like putting a bottling plant where the town square would normally go. In an ideal situation, the center of the base would host the most restrictive residential uses (residential and community support), but it only hurts the overall mission when other units are waiting at the doorstep, ready to install the infrastructure they need.

I can see where seemingly imprudent land use decisions must proceed because they meet ever critical short-term needs, even if they are a long-term disaster. But what about the planning involved in constructing individual buildings within a base?

Most military units and battalions, as they build the requisite structures for the implementation of respective missions, are impelled/compelled to abide by Minimum Military Requirements—a fundamental understanding that few if any new bases are going to be permanent installations, and thus the shelters should leave a minimal footprint and cost as little money as possible. It entails basic responsibility with public dollars. Thus, throughout bases like Camp Marmal, the American quarters typically look more like this:

A combination of Small Shelter Systems (SSSs) by different manufacturers: usually Alaska Structures or CAMMS, sometimes California tents. (The concrete objects to the right in the lower photo are bunkers to protect from rocket or mortar attacks.) Inside each residential tent is a labyrinth of ropes and carpets, strung from the side beams to form makeshift privacy partitions for the eight to sixteen people sleeping there, often in bunks. Compare this with the German quarters on the base:

The magnificent mountain backdrop may continue to distract from the humdrum foreground, but the fundamental point is clear: while nothing fancy, the Germans get modular units strung together along a double-loaded corridor. These narrow structures (sometimes nicknamed “hooches”) usually measure about 8 feet by 20’ and, I believe, hold two troops who share a bunk bed. As the photo indicates, each unit can control its own heating/cooling, and the structures sit on a graded base that is clearly meant to last. The Germans control the land on this base (reputedly purchased), and they can set their own standards, which, due to their long-term presence, ostensibly does not require a maximum threshold for construction sophistication. Thus, their compounds boast a higher number of hardened structures.

But the Americans, with a military presence in Afghanistan ten times the size of the Germans, are operating with different prerogatives. The original photo from this post captures a core concern in the prioritization of expediency over other planning elements. Two-story plywood structures typically host office and administrative functions, and they have been nicknamed SWA-Huts. They are always windowless.
By most measurements, these structures are suitable, perhaps even ideal, for hosting the administrative arms of long-term, non-permanent field operations. They’re quick and cheap to build. They’re easy to secure, and they manage extremes in climates better than tents, protecting the sensitive information and valuable equipment inside. Because the foundations and load-bearing walls can accommodate two stories, they offer the opportunity to consolidate personnel with interrelated tasks into a smaller space than the Alaska tents. And they remain in good shape just long enough for a long-term (5 to 10 year) installation, with little cost to demolish—or even to dismantle—when the work is complete, which is almost always a longer time frame than initially anticipated.

But nestled within these expeditionary structures are some deficiencies that, if built on the home front, would be illegal.

From a distance, these stairs look no different than what one might see leading to an elevated deck in a person’s back yard. A landing bisects the stairwell so that it ascends perpendicularly, creating far less of a protrusion from the building than it would if it lacked this vertex. But the midway resting point almost helps disguise a serious design flaw. Notice the stairs on the lower half, below the landing:

And now observe the stairs above the landing:

It’s difficult for a photograph to capture the distinction (believe it or not, the snow actually helps), but perhaps some other angles will make it clearer. Again, here’s the lower half of the stairwell from the side:

And viewing it looking downward:

And here’s the half from above the landing, from both the side…

And looking downward.

If it still isn’t clear, the treads to the steps are smaller below the landing than they are above. The construction team used two different sized boards, and the upper ones are about an inch wider; with two boards per step, the treads are about two inches wider on the upper portion. While this might not seem like a serious offense, for most people ascending and descending a staircase is a largely unconscious act, primarily because we safely assume that the rhythm our feet travel is going to be uniform. Few people climbing the stairs to this SWA-Hut have managed it without stumbling at least once or twice, and descending is particularly problematic at night, since the building has no exterior lighting. It is only a matter of time before someone is seriously hurt. I still use a flashlight every night after having used this building for over a month; I’ve nearly wiped out a couple of times. Imagine the danger posed if personnel have to evacuate the building in a hurry, which is a legitimate possibility in a war zone.

The outside environment offers another example of a more justifiable but still unfortunate exclusion:

None of these offices have plumbing; everyone has to use port-o-lets. No structure would meet Minimum Military Requirements if indoor plumbing were installed, let alone the fact that it would have to link with a broader network and water/wastewater treatment system. No plumbing means no toilets and no sinks—no sinks means no place to wash hands after using the restroom in this crude, dirty environment. This has been illegal for approximately a century in the US. These green port-o-lets have little dispensers of sanitizer solution, but they are seldom operative, and no public health expert has ever suggested that this fashionable alcohol-glycerin combo should ever take the place of soap and hot water for killing bacteria. The closest latrines with a sink, water, soap, and flush toilets are a five minute walk away. Functionality, safety, and general sanitation take a back seat in the interest of getting the job done quickly and cheaply.

The building reveals other deficiencies on the interior that prevent the population from evacuating safely. Notice the hinges on this door, leading to a second office from the entry room on the second floor of the building.

The door pivots to the interior. This inner room has no other exits. All personnel must leave through the door in the photo above, walking into another room first before exiting. Here are views from inside this interior room:

The 5 to 10 workers using this room at any time will have to pull on the closed door in order to open it, though modern building codes would require the hinges to operate so that the door requires pushing. Having a pull door only creates an impediment in the event of an emergency that requires evacuation. Unfortunately, most of the doors in the building have been installed under these standards.

Elsewhere on the base, code violations are less obvious, but a trained eye can certainly identify them. I don’t have the skill set to spot most problematic circuitry, but many people on staff do.

Seen above is an extensive row of Small Shelter Systems, most likely Alaska tents, viewed from their “back yards”. The large box on the right side of the second photo is a 100-amp breaker. Here it is up close.

And here’s the other side of that 100-amp breaker…
…ports filled with 60-amp cables. This is not as dangerous as it sounds. But it is certainly not up to code. Under normal conditions, 60-amp cables can handle the current generated from a 100-amp breaker. The problem is the combination of excessive current coupled with extreme outdoor air temperatures, which is a legitimate concern in the Afghanistan summers, when temperatures can break 120 degrees and the air conditioners are cranking at full capacity. A 100-amp breaker often will not trip when the current is excessive until it’s too late, and there will be a short on the cable. The most likely outcome is nothing more than a series of ruined cables. In a worse case scenario—if these cords were covered with, for example, blankets or paper bags—the shortage of a cable could induce a fire.

In all likelihood, expediency supersedes optimization of supplies in each of these instances. It was not a deliberate act of carelessness to use two different sizes of boards on the stair treads, or to link cables and a breaker with different current flows. The construction team had to do the best it could in a limited time frame with the materials that the workers received. But cost is undoubtedly also a factor, and the lack of uniformity does seem a bit surprising, considering that most units are contending with budget constraints. Take, for example, the back of these LSS (Latrine Shower Shave) units:

Notice that the middle latrine uses a different piping configuration than the other two. Elsewhere in this row, one can find some really creative pipe networks:

Wouldn’t it have saved money to buy the exact same pipe fittings? After all, most of the latrine units themselves are identical, presumably ordered in bulk. I have no idea what went on in the installation of these facilities, but it would appear that the LSS units and the plumbing came from different sources. Maybe these units weren’t all brand new, and some smaller pieces were lost in transit, resulting in pipe networks that the construction team cobbled together with whatever was available. The latrines may very well all operate with reasonable efficiency—the plumbing configurations are simply different means to the same end—but it would be virtually impossible for them to operate identically, since they use such different infrastructure.

Frugality, expediency, and functionality make uncomfortable bedfellows in facilities planning, particularly in a military setting. It is difficult for any combination of the two to prevail and virtually impossible to achieve all three (the elusive “win-win-win situation”). The disharmony of functionality and frugality is obvious; you get what you pay for. A good example of this is a bulk order of chairs that recently appeared in the American dining facility, a welcome contrast from the uncomfortable, noisy, awkward metal benches.

These chairs are lightweight, padded, and have a moderately ductile backs for reclining. They are also mind-bogglingly junky. The facilities operators introduced them in the handful of days between Christmas and New Year’s Day. At the time that I write, a month has passed, and I would estimate that over 80% of them look like this:

Good luck leaning back in that. The ductile plastic suffered from excess pressure applied to it; it snapped. Now the chair is little better than a stool. By no means is this an indication that the troops and civilians here are rough with the chairs. It doesn’t take engineering knowledge to see that these chairs had a design that encouraged leaning back, but they lacked the structural support to do so. The result was inevitable. And now they have had to order another set of chairs and reintroduce most of those abrasive metal benches. I can only hope that no one was seriously hurt from one these jalopies.

Analogous to this scenario is the one motivating the decision to mix amperage between cables and breakers: no doubt 60-amp cables cost less than 100 amp ones. Obviously the ratio of cables to breakers is high, so the aggregate cost savings for 5000 cables at 60 amps versus 100 amps is probably significantly greater than the savings for 100 breakers at 60 instead of 100 amps. And, as is indicated earlier, skimping out on the cables is not likely to result in catastrophe, which might not necessarily the case if the purchaser had ordered breakers with inadequate amperage and splurged on the cables. Neither one of these situations has caused any bodily harm that I’m aware of, but between functionality and cost, it is clear which variable won.

The glitches around and inside the two-story plywood office indicates the likely victor in a duel between functionality and expediency. It may not have cost any more to build stairs with uniform treads—in fact, it may have cost less—but it could have caused delays if the team had to wait for the appropriate supplies. Most likely the shipment was partially wrong here and the builders had to make do with what they had at their disposal. (One of the neighboring two-story plywood structures seems to have uniform treads.) I’m not sure what motivated the installation of interior doors that swing the wrong way. Maybe it was a supply issue again, and they just didn’t receive the right hinges but had to build promptly. To me, the repeated occurrence of such an easily avoidable flaw is redolent of a hastily conceived design not fully vetted by architects or engineers.

The issue of quality control helps tie the last problematic pairing of our three variables: expediency and cost. Building a structure quickly with little thought to the design will inevitably result in a product that functions more poorly than it otherwise would. But building quickly is frequently also antithetical to building cheaply. A rush job often costs more, just as it costs to deliver mail express rather than standard. The situation at hand in a conflict zone changes routinely and demands immediate reaction, sometimes lacking the forethought it needs and frequently resulting in escalated costs in order to get the job done quickly. Foregoing the standards set that US building codes set decades ago clearly speeds the process. Regulations and standards routinely intend to improve functionality but rarely help cost or speed/efficiency. Thus, we witness an abundance of poorly built structures that still cost significantly more than the sum of the individual parts would suggest, chiefly because time was of the essence.

Of the three variables—speed, price, quality—I would never assert that one always comes out the loser. All three rise or sink in importance in various situations; this is hardly profound. The unfortunate reality is that rarely do two of the three ever share top billing. The builders on a construction site are seldom culpable; they simply implement what they are told to do with the supplies given. Clearly the suppliers and implementers do not always communicate through the construction manager as well as they should, but to pin the blame on any of these entities fails to account for the logistical challenge of getting these supplies into a war zone. The people in charge of the purse strings are hardly steering the ship either; budgets shrink and grow from a variety of forces, the political one proving a formidable wild card. And any budget, no matter how well planned, will wilt under radically fluctuating costs.

In identifying all the safety compromises in the built environment of a military base in wartime, I identify a problem without a clear origin. These sort of problems are the wickedest of them all. No one would argue that the powers that be have anything to gain by turning a blind eye on US building codes and construction standards, but they very well lose out in other critical aspects of the mission if they always stop to mind the Ps and Qs. It fosters a climate of individual solicitousness, to identify these almost unavoidable weaknesses beforehand in order to prepare for them, because they’re not going to change. We residents of a base just have to remain vigilant and be sensible when encountering a potentially risky situation. I offer a final example of the best and worst with which the military must contend. Much of the construction work is required by national and international law to engage in the services of LNs, or Local Nationals: in this case, Afghan companies that have responded to RFPs. It does not take long from observing these generally industrious men to realize that Afghanistan has nothing resembling an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

There was a parking lot...now it's a peaceful oasis.

2011-01-18T19:42:00.003-09:00

Hardly a month goes by—perhaps more like once a week—without some new artistic endeavor depicting contemporary life synecdochically through paved surfaces. We can all think of one. Whether the first that comes to mind for you is a song by Joni Mitchell (or maybe David Byrne), a Terry Gilliam movie, or a Kurt Vonnegut novel, the world today has been smeared across by some paving surface—or so they'd have you believe. Granted, most of these examples, by virtue of the fact that they criticize this phenomenon, share a certain political leaning (and, most likely, a dense big city that they call home), but the fact remains that modernity and concrete or asphalt share a loose fungibility: the phrase “paving the way” implies progression, or, at the very least, succession.

Is it justifiable to bemoan the fact that the earth, in totality, is most likely becoming increasingly impervious with each passing second? Even the greatest Luddites can hardly complain over the fact that, a century ago, most roads outside of urban centers in the United States—the nation with the largest road network by far—were dirt or gravel at best. After all, a hard surface that resists most weather patterns is unambiguously superior for travel, and individual mobility is better than ever before, with all evidence that it only stands to improve in the future (even if perhaps at a higher cost per unit traveled). These broad artistic swipes at our increasingly paved future generally achieve satire and a resonant message, more readily than a dire warning of eminent peril. At least they make for a catchy tune or a cult novel/movie. Nonetheless, most people simply do not allow the cement trend to bother them; perhaps they even welcome it as an indicator of improved convenience. And perhaps the fact that so much of the world still remains unpaved—sometimes completely removed from human intervention—that a dystopic future devoid of natural plant growth can only achieve resonance in the topos root of the aforementioned word: we do indeed have a “place” here in the future that is simultaneously the present, but it is hardly so devoid of all that is green and pure to be dys, or “bad”.

Maybe it is legitimate to claim that the world is increasingly paved, but a thousandth of a percentage's incremental increase still smacks of hyperbole. Even in most urban environments, plant life is abundant—sometimes more so than the unsettled world around it (particularly noticeable in my current home here in Afghanistan, where trees are non-existent except in well established towns). So the collision of the built and the natural ultimately isn't as bleak as Mitchell and Vonnegut would like us to think it is. Sometimes the harmony between the two is so unexpected that it is particularly charming, as in this eminently suburban streetscape in Gulfport, Mississippi:

Aside from blurring people's faces to leave them anonymous, I'm not normally one to doctor my own photos. But I couldn't help but try to capture the serenity of this live oak by at least toning down the ordinariness of the surroundings. So I confess: I “Photoshopped” out some of the signage. Here's the actual vista of this tree:

There it sits, right in the middle of a grocery store parking lot. The Southern live oak is one of the most emblematic trees of the South. I suspect that only the magnolia surpasses these expansive titans for evoking the ecology of Dixie, particularly in a place like Mississippi—nicknamed the Magnolia State. But the magnolia is the name for a genus, a broader classification than the specific Quercus virginiana of the Southern live oak—not surprisingly, the magnolia family of trees covers a much broader geographic region. (By the same token, the live oak characterizes a broader Quercus genus as well; the Quercus virginiana, or Southern live oak, is the specie of focus here.) The Southern live oak generally thrives in exclusively the coastal Southeast, making it most characteristic of the Deep South, whereas magnolias can endure as far north as Philadelphia. It is common practice—almost a cliché—for artists/filmmakers/photographers to show American “Southern-ness” through a silhouette of a grove of Southern live oak trees, with Spanish moss draped lazily across the horizontally inclined branches. Not surprisingly, Southerners by and large revere these trees, in part for their tremendous canopy, their idiosyncratic evergreen characteristics (they are never without leaves), and their ability to withstand hurricane-force winds. The streets of New Orleans, Savannah, and (prior to Hurricane Ike) Galveston all derive the majority of their canopy from these trees. One of the most prominent old plantation homes in Louisiana is the beloved Oak Alley, featured in many movies, as well as this blog quite some time ago.

So, if these trees are so pervasive, what makes this one so special? As is clear from the photos, it is in what is otherwise a pretty unremarkable parking lot to what seems to be a run-of-the-mill southern grocery store chain.

If the photos have not made it obvious already, this particular Southern live oak is big. Huge.

Though I didn't take any measurements, I really didn't need to in order to assert that it's bigger than most if not all of the Southern live oaks in New Orleans neighborhoods. Thus, it's safe to assume that, by virtue of its greater size, it's also older than the 150 year old plantings that line St. Charles Avenue in the Big Easy. In fact, I would venture to guess that this tree is comparable in size to the Southern live oaks in Oak Alley Plantation, which, in turn, were planted over three hundred years ago. Carrying this deduction a step further, I suspect that this tree is of a similar age, which would date it a good 180 years prior to the incorporation of the City of Gulfport in 1898.

And, as gutsy as it may be for me to assert this, this Southern live oak may even pre-date the Winn-Dixie! Most of the development around this part of Gulfport, based on the appearance of the homes, comes from the 1960s through the 1980s, a era when automobile-oriented design and parking lot provision were often at their most generous. Relatively few subdivisions that originate from this time have sidewalks, particularly if they were platted outside of an incorporated area. Developers of commercial plazas focused little on aesthetics or preservation of green space; the biggest amenity of a strip mall was its abundance of free, plainly visible parking.

Yet shifting consumer tastes have elicited a gentle irony: many of these 40-year-old strip malls are now struggling with high vacancy levels, having been replaced by lifestyle centers and other retail typologies that emphasize aesthetics in general—and greenery in particular—much more than in the past. In most municipalities, the inclusion of some form of landscaping is mandated for parking lots over a certain minimum size. The US Green Building Council's Version 3 of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for New Construction and Major Renovations provides multiple incentives for developers to “break up” an expansive sheet of pavement through trees and landscaping, partly to facilitate stormwater management by reducing impervious surfaces, but also to help minimize the urban heat island effect, largely induced by pavements and other aggregate materials that retain heat. Both of these negative characteristics of conventional parking lots can pose a huge burden and source of discomfort in a hot and rainy climate, such as southern Mississippi in the summer.

But somehow I suspect that ecologically sensitive stormwater management and heat island mitigation were not on the developer's mind when building this Winn-Dixie. First of all, if this store is as old as most of the housing and commercial establishments in this area, its construction precedes that of city ordinances mandating landscaped islands, LEED certification, and the green building movement altogether. The installation of landscaped islands is hardly consistent throughout this parking lot. Some other angles reveal that most of the rest of the lot is barren and exclusively impervious...

...with the exception of the perimeter, which hosts islands with significantly younger plantings.

These perimeter trees were most likely a private decision and not a public mandate. At any rate, their existence depended on development of this site; obviously they didn't grow in this pattern by nature. Parking lot landscaping has become particularly prevalent in the last decade, induced by a combination of municipal codes and—perhaps most potently—market forces: developers have found that strip malls/lifestyle centers/shopping plazas attract the eyes of passers-by through their inherently more upscale appearance. Treeless strip malls look old-fashioned, tired, and barren in comparison.

In fact, upon further scrutiny, aesthetics may actually be the single greatest justification for these landscaped islands, because the ecological benefit is increasingly dubious. While they undoubtedly provide at least some shade and relief from the heat island effect that makes Mississippi parking lots so uncomfortable in the summer, the cost of maintenance may outweigh the benefits, particularly if the installation uses landscape or trees that demand a great deal of water or irrigation, further skewing the natural hydrology of a site. A not-so-recent article of Urban Development observed that because so many of these landscaped islands seem like afterthoughts to accompany a stormwater management system of pipes and culverts, the islands do not achieve a great deal of their mitigating effect. In addition, passers-by routinely trample the ground cover, the islands aren't big enough for the root systems to grow, and catch basins collect much of the water before it permeates the soil for the trees. Thus, the street trees often die within a decade. (These shortcomings are undoubtedly one reason why LEED encourages xeriscaping, or drought resistant plant cultivation, in any stormwater management system, with more emphasis on vigorous, natural landscaping to reduce the need for catch basins.)

Regardless of what inspired these much younger perimeter tree plantings, they do not fit in with the mighty old live oak.

They belong to a different pattern, and the big tree is an exception to this. Were the developers that saved this tree were motivated by something else: a love for this tree in particular? They sacrificed at least four parking spaces for it, but in the process salvaged what almost manages to serve as a landmark for the area. The “island” is more like Australia (or at least Madagascar), providing ample space for the live oak's sprawling, generally superficial root system. They didn't try to jam additional landscaping at the ground of the tree, which would most likely not survive for lack of water and sunlight, or it would flourish on its own terms but rob the mighty tree of its nutrients. Whoever conceived this may not have been an expert arborist, but he or she was not likely a mere amateur either.

The titanic tree flourishes thus far, after having been surrounded by asphalt for at least two decades and probably much more. And in all likelihood, it will outlast its much younger cousins, who were given the poorly thought-out treatment that Len Zickler and Duane Dietz rail against in the aforementioned Urban Development article. These smaller trees—also Southern live oaks, I believe—are jammed into much smaller islands, sometimes two at a time. Some rust colored mulch and compost undoubtedly try to endow them with the nutrients they need but otherwise are not receiving. Chances are strong that the will succumb to their poor environment within the next few years. But, if it's lasted this long, the older cousin will most likely persevere into the distant future.

This anomaly—an old-growth tree in a settlement less than 40 years old—proves that not everything those talking heads (pun intended) satirize about modernity is not entirely fair. The artists who denigrate the paving of America routinely target suburbia in particular—take the examples mentioned at the beginning of this post, or, a much more recent one, Win Butler. And these suburban-critics would have us believe that leaving the city is predicated upon a hostility to both the old (aging architecture) and the natural (the desire to get around everywhere through a gas-guzzling vehicle). But keep in mind that the original inspiration for suburban living was a return to nature, often not by the middle class but by the gentry who could afford the greater travel costs. Today, an overwhelming number of Americans continue to prove by their buying (and foreclosing) patterns that they'd prefer a big yard, even if it means the houses are spaced so far apart that they have to drive ten minutes to buy a can of Coke. Sure, that big green expanse might have the biodiversity squelched through fertilizer and pesticides, but it is a perception that it is far more natural that closely packed urban living. A lawn is certainly not impervious like a tightly packed urban streetscape. And a city park is rarely any more of a realistic, natural ecosystem than a suburbanite's manicured back yard.

Here, in Gulfport, one can witness veneration for both the old and the natural in this preservation of a long-standing Southern live oak tree. It does happen now and then. The distinctions between between rural and urban—the synthetic and the natural—the modern and the pre-modern—the good and the bad—get hamfisted treatment by both the city artists/intellectuals and the designers of giant new exurban subdivisions. And, long after the polemic ends and the two sides have died of exhaustion, years after some technological advancement renders the Winn-Dixie (and all grocery stores) obsolete, this tree will continue to stand, enjoying increased breathing room amidst the cracked and decaying pavement. It used to be real estate; now it's only fields and trees.

Neither gone nor forgotten.

2011-01-14T11:17:00.002-09:00

My apologies for being negligent of my blogging duties as of late. I haven't forgotten, nor have I tried to let it drop--though this is the longest I've gone without a post since "Dirt" began. Work has been particularly intense lately and my health has not been 100%. BUT...I am working on a post and will have it ready in a few days. All the best; thanks as always for reading!

DUST: What does the flag capture?

2010-12-24T02:50:00.008-09:00

My suspicion is that I have less to say on this subject than I’d like to think, but I’m still feeling my way around in terms of the appropriateness of featuring certain material on this blog, so in the meantime it is best that I linger on the fluffier subjects. And I can’t help but indulge in my love of flags and all their expressive content while I live on a multinational military base. As my previous Afghanistan post indicated, they’re everywhere. They are less prevalent in their original, fluttering cloth form on an American base like Bagram Air Field. But the other two bases in which I have lived, Kandahar and now Camp Marmal, lack a single nation’s dominant military presence, and flag poles stand sentinel at various points across both bases.

The above photos, both taken at Kandahar, are hardly the greatest at capturing the semantic properties of flags. In the first photo, the flag—possibly German—projects just to the right of the street sign with “Illinois” misspelled, and in the second photo, a Danish flag (if I recall correctly) spears the sky in the distance on the left, slightly higher than the power lines. I never intended the flag to be a focal point in these photos. But they do at least suggest the flags’ power to serve as monuments in a base setting, primarily through two different expressive tools. When propelled on poles or stanchions, they punctuate the landscape by simply being taller than most structures amidst a flat, treeless terrain. And the banners themselves achieve prominence through their hues: bold colors contrast to the sepia tones of dust and particulate matter that veils the horizon, even when low wind levels keep the flag furled. The example below in Camp Marmal with a Norwegian flag gets the point across somewhat better, thanks to cleaner air and the relative absence of power lines.

These contrasts help to explain how flags engage with their surroundings at the sensory level, but the question remains how they operate spatially. In short, how do they govern the area around them, if they have any control at all? Obviously the devices used in display of the flag matter critically here. Within the context of a coalition base made up of multiple national armies such as this, the flag most clearly connotes two seemingly paradoxical territorial ideas: 1) that the area below the flag is part of that nation’s compound and “belongs” to it, so that the flag presides over that portion of the base; and 2) that the particular nation has a presence on this base and is a “team player” in the Afghanistan conflict as a whole. It’s quite simple. It operates much the same way when flags project from a particular movable object, such as the Croatian flags on the MRAPs below:

The red white and blue (also an adhesive on the side of the vehicle) is the national flag; the other one pertains to a particular mission. Obviously these vehicular flags serve primarily to identify the nationality owning that vehicle, which means they do not appropriate the same amount of space as the ones tethered to poles planted in the ground. But these flags can venture outside the wire and still effectively indicate Croatia’s participation in combat.

The use of words “govern”, “preside”, and “appropriate” only effectively applies, though, to flags in isolation. Throughout many of these coalition bases, flags are grouped in a formation of multiple poles, like the one below in Camp Nidaros, a Norwegian compound nestled within Camp Marmal:

Despite the fact that Marmal is a German-owned base and is the headquarters for Northern Regional Command (led by a German General), these flag formations tend to be as egalitarian as possible, most likely in an effort to demonstrate that no one country’s forces are hierarchically superior to another. The formation in the above photo seems particularly self-abnegating, because the banners attached to the poles are not even national flags: they are narrow streamers with a different configuration of each country’s respective national colors. They diffidently reference the country without proclaiming it. If I can interpret them correctly, this display shows, from left to right, the colors of Norway, Finland, Latvia, Sweden, and Germany. All of those nationalities with the exception of Germany have troops stationed in this particular compound Camp Nidaros; billeting for Germany is scattered elsewhere across the base. One would think that either the compound’s commander (Norway) or the base commander (Germany) would occupy the central flag pole to show ownership. Instead, that pole belongs to Latvia, while Norway and Germany occupy the peripheries. I have no doubt that this configuration was conscious. Place a flag in the company of others and the aforementioned territorial paradox—that of simultaneous individual ownership and operating as a team—immediately collapses, because the ability to denote “owning” a portion of the base evaporates. Here’s another formation at Camp Marmal that coyly dissolves hierarchy:

The flags of the United States, Germany, Afghanistan, and the U.S. Navy all hang at half-mast. The deployment of an even number of flags clearly avoids placing any one flag at the center, and in this case, the host nation, Afghanistan, gets equal representation with two countries and one branch of the military of that same country. The building to the left houses exclusively US forces, predominantly associated with the Navy, yet two other nations’ flags wave out front.

The half-mast configuration, nearly always intended to show mournful deference for the recently deceased, assumes a new poignancy with the next photo, taken just minutes after the previous, as dusk had set in:

This event comprises an unannounced visit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the evening of December 18, 2010, speaking at the memorial of a German soldier who had died in an accident the preceding day . Notice that in the first of those two photos, the German flag is half-mast. But here as elsewhere, the presentation soon diverted to the shared responsibility, as Merkel continued her brief speech about Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan. By the conclusion, the flag was full-mast along with the others.

Again, the flag formation avoids placing any nation in a position of primacy. Germany, the owner of the base, stands at an unremarkable position of third from the left. The United States, the second largest presence, sits on the far right. And while there are an odd number of poles (21), allowing the potential for one pole to take center place, the framing of the poles around a central memorial places eleven on the left and ten on the right; no nation takes the center stage. Here are some close-ups of the memorial in daylight without the crowd:

Protocol for the display of the US flag requires that it observe international standards when juxtaposed with other nations, and none should rest above another at a time of peace. Obviously the existence of Camp Marmal is predicated on this precisely not being a time of peace, and yet the coalition nations (including the euphemistic “host nation” Afghanistan) still observe the peaceful display here as in every other location where more than one national flag presides over the space. Yet every time the flag waves in isolation, it proclaims its territory. The difference, it seems, is the level of conscious thought invested in the display: asserting national presence and ownership requires demands very little additional scrutiny, and, cheaply fluttering from the back of a Hummer, almost seems like an afterthought. Conversely, the assembly of a group of national flags in mutual respect requires serious deliberation.

The semiotics that underpins any display of multiple flags operate differently when the display takes place indoors. The pictures below take place in a DFAC (Dining Facility) at Kandahar Air Field:

It seems to be common practice to decorate the dining halls in the larger bases with national flags. But the flags preside over clearly bounded space here; any assertion of territoriality simply adds a dimension to the message already communicated by four walls. The display of flags indoors does not convey the potentially contentious air of imperial entitlement that it has the potential to suggest when outdoors; the flags address an enclosed space and not the open air, or the land itself. Perhaps it’s just me, but flags also lose expressive impact when they are limp and static; the fluttering of a flag from wind, however mild that wind may be, projects authority that it is hard for a motionless flag to muster. So while the exterior display of flags seems particularly sensitive to the fact that these nations collectively occupy a land with which they are waging war against a certain faction, all the rules fall by the wayside when flags hang indoors. No one seems particularly sensitive of who owns what. The PAX terminal at Camp Marmal is an excellent example:

Near the back of the building on the right is a colossal German flag—the country that owns the base. The other flags in the photo represent the three nationalities with the next largest presence on the base: in the far distance (with the checkered shield) is Croatia; to the right of the German flag is the American flag; to its right (partly cut off by the picture’s edge) is the Norwegian flag. All of these flags occupy a noticeable second tier to Germany. Pan to the right, however, and the message becomes a bit more muddled.

From left to right, the picture shows Norway again (same flag as the previous photo), Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Montenegro, Slovakia, Latvia, and part of Turkey. The positioning, size, and even the choice of nationalities here seem to be based more on expediency than any sort of conceived arrangement. The spacing between them seems inconsistent, the size does not fit with either a hierarchy or an egalitarian coalition, and while Turkey and Slovakia may be part of the coalition, they have yet to show any presence at Camp Marmal, while other nations clearly berthed here have had their flags omitted. Anyone plunked into this facility while blindfolded would draw the conclusion, upon removing the blindfold, that it is a German-run building. Provided that he or she knows the German flag, the enormous mural makes it obvious. But the participation of these other nations and how they fit into the system on this base is completely undefined. The flags help add color to an otherwise sparse terminal; otherwise they might as well be garland.

The DFAC at Camp Marmal has a similar configuration on one of its walls, with even more diluted semantic results:

Again, we see a row of thumbtacked flags used as decoration, with little regard for placement. Is this display trying to show a hierarchy, with the NATO flag (the white compass on a blue field) taking precedence in the middle of all the participating partners? That doesn’t work, because the NATO flag is not in the middle; there cannot be a middle position with twelve flags. Are the participants all on equal footing? Perhaps they are, but the disparity in size of the flags would not suggest it:

Montenegro and Latvia are huge compared to Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United States, and NATO. Again, it seems the decorators bought whatever size flag was available (and whatever relevant nationality they could find) in order simply to decorate, without intending any other message. Compare this to the precision and thought that they applied to the adornment of another wall, with photos of the Afghan countryside:

It’s much easier to get away with a sloppy flag display in an indoor setting, where there is less at stake.

No doubt this analysis may come across as one of my much-ado-about-nothing posts. After all, they’re just flags, and it is possible that I’m projecting my own fascination with the topic by inferring more out of it than anyone ever intended. But flags are also a powerful diplomatic tool, and they may be the most widely available, transportable material to clearly convey both a nation-state’s government and often the very essence of the land. Witness the recent global coverage of burnings of the American, Danish, or Israeli flag and it would be hard to shrug aside its potency within a broader understanding of semiotics. In a multinational setting rife with the potential for a serious imbroglio, a blasé display of a nation’s flag could set tempers flaring.

The use of flags on these bases suggests that the outdoor display has significant political ramifications, but indoor displays do not matter so much. Maybe it’s true that an indoor display will never carry the same territorial weight, but it can still result in a transnational contretemps. A recent meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, hosted by President Obama in New York City, aroused some ire and international press when the Philippine flag was accidentally displayed upside-down, indicating the nation to be in a state of war. The problem with the indoor settings at the PAX and DFAC in Camp Marmal isn’t that they’re purely hierarchical or egalitarian; it’s that they’re neither, or a little of both. National flags might be beautiful to some, but they are too semantically rich to serve a purely aesthetic purpose.

I conclude with one particularly interesting flag that can serve on its own as a microcosm for what a carless flag display loses semantically. The national flag of Croatia has already graced this blog post a couple of times; they constitute one of the largest forces at Camp Marmal.

This brief analysis constitutes a bit more of what I know about vexillology, the study of flags as semiotics, which I covered at much greater length in a blog post on the Maryland flag many moons ago. The Croatian flag is by no means a particularly bad flag; it certainly looks far more elegant than the contrived, deer-on-hind-legs antiques that constitute many of the US state flags. But the real core of the flag is the checkered shield, serving as the flag's central charge; this escutcheon pattern predominates on a lot of the exercise gear that the Croats wear around the base in their down time. I particularly like the way the checkers align with the bottom blue fess (stripe). The decorative "flair" sitting in the place of a coronet above the checkers might help to embellish the shield, but they erode the symmetry, suggest hierarchy (some emblems might be more important than others), and they complicate the entire presentation, thereby diluting the message and the overall readability of the flag. The North American Vexillological Association asserts that the key indicator of an effective flag is that a child should be able to draw it from memory. Its impact should be immediate and unforced. By no means is the code of the NAVA the Gospel on flags, but I cannot imagine most six-year olds reproducing the Croatian flag after just a few minutes. Most 40-year-olds wouldn’t do a great job either.

The weaknesses in the Croatian flag echo the problems with the display of national flags in the interior public spaces of Camp Marmal, or many other situations where they serve an ornamental purpose. The display of flags to convey either hierarchy or egalitarianism is fine; there are no inherent faults in either of these organizing principles. The deficiency lies in when the display blurs the line between the two—when it is ambiguous as to which entity, if any, should stand out—which is precisely the problem with the array of symbols in the Croatian flag and the panoply in the DFAC. Ambiguity serves a distinct aesthetic purpose, but a flag’s communicative intent should always be clear. We don’t make light of the most prominent proxy for nationhood, whether in an Olympic natatorium or in a war zone.