Urban Farming Video

The illustrious Will Allen, via City Farmer:

Urban Crude

One the most fascinating passages of the book 'The Infrastructural City' was the chapter on oil production that still existed in a variety of forms throughout the urban form. The fabulous Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) has done some investigations, which are captured on a post in the Places portion of the Design Observer site.


:: image via Places

"Los Angeles is the most urban oil field, where the industry operates in cracks, corners, and edges, hidden behind fences, and camouflaged into architecture, pulling oil out from under our feet. . . . Los Angeles is an active laboratory for how to extract oil from a developed city, something more likely to occur as the world urbanizes. Generally considered unsightly, dirty, and smelly, the oil industry has had to develop defenses against the rising value of the land and the encroachment of housing and retail. Sound muffling technology, visual barriers, and the concentration of wells into smaller areas, using directional drilling techniques to access fields through diagonal and horizontal wells, are all technologies developed here."

One aspect beyond the mere existence of these in the city, but also interesting was the methods of hiding this infrastructure within the urban form. One of these is the Venoco Oil Field Tower, which is "...an urban drilling and work-over tower is clad in soundproof insulation, decorated during the permitting process".


:: image via Places

Or the Breitburn Energy’s Cardiff Well Site which has the "...drilling and work-over derrick is concealed within a tower which vaguely alludes to synagogue architecture."


:: image via Places

A slideshow offers many more images in typical CLUI style. It brings to mind the ideas mentioned in the recent post on Subnature, where we want the pure urbanism, but are often forced to incorporate some of the messiness of natural resources and industrialism in our cities - and what that leads us to come up with for ideas.

As We Found Them... As We Leave Them

A provocative image found in an email from the local Audubon Society email offers the visual of 'As We Found Them... As We Leave Them', a Jay “Ding” Darling cartoon from 1923, as a statement about the state of our rivers in the face of urbanization.



The reason for the email was an upcoming hearing on the Willamette River in Portland. The text:

"On Wednesday, December 16th at 630 pm Portland City Council will hold its first hearing on the North Reach River Plan. This is a unique opportunity to reverse more than a century of degradation in the Willamette River as it passes through Portland. The North Reach stretches 11 miles from the Fremont Bridge to the Confluence with the Columbia River. It is one of the most degraded stretches of river in the United States.

The North Reach Plan is the City's first major update to the zoning code and design guidelines for this stretch of River since 1987. The Plan took more than two years to develop and proposes more than $500 million in new infrastructure to support river industries and new trail alignments that will provide the public with greater access to the river. The Plan also proposes critical new strategies to protect and restore habitat in the North Reach. Specifically the plan proposes the following:

• Environmental Zoning to provide baseline protections for the most important riparian and upland resources;
• A system of 21 permanently protected restoration sites designed to allow listed salmon and steelhead to safely pass through the North Reach;
• A funding structure that requires industry to fully mitigate to replace existing habitat that is eliminated in the course of development and a small additional fee which will go towards supporting habitat improvement in the North Reach.

We expect strong industry opposition to this plan. Industry has been arguing to eliminate environmental regulations on industrial properties and to gut the proposed funding mechanisms. If they have their way, the regulations established under the new River Plan would be even weaker than the regulations that we have today---the regulations that have already allowed the North Reach to become the most degraded stretch of river in Oregon."

Get out and protect the rivers in Portland people. Questions can be directed to Audubon via Conservation Director Bob Sallinger.