Cold Ring Catalysts: Co-Optive Strategies of Urban Logistics

Thesis Title:


Cold Ring Catalysts: Co-Opting Strategies of Urban Logistics

Cold storage is an emerging network of public infrastructures for design opportunities along the busiest logistical corridor of North America: the NAFTA superhighway.

Much of the cold chain's pull on this highway originates from the Great Lakes Mega Region, but this thesis concerns itself with the southern tail: the emerging Texas Triangle.

The critical nexus of this global-regional crossroads is the metropolis of Laredo-Nuevo Laredo: the prototype for the logistical city.

This thesis claims that logistical entities such as cold storage have had the greatest impact on the spatial development of cities. This thesis also claims that if architects and urbanists still wish to be active agents in this process, much can be learned by studying and co-opting the logic of cold storage with a set of new design protocols.

The Scenario: Increasing Cold Trade Volumes

Global Cold Storage trade volume is projected to grow by 4% per year and its capacity will likely increase along the NAFTA Superhghway. The impact will increase carbon foot print, increased consumption of water and electricity in freezing/cooling activities, accumulation of pollution (i.e. refrigerant gasses and transport emissions) at site and arriving to the site.

With the Obama administrations restoration of the Mexican trucking program and the increasing consumer lifestyle demand for time-sensitve perishiable goods, the urban fate of Los Dos Laredos are at stake. How can architects and urbanists intervene in this inevitable process?

Catalyzing Cold Storage with New Urban Protocols

The Los Does Loredos must co-opt the inevitable and indifferent logic of cold storage with a set of urban design protocols that turns them into catalysts for potential new urban spaces, forms and programs. The first mover advantage does mean something here in this unrealized game of spatial city development. The end goal of these protocols is a phased in concentric nodal urbanism that generates a healthy and beneficial impact on the local, border, regional, and global scales of logistics.

sourcemap

http://www.sourcemap.org/

Loophole

Underground Storage of Thesis Projects

Hacking big ice boxes is tougher than expected.  Two maneuvers are of worth consideration for this thesis.  

First, despite the explicit rules imposed by a storage facility for tight efficiencies of space, every site and architecture must have unexpected consequences or byproducts as a result of these rules.  After all, no generated spreadsheet for the planning of a new storage facility can possibly account for every cost or benefit. At best, these logistical regimes default to coping mechanisms of categorically placing these very unknown variables in insurance terms of "contingencies" or "acts of god".  The small details that are left out of this planning equation is where architect as hacker needs to be looking at closely.

As of now, byproducts that are worth considering at the architectural level:

• Emissions from the mechanical systems that support the temperature controlled rooms
• Accumulations that are brought to the site via trucking and rail.
• Impervious surfaces and drainage of phosphorus.

Second, the code for formatting the spatial development of storage facilities resides in the faulty language of bureaucratic planning documents.  Again, its rule making explicitness is prescribed in quantitative measures of x-feet above, below, or back from the street.  This logic is buried in the bureaucratic pages of planning documents but inevitably physically manifests in the forms of setbacks and property lines  staked into the ground.  The legal loopholes of the language needs to be hacked, then a demonstration of the set of hacking tactics needs to be demonstrated (Alex Lehnerer's Grand Urban Rules or Sub Plan).

Underground Storage

Meanwhile, the default mode of hacking projects resort to program.  The legacy of Dutch architects have taught us that its the program stupid!  Tongue-in-cheek as these projects maybe, these projects have been successful in repurposing, infilling, and retrofitting of depleted or used up post-industrial sites seems to be in vogue.  Pertaining to the thesis at hand are underground storage facilities cropping up in old limestone mines.  The melting waters of ice age past and the coursing water of the Missouri set the stage for productive industrial sites of extraction.  The activity continues, but not of the same intensity nor of the same locale.  Its productive work resides in the network of gravel pits that pave way for the expanding suburban streets.  The old sites of extraction becomes a relic of Fordist economies.  In this case, the functional repurposing of a site of extraction into one of conveyance and accumulation of goods 

Docking Area

Springfield Underground

If the thesis project was to employ the same kind of program centric tactic, it would look like the following equation:  

Intermodal Distribution Center in Cold Commodities + ___(x-plus)                         

                                                                                              education                     

                                                                                          __tourism                         

                                                                                              shopping/dinning         

                                                                                          _  recreation                     

                                                                                          __hotel   _____________

All of the above mentioned x-plus that the supposed architect as agent brings to the table are tinged with a consumer culture of fetishizing the box.  NeoMarxist critiques are powerful and hard to escape, something I don't think you can totally escape from, but if this thesis really is going to consider combining the topic of health, it needs to be worry about health becoming a derivative for a fast-serving IKEA of Health and Personal Health products and services on full spectacle.  

Offices

This thesis project acknowledge program as a method, but aspires to hack without having to solely resort to such means. 

Working Project Titles:

Cold Empires
The Cold Chain Complex

Cold Chain Complex
ProtoPharmopia
Pharmopia
Pharmoplis

Pharmacopic Follies

Pharmacopic Post

Mall Medica
Medi-log
Meditopia
Mecha-Medilistics
Mega Medical Stop

Mega Medical Exchange

Medi-Mart

Mega-Mini Mart

Medical Mechanica

MechaPharm
MechaPharm Logistics
Mecha-Medi-Mart

The Medi-market exchange

Medica's
Medilistic's

Guns-Meds-Foods
The Cold Zone

Health Zone
The Ice Stop

The Health Stop
The Health Exchange

Boomers and Doctors

Notes from Networked Cities

Universal  Situated
anytime-anyplace | responsive place

     mostly portable | mostly embedded

          Ad hoc aggregation | Accumulated aggregation

context is location | context is activity

           fast and far | slower and closer

uniform | adapted

-Malcolm McCullough

NAFTA as text

When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation's Wal-Marts.

-Christopher Hayes, in "The NAFTA Superhighway" The Nation, April 9. 2007