Should big box retail exist in New York City? The physical space required often prohibits such programs from existing in cities as dense as this, but perhaps the flow of goods and volume could be utilized to produce new land for these typologies to exist. If this were the case then no longer would big box retail cast the same political shadow it historically has. Instead it might offer a unique opportunity to channel the American consumer’s force into a land building operation. These images are from the Crisis Front Midterm Review and depict a range of studies that collectivity attempt to harness the power of global logistical flows and direct that energy into a tangible good that can be given back to the city. Currently the dredged materials form the Hudson River are carried out into the ocean and dumped because of their toxic attributes. However the toxicity levels are dropping and for the first time since an industrialized New York, the sediment collected from dredging operations has the potential to remain in the city and be utilized in a land forming process. With a system in perpetual growth and change like that of the shipping infrastructure and big box retail, coupled with a local material, a new dynamic between infrastructure and the consumer is on the horizon; one where you directly participate in the creation of new topographies.

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Images from the first review of Spring 2010. These pertain to studies of volume fluctuation within port infrastructures for their harvesting and application as possible land growth and extension.

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A series of studies for performative membranes and volumes that could potentially embody the protocols and programs of the scenario or proposal.

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Three videos from National Geographic’s Man Made series showing the infrastructures managing the movement and volume of materials. Two show how UPS sorts packages arriving at their Worldport in Louisville, and the other speaks of the unloading, sorting and gathering of containers at Long Beach port in California.

….Via: National Geographic

Alliance Landport is an intermodal facility composed of an airport, a freight train station, industrial warehouses, residential & retail areas. It is a space fueled by global commerce, where a series of vastly different programs, traditionally existing in separate contexts, is merged into a shared landscape. It’s a space that Clare Lyster, author of Landscapes of Exchange: Re-Articulating Site, cites as a space of potential reprogramming because of its infrastructural richness. It’s a landscape programmed and designed with an ease of access to utilities that makes it highly re-programmable. This type of rigid infrastructure is the landscape where our research semester focused. Highly programmed and protocolgical spaces become highly exploitable because the protocols in which they operate are not flexible enough to account for entities that wish to hack into them.

The baratillo is a market in Guadalajara, México that is deployed every Sunday morning. It has over 10,000 vendors spreading over 50 city blocks. Some consider it the largest market in Latin America. City police enforcement are extremely condoning of the activities and types of items that are sold here. Visible to the average consumer, you can find, bootleg copies of any CD or DVD that is currently out, animals not native to the country, stolen (“used”) cell phones, videogame consoles, cameras, motorcycles, bicycles. It is rumored that one can find endangered species and firearms as well. The extent of the products found here is amazing, one could do all our grocery shopping there, get clothes, and even buy a gun, within a temporary infrastructure. Of interest within this market is it’s prominence for selling illegal products, but also its ability to deploy and pack up within a few hours.

Above you can see a video of a walk though an area of the market, this is the street which has been taken over by a two lane path marked by sales booths. Below is a small sample of the things that can be found there.

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This is the most up to date deck, compiling our work and text from the Fall 2009 Degree Research semester.

You can find a PDF to downlaod, here: 091229_ErikMartinez_ShawnSims_FA09_PrattDegreeResearch

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