Key note presentation at the Island Cities and Urban Archipelagos 2016. 07-12 March 2016, Hong Kong, University of Hong Kong See http://www.islandcities.org/icua2016.html

1. Vertical Ground: Making Geology
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University

2. Contents
I. Introduction: Cities, Geology
and the Anthropocene
II. The Ground Beneath
Our Feet
III. Exported Ground
IV. Making Ground
V. Waste Ground
VI Landfill to Landfill

3. I. Introduction: Cities, Geology and the Anthropocene
“The talent the geological sciences have for
placing humans on unfathomable time lines
– in which human history appears as little
more than a gracious footnote to forces
too powerful to measure and too slow to
watch – seems to be exercised less and less
as images of melting glaciers and
exponential curves produce a very
different kind of feeling.The image of the
city, in particular, as a thing that is made of
geology or on geology, increasingly has to
contend with the idea of the city as a thing
that makes geology”
Seth Denizen (my emphasis)

5. • Teufelsberg:‘Devil’s Mountain’ Berlin
• A dominant chunk of the remains of a third of all pre-war Berlin –
which totalled 50,000 burnt and bombed-out buildings, sixteen
square kilometers of the city or 75 million tonnes of rubble -- are
piled high beneath the hill’s surface.
• .This amounts to a sixth of all the rubble created by the bombing of
all of Germany’s cities in World War II.

6. II.The Ground Beneath Our Feet
• Of all things, modern humans tend
to naturalise the ground, seeing the
terrestrial platform beneath them
as some immutable and natural
product of geological processes
working gradually over
unimaginable time horizons. Such an
understandable tendency leads to
an overwhelming sense of ground
as an inherently horizontal
phenomenon – the very surface of
the earth stretching to and beyond
the horizon.

7. • Increasingly, the terrestrial material beneath our
feet is anything but ‘natural’ geology: it is the
vertically-accumulated phenomenon of
manufactured ground.
• Shift of material by humans through
construction, mining, agriculture and the
generation and movement of materials deemed
to be waste now amounts to between around
59 billion tonnes a year.
• Startlingly, this now exceeds the transport of
material by the world’s rivers and oceans (22
billion tonnes) almost by 300%.
• Globally, 21 tonnes of rock and soil were moved
for every one of the planet’s then 6.5 billion
humans through agriculture and construction
(2000 data)

9. ‘Artificial Ground’
• Densest in ancient cities that have
been continuously inhabited, rebuilt
and redeveloped over thousands of
years. It is also particularly widespread
beneath old industrial cities which
have experienced many cycles of
construction and destruction.
• In addition, new urban soils are
created with “trash, construction
debris, coal ash, dredged sediments,
petrochemical contamination, green
lawns, decomposing bodies, and rock
ballast.” . Seth Denizen,

10. Studies have shown, for example, that the 20% of
Manchester classified as ‘artificial ground’ can easily reach
depths of 10 metes.The ancient city ofYork, meanwhile, is
based on at least 8 meters of human-made geology.The
surface of Rome, which hides many complete ancient
worlds, has been built up as much as 15 meters (50 feet )
in the last 2000 years.

11. Highly Politicised ‘ Archaeosphere’ (Matt Edgeworth)
“A kind of giant carpet covering large areas, on which the furniture of
the human world (its buildings, bridges, monuments, pylons, oil-rigs,
telegraph poles, roads, railway viaducts, cities, shanty towns, parks,
airports) stands and is supported, and into which it will eventually
crumble. Deep-layered in places, threadbare and patchy in others, this
carpet of near-global extent provides the surface on which people
carry out their lives. Like a carpet, it is so well-used it is taken almost
totally for granted”

12. NewYork has long been a “geological hot spot” Manhattan
means ‘Island of many hills’ in language of the local Lenni Lenape
indigenous tribe

13. • Today, NewYork is a crucial node in the human manufacture of
local, regional, national and international geology.
• NewYork’s Smudge Studio have published a guide book
illustrating how the city is a geologic force of truly global
importance within the contemporary ‘Anthropocene’ period.
• They trace the distant origins of the materials that make up the
city’s pivotal supplies of concrete, steel, road salt, gold reserves,
food, energy, water and fossil fuels.They also map the new
geologies and landscapes created by the city’s construction
industries, demolitions and waste outputs.

14. • They then draw parallels between the geologic processes
of city life and natural geological events.“Like an island-
building volcano or a river-diverting fault shift,” they write,
“the City instantly transforms materials that took slow
and powerful earth forces vast spans of time to create. In
the process, the City unleashes utterly new geo-dynamics
that will play out for thousands – and in some cases
millions – of years to come”

15. Most powerful here is the analysis of how cities which face cold
winters like NewYork create their own huge ‘terminal moraine’
landscapes by bulldozing millions of tonnes of dirty, salty snow – full of
worn brake linings, tyre dust, exhaust pipe chips, and other detritus--
into huge urban ‘glaciers’.These then melt in the summer months,
dumping their ‘moraines’ -- just like ‘natural’ glaciers – as new geologic
formations in the process

16. • Globally, such is the vast scale of the abandonment of metals in the
archaeospheres of the world’s cities – what Björn Wallsten calls
‘urks’ in Swedish-- that humans are currently using only 50% of all
the metals they have ever extracted from the earth.
• Wallstein estimates there is as much copper embedded in the wires
within Swedish telecom and electricity grids as there is left in the
vast Aitik complex -- Sweden's, and one of Europe's, largest copper
mines

17. III. Exported Ground
• Artificial ground, far from static, is also,
quite literally, exported on ever-greater
scales.
• Movement of material for new geology
to be manufactured elsewhere.
• Boston’s famous ‘Big Dig’, for example, –
meant that over 12 millions square
meters of material needed to be
disposed of.
• It was “distributed to many different
locations in the Boston area, ranging from
construction sites, to landfills in need of
caps, to a deep ocean disposal site.” James
McCarthy and Kate Driscoll Derickson
• Spectacle Island, off the city’s shore,
gained 16 hectares in size due to further
dumping

18. At Wallasea on theThames estuary, meanwhile, an island the size of
the City of London financial district is being created as a bird
reserve out of the material excavated by London’s mammoth
Crossrail subterranean train project.

19. Mining Cities: two hundred hills which dot the landscapes of
Johannesburg, for example – the very foundations of the city– are
actually ground manufactured from the often highly polluted
‘tailings’ of the hundred and thirty years of gold mining that led to
the building the city.
“I don’t think many residents even think of [the hills] as being
made by hand,” photographer Jason Larkin writes.“They see them
as just part of the ‘natural’ backdrop to the city.”

20. The notorious oil sands landscapes of Alberta are a powerful
example here, In what activists have called a ‘toxic sacrifice zone’ --
a pristine boreal forest the size of England -- the very geology itself
is being deeply excavated en masse by giant machines to be
processed at huge environmental cost to produce hydrocarbon
products.

21. • Open-cast coal mining in Kentucky,WestVirginia,
Virginia, andTennessee, meanwhile, is being upscaled
radically to centre on the low-cost removal of entire
coal-bearing mountain.
• The highly polluted material produced as a by product
-- often 18-20 times more bulky than the removed
coal -- is then simply dumped to fill adjacent valleys.

22. IV Making Ground
‘The old adage,‘Buy land –
they’re not making it any
more’ is no longer true!’
René Kolman

24. • The manufacturing of large amounts of new ‘reclaimed’
land is now as central to the extension of littoral
megacities as is their more celebrated vertical extension
through skyscraper and high-rise construction.
• New dredging technologies allow sand and gravel to be
sucked from 100 meters or more down in adjacent seas,
estuaries, islands, coasts and oceans to fill the required
volume with sediment.This allows ever-more grandiose
land construction projects to be funded, planned and
engineered in littoral cities and ports.

25. As old as port cities themselves. Most extraordinarily of
all, fleets of derelict ships, obsolescent at the time, were
often used to help fill the space between the old wharfs.

27. In the 1920s,Amelie Ransome
Nevilel, an ageing San Franciscan,
recalls her amazement at seeing
the ships being interred as a child
in 1856.“We went, one day, down
to Long Wharf,” she recalls,“ now
part of the filled-in land that
extended the city’s waterfront... It
was strange to see old ships built
into the city streets; derelicts that
had been left where they lay in
the mud flats when the land was
filled in, waves and lapping water
forever lost to them”

28. • Now much vaster in scale. E.g. Singapore: Between 2004 and
2014, 120 square kilometers was added to the country – 20%
of its size at independence in 1965.A further 100 square
kilometers of new land is planned by 2030

29. • In effect, this means that land itself is now flowing from poor to rich
countries and from rural areas to cities.“Less obvious than the
increased capital flows across territories is the flow of territory
itself’, Joshua Comaroff writes.“It is a form of appropriation that
differs rather dramatically from traditional seizures of territory,
through war or colonial expansion”

31. • To facilitate this process, huge, guarded, stockpiles of imported
sand are held in the city’s Seletar andTampines districts, ready to
be distributed to the next reclamation projects.The volumes
required are enormous: just 0.6 of a square mile of new ground
necessitates 37.5 million cubic meters of fill: the capacity of
nearly 1 and a half million dump trucks

36. “One curiously geographical form through which this circulation of
new globalising, cultural spatialities takes place is the artificial island.
The worldwide phenomenon of the artificial island has become a key
defining imaginary and material form of 21st-century development
visions clamouring to `ornamentalise’ and reinvent, their urbanising
coastlines” Mark Jackson andVeronica della Dora

38. Agitation by local artists, journalists
and researchers about the
catastrophic social and environmental
impact of corrupt, elite-led land
manufacturing programmes in
Bahrain
The activists mourned the
replacement of Bahrain’s fishing and
pearling communities – now distant
from the sea -- with miles of deluxe
high-rise hotels and condos on
manufactured land owned by the
local dictatorship and distant elites --
and presided over by big western
architecture and planning firms

40. “An island nation once
completely dependent
on the sea, through its
fishing and pearling
activities,” the activists
wrote,“has today
nearly turned its back
on it. Nearly: all
[except] for the high-
rises competing for a
postcard view of the
sea and a few
disseminated
fishermen’s huts
searching for a slice of
sea along the
temporary coastline.”

41. The entirely new island-city of Eko Atlantic, currently being built
using material dredged up from the Atlantic floor off the coast of
Lagos, Nigeria, is another powerful example.A private and
deliberately elitist enclave of soaring towers and green parks built
to house 250,000 people, the city evokes the offshore elite
secession so common in science-fiction films

42. ‘Great Wall of Lagos’ -- a sea defence barrier made of 100,000
five-ton concrete blocks.
Martin Lukacs,:“an architectural insult to the daily circumstances of
ordinary Nigerians.The criminalized poor abandoned outside their
walls may once have served as sufficient justification for their flight and
fortification – but now they have the very real threat of climate change
as well.”

45. In a final important example of the politics of dredging material up
from the seas to make land, China’s terraforming of a string of ‘fake’
islands in the Spratly archipelago in the South China Sea since
December, 2013 demonstrates that ‘reclaiming’ land through
dredging up material from the sea floor can also work to bolster
major national geopolitical claims to sub-sea resources, maritime
and air space in contested zones.

47. V Waste
Ground
In many ways, landfills, as prime sites for the
manufacture of artificial ground within
contemporary urbanism, must therefore be
considered “the true archaeological sites of late
modernity” Cinzia Scarpino

48. In the megacities of the global south, though, landfills become much
more still: they are places of mass inhabitation by the poor and
marginalised. India alone is home to at least 1.7 million ‘rag pickers’.
Given that their slopes are often immediately surrounded by shanty
communities, the dangers are obvious.

49. Waste-slides often kill the urban poor below with sudden collapses of
the piled up rubbish of the rich far above. Indeed, lethal waste slides
work to reveal the ways in which the piling up of waste in densely-
settled spaces necessarily leads to the production of highly unnatural,
manufactured, disasters.
In the first international survey of its kind, Dave Petley estimated that
there were 2,620 fatal waste landslides between 2004-2010.These
buried alive and killed 32,322 people: 4,617 people a year!

50. Payatas, Manila,
Philippines,
July 2000
• At least 216 people died, and 200, possibly many more, were left
missing, presumed dead
• “We want justice for the victims,” local activist Romeo Capulong
said in July 2000.“We want to highlight the criminal neglect of the
government—national tragedy and local—as well as public officials
when it comes to the plight of the poor people.The immediate
cause of the was the height, weight and the condition of the
structure that they kept dumping garbage on”

52. End of 2015: Shenzen
construction waste slide
(67 deaths) and
Hpakant mining waste
slide (killed 200 itinerant
Jade miners)

53. VI Landfill to Landfill
“The relationship between skyscraper and pit has taken
on new implications” Lucy Lippard

54. Jani Sandura, the building of the world’s tallest structures at least
partly on manufactured ‘reclaimed’ ground suggests that “both the
spectacular heights to which garbage may be raised and the less
popular vision of capital built upon the foundations of its own
refuse.

55. The barge loads of material shipped from Lower Manhattan to
Staten Island consisted of rubble made up of crushed and broken
concrete, asphalt millings and pulverized and broken steel in
various sizes. But personal effects, mixed with body parts,
inevitably peppered the remains.Amongst the material sifted and
deposit, were “4,100 body parts, 1,350 crushed vehicles, clumps of
human hair, the engine from one of the hijacked planes, dozens of
Gap bags and Fossil wristwatches [...] Blue Cross/Blue Shield
insurance cards [...] diamond engagement rings [...] sets of keys [...]
baseball memorabilia” Jani Scandura

56. 16 storey-high ‘pile’ at Ground Zero was the last to be interred in
the Fresh Kills site before it was sealed for rehabilitation and reuse.
James Corner’s “Lifescape” project aims to create a large park out
of the closed Freshkills landfill

57. • Along with vertical memorial, twin horizontal earthworks will
directly mimic the vertical doppelgängers of theTwinTowers,
memorializing their bloody incarceration into the ground.
• In this way, the designers seek to explicitly relate the horizontality
of the emerging leisure landscape being inscribed atop the Fresh
Kills landfill with the extreme verticality of the architectural remains
that they inter (Christopher Lindner)

58. • Monument made up of two inclining landforms that mirror the
exact width and height of each tower laid on its side.
• Visitors will look out on an iconic vertical view that no longer
exists.The absent towers before them, interred in an ‘afterlife’ in
the green ground below their feet, emerges as one ultimate
symbol, perhaps, of the ways in which all vertical structures
erected against the entropic force of gravity must eventually be
remade into manufactured ground

59. ThankYou!
Steve.graham@ncl.ac.uk

64. • “Successive phases of development ,” geologists
Simon Price and colleagues stress,“add…, or in
some cases reuse … and recycled this artificial
ground, leaving a complex ‘stratigraphy’ of
deposits including drains, middens, pits, cellars,
foundations and trenches amongst other
features.” Price ‘Humans as major geological and
geomorphological agents,’ ibid.

65. • Given that in nearly all urban cultures, burials take
place below ground, these deep urban geologies
are also the spaces housing incalculable numbers of
previous urban populations. (It has been estimated
that fully six million dead are housed with the
extraordinary 200 mile network of tunnels, old
quarries and caves that form the Parisian
catacombs, for example). Invariably, such remains
are rediscovered in ancient cities whenever the
ground is disturbed though deep construction.

67. • The extreme cycles of creation, destruction and
uneven development that characterise
contemporary capitalist urbanism necessarily
means that rates of ruination and the
manufacture of geology are especially high.

68. • Whilst the street level of major cities tends to
be naturalized, urban history is replete with
extraordinary examples of the vast geologic
work necessary to create it. Mexico City, for
example, which has sunk 10 meters in the last
century, was built on the bed of a huge drained
lake on the site of the Aztec capital of
Tenochtitlán

69. • The whole level of downtown Chicago,
meanwhile, is the production of a 19th century
engineering project to raise up the City’s
ground level out of and above the swamps
where it was located.

70. • Port cities are also often partially built on
manufactured ground that has been systematically
imported over centuries in the form of ships’
ballast and progressively dumped onshore to allow
arriving ships to take on their valuable cargo.The
famous quaysides of Newcastle in north east
England – the author’s home city – are actually
built on ‘Ballast Hills’ created through the dumping
of ballast brought in by coal ships returning
repeatedly to theTyne over a period of three
hundred years or more to export coal.

71. • Many port cities on the eastern seaboard of the
United States have manufactured shorelines that
owe much to the dumping of ballast soil by
fleets of European ships over centuries of trade.
Archaeologists in NewYork find coral and flint
deep in the foundations of Manhattan, brought
there from the Caribbean and England,
respectively. Unknown to most, cities thus even
export geology to each other

72. developable land in the urban booms of
the 18th and 19th centuries. In a process
now being repeated at much bigger
scales in Hong Kong, the Netherlands,
and other centres of land ‘reclamation’,
the gaps between the old piers of the
cities’ harbours were simply filled in with
whatever landfill was at hand until new
ground extended to entirely new wharfs
beyond.

73. Most extraordinarily of all, fleets of
derelict ships, obsolescent at the time,
were often used to help fill the space
between the old wharfs.

75. • In the 1920s,Amelie Ransome Nevilel, an ageing
San Franciscan, recalls her amazement at seeing the
ships being interred as a child in 1856.“We went,
one day, down to Long Wharf,” she recalls,“ now
part of the filled-in land that extended the city’s
waterfront... It was strange to see old ships built
into the city streets; derelicts that had been left
where they lay in the mud flats when the land was
filled in, waves and lapping water forever lost to
them

76. • “National imaginations require signature of the visible,” Dutch
Archaeologist Maja Gori contends.“And archaeology as a practice is
about signatures of the visible”
• Thus, acts of surface colonization in the ongoing appropriation of
space from Palestinians have often been directly shaped to bolster
subsurface claims.The names of new Israeli settlements are often
taken from the Bible and located very closely to sites of ancient Jewish
archaeological settlements.The new Jewish-only settlement ofTel
Rumeida, carved since 1999 out of the middle of a Palestinian
neighbourhood in the ancient city of Hebron on the West Bank, has
even been built on stilts within a protective wall, as a means of
protecting Bronze age excavations beneath that were used to bolster
historical Jewish claims that the area was the original ‘City of David’

77. • In Hong Kong, 6% of all land was reclaimed in 2011
but controversial plans are in place to reclaim 1500
more hectares at 25 sites by 2039.
• Tokyo has added 25,000 hectares of land to its
harbour
• since the 17th century, Mumbai has been re-made
from an archipelago of seven islands into a single
peninsular.
• China has 12,000 square kilometers of
manufactured land

78. The crisis is so bad in Florida that
authorities have even considered
grinding up recycled glass to produce
all-important sand.

82. • raises important but neglected questions about the links between
vertical architecture and the waste ground it creates after it is
removed
• Carefully excavated and removed across NewYork’s Harbor to the
City’s largest landfill site – Fresh Kills -- on Staten island, a complex
politics has surrounded this most sensitive and controversial of
projects. Given that the sites for theTwinTowers were originally
manufactured through centuries of waterlogged landfill, the eventual
internment of their remains across the harbour on Staten island
underlines the radical circularity of processes linking urban ruination
and the manufacturing of ground. (The 92 acre site for Battery Park
City, just to the East of theTowers, was manufactured in the 1970s
using sand dredged up from the Atlantic Ocean).
• .

83. • Port cities are also often partially built on
manufactured ground that has been systematically
imported over centuries in the form of ships’
ballast and progressively dumped onshore to allow
arriving ships to take on their valuable cargo.The
famous quaysides of Newcastle in north east
England – the author’s home city – are actually
built on ‘Ballast Hills’ created through the dumping
of ballast brought in by coal ships returning
repeatedly to theTyne over a period of three
hundred years or more to export coal.

84. developable land in the urban booms of
the 18th and 19th centuries. In a process
now being repeated at much bigger
scales in Hong Kong, the Netherlands,
and other centres of land ‘reclamation’,
the gaps between the old piers of the
cities’ harbours were simply filled in with
whatever landfill was at hand until new
ground extended to entirely new wharfs
beyond.