Bayou City, Houston -Remembering Things-
John Montag
Part I, the growth of the global city is the globalization of "things"
Since 1950, world trade has grown more than twice as fast as the overall global economy.
In 1999, despite the world economic slowdown, the value of world exports was US$6.82 trillion, and growing by between 5 and 10% per year. In fact, growth in trade now exceeds growth in actual output. The link that Tokyo, New York, and London have to this global flow of capital has served to define them as so-called Global Cities. These three cities--and a handful of others--have been positioned as nodes on an global network of capital and information.
While there are merits to this mode of analysis--specifically in isolating points of power outside of traditional nation-state constructs--it masks a fundamental aspect of the network itself: all these flows, be they dollars or bits, represent "things". We focus on the incredible (incredible in size and incredible in complexity) network of money travelling between Tokyo, New York, London, etc. But this money is just a place-keeper, a proxy, for goods--for "things". US$1.35 trillion of world exports was commercial service, rather than merchandise, but this ultimately ties back to things: lawyers represent companies manufacturing goods, insurance companies mitigate risks in shipping goods, and so on. In this brief essay, I wish to use the example of Houston to show the thingness of its networks, and suggest that this thingness is a trait shared by all global cities.
Part II, the doubling of infrastructural networks
Houston (Fig.1,2) has the nickname "Bayou City", which refers to the network of bayous--small streams--coursing through it that drain rainfall to the Gulf of Mexico. These bayous were the initial means of moving goods (things) from within Texas to the coast. One bayou, Buffalo Bayou, has been excavated and is now the ship channel--an indication of the importance of the bayou system (Fig.3).
These bayous flow beneath and among the structure of a much more potent metaphor for the city: the 3,000 mile network of Houston's freeways. This freeway network radiates out from the downtown district in three concentric circles: the 1970s era 610 Loop, the 1990s era Beltway 8, and the Grand Parkway, still under construction. Each day, 3.6 million drivers use the freeway network to travel a total of 70 million miles. 321,000 vehicles per day pass through one interchange alone, between US-59 and the 610 Loop--the busiest in the US--and drivers spend 60,507 hours in stop-and-go traffic there daily.
Like the bayous before, the highways are a network for moving things (people or products). Thus, in Houston, the networks are doubled both physically (they are overlaid) and metaphorically (they are networks visually, and they support the network of product movement locally and globally). This double layering of infrastructure and international trade elevate the freeway to a position as Houston's sole monumental architecture.
Part III, the gateways for things
The North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico will add 3 million trucks a year to Houston's crowded freeways. What does not come from Mexico by truck comes from by boat: Mexico is the Port of Houston's largest trading partner. The port is deployed along the 25 mile long Houston Ship Channel, and is Houston's reason for existence (Fig.4,5). In the 1800s, it provided a way to funnel the agricultural wealth of the Texas out to the east coast. In the 1900s, with the discovery of oil in East Texas, it became a base to unload machinery and load crude oil.
Ports (both ship ports and airports) are interesting because they are entirely dedicated to moving things. But the only way we can comprehend the amount of things is through dollars and tons--that is, through abstractions. Today, the port's refineries are a $15 billion petrochemical complex that is the largest in the nation and second in the world. The Port itself ranks first in the United States in foreign tonnage, and eighth in the world. More than 100 shipping lines offer service between Houston and 200 ports around the world. In 1998, 7,000 ships carrying 107.8 million tons of cargo, valued at $36.3 billion passed through the port. These things included machinery (41.4 %); petroleum and petroleum products (22.1 %); organic chemicals (8.8 %); iron and steel; and vehicles.
The port is lined with thirty-two Free Trade Zones. FTZs are areas--usually giant warehouses--where goods can be offloaded, sorted, modified, repackaged, and reloaded without customs duties. An FTZ is a small piece of land with extra-territoriality: it is outside of the jurisdiction of the US Government, but inside the boundaries of Houston. The zones in the Port of Houston include liquid tank storage, warehouse space, industrial parks, and storage silos to service of all aspects of Houston's broad manufacturing base. Thus, products can move between these FTZs and be "outside" of the United States, and these FTZs also represents a node in the global trade network; so once again, there is a doubling of the network between abstraction (global trade network) and thing (products).
Part IV, the legacy of things
Money is "clean". It moves from country to country without contamination. Products, too, in themselves are "clean" (usually). But they leave behind their contamination. The legacy of manufacturing here is that Houston now has the worst incidence of photochemical smog in the nation. (Refineries buy out entire surrounding neighborhoods--relocating communities--when they can no longer meet local air standards (Fig.6,7)). Elsewhere, Houston is slowly burying itself under its own garbage(Fig.8): two landfills handle two million tons of solid waste each year, creating mountains in Houston's otherwise flat topography (Fig.9,10). Still elsewhere, eleven toxic waste sites await federal government cleanup. A few of the eleven are related to the toxins that are byproducts of the petrochemical industry. Many, however, are not so obvious: at the 66 acre S. Cavalcade wood treatment plant, creosote leaking into the ground from 1910 to 1962 poisoned the dirt and threatened the water supply of 4,200 people in the neighborhood. The government removed 7000 cubic yards of dirt and placed it on an adjacent site. Too toxic to move further, they covered it with thick blue tarp and are waiting for a scientific treatment to be discovered. The remainder of the dirt was sealed under a thick concrete cap, which has become the pavement of a huge trucking warehouse. The warehouse if full things trans-shipped from distant places, destined for our living rooms (Fig.11,12).
Part V, conclusion
Toxic waste is usually the by-product of a process used to make a thing (mercury in gold mining, for example) or to provide a service (toluene in dry-cleaning). It is the shadow that remains after the "thing" has gone, and it is possible to trace the history of a thing (a product) in an city by looking at the wastes that remains in that city. This buried toxicity in varied forms is part of the network of things that defines the modern city. Thus, this essay is not the story of just Houston, but of any metropolis with an industrial past. It is the story of New York and Chicago, Tokyo and Taipei, London and Berlin. This network of things--this network of thingness and its shadow--is what defines the city and manifests it to the people living there.
What architects and urbanists work with, ultimately, are not global flows of capital, but things and the shadow of things that these flows represent. It is part of the structure that architect's must overcome, even as it is part of the pallet that they work with.
profile
John Montag
John Montag is in the graduate school of architecture at Rice University.
He is a Monbusho Fellow at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, and
works with the office of Merriman Holt Architects in Houston.
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