Brisbane

Stochastic Land

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A River With A City Problem – Margaret Cook (2019)

Termination Shock – Neal Stephenson (2021)

Last year I fled my house due to rising floodwaters, and soon after, my daughter’s cricket team finished up for the season. The water stopped short of our backyard, though not by much, and my daughter took some nice wickets with her loopy leg spin. It’s the second near miss we’ve had since buying the place nearly twenty years ago, but on the other hand, it’s two solid misses in two major Brisbane floods, which is a pretty good strike rate. Nevertheless, the whole street still exists on a rise at the edge of a wetland cleared a hundred and twenty years ago. Streets further south, the ones that had the creek running through them during the flood, would have been in the wetland itself, once. What does that make the odds of our house flooding? One in a hundred years? Maybe five hundred?

Fairly early in Neal Stephenson’s near future science fiction novel Termination Shock, a Texas oilman is flying over submerged Texas houses, many of which have been built thirty years earlier, and some of which have been expensively retrofitted by raising them on stumps. The oilman muses while watching a man standing on a porch with floodwaters near his feet. “He did not understand – none of these people did – that this is stochastic land on the edge of a stochastic reservoir. He didn’t understand because those are statistical concepts. People can’t think statistically.”

A lot of Brisbane is built on stochastic land. Yeronga. Rocklea. New Farm. Milton. Tucked into the sinuous curves of a tidal river, in the folds of crinkled hills and gullies that don’t seem vulnerable until your kitchen is full of muddy water.

It’s not hard to find evidence that people don’t understand statistical concepts. Casinos are full of bad gamblers. Kahneman and Tversky won a Nobel Prize for showing numerous ways that people don’t choose mathematically optimal strategies on various probability-based problems. Fine. On the other hand, statistical phenomena are pervasive. Will it rain today? Are the fish biting? Will the price of my house go up? The natural and artificial worlds are full of things that might happen, and that we can put some sort of partially informed odds on. If our bus to work is often delayed by traffic, we learn to leave more time, so even if the dice rolls badly, we won’t be late.

So perhaps we are bad at preparing for low probability catastrophes. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence for that as well, as flooded cities across Australia, melting cities in Europe, and accumulating disasters elsewhere attest. Yet long-established human societies learn rules for dealing with rare catastrophes as well. This is where Margaret Cook’s book, A River With A City Problem, starts. The Turrbal and Jagera peoples are fishing peoples, but when they camped on the banks of the Maiwar, the Brisbane River, they camped 14 metres above the waterline. 

Cook has written a history of the Brisbane River, and in the period since colonial settlement, that makes it mostly a history of floods. There have been half a dozen major floods since the Brisbane penal colony was established in 1823, and a number of smaller ones in between. The pattern has been: new immigrants build unwisely on the floodplain; a flood comes a few years or decades later, with tragic loss of lives and livelihoods; reports are written and sometimes dams are built; rinse and repeat.

In a 1983 interview with James Peck, Noam Chomsky was asked why people aren’t informed about the complicated systems of world politics, intellectual history, and so on. Chomsky had an unusually modest response.

CHOMSKY: Well, let me give an example. When I’m driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I’m listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it’s plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding.

This sophisticated technical understanding and engagement is also probabilistic. Sports are probabilistic. That’s a way they generate drama and surprise. Players exploit this in many different ways; they learn techniques to slightly tip the odds in their team’s favour. Fans know much of this too. The interplay all adds to the richness of the game. We evolved to survive stochastic land. And though people may not be optimal in the way they manage probability, they can work with numbers too, as sports stats show every day of the week. The problem is not so much that people can’t navigate stochastics, at least in a rough and ready way. It’s explaining how a person can both know that Don Bradman had a batting average of 99.94 and also live in a house that will flood an average of every forty years.

A River With A City Problem goes some way to explaining how. It was a combination of path dependency, social proof, and lies. Waves of new settlers came to Brisbane and Ipswich, short on local knowledge and keen to take advantage of the low-lying land near the river. At first this was because the rich soil (from historical floods) made farms there fertile. Later on it was because new subdivisions in suburbs like Rocklea were more affordable for working class families saving up to buy their own home. Dams built for drinking water and partial mitigation upstream were treated as magic totems that banished all future floods. Once suburbs were developed, with many different title holders, roads, electricity, and other infrastructure, they were extremely difficult to unsettle. Roads build a literal path dependency of the most material sort, made of gravel and bitumen. And a whole street full of families is a pretty powerful piece of social proof.

Real estate developers lied about flood risk. Politicians lied about the protection of dams. People lied to themselves about what living in a subtropical climate next to a winding tidal river means. Any child who has played with water pooling in the rain can tell you that a dam only protects you from rain that falls above it in the catchment. Queenslanders learnt from their environment in plenty of other ways. The traditional Queenslander house is on stilts, like the fishing villages on the subtropical Mekong.

People also lied to themselves because no political institution to mediate the river and the cities existed. The state government had the power but was at the wrong scale to manage subdivisions and urban flood maps. A unified Brisbane City Council was only formed in 1925; powers to resume land with houses on it was only granted in 1965, and has barely been used. In 2000 half a metre of buffer was added to the allowed height for housing; despite new data, the official flood level wasn’t changed. There’s been two major floods since then. In summary, people and governments haven’t done nothing, but they haven’t done much, and what has been done has always been late, disconnected from technical evaluation, politically easy, and on the cheap.

The climate change metaphor alarm is deafening.

Cook really wants to blame technocracy for this. She also really wants to whack governments for a failure to act on expert advice.

Cook repeatedly portrays the building of dams as a semi-tragic fall into a ‘hydraulic society’: “A reliance on technocratic solutions to control floods endures in South East Queensland, which has led to the misguided belief that floods will not happen again.” SEQ certainly became a hydraulic society, but surely the bigger problem is that it’s not very good at it. What’s so strange about these assertions is they are directly contradicted by adjacent text. This wasn’t a society that enthroned technical expertise, but that ignored it: the known expertise of local tribes, but also the colonial knowledge of flooding tropical rivers from India, and the repeated engineering reports describing what dams would and would not do. This wasn’t technocracy, it was presentocracy, government for the moment; procrastinatocracy; la-la-la-I’m-not-listening-ocracy.

While the expert historian Cook has an uneasy relationship with experts, not knowing whether she wants to excoriate them, use them, or whack politicians over the head with them, Neal Stephenson has no such ambivalence. He bloody loves experts. He loves the way they think. He loves the way they talk. He always has, ever since Snow Crash (1992) and Interface (1994):

“When lawyers and family members are present,” Mary Catherine said, “we say that the blue parts were damaged by the stroke and have a slim chance of ever recovering their normal function.”

“And amongst medical colleagues?”

“We say those parts of the brain are toast. Croaked. Kaput. Not coming back.”

And though he does love his scientists and doctors, he loves other forms of expertise too. In Termination Shock we have detailed descriptions of the problems faced by deep sea oil divers, wild pig hunters, and Queens of the Netherlands, to name just three.

Termination Shock is a geoengineering novel. It is not only a novel about consciously intervening in the planet’s climate, and the political and geophysical reaction to that, but one fairly comfortable with the trade-offs involved. The main character is a giant cannon that fires sulphur into the stratosphere, in a non-speaking part. In this near future, much like our climate present, energy transition solutions have been partial mitigations at best, sophisticated technical advice and lived local expertise has been ignored, and politicians and captains of industry have continuously lied about how protected we are. Impatient with the slow failures of multilateral technopolitics, a Texas oilman builds a big gun in the desert to at least apply some brakes to the heating feedback loop the world is now rollercoastering around. This is entirely grounded in our present technical understanding: atmospheric sulphur mimics the natural process of volcanic eruptions, and though not popular, is the geoengineering proposal that makes people fret the least. A little startup is trying it with hot air balloons.

It’s quite a fun book, in the way of good Stephenson novels, and I enjoyed it more than it perhaps deserves. It’s a flittingly and fittingly global novel. He even makes room for sports with ambiguously political consequences, and a violently repurposed cricket bat. Science fiction can fetishise the technical, and human power, but can also decentre the human in a positive way. It’s not an austere novel. It loves spending time with its hypercompetent human characters. But it loves the atmosphere, the eagles, and the drones too. A genre that can have terrain, inhuman intelligences, or machines as characters lets us put our human social obsessions into ecosystemic perspective. It can remind us that, as Cook’s title has it, a river might have a city problem.

In A River With A City Problem, Cook has written an opinionated history, one that argues for ending reckless urban expansion and conducting a managed retreat from building in the most flood-prone urban areas. She has a point. But implementing such a rollback would surely involve new regulations, the scrutiny of flood maps and models, the acquisition by government of title to existing lands, so that some houses can be demolished, and similar measures. These are surely also technocratic solutions. They are solutions that would make Brisbane a more successful hydraulic society, one where blood and treasure weren’t sacrificed to a particularly venal form of short term thoughtlessness and greed.

—

References

The Chomsky Reader – James Peck (1983)

Interface – Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George (1994)

Modern Ornament

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There is a landing, on the river side of the Queensland Museum, and above the Queensland Art Gallery, which is reliably mostly empty. It faces a large, busy cafe, often full of daggy and aspirational Brisbane parents and their noisy, curious kids. It is near walkways and stairs for people walking either way along the river. This corner landing repels people. People stop there for a moment, wanting to do something, and move on quickly.

The museum and art gallery is a reinforced concrete structure, built 1982-86, according to the style at the time, echoing the Barbican in London or the Lincoln Centre in New York, a monumental grey and light brown culture production machine. The staff make clever and lively use of the cavernous spaces inside. There is an enormous fossil of hundreds of mud footprints, capturing a dinosaur stampede, against one cliff-like wall. Nearby, outside, full-scale models of humpback whales hang overhead, while whalesong pipes through discreetly placed speakers.

The whole building is a bit like that landing though, at least on the bare concrete outside. It has a striking concrete slab geometry, all rectangles. It is unshaded in the glaringly hot summer sun and humidity, and open to thunderstorms. In the bright Brisbane winter, the glare remains, but the heat is substituted for a chilly draft, seasoned with city grit and dust. You can’t talk to people, read a newspaper, eat a sandwich, or even check your phone, really. So on busy days, there is a steady stream of people needing a moment’s rest, not finding it, and disconsolately moving on. Perhaps I am misreading the building, and this is by design, like the seats in McDonald’s that are placed a distance from the table precisely determined to make you uncomfortable after five or ten minutes.

Queensland Art Gallery and Museum

Queensland Art Gallery and Museum by kgbo (cropped)

There’s a part early on in The Timeless Way of Building where Christopher Alexander meditates, in a somewhat angst-ridden way, on how problematic he finds contemporary (1970s) architecture. Very well, he relates, I must face that I am a conservative. (Horror of Berkeley horrors.) He then talks himself out of it, deciding that he is not against new buildings and materials so long as they learn from the beauty of old patterns, and that their design is in the hands of the communities they house.

Alexander has had an influential career, including inspiring the design patterns movement in software, but was never quite embraced by the mainstream of the architecture profession. He did get an award from the arch-conservative US National Building Museum. And there is that not-all-wrong, definitely reactionary, article by Rennix and Robinson on ornament and modern architecture that does the rounds on Twitter every few months. The article highlights a 1982 debate between Alexander and Peter Eisenman on beauty. It’s a debate that seems more important to conservative partisans (alt-historical 1980s youtube videos on how Alexander DESTROYS Eisenman flick before one’s eyes), but really is about technical expertise and the way it causes pain, the way we overwhelmingly live in an ecosystem of industrial creative destruction.

From the very beginning it is clear that Alexander and Eisenman don’t really even share a common frame in which to debate. Alexander’s early work, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, is highly mathematical, and Eisenman also makes heavy use of repeated geometrical forms. But Alexander, as always, advocates for a sense of wholeness and harmony, like the way the senses are comforted by detail related at different scales, which he thinks can be got at mathematically. Eisenman is fonder of ideas of deep structure from literary postmodernists like Foucault, Barthes and Derrida, and distrusts these feelings of comfort.

My design sympathies are with Alexander – it’s certainly a better default – and yet, if we zoom out, Eisenman isn’t all wrong. Sometimes technical experts need to inflict pain. The Hippocratic oath doesn’t stop surgeons from using a bone saw, just when they decide it’s worthwhile.

Peter Eisenman: Moneo’s courtyard … was taking away from something that was too large, achieving an effect that expresses the separation and fragility that man feels today in relationship to the technological scale of life, to machines, and the car-dominated environment we live in.

Christopher Alexander: Moneo intentionally wants to produce an effect of disharmony.

PE: What I’m suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything’s all right, Jack, which it isn’t. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right.

So sure, art does need to do that, sometimes. It sounds like an awkward place to live, though. The residents of Eisenman’s House VI thought so, too – they even wrote a book about it.

The point of inflicting this pain – disharmony is pain – is usually that you go through it in order to become something else. The danger of a disharmonious building is surely that it is so permanent, that on even a generational timescale, it is a destination, not just a transformation. All pain and no amputation. Let alone the prelude to a cyborg prosthetic upgrade, or whatever mutant response to machinic modernity you might need.

Arizona State Football Stadium

Arizona State Football Stadium, by MCSixth

Eisenman is a prolific theorist, though I haven’t dived deeply into his writing. He has had a successful commercial career, too; it’s not all frozen museum pieces like House II. The curves of modern steel and autocad construction have been kind to his later work. His firm built the Arizona University football stadium. It’s a blobby magic schoolbus shape; a cutely monstrous gladiatorial arena.

PE: [Palladio’s Palazzo Chiericati] … makes me feel high in my mind, not in my gut. Things that make me feel high in my gut are very suspicious, because that is my psychological problem.

I guess he got over that. Of course you don’t live in a stadium, either, and they’re not meant to make you comfortable.

Eisenman is probably most famous for another late work, the 2005 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin. The design was selected by competition. As described by James Young, one of the reasons the previous round of competition had failed acrimoniously was the previous winning design was too much of a kitschy ornament. The very concrete elements: the giant tombstone, the specific numbers of boulders, and so on, all become points of disappointment and interrogation, inadequate symbolism under the scale of industrial murder; an enormous snow-globe of death.

This piece by K Michael Hays, part of a lecture series, gives a sense of the project and its institutional reception.

It is a field of many abstract and minimalist stone pillars, without a single defined entrance-exit path, variations in the height of the pillars and the gradient of the ground creating an uncanny, disturbing, maze-like effect amongst the tallest pillars, at the centre. 

It’s hard not to connect the earlier criticism of Eisenman with the strengths of the memorial: “reminding people that everything wasn’t all right”. The memorial to industrial genocide is human-repellant, unheimlich, uncanny, un-home-like. That’s the point. Though when pressed, Eisenman doesn’t even commit to a meaning that concrete; he even considers it might be used by skateboarders, or in a spy film.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you have a favorite monument?

Eisenman: Actually, I’m not that into monuments. Honestly, I don’t think much about them. I think more about sports.

(Spiegel Interview)

The Mall

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This is not one of 50 Posts About Cyborgs, but it owes much to the series.

The mall is a cybernetic garden at the crossroads of suburbia. It exists as a reconstructed island of metropolitan density in an environment hostile to it. Suburban houses are on a relatively human scale, but suburbia is not. Suburbia in the large is the domain of the automobile.

The city and the mall are cybernetic in that they are self-regulating human structures which take on environmental management in a way that makes it unconscious to users. The mall air conditioning is a clue. With cybernetics we change our environment; as cyborgs we change ourselves.

An informative exercise for those wanting to discover this island of density is to cross a shopping mall car park by foot on a summer’s day. It is striking what a brutally awkward space it is. It is at the intersection of car and person, hostile to both.

The most excellent mall entrance from a carpark I have seen is at Suntec City Plaza in Singapore. As in many Brisbane shopping centres, the underground carpark leads into a large stairwell for the escalators up into the main set of shops. At Suntec City they have expanded the space and included a massive pond. Large Chinese goldfish and carp swish through the water, easing the stress of bustling and queueing that is mall and carpark existence. Small waterfalls provide white noise cover for engines revving in low gear downstairs and muzak upstairs. The water garden of lilypads and shrubs scrub the air of exhaust fumes. The glass of the automatic doors reflect the tranquility into an imaginary middle distance. Fish ponds are not unusual in Singapore, but the enervating context makes this one an underground Hanging Garden of Babylon.

I have more affection for the entrance than the rest of Suntec City, which is otherwise a graceless sprawl of one way escalators and cavernous halls segregated from the metro system (until very recently). It is a confusing space, twisty but without organic paths of use, where assistants have to be paid to accompany the standing maps, as a rescue service for beleaguered shoppers.

More common is placing a mall above an MRT station. Crossroads are common precursors to markets. The intersection of needs is already in place.

City is a recurring suffix for malls in Singapore – Great World City, Turf City, Vivo City – which is a curious intensifying suffix to use in a country which is already a city-state. City in Chinese is 城市, literally a wall plus a market. A mall, too, is that.

To conclude, or perhaps, to make manifest:

The city is a self-regulating human modification for surviving hostile environments.

The mall is a type of internal city which attempts to modify humans to survive the hostile environments of cities.

The inner city and the outer suburbs can both be hostile environments.

Where the city itself is a savannah for metropolitan cyborgs, the mall-spaceship can be dismantled.

The natural environment of man is yet to be built.
— John Powers

The Well-Ventilated Cage

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There’s been a brief algal bloom of discussion on urban blogs on the historical roots of anti-urbanism, particularly Ryan Avent and Stephen Smith. It seems as good a time as any to mention the Brisbane experience. Brisbane is a nineteenth century city, and like most Australian cities, a casual attitude to earlier hunter-gatherer settlement meant it suffered from no shortage of land.

Brisbane has a strikingly sparse density for a city of two million – 918 people per square kilometre. That’s about a tenth of the density of New York city or an eighth of Los Angeles. Though it’s worth noting the city limits are drawn to include more suburbs than many other cities, it’s a pretty obvious feature of the city for even the first-time visitor.

The culture of sprawl certainly runs deep in Brisbane, buying a house on land is the conventional wisdom, and new suburbs have been ever unfolding throughout my life and before, while commute times soar ever upwards. It’s a city that demands a car, but where the ubiquitous suburban blocks are often green. I’ve been in forests overseas with less trees than the Brisbane suburbs. It may be one of the few places to deliver on that part of the garden city vision. Perhaps because of this, I had always assumed that the development pattern was driven solely by cheap land and human nature, despite my own frustration with driving for hours to do anything, or the inconvenience of taxi-ing home to the middle of nowhere after a few drinks.

In fact, much like the US examples Stephen cites, the roots are as much regulatory as organic, and they date back to the Undue Subdivision of Land Prevention Act 1885. This set a minimum lot size of 400 m^2 with a ten metre wide block. The population, though going through a boom, was only a few ten thousands at this time, and it had a huge impact on the development about to occur. The house I am writing this in is on a block of exactly the minimum size and shape specified in the act, even though it was rescinded in 1923. The motivation, as wiki notes, was slum prevention. The cost of not letting people choose smaller houses, if they wanted them, was a city that was too expensive to comprehensively sewer until the 1970s. It was also much hard to keep services like trams economic when cars emerged. Residents were trapped by sprawl, in a well-ventilated cage.

2010: A Zed Odyssey

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Community radio station and Brisbane institution 4ZZZ celebrates thirty-five years of existence this year. To celebrate, or maybe just for the heck of it, they painted their offices with a three storey high mural. In keeping with the general idealism and radicalism that emanates from the place, the 4ZZZ offices are also the former HQ of the Australian Communist Party.

4ZZZ was originally a student station, started at UQ under a liberalization made possible by the Whitlam government (though National Peter Nixon amusingly ended up signing the paper). It moved to the current office in the valley after a formative struggle which has an almost mythological status. A change of power at the UQ student union put the Young Nationals in power. Under president Victoria Brazil, they cut costs, including kicking 4ZZZ off campus. The National Party had been in power in the state of Queensland for several decades straight, leaning well over the line towards a thuggish police state at the end, rigging the electoral system and intertwined with corrupt police. Though in retrospect it seems obvious the Nationals were on their last legs, at the time occupying the radio station in protest must have seemed proportional resistance to a semi-fascist regime disturbingly willing to use illegal or paramilitary force. By John Birmingham’s 90’s account in the UQ student newspaper, Semper – he rather gleefully described punching Young Nationals in the face – the station occupation wasn’t exactly a model of Gandhian non-violence either. (Semper archives are still dead-tree based, unfortunately.)

It may appall every other subscriber, but I think kicking 4ZZZ out of the uni has been good for it. Certainly it was a Thatcherite kill-or-cure solution, and probably intended with more kill than cure. The content is still flavoured by a student aesthetic. The title of this post comes from the anniversary booklet of the same name, and it’s very reminiscent of Semper, the UQ paper. It’s not a bad paper, but the programming itself looks beyond the somewhat self-absorbed venue of the campus. The result of eviction, even if unintentional, was creating an independent pillar of civic society, that stood on its own terms, not beholden to any parent organisation. You could call it an institutional expression of anarcho-syndicalism at the centre of a modern corporate city, or you could just say it’s like the local cricket team. Not too large. Fit to purpose.

4ZZZ programming mostly displays the glorious, fractious diversity of the left, but it’s also a distinctly local voice. It doesn’t have playlists, and though there is a kind of consensus 4ZZZ reality, its shows become windows into the Brisbane community, and communities within that community, in a way other stations cannot, simply because of their central corporate or national organisation. Triple J, for instance, the national youth broadcaster, and not a bad one, if you’re going to have such a thing, simply can’t give as many local bands a break as ZZZ, because of its size. And because of its no playlist policy, you get a delirious skittering around during the week, from Nothing But The Blues, to Zed Games, to the New Zealand Show, to Dykes on Mykes. It has an amateurish charm. It resists a mere demographic averaging in a way that anticipated the internet, and is as old as free speech and songs without words. It’s a week late, but happy birthday.