Brown Field$: Mapping the Unseen
Originally from: Day to day.
Brown Field$: Mapping the Unseen:
Courtesy PJ ChmeilSometimes its the not what anyof us can see that changes a city, its what we can’t. It’s the smell-lesss, siteless,presence of the unknown that exists, permeating the ground we walk on. It’s the fear of what encumbers the soil rather than the knowledge of is molecular parts. The Brownfield privateer relishes these moments. As a firm they capitalize on specific knowledge to literally sweep the ground clean from beneath our feet. Often being able to spot clean earth where all would claim its contamination. Often more knowledgeable of quick cheap clean up solutions that make redevelopment fast and easy, these real estate speculators acquire the land no one knows enough about to capitilze on its location and future use.
Los Angeles has gone so far as to develop a gas station program to inform regular developers about the ability to mitigate environmental concerns. Financial institutions have created Environmental Risk Managers, (who have their own website) to provide a protocol for the evaluation of risky sites. The metrics of such an investment can only lean one way. Unlike mortgage backed securities forensic science can evaluate these investments. Merchant Bankers, like the adventurers sailing across oceans to find riches in distant lands, drive through the urban and suburban landscape looking for “relatively large and ‘dirty’ sites.” Peter B. Meyer and Thomas S. Lyons in their article Lessons from Private Sector Brownfield Developers, reference Michael Porter’s Competitive Advantage in their description of entrepreneurship as a practice that is akin to the Cortes’ conquests. They describe it as “innovation and the provision of new products or services that meet the demands of emerging market niches.” Those products today are dependent upon an authoritative super-ocular vision from above.
Subsidence maps like these combined with records of oil and water extraction and injection will help scientist understand how the rocks within an oilfield are behaving, leading to improvements in oilfield operations. courtesy of Nasa Earth Observatory
The lesson here is that the map is in fact the territory, and defining that map, its ecologies, vectors, spreads, flows and throws provides powerful analysis that drives markets, development, and the redevelopment of the cities we live in.