Spatial Logistics: Rob Holmes



The Five Thousand Pound Life: Land
Session Three: Spatial Logistics
Rob Holmes
Recorded September 26, 2014

The Five Thousand Pound Life: Land was a symposium on rethinking land and its value in light of climate change organized by The Architectural League and co-sponsored by The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design in September 2014.

The Spatial Logistics panel invited an industrial real estate developer and two designers and academics to unpack the spatial dimensions of the sometimes hidden networks of logistics and debate their consequences — the good, bad, and unknown — for design and society.

In this presentation, Rob Holmes details the significant relationship between landscapes produced by logistics and climate change, yet cautions that the consequences and opportunities of these landscapes are difficult to predict. Using the current expansion of the Panama Canal as a case study on landscape generation through logistics, Holmes demonstrates how the dredging and expansion of the canal — an attempt to reclaim a share of global commerce that has shifted to the Suez Canal and the United States intermodal system — has created an “engineering shockwave.” The need to accommodate so-called “post-Panamax” ships has led to port expansions on the Atlantic and Gulf costs, including the New York Harbor, where the clean sand removed through dredging has created the unexpected opportunity for marsh restoration in Jamaica Bay. Holmes argues that the competition of logistics has created a “zero sum game” with misaligned incentives in which the winners, losers, and reverberations are unclear, and poses the question: how can design constructively enter into this work?

Rob Holmes is an assistant professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Florida and co-founder of Mammoth, a blog about infrastructures, logistics, landscapes, and architecture.

The Five Thousand Pound Life (5KL) is an initiative of The Architectural League on new ways of thinking, talking, and acting on architecture, climate change, and our economic future.

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