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- Convenors:
-
Eeva Berglund
(Aalto University)
Delphine Rumo (Aalto University)
Paula Schönach (Aalto University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Energy and Infrastructure
- Location:
- Room 10
- Sessions:
- Thursday 22 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Many landscapes and practices have historically embedded designs that may contribute to unsustainability yet were originally planned and implemented as improvements. Aiming to better understand the role of hidden designs in our environs, we seek grounded accounts of the invisibilization involved.
Long Abstract:
Many landscapes and practices incorporate historically embedded designs that may contribute to unsustainability yet were originally implemented as improvements. Although goods and systems once designed to enhance convenience – mobility systems or digital infrastructures, for example – are increasingly viewed as unsustainable, proposing alternatives is problematic because so much about them is literally invisible or unknowable. There are many reasons for this. Infrastructural systems have often been designed for market needs more than people’s needs, they may have been hidden for security or safety reasons, their technical features may be imperceptible in themselves (such as radio-waves) and so on. Some functionalities of consumer goods are deliberately hidden from users making their sustainable use and disposal difficult. Such myriad historical processes generate layered and potentially problematic environments that, however, become naturalized over time and progressively more obdurate. Describing them involves keeping ecological and political specifics in mind. Analyzing them means working with frameworks that merge human and natural histories.
We invite environmental and design historians and others, from STS, geography, anthropology, and beyond, engaged in empirical research to share stories of invisibilizing. We aim to contribute to a better understanding of how black-boxed or otherwise hard-to-know aspects of our environs have been cemented into ordinary life. We seek grounded and compelling accounts of how the dynamics of consequential environmental change has in fact been hidden from view. The discussion will help make visible the systems, desires and things that compose unsustainable socio-material cultures and will thus render change more tractable.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 22 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on gendered everyday practices involving disposable products. In the decades following the World War II, disposables were expected to free women from household chores. The carefree practices of disposal increased the practicality of these products.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on disposable and short lifespan products as part of gendered everyday practices in Finland in the decades following the World War II. The new material objects reflected the new ideals: In the late 1960s, when private consumers adopted disposables such as paper and plastic tableware, and (later discontinued) non-woven sheets, disposables were expected to free women from arduous household chores. The hostess of a party was free to entertain, or a mother to relax at the summer cottage. Consumers were advised to pack used items into plastic bags and dig into the ‘compost’ or burn in the fireplace, but not to throw them into the sea, as they floated and did not disappear. Disposing created the products’ practicality - in the immediate post-Second World War scarcity a tablecloth made of paper was just a bad-quality substitute to fabric, as it had to last. The carefree practices of disposal in the latter half of the 20th Century increased the practicality, and reconciliated eventual discrepancies between single-use and the materials such as plastic. Some of the disposables’ invisibility was further enhanced by stigma. The idea that menstruation was shameful and needed to be successfully hidden increased demand for flushable pads.
I utilize social practice theory, that addresses practices as a combination of cultural meanings and norms, material and technological aspects, and users’ competences. The research is based on a variety of sources: industry archives, statistics, advertising, and magazine articles on the products and their use.
Paper short abstract:
Coldness is an invisible, yet crucial "produce" that has historically been based on utilization of frozen water, natural ice. This paper explores the network of hidden urban spaces of isolation and insulation that were created to preserve the icy resource of early cooling infrastructure.
Paper long abstract:
During the 19th century mastering of low temperatures resulted in increasingly networked systems of controlled coldness for the purposeful refrigeration of objects, spaces and processes. Coldness, as such invisible to people, materialized in natural ice that was harnessed for cold production. The creation of ice based cold infrastructures became an indispensable part of modern life by enabling year round operation of industries reliant on cooling (e.g. beverage industries), enhancing food hygiene (especially meat and dairy) and supporting the increased consumption of new types of thermally defined goods, such as cold drinks or iced delicacies.
Since the extensive temporal lag between harvesting of natural ice during the winter season and the end use of ice as a coolant necessitated lengthy periods of storage, preventing the exposure of the ice to ambient warm air was crucial. Thus, the basis of urban cold infrastructure was the invisibilizing of the materiality of coldness. This paper explores these spaces of isolation and insulation that were created to preserve the icy resource of early cooling infrastructures in Helsinki, Finland. Ranging from fenced piles concealed under saw dust, to underground cellars and closed storage houses these hidden urban spaces became an invisible, yet crucial component of the urban coldscape (Twilley 2012) that was to precede modern, yet also invisibilized, but carbon-fuelled cooling infrastructure.
Paper short abstract:
Like a ghost, Flint’s River Bank park languishes. This “landscape as infrastructure” vanishes as stormwater, poisoned by chemical spills, rushes through the Flint River. This paper uncover how even the beautification of the RiverBank Park cannot hide the consequences of human intervention.
Paper long abstract:
Through the middle of the city of Flint, Michigan, the Flint River runs, twisting through the landscape of ruined houses, empty storefronts, and weed covered banks. This river, source of vibrant trade with First Nations, and transportation for wood mills, transformed into a backdrop for car manufacturing, and then ruined by a city ripped in half with a highway.
In many places, rivers have been paved over. In Flint, the river changes as it reaches the city into a park, composed of six blocks, intended to work as a flood control project by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. To cross the river downtown, you must drive down a four lane road, with running like ribbons access over bridges, cracking and crumbling concrete. Looking east, a failed dam project barely removed in tim, replaced by a new bridge. Fishers casting into the river. Laughing, crying. Ignoring the signs explaining the necessary limits of earring fish from the river.
Like a ghost, Flint’s River Bank park languishes. This “landscape as infrastructure” vanishes as stormwater, poisoned by chemical spills, rushes through the Flint River. This paper uncover how even the beautification of the RiverBank Park cannot hide the consequences of human intervention. the crumbling infrastructure echoing the crumbling economy of this Rust Belt City. Looking backward to the origins of the river, as a trading post for First Nations, one can trace how the industrial development, hidden by embracing industry as a natural evolution, create consequential environmental damage.
Paper short abstract:
Unwanted earth materials from industrialized construction are reused for the construction of parks and leisure areas. I trace threads of soil disposal focusing on the construction of geoengineered landfill hills and discuss entrenched extractive economic models.
Paper long abstract:
Wet clayey soils, sulfur-rich ground, contaminated sediments, and other unwanted earth materials are reused for the construction of parks and leisure areas. The reuse of these soils is seen as an essential part of more sustainable construction and the development of circular solutions generates opportunities for the construction industry to capitalize on voluminous flows of removed earth materials. However, these geoengineered landscapes reflect a narrow vision of the economy—a certain way to live and make a living with our environmental commons. This paper traces threads of soil disposal in the south of Finland, with a focus on landfill hills turned into recreational areas. Landfill hills have been receiving hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of surplus soil from construction sites. Such projects have also enabled the concealing of large volumes of earth materials. They have been careful designs of layering and sealing challenging soils into place. Yet, existing practices of control only temporarily and partially minimize the risk of harmful substances leaking or leaching into the environment over time. Additionally, increasing industrialized activities and the intensification of capital-seeking investment result in more soil being removed and land amputated. I suggest that investigating soils in disposal is significant in that it highlights the materiality of entrenched extractive models and problematic infrastructural systems. The paper concludes with a discussion on how surplus soils have been entangled in industrialized construction, and gestures toward diverse economies thinking, grappling with the challenges, paradoxes, and systemic complexities that are involved in efforts to activate post-extractive narratives.
Paper short abstract:
The paper scrutinizes the heterogeneous legacy of the National Spatial Planning in Sweden, in order to counter a naturalization of the landscape as a clean slate for planning interventions. It reveals a legacy of a rational planning ideology, but also contested and lingering ideas of landscape.
Paper long abstract:
Landscape and planning scholars alike have claimed landscape as an integrative approach for sustainable planning. However, while they acknowledge the importance of landscape history, they tend to overlook or simplify the troubled legacies of past planning. By doing so, the landscape can be treated as a clean slate for novel planning interventions. However, to facilitate sustainable transitions we need to unpack the heterogeneous legacies of past planning, as it effects institutional frameworks, planning practices, planning regulations and the actual land use. This paper explores the heritage of the Swedish National Physical Planning, initiated in the 1960s, institutionalized in environmental and planning law in 1987, and currently a topic for a national enquiry (2022 – 23). While this planning is in part recognized, I aim to tease out some of its forgotten heritage and naturalized effects in order to discuss its ambiguous and modern enactment of the environment. Importantly, this planning also included a rational planning approach to landscape, which affects not only the contemporary landscape but also contemporary methodologies. Theoretically, the study draws on landscape theory with relational ontology/STS. Empirically, it relies primarily on national enquiries and reports from the Environmental Protection Agency, combined with reports on pilot projects on Landscape planning, with a special focus on the 1970s. The paper concludes with a discussion on how previous planning is entangled (and yet partly invisible) in the contemporary landscape, but also by discussing how contemporary approaches to landscape are mirrored in this history, which calls for a revised landscape approach.
Paper short abstract:
New digital solutions are claimed to be significant in making maritime logistics more sustainable. We examine the transition impacts of these infrastructural changes as concerns regarding the socio-cultural limits to sustainability, tracing how seamanship transforms within the green transition.
Paper long abstract:
New digital solutions are claimed to have a significant impact in making maritime logistics cleaner, safer and more efficient. However, many examples from the past show that when humankind tries to solve environmental problems, the solutions end up creating new challenges. Recently, attention has been directed at such challenges by using the notion of “transition impacts”, i.e. impacts that result from the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. In the context of the green transition in maritime logistics, concerns have been raised about security aspects of digitalization. In this paper, we examine these concerns primarily as concerns regarding the socio-cultural limits to and pre‐conditions for sustainability. Regarding digitalization as one tool of mitigation of and adaptation to climate change in maritime logistics, we ask: What other socio-cultural challenges does this attempt at addressing climate change in maritime logistics imply? Our answer utilizes an approach to socio-cultural sustainability that places heavy emphasis on cultural heritage as well as on the tools and skills needed to understand and transform the world towards sustainability, including literacy, creativity, critical knowledge, sense of place, empathy, trust, and risk. Regarding Finnish maritime logistics, we tentatively suggest that the main “transition impact” stems from various kinds of (to us) invisible infrastructural displacements. In this paper, we pay special attention to the socio-cultural dimensions in these infrastructural displacements, tracing how particular social components of the infrastructure such as seamanship, where physical (interactions and) working environments transit to more digital, transform within the green transition.
Paper short abstract:
Parking is at the core of our current system of automobility, but its history is understudied. This paper concentrates on the history of underground and otherwise “hidden” parking in Helsinki and considers it as a powerful but invisible tool of changing urban environments and mobility systems.
Paper long abstract:
The availability of free or cheap parking is at the core of our current system of automobility (Urry 2004) that governs over space and time. Parking is often provided by several different actors, making it both more complicated to control and more difficult to study than for example the road and street infrastructure. The spatial and environmental history of parking has not been widely studied, although some research exists (see Ben-Joseph 2015; Hagman et al 2007; Hankonen 1994). In this paper, I study the history of “hidden” parking, i.e. parking infrastructure that has been planned or built out of sight as well as its impact on urban environments and its role in naturalizing and cementing the system of automobility.
Using newspaper sources and city governance documents I study the history of hidden parking in Helsinki. In Finland, parking became a main planning question in the 1960s, and large-scale parking solutions were built from the 1970s onwards. The aim was to remove parking from the streets and to place it in or under inner-yards, buildings, and natural formations, increasingly underground. Underground parking is a powerful part of car infrastructure as it is very costly to build and causes permanent environmental impact. Bedrock, yards and even bodies of water became a resource for parking. Parking also intersected with the history of other underground facilities, such as bomb shelters, sewage, and transport. I use Brian Larkin’s (2013) concept of “aesthetic order” to analyze how this seemingly invisible infrastructure has reorganized urban environment.
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses the case of Berlin’s infrastructure history since 1920 to explore how infrastructures are rendered both invisible and visible, what forms infrastructural in/visibility can take and what ends it can serve.
Paper long abstract:
Infrastructures are commonly described as invisible until the services they provide go missing. Ironically, it is the absence of infrastructure provision that makes infrastructures visible in the public realm. This paper takes issue with the underlying assumption behind this narrative that infrastructures are intrinsically invisible. Building on recent scholarship from the fields of human geography, STS, anthropology and the history of technology, it argues that infrastructures are rendered invisible – whether deliberately or unintentionally – in processes of socio-material assembling, disassembling and reassembling. By the same virtue, infrastructures can also be rendered visible, whether through selective modes of representation by providers, regulators and users or by infrastructural artefacts not following the script designed for them. I draw on earlier and ongoing research on the history of Berlin’s energy and water infrastructures over the past century to elucidate processes of making infrastructures visible and invisible. Illustrative examples will include: publicizing the role of utility services in unifying Greater Berlin in the 1920s, making the city’s infrastructure invisible to enemy bombers in the late 1930s, celebrating the inauguration of new power stations and gas works in West Berlin during the Cold War, infrastructure capacity failing to meet demand and concealing the contractual obligations surrounding the privatization of the water utility in 1999. Ultimately, the paper strives to transcend the simple binary of visible/invisible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the different forms infrastructural in/visibility can take and the different ends it can serve.
Paper short abstract:
Nordic second homes, designed for getting away from it all, are places where technology is often invisibilized. But at least the question of how modern comforts and technologies ‘fit’ with cabin life has been explicitly posed, making Nordic second homes an interesting case for studying modernity.
Paper long abstract:
The Nordic hytte/cabin experience is many things: nursery of nationalism; unsustainable lifestyle accessory; etc. Whatever the angle, the presence or absence of modern infrastructure and the comforts and conveniences that it allows, is a central question, making the invisibilizing of technology in second homes an intriguing issue for the cultural history of sustainability.
We ask why have people tried to hide modern technology: the electrical stove under a removable panel, the incandescent bulbs that look like gas lighting, the carefully boxed-in wires and other tell-tale signs of modern technologies at odds with the simple life of the hytte/cabin. What kinds of values and discourses does this hiding of modern technology spring from?
We look to the over 100-year history of summer cabin culture with examples from Norway and Finland. Cabin cultures have both supported and run counter to prevailing national political tendencies, they have generated ‘cabin porn’ as well as off-grid simplicity. It would appear that modern technology in this context has always required a stance, that is, decisions about the equipment necessary for getting away from ‘it all’, close to nature and looking to the past more than the future. This culture of leisure, we suggest, is interesting for indicating ambivalent or complex relationships to modernity, for the cabin/cottage/hytte is not the opposite of modernity. If it enacts an internal contrast or intrinsic divisions within the notion of the modern, it makes Nordic second homes an interesting case to study.