part ii architectural assistant portfolio

B R I A L L E N R O B E R T S | A P P L I C A T I O N P O R T F O L I O

P A R T I I A R C H I T E C T U R A L A S S I S T A N T

MArch Urban Design, Bartlett School of Architecture University College London, United Kingdom 2014

Master of ArchitectureThe University of Western Australia, Perth Australia 2013

Bachelor of Environmental Design [Architecture]The University of Western Australia, Perth Australia 2010

LIQUID E ARTH, SOLID SE A

1. STUDIO BRIEF

2. INTRODUCTION: LIQUID EARTH, SOLID SEA

3. RESEARCH

3.1. Geopolitical Scale

The Sahara as an Autonomous Productive Network

Thesis of the Solid Sea Security and Human Movement in the Mediterranean

History of Climatic Change in the Sahel and Sahara

3.2. Territorial Scale

The Discovery of Underground Water Reservoirs in Africa

The Exploitation of Algerian Hydrocarbons and Resources

The Potential of Overland Trade Networks in the Sahara

3.3. Urban Scale

The Mediterranean, The Impact of Containerisation on the Historical Significance of the Port

The Circular City as Political Form

Case Study: MZab

Case Study: Ain Salah Southern Gas Fields

3.4. Architectural Scale

Type Study: Courtyard Housing in the Pre-Colonial, Colonial, Post-Colonial Period

4. Design

The Family Unit [Housing Scheme]

Narritives; The City as a Theatre of Difference

5. Exhibition

OPEN AGENDA: RE SOURCE IMAGINARIE S

1. RESEARCH PAPER

2. GRAPHIC EVIDENCE

2.1. Geopolitical Scale

Geopolitical Map of Sweden

Geopolitical Map of Australia

2.1. Territorial Scale

Territorial Map of Kiruna, Lapland Sweden

Territorial Map of Kalgoorlie, Goldfields Western Australia

3. PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY

4. EXHIBITION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ii

THEORY = DE SIGN = THEORY

1. RESEARCH PAPER

2. The Multivalent 3D Drawing

The Moleskine Notebook

The Course of Contemporary Nomadicism

3. Historical Materialism

Agnostic Responses; A Conflict between Adverseries who recognise a Common Ground

4. Design Tactics

5. Graphs and Statistics

Asylum Seeking in Australian Territory

Site; The Australasian Archipelago

U.W. S STUDENT HUB1. Site Plan and Master Plan

2. Internal Poetics

3. Relationship to Site

4. Spatial Organisation

PROFE SSIONAL WORK: WINTERTHUR HOSPITAL

PROFE SSIONAL WORK: U.P.K PYSCHIATRIC HE ALTHCARE

iv


Our common character: goodwill, a natural capacity for thought and an inclination for truth. The good always synonymous with the common. The common as synonymous with a truth that is shared equally among all. A public spoken of in the singular. A city unified in the concept of the citizen. A state unified in the concept of the nation. A planet unified in the idea of universal human rights. It is no exaggeration to say that everything rests on these presuppositions. The good, the progressive, the loyal and the equal: our sensus communis.

These terms are infused with a value that is essentially moral. Their efficacy is based on an explicit presupposition that the role of the architect is to serve the public. Their sense is drawn from an implicit presupposition that this service is intrinsically virtuous. Their legitimacy is grounded in the presumed clarity of the peoples will. In the midst of these beliefs, our most cherished ideals find their homes: a public still to be invoked or unnamed community to come, a lost republic to recover or global commons to be protected.

And what serene, harmonious homes we were led to believe they were: the agora, the polis, and the city-states of antiquity - perfect in their equipoise the spatial summation of the Cogitatio natura universalis.

Like compass sections through a celestial sphere, the materialisation of these ideals relied on the rationality of science. Calculation became more than a working instrument, it confirmed the belief that some essentially Platonic geometry underwrote all. This idea appeared twice within urban thought. First during the Renaissance and the invention of perspectival representation. Second through the spatialisation of statistical calculus in the nineteenth century. And now for a third time it seems we too will have our Platonists. Cruder, though stranger and only a little less essentialist than their historical forbears, the core belief that reality is wholly calculable remains. The fear that the world is too arbitrary, too contingent; too complex to be threaded by one reason, elicits its own reassuring hymn from each era. There simply must be something one thing - behind it all some recurring pattern, deep structure or DNA, guiding

us with an invisible but ultimately benevolent hand. Within design, these theories have two jobs to do. Through abstraction they are able to conflate difference through a process of analogy like pseudo-structuralist successors to classical ideas of mimesis. But most importantly to make virtuous processes of interaction, participation and group behavior: the good emerging from the common. The common as synonymous with a truth that is shared equally among all.4

So who or what will emerge: Epistemon or Eudoxa - the pedant or the idiot? In any case the formula is always the same: every body knows, nobody can deny. Socialization, collaboration, innovation = capital. Diversity, choice, competition = capital. Socialization, belonging, interaction = community? Is this collective intelligence or collective stupidity?

History bears terrible witness to the latter, despite all the rhetorical hallucinations about the former. In reality, its probably something far worse than intelligence or stupidity its a contradiction. We describe any image of thought in which the symbolic universe is consistent as monotheistic. Monotheists are caught in a permanent state of surprise and disappointment. Witness the indignation and astonishment feigned only because it is repeated so often when symbolic consistency is not upheld. Note the shock felt at every error, exception, contradiction and paradox encountered. Not only this, but even when these ruptures break the order of the everyday, they only serve to reinforce the very thing from which they are separated? For example, what is an interest in territorial exception if not an undeclared promise to restore the virtue of sovereignty?

This is why, for us, thought is still far too moral, still far too monotheistic. Similarly, all of the aforementioned beliefs in calculability must insist on positing a concept of being that is ontologically consistent - a good faith in the numeracy of the people and the will of the demos. There is no greater impetus behind the sensus communis the continual expectation of and impetus toward, the calculable, the equal, the common and finally the good the entire idea of reform so central to urban thought and practice is premised entirely on this.

THE CIT Y, THE TERRITORY, THE PL ANETARY

T HE SEN SUS C OMMUNI S: A P HILO S OP HIC A L P R OL EGOMENON

vi

Because it is believed to be calculable, being is not only said in one and the same way for all things - it is made consistent and common in character: goodwill, a natural capacity for thought and an inclination for truth.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they will not stop praying to one god, but we are done with the Church and the State. We have no ideals. We are not so easily disappointed. Moreover, we are tired of faking astonishment at difference. We are left then with a momentous decision: to side with the orthodox belief in consistency, in innate goodwill, common sense and the essential virtues of the collective. Or else, to confront all the evidence of common idiocy, malevolence and banality that surround us.

We make decisions based on evidence. It is time to furnish a space for tyrants, slaves and imbeciles. In this universe, inconsistency will no longer come as a shock, and stupidity can finally be given its full, encyclopedic, cosmic, import.

Our gods are at war.

vii

Consistency is the secret affinity that ties all to all. To be against consistency seems to be against reason itself, to deny coherence perhaps even logic. The principle of non-contradiction is a first principle, perhaps the first principle; a fundamental philosophical axiomatic on which all rationality must rest. If we cant distinguish a man from a jaguar we have no basis for reasoned discussion, or so the argument goes. Though this first principle assumes a domain of relevance that is universal in its scope, not all societies partition the world in the same way. Different cosmologies make their own ontological distinctions, distinctions that are no less operative within their own contexts, no less useful at sense making, or organising social relations than the belief systems that underlie and animate the various societies of the West.

Because contradiction is grounded in the supposed same recognition of difference, and this recognition is not universal, contradiction is domain dependent. The mistaken assumption that every social grouping valorizes the same aspects of the world in the same way assumes a planet that is unified and consistent in its cognitive and epistemological structures. At its outset, moving beyond the principle of non-contradiction means moving beyond a Universalist concept of reason, acknowledging a multiplicity of rationalities and according to them a limited horizon of action. The multi-perspectival character of these various forms of knowledge production do not resolve to form a single picture let alone a unified globe, there is no single map upon which each point can finally be plotted, each blank space filled. Difference pertains, and it pertains in such a way as to prevent making one thing the measure of all others.

In a very real way, something in the world forces us to think difference, and to think it differently, returning to the theme of this studio, it is our contention that the problem of difference within architecture and urban design are not the same. Understandably, difference can be, and has been, domesticated within architecture. In the very idea of the project, in the relation between parts, and the spatial reasoning that brings them into being internal consistency and coherence remain sacred after everything else has been profaned. In architecture schools, it is often said, that the lack of these ideals is the mark of a bad project.

In this sense, the city can never be more than a bad project. After all, it must pit reason against reason. Its disputes will not be easily domesticated let alone subsumed within a consistent framework. For this reason the extrapolation of architectures internal reasoning from the scale of a building to the scale of the city can only end in disappointment. The cities of the past could still turn conflict in space to conflict in time each regime leaving its own mark alongside others in a dialectic of succession. The cities to come can do nothing more than hold an uneasy claim on the present. Further, the old idea of a city as a space in which all ties dissolve in an anonymous and cosmopolitan sea of civic belonging can no longer withstand the evidence that everywhere perforates the attempts to insulate inside from outside, that links the near and far, the weak and the strong.

The question then is this: how to start? How to start without these despotic ideals: the public, the common, the city, the state, and the planet? Moreover, how to accomplish this without relying on concepts like participation, pluralism and multiculturalism that only serve to pacify difference? It is a formidable task. It is not for nothing that difference cannot be thought easily, difference is not diversity, difference is violence.

BE YOND T HE NON- C ON T R A DICT ION P RINCIP L E

viii

It is our hypothesis that scale describes a set of problematiques. We use the French term to emphasize the way this concept emerges from the history of French epistemological thought. We will move beyond this initial claim in order to propose the idea of a problematique as the basis for all individuation: cognitive, epistemological, ontological and discursive. The material world no less than the cultural or the political one is riven by problems that solicit attention and that will form the basis for the individuation of subjectivity and thus for our project. In turn, reason is immanent to the problematique that calls it into being; it can no longer be spoken of in the singular. It is the hypothesis of this studio that reason must therefore be circumscribed within a limited horizon of action; it can only remain internally consistent if it is allowed to make contact with an outside that does not belong to it. That is to say reason has a certain scale or domain in which it is relevant, and an outside which it needs and depends upon in order to individuate itself. What was once called contradiction can now be precisely reframed as the conflict between different scales.

The Faustian fact that scales conflict is enough to destroy the entire notion of the sensus communis it is enough to re-inscribe the political within the heart of reason and extinguish any remaining hope of access to an innocent exterior where we might yet keep our conscience clear, our hands clean, and our fingers crossed. All we have is a force field of deep ontological, epistemological, cognitive and discursive difference. And we are in the middle of it.8

If we are accused (rightly) of lacking in ideals we will reply that we simply insist on a non-reductive thought, that we are against prematurely unifying different domains, that we abhor metaphors, and refuse to let symbols do our work for us. We might occasionally receive messages from Angels, but we will never stop dancing with the Devil.

Adrian Lahoud

Head of Programme

1. Of importance here is the way the structure of collective forms of subjectivity are understood, especially the belief that they automatically secure an impetus toward truth.

The two crucial figures here are Giles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Deleuzes critique of

philosophy is premised on the consistency of the sensus communis and the transcendent

orientation of thought it brings about. Foucaults critique of Kantianism replaces the

transcendent/sovereign form of power as a basic limit with a series of overlapping ideas

such as the historical a priori, episteme, and problematique that together form a kind of

anonymous discursive limit on what can be known and said. See DELEUZE, G. (1968

(1994)) Difference and Repetition, Paris, Gallimard and FOUCAULT, M. (1966) The

Order of Things, London, Routledge. FOUCAULT, M. (1982a) The Archaeology of

Knowledge London, Routledge.

2. Where Platonic Idealism commits to a fixed underlying structure of essential forms that are common though do not change, someone like Manuel Delanda commits to series

of dynamic non-essential forms. It is strangely Platonic despite protestations otherwise

in that the same deep diagrams keep repeating across radically different problems. Where

there where divine solids, now there are basins of attraction. DELANDA, M. (2000) A

Thousand Years of Non-linear History, Zone Books, New York.

3. When it comes to the city, complexity is in surplus, knowledge is in deficit. Complexity provokes epistemology into being. The lag between present knowledge and some

omniscient future works like a debt that can never be repaid; the structural role of this

argument is to animate the present around a perceived problem. The problem it poses to

contemporary urban thought and practice is informational deficit. This project had some

early success. Starting with the epidemiological and criminal reform agendas that remade

the nineteenth century we can trace the way that scientific reasoning constitutes a certain

truth about the city through the frame of an empirical project. Today this project is stalled

by its monotheistic zeal, now it is even said by some architects that buried in the behavior

of virus populations, phonemes and anthills lurk systems that can be captured in rules

and coded in order to render visible the essential qualities of all material life. It is said by

us that architecture is like science without peer review.

4. In the final chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs concludes with a rather long reflection on a quote by Warren Weaver, whose Mathematical

Theory of Communication co-authored by Claude Shannon is one of the canonical and

yet widely unread texts on cybernetics. Weaver uses the occasion to reflect upon the

possibilities opened up by research into complexity. Weaver tells the story of a transition

in science, from a regime of disorganized complexity dominated by statistical techniques

and probabilities, to a phase of organised complexity, focusing on interactions that were

characteristic of biological systems. Jacobs interest in Weaver is obvious; she wants

to tie modern planning to its reductionist ballast and sink it. Cybernetics will offer an

alternative empirical frame through which to understand the urban territory, not as a

static distribution of quantities but instead as a dynamic feedback network of locally

interacting agents.DESCARTES, R. (1677 (1984)) The Search for Truth by means of the

Natural Light, Cambridge University Press.

5. Nietzsche is the first to show that this infusion of value into common sense is essentially moral, and how morality secures the equation of a natural capacity for thought

with its natural inclination towards the true perception of its object. NIETZSCHE, F

(1909-1913). Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. by Helen Zimmern, 257-261. For a discussion

of Monotheism with respect to society and its expectations of conflict and contradiction

see: GREENFELD, L. Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human

Experience. Error, therefore pays homage to the truth, to the extent that, lacking

a form of its own, it gives the form of the true to the false. DELEUZE, G. (1968

(1994)) Difference and Repetition, Paris, Gallimard, 165. The dream of a world without a

hegemon! Even post-structuralists will be horrified at what they have woken up to.

A F T ER MONOT HEI SM

x

Following Pages:

Image One: Mapping out the day over breakfast

by Matt Hoffman from his collection, Cycle to the

Sahara Source: http://cargocollective.com/letsgo/

Cycle-to-the-Sahara, accessed 23rd March 2014

Image Two: Algiers, 1960 by Nicolas

Tikhomiroff. Source: Magnum Photos,

http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.

aspx?VP3=SearchResult&STID=2S5RYDIVX4JC,

accessed 09 June 2014

Image Three: Cropped Hillshade map of the Algerian

Sahara. Generated through GIS analysis of the Digital

Elevation Map.

Image Four: SEM Photo - Pore Space in Sedimentary

Rock. [Photomicrographs are one such technique

used by researchers to identify minerals and the

fine structure in rock formations. This particular

sample has helped to determine areas of possible

underground carbon storage and sequestration].

Source: http://www.co2crc.com.au/imagelibrary2/

storage.html, accessed: 10th August 2014

Image Six: Closed Cities, Russia, Qatar, Chile,

Westsahara, Argentina, Azerbaija. Photograph 4 of 151

photographs, 2009-2012. Location: Sahrawi Refugee

Camp, Western Algeria.

01

LIQUID EARTH, SOLID SEAThe Sahara as an Autonomous Product ive Network

02

LIQUID EARTH, SOLID SEAThe Sahara as an Autonomous Product ive Network

This project is located in the Sahara in Southern Algeria.

It presents a new city model within a proposed network of Saharan trade centres whose activities and relationships set out to reorient Africa away from the Mediterranean and back toward the Sahara. If security makes the Mediterranean solid, insecurity makes the Sahara liquid. If the Sahara is a sea, we imagine that the cities on its shore can become ports, while the cities in its centre become archipelagos. The Sahara will become what the Mediterranean should have been.

The Saharan trade network sits directly above the largest groundwater aquifers on the continent, which span 106km2

and run 100 to 200 metres beneath the desert surface. They are estimated to hold significant quantities of water for at least 1000 years. Each node in the network will cultivate different and complementary activities. The city plan developed is based on a socio-political diagram in which conflict between different constituencies is spatialised through the figure of a circle broken into parts. A city with no hegemon that exists in a permanent state of asymmetry driven by the tension between each group is proposed. The edge of the port city is organised by a re-invention of the pier which becomes a membrane able to regulate trade and also to discipline the unregulated sprawl that is typical of urbanisation in this area. The centre of the city will remain empty except for a water body drawn from the aquifer whose purpose is to regulate the ambient temperature in the desert climate.

13

LIDUID E ARTH, SOLID SE A

T HE S A H A R A A S A N AU TONOMOUS P R ODUCT I V E NE T W ORK

The Berlin conference of 1884 legalised the territorial control of Africa to Western European powers. Dividing Africa and its resources into political partitions, these events were later referred to as the scramble for Africa. In the second half of the 19th century, the partitioning of Africa transitioned from imperialism and hegemony by military and economic dominance to direct colonial rule. Africa offered western powers such as Britain, Belgium and France an open market that would provide them with resources, trade and capital surplus. Africa further provided limited competition and an abundance of raw materials that could drive an exponential increase in industrial production.

SAHARIAN PLATFORM

TARGUI SHIELD [hoggar]

REGUIBAT SHIELD [eglab]

SAHARIAN ATLAS

HIGHLANDS

TELLIAN ATLAS

PORTUGAL

F R A N C E

IT A L Y

-8 0 0 - 6 0 0 - 4 0 0 - 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 4 0 0 6 0 0 8 0 0 1 0 0 0

- 8 0 0 - 6 0 0 - 4 0 0 - 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 4 0 0 6 0 0 8 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 - 1 0 0 0 - 1 2 0 0

SAHARIAN PLATFORM



SAHARIAN ATLAS

HIGHLANDS

TELLIAN ATLAS

DEVONIAN

VOLCANIC

JURASSIC

MESOZOIC

PALEOZOIC

SCOLE / BASE

DEVONIAN ERA

CRETACEOUS ERA

GAS PIPELINES

OIL FIELDS

OIL PIPELINES

GAS FIELDS

14



Following the commencement of the French invasion and occupation of Algeria in 1830, settlers and metropolitans alike increasingly came to think of Algeria as a new France or a trans-Mediterranean province connected to the national body rather than a colonial appendage. This imaginary was articulated and broadcasted between 1830 and the advent of the Third Republic in 1871. Establishing new memories onto the landscape was pivotal to the Saint Simonian imagined community and conquest over new French territory. The creation of new depictions of the Sahara from the nomadic trade routes and townships of great wealth could create an imagined connection necessary for French nationhood. The Sahara becomes significant for the French not because it represents a national memorial or site of significance; such as a battle, but that it is a landscape that is part of the restaging of scientific and ethnographic production of nature.

15

SAHARIAN PLATFORM



SAHARIAN ATLAS

HIGHLANDS

TELLIAN ATLAS

ENRICO

MATTEI

(GEM)

PEDRO DURAN FARELL(GPDF)

PORTUGAL

F R A N C E

IT A L Y

EL OUAR II

IN AMEDJANE EL OUAREL OUAR

OUED EL MERAAGHARDAIA

KSAR EL HIRANE

SID NABJI

HASSI RIMFL

EL HARCHA

EL ARICH

BIR ROMANE

RH. ESSID

A-ERROUN

RH. SEGHIR

AKFADOU

RH. YACOUBRH. EL FARES

BERKINE

MERK

LEDJMAT

SIDI YEDDAEL ARF

B.O.D TINRHERT

ALRARBOUKHECHBA

HAMRA S E

RHOUDE NOUSS

OULAD NSAR

ZOTTIEST

EL ASSEL

ZEMOUL EL KBAR

AHNET

TIDIKELT

REGGANE NORD

TOUAT

HASSI MOUINA

BECHAR

HASSI BAHAMOU

ALGIER

ARZEN

SKIKDA

TAMANRASSET

AMENAS

ILLIZI

DJANET

INSALAN

REGGANE

ADRAR

BECHAR

MEZARIF

MENCUNET

TINDOUF

OUARGLA

BISKRA

BOU SAADA

GADAMIS

HASSIMESSAOUD

GADAMIS

- 8 0 0 - 6 0 0 - 4 0 0 - 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 4 0 0 6 0 0 8 0 0 1 0 0 0

- 8 0 0 - 6 0 0 - 4 0 0 - 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 4 0 0 6 0 0 8 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 - 1 0 0 0 - 1 2 0 0

SAHARIAN PLATFORM



SAHARIAN ATLAS

HIGHLANDS

TELLIAN ATLAS

DEVONIAN

VOLCANIC

JURASSIC

MESOZOIC

PALEOZOIC

SCOLE / BASE

DEVONIAN ERA

CRETACEOUS ERA

GAS PIPELINES

OIL FIELDS

OIL PIPELINES

GAS FIELDS

16



Historically, life in the Sahara and on its desert shores was characterised by a complex network of trade, settlement and economic activity. This richness was affected by two discoveries, first the discovery and eventual colonization of Africa by European powers- and second - the discovery of hydrocarbons and resources in the post-colonial period. Historically the shores of the Sahara can be characterised into distinct concepts (not periods) of transformation: the Atlantic slave trade, the colonisation of the upper Nile and Great Lakes (see Jean-Pierre Chretien) and the Anthropocenic Equator or what is also described as the corridor of terror. As with any sea, each shore acquires a different character.

17

SAHARIAN PLATFORM



SAHARIAN ATLAS

HIGHLANDS

TELLIAN ATLAS

ENRICO

MATTEI

(GEM)


PORTUGAL

F R A N C E

IT A L Y

EL OUAR II



KSAR EL HIRANE

SID NABJI

HASSI RIMFL

EL HARCHA

EL ARICH

BIR ROMANE

RH. ESSID

A-ERROUN

RH. SEGHIR

AKFADOU


BERKINE

MERK

LEDJMAT

SIDI YEDDAEL ARF

B.O.D TINRHERT

ALRARBOUKHECHBA

HAMRA S E

RHOUDE NOUSS

OULAD NSAR

ZOTTIEST

EL ASSEL

ZEMOUL EL KBAR

AHNET

TIDIKELT

REGGANE NORD

TOUAT

HASSI MOUINA

BECHAR

HASSI BAHAMOU

ALGIER

ARZEN

SKIKDA

TAMANRASSET

AMENAS

ILLIZI

DJANET

INSALAN

REGGANE

ADRAR

BECHAR

MEZARIF

MENCUNET

TINDOUF

OUARGLA

BISKRA

BOU SAADA

GADAMIS

HASSIMESSAOUD

GADAMIS

- 8 0 0 - 6 0 0 - 4 0 0 - 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 4 0 0 6 0 0 8 0 0 1 0 0 0

- 8 0 0 - 6 0 0 - 4 0 0 - 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 4 0 0 6 0 0 8 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 - 1 0 0 0 - 1 2 0 0

SAHARIAN PLATFORM



SAHARIAN ATLAS

HIGHLANDS

TELLIAN ATLAS

DEVONIAN

VOLCANIC

JURASSIC

MESOZOIC

PALEOZOIC

SCOLE / BASE

DEVONIAN ERA

CRETACEOUS ERA

GAS PIPELINES

OIL FIELDS

OIL PIPELINES

GAS FIELDS

18



Hydrocarbon extraction accounts for about 97% of Algerian exports and 30% of total GDP making the state highly dependent on resource extraction, sensitive to oil and gas prices and a major contributor to global CO2 emissions. Social stability and territorial integrity are interlinked. This project proposes to use the existing hydrocarbon economy as a means to construct new colonies in the center and the mid-east of Algeria. Hydrocarbon profits are used as a boost to stimulate a self-sustaining network of alternate economic activities within a regional network.

The aims of this project can be summarised as follows: First, the securitisation of the Mediterranean is addressed through an economic and political reorientation inward towards the Sahara. Second, the territorial colonisation of the Saharan frontier in the establishment of a trans-Saharan trade network. Third, the urban negotiation of a new political form for this network of cities in which there is no hegemon only a partial representation of political groupings established by the organization of activity within the city.

19

SAHARIAN PLATFORM



SAHARIAN ATLAS

HIGHLANDS

TELLIAN ATLAS

Bordj le Prieur

Ti-n-Zaouatene

I-n-Guezzam

Reggane

Chenachene

In-Salah

Timimoun

Bordj Omar DrissI-n-Amenas

lllizi

Ghadamis

Hassi Meassaoud

Ouargla

El Golea

Abadla

El Oued

Touggourt

Laghouat

Djelfa

El Bayadh

Naama

Ain Sefra

Beni Ounif

Bechar

Tindouf

Biskra

Tebessa

Batna

Bou SaadaTiaret

Saida

Oum el Bouagni

AnnabaSkikdaJijel

ConstantineSetif

Bejaia

Arreridj

Boumerdas

Biida

MedeaChlef

Relizane

Mostaganem

Tlemcen

Sidi Bel

Oran

Gara Djebilet

Silet

I-n-Ziza

Timiaouine

Meredoua

Tinfouchy

Anguid

Base d' Hassi Messaoud

Base d' Hassi er

Bordj Tan Kena

Camp Militaire d' El

Camp Miltaire Bonvalot

Camp d' Erlon Camp des Zouaves

Kef el Ahmar

Kheneg Azir

Caserne de Ghriss

Camp Militaire du Lido

IN SALAH GAS FIELDS

ENRICO

MATTEI

(GEM)


PORTUGAL

F R A N C E

IT A L Y

EL OUAR II



KSAR EL HIRANE

SID NABJI

HASSI RIMFL

EL HARCHA

EL ARICH

BIR ROMANE

RH. ESSID

A-ERROUN

RH. SEGHIR

AKFADOU


BERKINE

MERK

LEDJMAT

SIDI YEDDAEL ARF

B.O.D TINRHERT

ALRARBOUKHECHBA

HAMRA S E

RHOUDE NOUSS

OULAD NSAR

ZOTTIEST

EL ASSEL

ZEMOUL EL KBAR

AHNET

TIDIKELT

REGGANE NORD

TOUAT

HASSI MOUINA

BECHAR

HASSI BAHAMOU

ALGIER

ARZEN

SKIKDA

TAMANRASSET

AMENAS

ILLIZI

DJANET

REGGANE

ADRAR

BECHAR

MEZARIF

MENCUNET

TINDOUF

OUARGLA

BISKRA

BOU SAADA

GADAMIS

HASSIMESSAOUD

GADAMIS

- 8 0 0 - 6 0 0 - 4 0 0 - 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 4 0 0 6 0 0 8 0 0 1 0 0 0

- 8 0 0 - 6 0 0 - 4 0 0 - 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 4 0 0 6 0 0 8 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 - 1 0 0 0 - 1 2 0 0

SAHARIAN PLATFORM



SAHARIAN ATLAS

HIGHLANDS

TELLIAN ATLAS

DEVONIAN

VOLCANIC

JURASSIC

MESOZOIC

PALEOZOIC

SCOLE / BASE

DEVONIAN ERA

CRETACEOUS ERA

GAS PIPELINES

OIL FIELDS

OIL PIPELINES

GAS FIELDS PROSPECTION IN PARTNERSHIP

RESEARCH SONATRACH 100%

PROSPECTION SONATRACH 100%

RESEARCH SONATRACH 100%

EXPLOITATION AREA

RESEARCH IN PARTNERSHIP

20

21

Historically, life in the Sahara and on its desert shores was characterised by a complex network of trade, settlement and

economic activity. This richness was affected by two discoveries, first the discovery and eventual colonisation of Africa by European

powers - and second - the discovery of hydrocarbons and resources in the post-colonial period. Historically the shores of the Sahara can be characterised into distinct concepts (not periods) of transformation;

The Atlantic Slave Trade, The Colonisation of the Upper Nile and The Great Lakes (see Jean-Pierre Chretien), and the Anthropocenic Equator (Sahel / Climate Change). As with any Sea, each shore acquires a different character. Hydrocarbon extraction accounts for about 97% of Algerian exports and 30% of total GDP making the state highly dependent on resource extraction, sensitive to oil and gas prices and a major contributor to global CO2 emissions.

Social stability and territorial integrity are interlinked; this project proposes to use the existing hydrocarbon economy as a means to

construct new colonies in the centre and the mid-east of the country. Hydrocarbon profits are used as a boost to stimulate a self-

sustaining network of alternate economic activities within a regional network. Limestone extraction can form an eventual replacement

for a hydrocarbon economy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and supplying a crucial agricultural product for the regional

economy. Algerian hydrocarbons are alleged major contributors to desertification in the Sahel since they are primarily consumed in the

Northern Hemisphere.

22

Currently there are two conflicting thesis on the future state of the Sahel; research from the Potsdam institute suggests a greener Sahel,

and research from the Earth Institute at Columbia University suggests a drier one. Environmental instability is assured in any case. More importantly, this suggests northward traffic of energ y

resources to be consumed in Europe is in conflict with the potential to construct new economic and political ties between Algeria

and the peoples to its south. Existing trade in the region can be categorised as follows: Grains such as millet, sorghum, rice, corn, salt, other cereals, fruit. Crafts: leather goods, weaving, ceramics,

glass manufacturing, embroidery, textiles. Cotton, livestock, processed meat, dried fish, sugar. Minerals: especially potassium and copper. Trade across the Saharan network is composed of primarily overland transport mainly trucks, convoys with some rail. Owing to the airport at the extraction site In Salah is also connected to

other Saharan cities with airport infrastructure.The infrastructural impetus (equipment, expertise, capacity) behind the hydrocarbon

economy can be diverted toward other forms of extraction (limestone) and also toward non-extractivist ends (infrastructure, housing,

trade). The empty desert is a colonial myth. The Sahara is already populated - both by Algerias greatest source of wealth oil and

gas, and by its greatest source of instability in the form of non-state actors engaged in illicit trade, trafficking and terrorism both of

these take place within an already existing context of nomadic and pastoral spatial practices.


T HE F U T URE S TAT E OF T HE S A HEL

Algerian hydrocarbons are alleged major contributors to desertification in the Sahel since they are primarily consumed in the Northern Hemisphere. Currently there are two conflicting theses on the future state of the Sahel; research from the Pottsdam Institute for Climate Research and the Max Planck Meterological Institute suggests a greener Sahel, and research from the Earth Institute at Columbia University suggests a drier one. As of 2013, anthropogenic net emission of CO2 have increased its atmospheric concentration by a comparable amount from 280ppm (Holocene or pre-industrial equilibrium) to approximately 397ppm.

In March 2014, concentrations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in human history. Research from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the Australian CSIRO Sustainable Agriculture Flagship centre have looked deeper into the possible greening of the desert due to global warming. Both institutes conclude that some expansion of vegetation into todays Sahara is theoretically possible as a consequence of CO2 emissions. Models from Max Plank show that the rate of greening can be fast, up to 1/10th of the Saharan area per decades.

These two institutes record atmospheric change in separate elements. Max Plank Institutue research examines the relationship between an increase in carbon dioxide, ocean warming and rainfall. CSIRO examines the relationship between an increase in CO2 and plant foliage fertilisation. Environmental instability is assured in any case. More importantly, this suggests northward traffic of energy resources to be consumed in Europe is in conflict with the potential to construct new economic and political ties between Algeria and the peoples to its south.

23

Row One: Portrait of Global Aerosols

High-resolution global atmospheric modeling

run on the Discover supercomputer at the NASA

Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard Space

Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., provides a unique

tool to study the role of weather in Earths

climate system. The Goddard Earth Observing

System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5) is capable of

simulating worldwide weather at resolutions of

10 to 3.5 kilometers (km). This portrait of global

aerosols was produced by a GEOS-5 simulation at

a 10-kilometer resolution. Dust (red) is lifted from

the surface, sea salt (blue) swirls inside cyclones,

smoke (green) rises from fires, and sulfate

particles (white) stream from volcanoes and fossil

fuel emissions.

[Image credit: William Putman, NASA / Goddard]

Row Two: Micrographs USGS, UMBC, ASU (L to

R) Western Sahara Project. [By Jonathan Jessup,

Vox, and Ludie Cochrane].

Row Three: Aerial photographs of southern Zinder,

Niger, show the increase in on-farm trees.

[Photos by Gray Tappan, US Geological Survey,

EROS Centre].

Yacouba Sawadogo is a pioneer of FMNR, the tree-based approach to farming that has transformed the western Sahel over the last twenty years.

Climate change is a subject I have something to say about, said Sawadogo, who unlike most local farmers had some understanding of the term. Wearing a brown cotton gown, he sat beneath acacia and ziz yphus trees that shaded a pen holding guinea fowl. Two cows dozed at his feet; bleats of goats floated through the still late-afternoon air. His farm in northern Burkina Faso was large by local standardsfifty acresand had been in his family for generations. The rest of his family abandoned it after the terrible droughts of the 1980s, when a 20 percent decline in annual rainfall slashed food production throughout the Sahel, turned vast stretches of savanna into desert, and caused millions of deaths by hunger. For Sawadogo, leaving the farm was unthinkable. My father is buried here, he said simply. In his mind, the droughts of the 1980s marked the beginning of climate change, and he may be right: scientists are still analyzing when man-made climate change began, some dating its onset to the mid-twentieth century. In any case, Sawadogo said he had been adapting to a hotter, drier climate for twenty years now.

In the drought years, people found themselves in such a terrible situation they had to think in new ways, said Sawadogo, who prided himself on being an innovator. For example, it was a long-standing practice among local farmers to dig what they called zaishallow pits that collected and concentrated scarce rainfall onto the roots of crops. Sawadogo increased the size of his zai in hopes of capturing more rainfall. But his most important innovation, he said, was to add manure to the zai during the dry season, a practice his peers derided as wasteful.

awadogos experiments proved out: crop yields duly increased. But the most important result was one he hadnt anticipated: trees began to sprout amid his rows of millet and sorghum, thanks to seeds contained in the manure. As one growing season followed another, it became apparent that the treesnow a few feet highwere further increasing his yields of millet and sorghum while also restoring the degraded soils vitality. Since I began this technique of rehabilitating degraded land, my family has enjoyed food security in good years and bad, Sawadogo told me. Farmers in the western Sahel have achieved a remarkable success by deploying a secret weapon often overlooked in wealthier places: trees. Not planting trees. Growing them.

Amsterdam who has worked on agricultural issues in the Sahel for thirty years, and other scientists who have studied the technique say that mixing trees and cropsa practice they have named farmer-managed natural regeneration, or FMNR, and that is known generally as agro-forestrybrings a range of benefits. The trees shade and bulk offer crops relief from the overwhelming heat and gusting winds. In the past, farmers sometimes had to sow their fields three, four, or five times because wind-blown sand would cover or destroy seedlings, said Reij, a silver-haired Dutchman with the zeal of a missionary. With trees to buffer the wind and anchor the soil, farmers need sow only once....

Sawadogo was not an anomaly. In Mali, the practice of growing trees amid rows of cropland seemed to be everywhere. A bone-jarring three hour drive from the Burkina Faso border brought us to the village of Sokoura. By global standards, Sokoura was very poor. Houses were made of sticks covered by mud. There was no electricity or running water.

It was a five-minute walk from the village to the land of Omar Guindo. Guindo said that ten years ago he began taking advice from Sahel Eco, a Malian NGO that promotes agro-forestry. Now, Guindos land was dotted with trees, one every five meters or so. Most were young, with such spindly branches that they resembled bushes more than trees, but there were also a few specimens with trunks the width of fire hydrants. We sat beneath a large tree known as the Apple of the Sahel, whose twigs sported inch-long thorns. The soil was sandy in both color and consistencynot a farmers idealbut water availability and crop yields had increased substantially. Before, this fi eld couldnt fill even one granary, he said. Now, it fills one granary and half of anotherroughly a 50 percent increase in production.

These farmers were not planting these trees, as Nobel Prizewinning activist Wangari Maathai has promoted in Kenya. Planting trees is much too expensive and risky for poor farmers, Reij said, adding, Studies in the western Sahel have found that 80 percent of planted trees die within a year or two. By contrast, trees that sprout naturally are native species and more resilient. And, of course, such trees cost the farmers nothing.

E XCERPT FROM MARK HERTSGA ARDS BOOK

HOT: L I V ING T HR OUGH T HE NE X T 5 0 Y E A RD S ON E A R T H

26

27

RE SE ARCH

T HE DI S C O V ER Y OF UNDER GROUND WAT ER RE SER V OIR S IN A F RIC A

Forty percent of all people globally who lack access to drinking water live in sub-Saharan Africa, with a total of 300 million people across the African continent.1 Demand for water is set to grow markedly in coming decades due to population growth and the need for crop-fed irrigation. Freshwater rivers and lakes are subject to seasonal floods and droughts that can limit their availability for people and for agriculture. At present only 5% of arable land is irrigated.

In 2012, the British Geological Survey and the University College London released a hydrology report2 revealing one of the largest groundwater systems in the world located in the North Western Saharan Basin (NWSAS), which extends across Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. The North-Western Sahara Basin (NWSAS) comprises two main aquifers: the deep Continental Intercalaire (CI), and the Complexe Terminal (CT) with a surface area of approximately 1,500 ,000 km2 and a total volume of water 100 times the amount found on the surface.

Globally, groundwater is the source of one third of all fresh water withdrawals, supplying 36% of domestic needs, 42% of agricultural needs and 27% of industrial needs.4 In Africa about 85% of the water is used in agriculture. Only 10% is used in households and only 5% in industry. Because of the growing urban population in Africa, embedded water consumption for agriculture and industry will increase. At present, the African continent is 40 percent urbanized. There are currently 414 million urban dwellers and only Asia has more city-based people.

The continents largest cities all have populations of over a million people.5 Moreover, the continent is developing at an unprecedented rate: the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) predicts that Africa will be 50 percent urban by 2030 and 60 percent urban by 2050. The World Health Organisation and UNICEF have calculated 50 litres per person per day as the required water supply. How are African cities, already under water stress and unable to provide water security for their populations, provide water for an eventual population increase of 60%?

Water security is defined both by the reliable availability of quality water and an acceptable level of water related risk. Reliable availability of water storage capacity is 750 cubic metres per capita. Currently, major cities south of the Sahel are only just meeting the 200 cubic metres per capita of water storage supply and water consumption per person per day across the Sahel is between 9 and 60 litres2.3 For context, European water consumption per person per day is between 150 and 400litres2.

Water extraction from the NWSAS aquifers creates an immediate tension in Africas negotiation of water security and requires trans-boundary integrated management of the shared aquifer system6. The Sahara does not have the climate or geology to become the breadbasket of Africa but its provision of groundwater to neighbouring regions can buffer climate variability7 and increase crop yields that would provide a viable African food supply alternative to current Mediterranean and North American imports. A quid pro quo agreement between the Sahara, Sahel and Sub-Saharan states encourages a trans-boundary network based on shared available resources that reorients trade relationships8 towards Africas new interior of hydrological viability and irrigation infrastructure.

Ground Water Resources in Africa: MacDonald, A.M. ; Bonsor, H.C. ; Dochartaigh, B.E. ; Taylor, R.G. . 2012 Quantitative maps. Environmental Research Letters, 7

28

UNDERGROUND AQUIFERS

REP OR T BY R . G. TAY LOR [UCL + BRI T I SH GEOLOGIC A L S OCIE T Y]

Very High: > 20 l/s

High: 5-20 l/s

Moderate: 1-5 l/s

Low-Moderate: 0.5-1 l/s

Low: 0.1-0.5 l/s

Very Low: < 0.1 l/s

Aquifer Productivity

References:

- Digital elevation map : Shuttle radar topopraphy mission (SRTM) at 3 arc second resolution. - Bathymetry : GEBCO_08 Grid provided by British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) released in Jan 2009- Hillshade map generated through GIS analysis of the Digital Elevation Map. - Political Boundaries : Natural Earth (http://www.naturalearthdata.com/)- Geological basins highlighting the highest aquifer productivity. Source : British Geological Survey NERC 2011 (http://www.bgs.ac.uk/)- Points of Armed Conflicts in Africa , 2012 -1997 . Source : Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (http://www.acleddata.com/)- Search and Rescue regions (SAR ) source : Search and Rescue Contacts - managed by the Canadian Coast Guard in JRCC Halifax location. At 2014 . (http://sarcontacts.info/srrs/tr_med/)- African and Mediterraneean Migration Routes, published by International Centre for Migration Policy Development

500km2500

Equator

wind

LEGEND

Geological basins high lighting the highest aquifer productivity and indicating what can be expected in different hydrogeological units.

201/s 1-51/s 0.1/s

TERRITORIAL MAP

The Mediterranean and the Sahara as context. This

map indicates Algerias geopolitical position

between the Mediterranean Sea an the Sahara and

Sahel.


T HE MEDI T ERR A NE A N A S A SPACE OF E XCH A NGE

In the context of the MArch Urban Design course structure, the relationship between our chosen site and the Mediterranean must be explored.

Historically, the Mediterranean as a sea was a space of exchange, traffic between different kinds of cultures organised along the coastline. There are two opinions regarding this organisation: According to Braudel the relationship is defined according to property in common and similarities along a shared coastline. The second opinion is that It is the relationship between the very diverse localities of the Mediterranean and the connectivitys that bind one locality to another. In fact, the fundamental geographical feature of the Mediterranean is thus, the enormous complexity of the region. [reference needed] Essentially the Mediterranean is defined not by similarities, but rather by a problem that is in common which is mitigated by a system of trade networks. [reference needed] If we imagine this historical idea of the Mediterranean as a network of cities that have more in common with other cities along the coast, than they do with cities in their own hinterland, we can start to think then that if the Sahara is in fact a sea, what are the cities on its shore?

29

References:


500km2500

Equator

Political Boundaries

wind

LEGEND


Points of Armed Conflict

Search and Rescue (SAR) Regions

201/s 1-51/s 0.1/s

TERRITORIAL MAP

Armed conflict across Africa and the

Mediterranean securitisation.

The port city is an urban form defined by the contact between land and sea, located according to the natural resources offered by the site and its hinterland. Historically, the port city staged encounters between different groups. Today the seaport is containerised, securitised, nationalised and corporatised as a result it is excised from its local context - no longer able to enrich the city and its inhabitants. Historically, the coastal port addressed the sea to the north; facing toward Europe. Today the Mediterranean Sea is solidified and secured by the state (Boeri); but in the south, the weakness of the state means that its sovereignty does not coincide with its territorial border. The shore of its Southern Sea remains liquid (Pezzani).

31


T HE C ON T EMP OR A R Y P OR T CI T Y

References:


500km2500

Equator


wind

LEGEND




201/s 1-51/s 0.1/s

TERRITORIAL MAP

The Mediterranean becomes Solid due to its

securitisation. It is the most policed water body

on earth


T HE P EIR , A NE W T Y P OLOGY

In the contemporary port, the idea of the pier is no longer important. With the development of containerisation, ports are now automated and linked to infrastructural networks. The contemporary port has lost the relationship to the city that the historical port had. In fact, even though we still call them ports, they are radically different typologies. In the case of the Sahara it is possible to reinvent and return to this idea of the port and its associated infrastructure of the pier, as an architectural device that is able to mediate between these different kinds of flows. It operates both infrastructurally as a kind of mode of addressing the sea, as well as a mode of addressing the city.

33

References:


500km2500

Equator


wind

LEGEND

Migration Routs

Islands and Cities




201/s 1-51/s 0.1/s

SOLID SEA, LIQUID EARTH


T HE S A H A R A N T R A DE CI T Y NE T W ORK

This project proposes that the historical seaport city can be re-deployed as a concept to recolonise the shore of the Sahara. This city can enter into relationships of trade and exchange with other Saharan port cities, forming a mutually enriching network of complimentary economies. Therefore, the land port becomes an experiment in re-organising the African geopolitical landscape. It does so by re-orienting economic activity to its interior, thus constructing new spaces for political autonomy.

35

In Conclusion, the Maghreb is a peninsula. Historically, a sea to the North- the Mediterranean and a sea to the South- the Sahara. Historically, the coastal port addresses the sea to the north. Facing toward Europe. Today the Mediterranean Sea is solidified and secured by the state (Boeri); but in the south, the weakness of the state means that its sovereignty

does not coincide with its territorial border. The shore of its Southern Sea remains liquid (Pezzani). The colonial presence tolerated certain fluidity in the desert and only extended its

interests into the Sahara with swift razzia raids on recalcitrant tribes when its hold on the coastal ports was at risk of being

upset by activity from the interior. The post-colonial state maintained sovereignty over the territory only in so far as

resource extraction points could be protected. Control of the Sahara and the permanent militarisation of its shores have

assumed primary importance in the stabilisation of the North African region. Today the Mediterranean becomes solid due to securitisation and policing; the Sahara is a sea because it

retains a liquid form of movement.

37

38

This hypothesis is confirmed because of the political formations that govern each space. Sub-Saharan migration to Algeria is primarily composed by refugees from Niger and Mali crossing through Agadez , Arlit and Tamanrasset respectively. This form of human movement is classed as irregular migration and is subject to severe punishment according to Algerian

law including prison terms. Further, there are currently some 35,000 Chinese labour workers in Algeria working on

primarily infrastructural projects in Sino-Algerian public-private partnerships. The Sahara and Sahel are increasingly characterised by environmental and political unpredictability, with conditions of drought, flood and conflict often resulting in massive human displacement. The state is weakest at

its periphery along its frontier of expansion. Therefore this is also where experimentation is most possible. The frontier of hydrocarbon extraction can become a site for new forms of social and political organisation. We aim to hijack the existing infrastructural impetus, which is captured by a

utilitarian relation between means and ends by strategising its inherent excess. We wish to reinvent the idea of the colony understanding it as a technolog y of frontier territorialisation

that is irreducible to its colonial legacy of indigenous dispossession and exploitation.


REORIEN TAT ION OF T HE S OU T H

This project suggests that Northern African nations must re-orient their attention towards the Sahara in order to colonise their own interior. Therefore, how do we reinvent the colony in such a way as to reorient political attention from the north back towards the South? If we are to reinvent new spaces of governance and political power, two options should be considered; either take control of the centre or reinvent the periphery.

This proposal chooses to reinvent the periphery. This means, not only a new city but a new form of political organisation. Taken from Pierre Bourdieus writings on Algeria leading up to its War of Independance in 1962 it can be quoted;

39

40

It was as if the Colonizers had instinctively discovered

the anthropological law which states that the

structure of habitat is the symbolic protection of the

most fundamental structures of a culture; to reorganize it is to provoke a general

transformation of the whole cultural system itself.

Pierre Bourdieu

POST-HYDROCARBON ECONOMIC NET WORK

REORIEN TAT ION TO T HE S OU T H A ND T HE C A SE S T UDY OF A IN S A L A H GA S F IEL D S

1. Archival Image: Geographical Elevation,

Krechba

Source: , Authors, 2014 modified from SRTM

Image, USGS

2. Archival Image: Ain Salah Gas Plant

Source: Djebrithn, 2006, Available at http://www.

panoramio.com/photo/33799693

3. Archival Image: The Gas Plant: Processing,

Storaging and Distributing facilities

Source: In Salah Gas, 2014, Available

at http://www.insalahco2.com/

index.php/en/media/image-library.

html?view=gallery&layout=bpGallery

4. Production and Injection Wells: Cooperation with

mobile-international employees and extractive

technologies

Source: In Salah Gas, 2014, Available

at http://www.insalahco2.com/

index.php/en/media/image-library.

html?view=gallery&layout=bpGallery

5. Archival Image: Mapping Krechba: Subterranean

gas reservoir and location of the plant facilities

Source: Authors, 2014 modified from

Mathiesona, A. et al., 2011,In Salah CO2

Storage JIP: CO2 sequestration monitoring and

verification technologies applied at Krechba,

Algeria, Energy Procedia, 4: 3597

6.Archival Image: Vertical Hydrocarbon Processing:

CO2 Trapping Mechanism, Vertical production and

injection with an future CO2 estimation

Source: Authors, modified from 2006, The In-Salah

CCS Experience Sonatrach

This project considers a new port located along the shores of the Sahara according to sites of existing hydrocarbon infrastructure and traditional trans-Saharan trade and migration routes. The edge of the port city is organised by a re-invention of the pier, which becomes a membrane able to regulate trade and to discipline the unregulated sprawl that is typical of urbanisation in this area. The centre of the city will remain empty except for a water body drawn from the aquifer whose purpose is to regulate the ambient temperature.

It is proposed that the re-orientation of Algerias pattern of settlement to its Southern Sea must be complemented by a gradual reduction in resource extraction and the development of a post-hydrocarbon economic network with other cities on the shore of the sea. New polities are formed in response to problems, giving rise to a diversity of spatial and cognitive practices, modes of valorisation and epistemologies. Rather than neutralising these contradictions, they have a positive potential that can be harnessed as well as a more open capacity to adapt to environmental and political transformations. This rejects the singular systematisation characteristic of the colony, instead - proposing a new model that is polytheistic that locates a positive potential in differences between subjects, between functions, and between economies.In direct transition of this thought process to the urban scale, the project moves away from a mono-functional resource town and explores the idea of an urban centre whose morphology and growth is imbued with the stasis of competing functions and polities.

The Krechba refinery and extraction point in central Algeria is the Central Processing Facility of the In Salah gas fields network and also the site of one of the worlds four critical carbon sequestration prototype projects. It will produce over 25% of the countries gas exports, which as an industry accounts for 98% of Algerias export revenue.

Coordinate: 271142N 2290E

Location: Krechba - Sahara, Algeria

Typology: CCS Infrastructural Machines

Joint Venture: Sonatrach (35%) / BP (33%) / Statoil (32%)

Pipe Linkage: 32/36km to Hassi Moumence 30/37km to Gour Mahmoud

Gas Reserve: 340 bcm

Dry Gas 9 bcm p.a. Production: Life span about 16 to 19 years

41

Ain Salah Southern Gas Fields and Carbon Sequestration: Processing and Distribution of Algerian Oil and Pioneering Carbon Sequestration and Storage Plan [Ain Salah, Algerian Sahara]

42

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

Historically, circular cities have always embodied certain socio-political ideaas in which different elements of the circle acquire unique importance. For example, the centre is defined as a space of rule or a space of negotiation- but always the centre of power. The centre is the force which arranges and binds the city. The urban fabric is defined by the concentric relationships to the centre as the city extends outward to its limits. The round city is at every moment of its spatial organization a reflection on its political form.

Ghardaia, Algeria: an autonomous democratic religious city arranged in community rule around a shared centre and Baghdad, Iraq:

administrative centre for the territorial rule of the Abbasiid Caliphate.

The Caliph Al Mansurs founding of Baghdad during the 8th century Islamic conquest of Iraq coincided with his violent expulsion of a fundamentalist Shiite Islamic sect, Ibaadiya, whose exiled adherents, established religious and commercial settlements in North Africa.

As Mansur colonized Iraq through garrison towns, the Ibaadiya colonized the Sahara with the establishment of community oriented commercial centres, governed by an elected council of clergy called the azzaba. The case studies of these two cities present the potentials of the circular city as a political form.

Baghdad the Round City, or al Mansur, consisted of three architectural elements: the outer fortifications, an inner residential area of symmetrically arranged streets, and the vast inner courtyard where the Caliphs mosque and residence were situated. Baghdad was designed a round city, with its main roads arranged radially and its most important institutions concentrated in the centre.

The divisions were marked by a series of walls. Two concentric outer walls surrounded by a moat for the exterior. Access to the residential area and central court was gained through four elaborate gateways and arcades beginning at the outer wall and ending in the courtyard, sitting equidistant from one another along the axis of the caliphs residence. These gated complexes framed the Northeast, Northwest, Southeast and Southwest quadrants of residential areas.

THE CIRCUL AR CIT Y A S A POLITICAL FORM

B AGHDA D A ND GH A RDA I A CIR CUL A R CI T IE S

The area circumscribed by the walls of al Mansurs city was too small for an integrated urban center. Functioned rather as a palace precinct of which the Caliphs residence and mosque in the central court was a major element. It was a ceremonial administrative centre of the Abbasid empire.

The gate complex was considered as an extension of the palace area to which it led, with a royal audience hall surmounting each of the citys outer gates. Thus the dignitary from the moment he stepped into the outer gateway was made to feel as if he were in the presence of the Caliphs palace. From this model we see a political fomation of one sovereign whose control radiates from the circles centre in control of all its parts.

43

Baghdad City Circular Form: The most famous round city during the Mesopotamia era; Baghad, build by Al-Mansur in the eighth century.

44

The left information mapping shows the relation of gas plant facilities with a technical detection of gas depos-it. With a main CCS production, the key positioning in extractors and re-injectors has been marked. A gas reserve can be bound in two ways; GWC and GFC. KB 501, 502, 503 are the final stage of processing machine to inject CO2 into the udnerground layer.

Ain Salah Southern Gas Fields

Underground Deposit / Activities GWC (Gas Water Contact) FGC (Full Gas Column) Gas Deposit Density

Surface Activities Gas Producer (Extraction Well) CO2 Starage Inlet (Injection Well) Pipelines Industrial Roads

URBANISATION IN THE SAHAR A

S A H A R A N T R A DE CI T Y - A IN S A L A H S OU T HERN GA S F IEL D S

The Saharan Trade City plan is based on a social political diagram in which conflict between different constituencies is spatialised through the figure of a circle broken into parts. The city has no hegemon, instead exists in a permanent state of asymmetry driven by the tension between each group.

It is hypothesised that the Saharan port city can stabilise the territory through prosperity not force. Its edges could be liquid like the sea that surrounds it. We engage specifically with Krechba, In Salah as our proposed site. Ain Salah is Algerias largest gas field and Krechba is its central processing facility, located along the trans-saharan highway, a point of convergence for existing Saharan activity and trans saharan migration routes. Founded as a major hydrocarbon extraction site in the 1960s and more recently, in 2000 has become a pilot project for underground carbon sequestration and storage. Ain Salah as a centre of knowledge regarding extraction of desert resources- vital in its geographic position above groundwater reservoirs and limestone deposits required for cultivation of agriculture in the Sahel.

45

Krechba Mapping: Subterranean gas reservoir and location of the plant facilities, Ain Salah Southern Gas Fields, Algerian Sahara

46

URBANISATION IN THE SAHAR A

S A H A R A N T R A DE CI T Y - A IN S A L A H S OU T HERN GA S F IEL D S

Urbanisation is a science that brings multiple elements together and a representation of the collective idea. The process of urbanisation is the negotiation between different social groups, which happens in different scales from the city, to the neighbourhood, architecture, arriving at a balance between co-exist and co-operate. The discourse of Utopianism was inspired by a harmonious society and sought out a status that a city can survive as self-sufficient. The fail of the utopian city experiment is the simplification of understanding the co-exist and co-operate in city scale, ignoring its relation to other cities or region. In this context, the project proceeds with an understanding of how Ain- Salah cooperates with other cities in the Saharan network as an archipelago that compresses such a relation.

The project examines the operation of such a social rule with the engagement of morphology analysis, in order to understand how radical social lifestyle were implemented not only as totalising utopians but a political concept to organise groups of inhabitants. Looking at the traditional village settlement of the Mzab Valley in central Algeria, [urbanised by the Ibadhites], whereby the political and cultural life were investigated as elements organised around social rule.

Ain Salah Southern Gas Fields

At Krechba, CO2 is separated from the natural gas from the three fields, and recycled into the saline formation some 1950m below. The CO2 is injected down-dip from the gas zone, and is trapped by the mudstones above. The reservoir covers an area approximately 20 kilo-metres long by five kilometres wide. Four new produc-ing wells with horizontal sections enter the gas zone. The gas is trapped in this zone by a 950m thick layer of mudstone forming a natural seal above it, prevent-ing its upward migration. The three CO2 injection wells are located several kilometres from the Krechba plant. With one of technical monitorings and simulations of the storage site, above diagram shows the expasion of CO2 for years later. This trapping is expected for 20 million years.

47

Carbon Capture and Storage: Carbon Trapping Mechanism and Sequestration [Pioneering Project], Ain Salah Southern Gas Fields, Algerian Sahara

48

THE CIT Y A S A THE ATRE OF DIFFERENCE

M A S T ERP L A N OF T HE A IN S A L A H S A H A R A N T R A DE CI T Y

Ain Salah Trade City Master Plan:

Ain Salah Trade City placed above the Ain Salah Southern Gas Fields and the Pioneering Carbon Sequestration and Storage Project.

Moving beyond the mono-centrality of the hydrocarbon facility, Krechbas new spatial order and urban morphology is dually derived from its function as port, as with traditional Arab-Berber modes of social organisation investigated with the MZab Valley.

A radiated pier formation serves to connect the space of circulation to the space of exchange and trade, a structure through which a limited scale of activity is promoted. In its section and proportion, the pier challenges the typical reading of the city as a public ground condition proposing a centrifugal rather than centripetal form of organisation that can continually re-energise the urban edge. Diversity of land ownership can be produced by limiting ownership and parcellation of the piers to a specific angle of the circle. Through insertion, integration and dominance, empowerment of a specific constituency at the expense of another can be established.

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THE CIT Y A S A THE ATRE OF DIFFERENCE

CI T Y OR GA NI S AT ION

The city works in hand with six industries each socially and functionally distinct. Governance, trade and social services are determined by each industry and allow for moments of violence or interaction as these social infrastructures pull the muliti-collectives into its centre through moments of exchange. These industry clusters can be likened to that of embassies, whereby collectives are linked not through a hegemon, but through the sharing of work across the Sahara [like that of a guild] and therefore explores the relationship between citizens of a city and of embassies. The proposal addresses a political moment whereby the South is seen as autonomous to the North, through recolonising - starting on the frontier.

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Ain Salah Trade City: Interior Perpsective from the Embassadorial Head-Quarters of the Ain Salah Saharan Trade City [From inside the Climate Dish]

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NORMATIVIT Y WITHIN THE CIT Y

CI T Y OR GA NI S AT ION

The city works in hand with six industries each socially and functionally distinct. Governance, trade and social services are determined by each industry and allow for moments of violence or interaction as these social infrastructures pull the muliti-collectives into its centre through moments of exchange. These industry clusters can be likened to that of embassies, whereby collectives are linked not through a hegemon, but through the sharing of work across the Sahara [like that of a guild] and therefore explores the relationship between citizens of a city and of embassies. The proposal addresses a political moment whereby the South is seen as autonomous to the North, through recolonising - starting on the frontier.

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Ain Salah Trade City: Aerial View of the Ain Salah Saharan Trade City, Ain Salah Southern Gas Fields, Algerian Sahara

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THREE PROPOSITIONS FOR BUILDING FORM

T HREE P R OP O SI T ION S FOR BUIL DING FORM B A SED ON S OCI A L C OMP O SI T ION

As part of the archipelago in the trans-Saharan trade network, this project hypothesises a compound of different social groups to settle here, which correspond to the cities multiple industry sectors. They are; The Family Unit, Seasonal Worker and the Fly-In Fly-Out Worker. Interested in the encounter of these collectives, the proposal looks at the urban and architecture morphology historically in North Africa to understand the interactions and transformation of the social relations. Three periods: Pre-colonial, Colonial and Post Colonialism are looked at in order to analysise the architecture typology, and living and social codes.

Type 1: The Family Unit

We want to recall the courtyard function: the act of gather, that through circulation. We add two blocks appended to the traditional courtyard type, as the injection of modern life: Living room area; the guest room and pray room. Then, through the creation of the public courtyard and private courtyard, we create two moments: the family union; the encounter of the visitor and residents.

Type 2: The Seasonal Worker [Ain Salah House]

Ain Salah House is a variation of the courtyard house for seasonal workers in trans-Saharan network cities. The structure is programmed to observe individual privacy in the courtyard living unit, but contrary to the typical inward facing courtyard dwelling, Ain Salah house encourages opportunities of social interaction through a communal circulation wall that faces outward onto the street.

Type 3: Fly-In Fly-Out Worker [FIFO]

This community is built upon the actions of all members, forming a network of constantly changing interrelations and interdependencies. The lack of hierarchy that exits between each block is aimed to prioritise correspondence between collectives rather than the traditional separation that commonly positions FIFO workers on the outskirts of a community. Interaction occurs in the common areas such as interior walkways, courtyards and the gentle ramps between the two levels of this distinctly horizontal proposal.

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Social Composition: The Social Composition of the Ain Salah Saharan Trade City; The Algerian Family Unit [National], Seasonal Worker and FIFO Worker

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The houses of this typology form towns created by the Ibadhites; they are fortified, built on concealed hills in the MZab valley, and they form the Pentapolis of the MZab. The valley is charatised by a series of date palm plantations that cultivate seasonal work for its inhabitants.

The house in the MZab corresponds to the courtyard house, with rooms organised around a central courtyard. Each house is inhabited by a single family and the size of each is strictly adapted to their size. These houses form a very dense radial urban fabric, topped in each case by the minaret of the mosque. In this sense, secrecy and reservedness reign, are given importance within the ksar [neighbourhood]. The street network is crooked. Alleys give no direction and are bordered by blind walls. People with the same clan live in the same neighbourhood, sharing the commual alley ways. As in most examples of traditional housing in the muslim world, the facade of the house reveals rather little of what is taking place inside. While the outside world is male dominated, the inside of the house is the womens territory.

The traditional Mzab house consisted of four different levels: ground and entry floor, upper floor, roof terraces, and basement. The ground floor contained the main spaces in the house: the entry, central room (roofed courtyard with small lightwell), family living room, kitchen, and multipurpose room. The central room was used for family interaction, childrens play areas, and for weddings and festivals. It was also used for daily activities such as sleeping, cooking, eating, and weaving. The family living room was used mainly for family activities or for receiving female guests. Parents and children used the multipurpose room for sleeping, as well as for storage and animals. The upper floor had a more open courtyard and contained male guest rooms, bedrooms, storage rooms, and other multipurpose spaces. This floor was usually reached by covered stairs and was connected to the neighboring house by a wall opening which facilitated socializing between female members of Mzab families.

The roof terraces contained many spaces divided by partitions for various summer family activities such as sleeping and sitting at night. The terraces were always reached by an open staircase.

Underground floor spaces also contained main family spaces used in the summer for activities such as sitting and sleeping. The traditional Mzab house allowed residents to enjoy life in the open air and also live securely in a confined area completely protected on all sides. This type of settlement maintained the privacy of domestic life in accordance with the Muslim way of life, Mzabite socio-cultural values, and the severe environmental factors of the desert.

ARCHITECTUR AL PRECEDENCE

T Y P E S T UDY: HOUSING IN T HE P RE- C OLONI A L P ERIOD [ MZ A B VA L L E Y]

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Female areaMale areaMix-use family areaCourtyard

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MZAB VALLEY CASE STUDY -SCALE:CITY

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CIRCULATIONPROGRAM STRUCTURE-SCALE:ARCHITECTYRE(HOUSING)

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MZab Valley Case Study: City and Neighbourhood Typological Study

City Scale Programme Circulation Unit to Whole

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Terrace

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Housing Typology: Pre-Colonial Housing Typology [MZab Valley, Algerian Sahara]



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Housing Typology: Pre-Colonial Housing Typology [MZab Valley, Algerian Sahara] Tradition Berber Courtyard

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C OLONI A L HOUSING T Y P E S

The Colonial Housing Blocks of Algeria recalled the spatial organisation of the rural housing type. Organised by an ever-extendable grid, each unit consisted of two rooms, a court with a water outlet, a separate toilet, and a sheltered terrace, Loggia.

The 40-square-meter individual units in the higher blocks of the Cite des Eucalyptus repeated a similar configuration, the formula that had evolved from a consensus on the lifestyle of indigenous people. A major difference from the earlier schemes was the placement of the bathroom inside the unit as opposed to its former location in the loggia, a change that stemmed in part from the diminished size of the latter. The toilet and the kitchen now became a unit in a most unhygienic combination. Perhaps it was again the new dimensions of the loggia that led the architects to make provisions for privacy by including high screens that allowed for correct ventilation while satisfying the Muslims taste for apartments sealed off from the exterior.

The Groupe des Cyclamens, an apartment complex in Clos Salembier, was organised in four, six story blocks with four units per story in each block. The unit sizes varied from one to four bedrooms. These were minimalist units that incorporated the few features determined to conform to the needs of evolutionary indigenous families: kitchenette in a corner of the living room, a loggia now reduced to a width of 1 meter (thus unusable as an extension of the living space and offering no privacy), and a water closet about 2 square meters that included a toilet, sink, and shower. The facades expressed the floor plans in a straightforward manner, the recesses of the balconies creating light and shade contrasts; a rectilinear geometry, generated by the prefabricated construction system, dominated the scheme. The architectural vocabulary and the massing aspired to Pouillons principles in nearby Diar el-Mahcoul.

C OLONI A L MIL I TA R Y TO W N S

The first task of the military upon stabilising territorial control is fortification. Laying out road networks allows the military to occupy the territory efficiently and is a regulatory framework than an urban management scheme. A fundamental concept in the analysis of processes for structuring colonial urban space is that of regulation. Many simplistic notions have dominated in the analysis of urban structures, identifying axial or centralised figures as those of domination, stessing the strict prescriptiveness of their plans. On this point, it underlines that while colonialism was certainly founded on armed and legalised violence, such voilence was not an end in itself.

The town of Sidi bel Abbles on the Algerian northern periphery was designed uniquely for a European migrants. The village consisted of several mosques and Morrish baths and was structured around the Arab market in the towns main square. This appreciation of the Arab culture however came with changes that involved the abandonment of the fortified wall and its replacement along most of its length by an external boulevard, a military quarter for public settlement, and transforming the public areas to French isspired collanades. Centres of colonisation were in all cases created along a military camp and were initially inhabited by workmen and tradesmen in the service of the army, their transformation into European settlements often came with a divide between Arabic culture and European ways of life.

The first rule of management of Colonial towns was to keep close to a regular geometrical figure in laying out the perimeter of the town. The town was drawn up on a grid pattern which was identical to the European town. Similarity, the town gates were placed in the axes of the two main roads, where fortified walls were replaced by a central road network that kept in parallel to allow colonial troops to quickly enter and fortify the town.


T Y P E S T UDY: HOUSING IN T HE C OLONI A L P ERIOD - S IDI BEL A BBL E S

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Colonial Architecture: Sidi Sidi Bel Abbes Neighbourhood in the Algiers Hinterland, Algeria [Archival Photograph]

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Colonial Housing: Typological Study on the Groupe des Cyclamens Housing Estate. Clos Salembier, Algeria.

Architectural Scale Programme Circulation Unit to Whole


T Y P E S T UDY: HOUSING IN T HE C OLONI A L P ERIOD

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Sidi Sidi Bel Abbes Case Study: City and Neighbourhood Typological Study [Above: City Scale, Below: Neighbourhood Scale]

Neighbourhood Programme Circulation Unit to Whole

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Mosque Architecture In Military TownChurch

Arab MarketMilitary Town Market

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T Y P E S T UDY: HOUSING IN T HE P O S T- C OLONI A L P ERIOD

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[ A IN A L L A H HOUSING E S TAT E ]

The concept of Ain-Allahs layout is inspired from the layout of most of the colonial areas in Algiers where the facilities are situated on the ground floor of the buildings along the main street. The implementation of Ain-Allahs buildings along a dangerous road with heavy traffic, not frequented by many pedestrians, however, makes it necessary to have the facilities inverted on an internal street. The way in which the buildings are implemented creates common spaces designed for the residents living around them, but creates no main street which links all the parts of the project which could therefore support the facilities. Consequently, certain common spaces are designated for this purpose.

The internal

part ii architectural assistant portfolio

Documents

s s i s t

t i o n p o r t f o

e n r o b e r t s

r c h i t e c t u r

urban scale

perth australia

architectural scale

iliquid e arth