(re) Making City, NETWORKED IMAGING,
Becoming Plant, Becoming Machine

Introduction

One of the first things that the Atomic Cities Research Group was asked to do was to provide a 1:350 physical model of ground concentrations present under the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PGDP).  We were amazed to find that scientists typically understand the ground concentrations primarily as sets of numbers and points. As designers we would first seek to define the slowly moving shape, formed by underground features, dynamic attributes, and the chemical make-up of the substances themselves.

Because of this, we began to take our imaging role very seriously. After our first pass at the ‘plume model’, we began to think of other ways to simply communicate the issues at hand.

As part of a comprehensive ‘Radical Remediation’ proposal, the Atomic Cities Research Group developed a ‘plume’ dashboard to be used by both scientists and citizens (Figure 1). The proposed dashboard would show every plume presently recorded, each with location and kinds of contaminants, with or without surrounding geographic information. Residents of any community, with contaminants or without, could log in to follow remediation efforts, plume movements, and successful cleanup strategies.

Information on this dashboard would be gathered by swarms of networked passive, sensing, 3d printed remediating devices or ‘robots.’ For these robots, rather than the typical sources, we took inspiration from sugar maple ‘propellers’, floating sticks and acorns – because nature has already designed these things to distribute themselves(Figure 2). Composed of variable rate degradation waxes, starches and other materials, these robots would be designed to decompose in a way that delivers remediating chemicals where they need to be over extended periods of time.

In addition to the dashboard and the robots, the Atomic Cities Research Group also proposed a series of hybrid species of plants that could be put into service to help remediate. Did you know that Poplar trees have natural properties that can help to degrade artificial chemical spills? The only problem is that these trees typically have shallow root systems that would not reach the depth of the contaminants in Paducah. The Group proposes grafting the Poplar tree with a plant that has a deep root system in order to create a new species for the job.