Welcome to my exhibition

Thank you for taking the time to review the blog and visit the exhibition. this blog is a work in progress and should be up to date with the exhibition information by the end of the weekend, so please come back and visit and comment on any of the blog postings. It is hoped that over the next week there will be some interactive blog postings and discussions on issues on landscape architecture and crisis landscapes.

Extreme tourism in the ghost town of Prypiat

A fairground wheel in the abandoned town of Prypiat. On the 26 April 1986 there was a catastrophic nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear power plant. in Ukraine. Prypiat was founded in 1970 to house workers for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It was officially proclaimed a city in 1979 but was abandoned in 1986. The city was home to 50,000 people who where all evacuated in 2 days following the disaster. In 1986 the city of Slavutich was constructed to replace Prypiat. 

Many of the building interiors in Prypiat have been vandalised and ransacked over the years. Because the buildings have not been maintained since 1986, the roofs leak, and in the springtime the rooms are flooded with water. Trees can be seen growing on roofs and even inside the buildings. All this adds to the deterioration process; a four-story school collapsed in July 2005.  

There are concerns about visiting Prypiat and the surrounding areas and you can now find companies to give you a guided tour, extreme tourism. The radiation levels have since dropped and in certain areas the radiation levels are very low. The city and surrounding zone are boarded with guards and police but it is apparently relatively easy to get the documentation to visit the site. 

Frequency of disasters

There appears to be an increase in the frequency with which disasters are occurring. According to statistics from the International Centre of Interdisciplinary and Advanced Research (ICIAR), disasters were about 100 per decade in 1900-1940, which rose to 650 per decade in the 1960s, 2000 per decade in the 1980s, and it reached 2800 per decade in the 1990s. Further to this the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) stated that by 2010, natural disasters alone have caused the death of more than 780,000 people over the past ten years and destroyed a minimum of US $ 960 billion worth of property and infrastructure (Amaratunga et al 2011)

They further discuss that it is hard to establish whether this growing number of crisis is due to an increase in events or an increase in vulnerability. Vulnerability could be increasing due to a rise in the global population, effects of climate change, the regions economic status, urbanisation, war, poverty or other underlying development issues (Blaikie, Cannon & Davies 2004). ICIAR believe that urban regions have complex infrastructures that support human activities, deliver services and facilitate economic growth which the population are increasingly dependent on and that dependence increases vulnerability. 

What is meant by crisis landscapes?

Our urban and rural landscapes are in a state of constant flux, they are never static. Disturbances occur all the time, some expected and some unexpected. The environment always responds to these changes, how, is dependent on scale of space and time (Bell 1999).

However humankind is now in an unprecedented and extraordinary position. There has never been a time in human history that our life-sustaining environment on earth has rapidly changed in one generation. Most of the changes are attributed to human activities through less ecologically balanced economic and technological activities that can potentially raise conflicts through physical, biological and social interactions (International Centre of Interdisciplinary and Advanced Research 2011).

Earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, torrential rainfall, droughts, food shortages, melting polar caps, degraded soil quality, rising fuel prices, unemployment, riots, political upheaval and bankrupt countries. The new millennium has so far been epitomized by changes in economic life, global industries, advancements in and accessibility to technology and the increase in natural disasters. 

Gilding (2011) has demonstrated clear arguments to show that the economy has clearly outgrown the earth’s limits. Two major indicators of this being that ‘resource constraints have been forcing prices up and ecosystem changes were accelerating at a scale suggesting that systemic shifts and tipping points were underway’.

There have been further indications and warnings of the force of human induced ecological and geological changes for many decades now stating that unless we change the way we live and use the resources within them, the impacts of man would result in a crash –economically, socially, physically and environmentally (Girardet 2008).

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man’s attitude towards nature is today critically important because we have now acquired a fateful power to destroy nature. But man is part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

Rachel Carson (1962)

We are at a turning point. The multitude and magnitude of disasters affecting the world today is hard to go unnoticed and both our anthropocentric and biocentric environments have to respond in new and more dynamic ways. One of the terms given to landscapes that have been affected by a natural or human induced disaster is crisis landscapes. This chapter intends to define what is meant by crisis landscapes for the purpose of this study.

Definition of crisis

According to the majority of dictionary definitions the word crisis can be identified as meaning a crucial or decisive moment or situation, at a point of time, of great danger or difficulty. The word crisis is apparently derived from the Greek meaning 'turning point', and should strictly refer to a moment rather than a continuing process, so that uses such as a prolonged economic crisis are strictly speaking self-contradictory (Fowlers modern English dictionary 2012). However, while many crises are started from rapid onset events, there are conditions that still lead to a crisis but have less clear start and end points. While there is less clarity of these points in time it doesn’t mean it isn’t a crisis (Glantz 1994).

The Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management see a crisis as a situation of complex systems, such as family, economic, societal and environmental systems, and ‘when the system functions badly an immediate decision is necessary to stop further disintegration of the system, but the causes of the dysfunction are not necessarily known’. Venette (2003) argues that ‘crisis is a process of transformation where the old system can no longer be maintained’ backing up Seegar, Sellnow and Ulmer’s (1998) theory that of their four defining characteristics of a crisis, one is the need for change.

Crisis linked to opportunity
Whilst there is much debate over its true meaning many people believe that the Chinese ideogram for crisis is made up of two character symbols, one that translates as danger and the other that translates as opportunity. An opportunity is a situation, which makes it possible to do something that you want to do, or the possibility of doing something (Cambridge dictionary).

Mair, (2009) a professor in Chinese literature, has ridiculed the translation stating that a crisis ‘is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one’s skin and neck! Any would-be guru who advocates opportunism in the face of crisis should be run out of town on a rail, for his / her advice will only compound the danger of the crisis’. He believes it is ‘muddled thinking’ that lures people into a false sense of security in believing that they can benefit from unstable situations.

However Bast (1999) believes that humans grow emotionally and spiritually from crises and in her experience doesn’t believe that just because we could benefit from a crisis we would welcome one. Humans may feel that the experience of a crisis can turned around into a positive outcome as it has caused them to stop and look at what really matters in a relatively short lifetime.

Although the debate into the actual true meaning of crisis continues, the notion that opportunity can present itself out of a crisis is widely accepted. Olshansky and Johnson’s (2008) research identified that the recovery from a crisis offers some intriguing opportunities for positive change. For the purpose of this dissertation crisis is to be defined as a turning point, a time when change has to occur, derived from an event that has either a sudden onset or a set gradual conditions. 

Residents refuse to pay council tax

On September 26 2012 residents in a Lancashire village are threatening to withhold their council tax after claiming blocked drains added to flooding problems.

David Shaw, from Hambleton, said there have been drain problems on Sherbourne Road for the past six months. Water levels reached 2ft (60cm) in part of the street leading to human waste and rats in his front garden.

Lancashire County Council's Rick Hayton said drainage systems had "struggled to cope" with the severe weather.

"I've only had three hours sleep worrying if the water was going to come through," said Mr Shaw.

Residents from around half a dozen houses which were vulnerable kept flooding at bay with sandbags and boards nailed to their front doors.

"It's been an ongoing problem for six to eight months. We've contacted the council several times but nothing has happened," he added.

He said residents in the street had joined together planning to withhold part of their council tax.

'Rats and faeces'

"This is a situation where it could destroy homes", said Mr Shaw.

"As soon as it got dark the rats were running up and down the road because they had nowhere to go - but the worst part was when the manholes were lifted up and the faeces came out."

Mr Hayton said the rainfall had been "exceptional and drainage systems have, in many cases, struggled to cope with the large volumes of surface water".

"Lancashire County Council's highways services have been working around the clock to deal with a high volume of incidents across Wyre and the rest of the county," he said.

"We will be liaising with all of our partners, including the Environment Agency, Wyre Borough Council and United Utilities, to investigate exactly what happened in Hambleton and to look at any improvements that can be made.

"We share residents' concerns about flooding in this area and will work with them and other partners to improve the situation."

The flooding has seen the cancellation of trains between Blackpool North and Preston because of a landslide at Weeton and there are delays between Preston and Lancaster.

The Environment Agency has put five flood warnings and 11 flood alerts in place around the region. It is advising people to use sandbags to protect their properties. Heavy downpours across England have resulted in homes being evacuated, disruption to train services and school closures while many roads have been closed.