Armageddon, USA

WIRED magazine story Welcome to Armageddon, USA

In the latest issue of WIRED, the article Welcome to Armageddon, USA exposes the story of Picher, Oklahoma, a town shut down by industry and contamination. The mining of lead and zinc contaminated the land to a point where it was no longer suitable to live. It reminds me of the very public controversy of the love canal in the 1970's. In the situation of the love canal, chemical waste was buried beneath the grade to reveal itself decades later.

Love Canal in 1995 by MotionBlurStudios

Ben Paynter, writer for WIRED, points out that "for all the famed cities with thousands of years of continuity - Paris, London, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Istanbul - most cities just stop. Picher isn't simply another boomtown gone bust. It's emblematic of what happens when a modern city dies: A few people say behind, trying to hold on to what they can. They are the new homesteaders, trying to civilize a wasteland at the end of the world."

These towns and cities that have seen the end of one generation of industry and are struggling so hard while wounded to carry on to the next phase are displaced and detached from the connected socio and economic flows. These places are the remnants of what was once useful and now unbearable to many as they simply walk away. How can these sites be fostered and remediated for those radicals who find themselves in solitude? Is there a way to bring back a life to the city, expand the possibilities of what the space was from before while also being able to nurse back to health the land and place to a richer and more fruitful ecology?

While the Love Canal is now a barren neighborhood with sidewalks that lead to nothingness, and Picher, OK is a hostile town fallen apart with no one to pick up the pieces, there are terrains of flight or fight that situate the opportunities for interventions calling for a new generation and definition of a place, waiting to be put back together.