Alternative Worlds: Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900 (Cultural History and Literary Imagination) [New ed.] 9783034317870, 9783035306736, 3034317875

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C ultural H istor y an d L it e rar y I m agination

Following a roughly chronological order from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present, this book explores the dreams, plans and hopes as well as the nightmares and fears that are an integral part of alternative thinking in the Western hemisphere. The alternative worlds at the centre of the individual essays can each be seen as crucial to the history of the past one hundred years. While these alternative worlds reflect their particular cultural context, they also inform historical developments in a wider sense and continue to resonate in the  present.

Ricarda Vidal is a lecturer, curator and translator and teaches cultural studies at King’s College London. Her monograph Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms (Peter Lang Oxford, 2013) examines the fascination with speed and the car crash in cultural production. She has also co-edited a collection of essays on contemporary approaches to death, The Power of Death (2014). She is currently exploring the impact of macro-engineering on the cultural imagination as well as leading a research and exhibition project into the theory and practice of translation within the fine arts and literature, ‘Translation Games’. Ingo Cornils is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on German science fiction, the German student movement and Hermann Hesse. Recent volumes include Memories of 1968: International Perspectives (2010, with Sarah Waters), A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse (2009) and Baader–Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism (2008, with Gerrit-Jan Berendse). He is currently writing a monograph on the construction of ‘1968’ in Germany.

Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils (eds) • Alternative Worlds

In an attempt to counteract the doom and gloom of the economic crisis and the politicians’ overused dictum that ‘there is no alternative’, this interdisciplinary collection presents a number of alternative worlds that were conceived over the course of the last century. While change at the macro level was the focus of most of the ideological struggles of the twentieth century, the real impetus for change came from the blue-sky thinking of scientists, engineers, architects, sociologists, planners and writers, all of whom imagined alternatives to the status  quo.

Alternative Worlds Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900

R icar d a V i d al an d I ngo C ornils ( e d s )

ISBN 978-3-0343-1787-0

www.peterlang.com

Peter Lang

C ultural H istor y an d L it e rar y I m agination

Following a roughly chronological order from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present, this book explores the dreams, plans and hopes as well as the nightmares and fears that are an integral part of alternative thinking in the Western hemisphere. The alternative worlds at the centre of the individual essays can each be seen as crucial to the history of the past one hundred years. While these alternative worlds reflect their particular cultural context, they also inform historical developments in a wider sense and continue to resonate in the  present.

Ricarda Vidal is a lecturer, curator and translator and teaches cultural studies at King’s College London. Her monograph Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms (Peter Lang Oxford, 2013) examines the fascination with speed and the car crash in cultural production. She has also co-edited a collection of essays on contemporary approaches to death, The Power of Death (2014). She is currently exploring the impact of macro-engineering on the cultural imagination as well as leading a research and exhibition project into the theory and practice of translation within the fine arts and literature, ‘Translation Games’. Ingo Cornils is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on German science fiction, the German student movement and Hermann Hesse. Recent volumes include Memories of 1968: International Perspectives (2010, with Sarah Waters), A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse (2009) and Baader–Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism (2008, with Gerrit-Jan Berendse). He is currently writing a monograph on the construction of ‘1968’ in Germany.

Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils (eds) • Alternative Worlds

In an attempt to counteract the doom and gloom of the economic crisis and the politicians’ overused dictum that ‘there is no alternative’, this interdisciplinary collection presents a number of alternative worlds that were conceived over the course of the last century. While change at the macro level was the focus of most of the ideological struggles of the twentieth century, the real impetus for change came from the blue-sky thinking of scientists, engineers, architects, sociologists, planners and writers, all of whom imagined alternatives to the status  quo.

Alternative Worlds Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900

R icar d a V i d al an d I ngo C ornils ( e d s )

 

www.peterlang.com

Peter Lang

Alternative Worlds

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY VOL. 22

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Alternative Worlds Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900 Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils (eds)

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiblio­ grafie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Vidal, Ricarda, 1976Alternative worlds : blue-sky thinking since 1900 / Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-0343-1787-0 (alk. paper) 1. Forecasting. 2. Future, The. I. Cornils, Ingo. II. Title. CB158.V53 2014 003’.2--dc23 2014020203

Cover image: Herman Sörgel, Schaubild von Atlantropa (Map of Atlantropa), 1932 © Deutsches Museum Munich, archival signature: TZ 04602. ISSN 1660-6205 ISBN 978-3-0343-1787-0 (print) ISBN 978-3-0353-0673-6 (eBook) © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2015 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

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Introduction Part I  Shaping the Earth and the Sea

1 17

Ricarda Vidal

1 Atlantropa: One of the Missed Opportunities of the Future

19

Daniel Garcia-Castellanos and Ricarda Vidal

2 Alternative Mediterraneans Six Million Years Ago: A Model for the Future?

53

Philip E. Steinberg, Elizabeth A. Nyman and Mauro J. Caraccioli

3 Atlas Swam: Freedom, Capital and Floating Sovereignties in the Seasteading Vision Part II  The 1960s: Building the Future

73 105

Patricia Silva McNeill

4 The Last ‘City of the Future’: Brasília and its Representation in Literature and Film

107

Elena Solomides

5 The Post-War High-Rise: Promise of an Alternative World

129

vi

Christopher Daley

6 ‘The landscape is coded’: Visual Culture and the Alternative Worlds of J.G. Ballard’s Early Fiction

147

Part III  Alternative Lives

165

Maya Oppenheimer

7 Designed Surfaces and the Utopics of Rejuvenation

167

Boukje Cnossen

8

The Alternative World of Michel Houellebecq

197

Susanne Kord

9 From the American Myth to the American Dream: Alternative Worlds in Recent Hollywood Westerns

213

Marjolaine Ryley

10 Growing up in the New Age: A Journey into Wonderland?

235

Part IV  Outer Space

253

Peter Dickens

11 Alternative Worlds in the Cosmos

255

Ingo Cornils

12 Between Bauhaus and Bügeleisen: The Iconic Style of Raumpatrouille (1966)

283

Rachel Steward

13 Blue Sky Thinking in a Post-Astronautic Present

303

Notes on Contributors

329

Illustrations

Chapter 1 Figure 1 Herman Sörgel, Schaubild von Atlantropa (Map of Atlantropa), 1932 © Deutsches Museum Munich, archival signature: TZ 04602. Figure 2 Georg Ferber and Wilhelm Appel, aerial perspective of the New Genoa after the sea level has been lowered by 100 meters, 1932 © Deutsches Museum Munich, archival signature: TZ 04843. Figure 3 ‘Decline of the West – or Atlantropa as U-turn and new Goal’. Publicity material for Atlantropa, commissioned by Herman Sörgel with drawings by Georg Zimmermann. Herman Sörgel, Die drei großen ‘A’ (Munich: Piloty & Loehle, 1938), p. 42f, Fig. 20, 21. Figure 4 ‘A People without Space’ – ‘Space without a People’, Sörgel’s book Die drei großen ‘A’ (1938), p. 53.

19

23

28 36

Chapter 2 Figure 1 Landscape near Sorbas (Andalusia, Spain) © Daniel Garcia-Castellanos. Figure 2 Artistic representation of the geography of the western Mediterranean during the isolation of the Mediterranean about 5.5 million years ago. Drawing: Pau Bahí.

55

58

viii Illustrations

Figure 3 Valley excavated during the desiccation of the Mediterranean at the mouth of the Ebro River (Spain), as seen through the reflection of seismic waves. Author: Roger Urgelés. Figure 4 Geography of southern Spain and northern Africa during the period of restricted connections between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, ca. 5.5 million years ago. Artist: Manuel Mantero. Figure 5 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972–1976, photo: Wolfgang Volz © 1976 Christo.

59

62

68

Chapter 5 Figure 1 Ian Robinson, Russell, Crescents – Hulme, Manchester, 1978.

141

Chapter 10 Figure 1 Kev & Anna, Anerley, 1979 © Dave Walkling. Figure 2 81 Thicket Road and members of the commune © Dave Walkling. Figure 3 Growing up in the New Age: ‘Flower Child’ © Marjolaine Ryley. Figure 4 Growing up in the New Age: ‘Holy Man’ © Marjolaine Ryley.

244 244 247 250

Illustrations

Figure 5 Growing up in the New Age: ‘Mushrooms and Sandbags’ © Marjolaine Ryley. Figure 6 Growing up in the New Age: ‘Forbidden Fruit’ © Marjolaine Ryley. 

ix

250 250

Chapter 11 Figure 1 The Production of Space: Lefebvre’s Conceptual Triad. 256 Figure 2 ‘Dreadful Sanctuary’ by Chesley Bonestell (1949). Reproduced courtesy of Bonestell LLC. 260 Figure 3 ‘Saturn as seen from its satellite Titan’ by Chesley Bonestell (1950). Reproduced courtesy of Bonestell LLC. 261 Figure 4 ‘Lunar Expedition in Sinus Roris’ by Chesley Bonestell (1953). Reproduced courtesy of Bonestell LLC. 261 Figure 5 Wernher von Braun demonstrates a model Moon lander to Chesley Bonestell, c. 1952. Reproduced courtesy of Ron Miller. 262 Figure 6 Space Art at the Frontier. A poster for Mars Society, 2003–2004 conference. Reproduced courtesy of Gus Frederick.269 Figure 7 ‘The Journey’ by Pat Rawlings (1994). Reproduced courtesy of NASA. 271 Figure 8 ‘Pioneering the Space Frontier’ by Robert McCall (1986). Reproduced courtesy of McCall Studios. 272 Figure 9 Cover of Astounding Science Fiction, April 1939. Painted by Charles Schneeman. 277

x Illustrations

Chapter 12 Figure 1 The Orion. Film still from Raumpatrouille © Bavaria Film GmbH. Figure 2 On the Orion set © Bavaria Film GmbH. Figure 3 The Orion takes off. Film still from the opening sequence of Raumpatrouille © Bavaria Film GmbH. Figure 4 ‘Astro-design’. Film still from Raumpatrouille © Bavaria Film GmbH. Figure 5 The Orion crew. Film still from Raumpatrouille © Bavaria Film GmbH. Figure 6 Robots. Film still from Raumpatrouille © Bavaria Film GmbH.

286 288 289 294 296 298

Chapter 13 Figure 1 Still from Simon Faithfull’s ‘Escape Vehicle No. 6’ (2004).  Figure 2 The sky from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA. Figure 3 Wood engraving from The Atmosphere by Camille Flammarion (1888 edition).

306 306 306

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Introduction

In the spring of 2011, visual culture scholar Ricarda Vidal organised a seminar series at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study on the topic of ‘Alternative Worlds’. The series was conceived as an antidote to the then pervasive sense of gloom following the British government’s austerity drive in the wake of the global financial crash and as an opportunity to reflect on the many manifestations of ‘utopian desire’ in the twentieth century. The choice of the word ‘alternative’ rather than ‘utopian’ was deliberate, as it provided the freedom to step outside an established discourse. This volume is intended to bring the discussion to a wider audience. It is no secret that utopian thinking has been in crisis for some time. As early as the end of the 1970s, Frank and Fritzie Manuel mused: Are we witnessing a running down of the utopia-making machine of the West? Or is it only a temporary debility? Does the utopia of the counterculture herald an authentic rebirth? Must utopias henceforth be nothing but childish fairytales?1

Since then, utopian studies have become mainstream and have subsumed every ‘progressive’ political thought, practical action and literary imagination (including science fiction)2 under their paradigm. However, with the fall of communism and the rise of a global communication network utopians have been fighting a rear-guard action. Frederick Jameson acknow­ ledges the challenges faced by the utopian ‘programme’ but insists that the

1 2

Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, Cambridge: Harvard, 1979, 801. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, New York: Methuen, 1986.

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Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils

utopian ‘impulse’ for radical change remains the only proper response to global capitalism: Disruption is, then, the name for a new discursive strategy, and Utopia is the form such disruption necessarily takes. And this is now the temporal situation in which the Utopian form proper – the radical closure of a system of difference in time, the experience of the total formal break and discontinuity – has its political role to play, and in fact becomes a new kind of content in its own right. For it is the very principle of the radical break as such, its possibility, which is reinforced by the utopian form, which insists that its radical difference is possible and that a break is necessary. The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break.3

Similarly, Peter Thompson argues in his recent book on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope that the world continues to require radical change: In the context of the work of Ernst Bloch, the apparent loss of hope for change or improvement seems to have become a self-fulfilling and debilitating condition. […] [W]hat is at stake is not simply the daydream of how things could be better but the underlying principle of how things could be better and how hope functions in the world as a real latent force.4

Cultural critics like Jameson and Thompson maintain that unless we have an ideological superstructure to successfully create a better world, every effort to change, alter or improve it will be in vain. Thompson freely admits that humanity had taken a series of what he euphemistically terms ‘ideological or theological byways’, but claims that these were not always ‘blind alleys or dead ends’. While this may certainly be the case, several of the alternatives we are examining in this volume were thought up in deliberate opposition 3 4

Frederick Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 231–2. See also Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, London: Verso, 2010. Peter Thompson and Slavoj Zizek (eds), The Privatisation of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia, Duke University Press, 2013, 2–3.

Introduction

3

to ideology, and, in some cases, as outspoken alternatives to the essential unrealness of utopia. Henk de Berg challenges the utopians’ belief structure and points out that cultural critics like Jameson or Thompson have little or nothing to contribute to the real existing problems the world faces today. He describes utopian thinking as misguided at best, and dangerous at worst.5 Indeed, the fundamental problem with the concept of utopia, the perfectibility of mankind, the striving for an ideal, is that it tends to turn good intentions into dogma. No matter how much scholars protest that utopias are not about an ideal,6 that is exactly how the wider public perceives it. Yet the more we want to reach an ideal state and tell ourselves that it can be reached, the more we deceive ourselves. Umberto Eco observes: often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself. Out of a hope in a possible future, many people are prepared to make enormous sacrifices and maybe even die, led on by prophets, visionaries, charismatic preachers and spellbinders who fire the minds of their followers with the vision of a future heaven on Earth (or elsewhere).7

Utopian thinking, especially if it tends towards the grand ideologies, contains in it the seed of its own destruction.8 Following two world wars and the Cold War in the twentieth century, we have become wary of the utopian. This manifests itself in the increasing production of dystopian thought and writing. There is no shortage of utopia’s dark mirror, the dystopia. One look at recent science fiction films (Melancholia, dir. Lars von Trier, 2011; Hell, dir. Tim Fehlbaum, 2011; Prometheus, dir Ridley Scott, 2012; Cloud Atlas, dir. Tom Tykwer, Lana and Andrew Wachowski, 2013; Star 5 6 7 8

Henk de Berg, ‘Utopia and the End of History’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester (eds), Utopia: Social THeory and the Future, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, 7–32. Gregory Claeys, Searching for Utopia. The History of an Idea, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011, 12/13. Umberto Eco, The Book of Legendary Lands, London: Maclehose Press, 2013, 309/310. Gregory Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2010, xi.

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Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils

Trek: Into Darkness, dir. J.J. Abrams, 2013; Oblivion, dir Josef Kosinski, 2013; Elysium, dir. Neill Blomkamp, 2013; After Earth, dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 2013)9 would convince any observer that we do not seem to expect much from the future. If the ignominious demise of the grand utopian ideologies in the twentieth century has shaken our belief in collective fixes, the rapid global changes in trade, migration and communication have overtaken utopian thinking. The call for papers for the 2014 meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies puts it succinctly: ‘Utopias have nowhere left to hide in an era of global capital and information flows.’10 Similarly, a call for papers for the conference ‘Memories of the Future’ observes that the utopian imagination increasingly looks to the past for inspiration: From our current ‘after the future’ position, where utopias have been crushed under the awareness that ‘the myth of the future is rooted in modern capitalism’ (Bifo), our imagination persistently draws on an extensive repository of symbols, forms and technologies rooted in history, imagination and memory.11

In her book Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (2013), Davina Cooper suggests that utopian projects are increasingly attempted on a smaller scale. Yet herein lies the problem. Can we still subsume the ‘utopian desire’ under the umbrella of utopianism when it has been privatised and emasculated?12 This volume proposes a break with the traditional (often ideologically driven) understanding of the utopian by exploring the dreams, plans and hopes, but also the nightmares and fears, reflected in alternative thinking in the Western hemisphere in the twentieth century. It attempts a paradigm 9 10 11 12

Cp. James Walters, Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance between Realms, Bristol: Intellect, 2008. [accessed 10 April 2014]. [accessed 10 April 2014]. Cp. Michael Hviid Jacobsen, ‘Zygmunt Baumann on the Transformation of Utopia’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester (eds), Utopia: Social THeory and the Future, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, 69–96.

Introduction

5

shift from utopian to alternative thinking, an acknowledgment that we have not and do not live in the best possible world, but that it is up to individuals, not ideologies, to effect change and experiment with alternatives. In German-speaking countries, examples of alternative thinking are the Lebensreform movement and the eccentric Monte Verità experiment in the first decade of the twentieth century,13 creative imaginaries in the form of the futuristic novel (Zukunftsroman) in the 1920s and 1930s, and the alternative lifestyle movement from the 1960s onwards, which encompassed, amongst other things, multicultural milieus, organic food, environmentally friendly transport choices, cohabitation patters and a favouring of sustainable energies,14 all of which had entered the global mainstream by the end of the century. In the UK, the alleged homeland of ‘eccentrics’, we might mention educational experiments such as Summerhill, agricultural ventures such as John Middleton Murry’s Community Farm,15 architectural experiments like the Italianate village Portmeirion or the popular television series The Good Life (1975–78), while in the US alternative thinking is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and manifests itself in a vast variety of denominations, types of universities and architectural styles. In the art world ‘Alternative Worlds’ have had a recent boost with exhibitions on architectural alternative thinking at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (‘L’Architecture Engagée: Manifeste zur Veränderung der Gesellschaft’ [‘Engaged Architecture: Manifestos for Changing Society’], 14 June to 2 September 2012), on alternative artistic worlds in the Hayward Gallery in London (‘An Alternative Guide to the Universe’, 11 June to 26 August 2013) and a large presence of so-called ‘alternative art’ at the 55th Venice Biennale (1 June to 24 November 2013). Held in popular institutions with huge international audiences these exhibitions reflect not only 13 14 15

See Anders Leben, Wilder denken, freier leben, grüner wohnen. Jugendbewegung und Lebensreform in Deutschland um 1900, ZEIT Geschichte 2/2013. Cp. Sven Reichardt/Detlef Siegfried (eds), Das Alternative Milieu. Antibürgerlicher Lebensstil und linke Politik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Europa 1968–83, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010. John Middleton Murry, Community Farm, 1952. See also Dennis Hardy, Utopian England: Community Experiments 1900–45, London: Routledge, 2000.

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Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils

art-historical developments but also wider cultural moods and trends. It is telling that the theme for the 2013 Biennale, ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’, should be adopted from a highly idiosyncratic artwork by the largely unknown self-taught American artist Marino Auriti. Auriti spent several years constructing a maquette of his ‘Encyclopedic Palace’ (1955), a gigantic museum which was to house all the knowledge of the world past and future and which would stand as a symbol to freedom and world peace. As Massimiliano Gioni, curator of the 55th Biennale, writes: [T]he dream of universal, all-embracing knowledge crops up throughout the history of art and humanity, as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many other artists, writers, scientists, and self-proclaimed prophets who have tried often in vain, to fashion an image of the world that will capture its infinite variety and richness. These personal cosmologies, with their delusions of omniscience, shed light on the constant challenge of reconciling the self with the universe, the subjective with the collective, the specific with the general, and the individual with the culture of her time. Today, as we grapple with a constant flood of information, such attempts seem even more necessary and even more desperate.16

In particular the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, but also the Venice Biennale, contained works which were never conceived as artworks but fell more squarely within the realm of so-called fringe science. While it is questionable why these works were shown within the framework of an art exhibition, they certainly fit the overall theme of the production of alternative knowledge. The Hayward exhibition, just as the Biennale and the show in Munich, answered a popular demand for alternative ways of perceiving and approaching the world – ways, which are, more often than not, independent of ideology or politics but have been created simply by adopting a new position which allows a view of the world from a fresh angle. Of course, alternative thinking can be instrumentalised just as easily as utopian thinking. The American National Intelligence Council recently published its report ‘Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds’.17 In this 16 17

Massimiliano Gioni, ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’, [accessed 4 June 2014]. [accessed 14 April 2014].

Introduction

7

context, alternative thinking denotes a creative engagement with geopolitical challenges at personal, communal, national and international levels in order to pinpoint and prepare for challenges to American national security. Thus, the Global Trends 2030 report anticipates four scenarios or ‘alternative worlds’: The present recalls past transition points – such as 1815, 1919, 1945, and 1989 – when the path forward was not clear-cut and the world faced the possibility of different global futures. We have more than enough information to suggest that however rapid change has been over the past couple of decades, the rate of change will accelerate in the future. Accordingly, we have created four scenarios that represent distinct pathways for the world out to 2030: Stalled Engines, Fusion, Gini Out-of-the-Bottle, and Nonstate World. As in previous volumes, we have fictionalized the scenario narratives to encourage all of us to think more creatively about the future. We have intentionally built in discontinuities, which will have a huge impact in inflecting otherwise straight linear projections of known trends. We hope that a better understanding of the dynamics, potential inflection points, and possible surprises will better equip decision makers to avoid the traps and enhance possible opportunities for positive developments.18

At this macro-level, the possible futures are imagined, but not necessarily available as simple choices. Rather, the point for decision makers in the security sector engaging with these futures is that it allows them the space to think through their desirability and the extent to which they would be prepared to support or oppose them.19 Alternative thinking tends to lack mass appeal, and thrives on individuation – even if this is not always the desire of those who develop these new visions of the world. It seeks out the vestiges of alterity in an increasingly homogenous world.20 As much as the world around us has a direct impact

18 19

[accessed 14 April 2014], p. xii. Another unlikely proponent of alternative thinking is the British comedian and actor Russell Brand. The interview conducted by BBC Newsnight’s anchorman Jeremy Paxman has currently just short of 10 million views: . See also Russell Brand, ‘We deserve more from our democratic system’, in The Guardian, 5 November 2013. 20 Kevin Kelly, ‘Out of Control’, in The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, New York: Perseus 1994.

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Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils

on the individual (energy, architecture, municipal and personal space, outer space), it is the individual’s desire to live life according to his/her precepts, the defiant anti-authoritarian tenets of the 1960s, the hedonism of the 1980s and the opportunities of a global communication network, that fuel the imagination. Jay Winter called an individual who pursued this course a ‘minor utopian’: ‘a visionary without a blueprint of a future society in which social conflict no longer existed.’21 The chapters in this volume reflect and delineate this process and illustrate that searching for ‘alternative worlds’ is a human constant in the twentieth century. It is likely to remain so in the present one as well, challenging consensus reality with initiatives, often leading to dead ends, but just as often opening new perspectives and opportunities for the expression of our infinite curiosity.

In Praise of Blue-Sky Thinking This book celebrates some of the weird and wonderful attempts at alternative worlds, from the concrete personal choice to live in a London squat to the geopolitical vision of linking continents as an alternative to war. The message is, in spite of the litany of voices claiming ‘there is no alternative’, that we always have a choice. When we speak of ‘alternative worlds’ in the title of our book, we mean worlds that have been conceived as practically realisable alternatives rather than as utopian spaces of criticism. Even though the majority of alternative worlds at the focus of the essays in this collection are concerned with changing and improving the existing world, alternative worlds do not necessarily need to revolutionise, or even have any impact at all on existing society. They can be parallel worlds, solipsistic sanctuaries for individuals

21

Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom. Utopian Moments in the 20th Century, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006, 5.

Introduction

9

to realise their personal dreams. As such, they reflect our restless imagination, which drives us to create ever more complex schemes to escape the confines of our world. The alternative worlds at the focus of the individual essays in this volume can each be seen as crucial to the history of the past one hundred years. While each reflects its particular moment in time, they also inform historical developments in a wider sense and continue to resonate in present culture. Instead of presenting mere mind games, building and the concrete realisation of the dream are crucial to all of them – whether that means the restructuring of the Earth itself, the construction of a new capital, the creation of an alternative society on Earth or on Mars, or the physical preservation of youth. The tension of dream and reality, of fact and fiction, which characterises all of these challenges to the status quo, is also represented in the interdisciplinarity of the volume which brings together contributions from the sciences and the arts. Indeed, most of the contributors ignore the rift between the ‘two cultures’ and point towards a convergence of the aesthetics of science and the social impact of art. Thus, the essays in this collection do not only present a retrospective of past alternative worlds and their after-lives but also an invitation to look towards our possible futures. Alternative worlds can be found in surprising places. While some believe an alternative is possible in the here and now (Atlantropa, seasteading, the conquest of space), others believe that we must change ourselves before we can change the world. This sentiment, a product of the idealistic 1900s as well as the 1960s, has prompted much soul searching. Can we engineer an alternative world through architecture (Brasília, brutalism), by engineering ourselves (cosmetics and cosmetic surgery), or creating a New Man? The book is organised into four thematic parts. The first part focuses on the creation of an alternative world by literally reshaping Earth. Chapters 1 and 2 are concerned with the Mediterranean. In Chapter 1 visual culture scholar Ricarda Vidal examines the early twentieth-century plans of the German architect Herman Sörgel to create a super-continent between Africa and Europe, Atlantropa, in a bid to solve problems of over-population, declining natural resources and threatening military conflict. Chapter 2,

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co-written by Vidal and the earth-scientist Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, looks into the geophysical facts at the heart of Sörgel’s proposal and at the revival of his plans in recent years, when his original project was updated and recast as a possible antidote to global warming. At the core of Sörgel’s project lies the recreation of the geophysical state of a dried out Mediterranean valley, which he dated around 50,000 years ago (in fact, today’s more accurate techniques fix the date to around 6 million years ago) and constructed in terms of an almost mythical golden past. His aim to reconstruct the lost Mediterranean valley can in some ways be seen as a parallel to the regaining of a lost paradise which is to be recreated in the present. In the third chapter the geographers Philip E. Steinberg, Elizabeth A. Nyman and Mauro J. Caraccioli take us to the beginning of the twenty-first century and the Pacific Ocean. The chapter examines the capitalist utopia of seasteading, that is, a proposal backed by American libertarian financiers to build floating cities with detachable houses in international waters, which would allow inhabitants to form their own governments, rules and regulations. Where Herman Sörgel’s recreation of the Mediterranean set out to create nothing less than lasting world peace and prosperity for all, seasteading is driven by an almost solipsistic embrace of the individual and an idealised vision of entrepreneurship and pure capitalism unrestrained by the fetters of any welfare state. The authors argue that while seasteading is a highly speculative project it reflects attempts to resolve contradictions within capitalism: between, on the one hand, the need for order and planning and, on the other hand, the desire to foster and idolise individual freedom. Part II of the volume is concerned with the big constructions of planned cities and alternative housing estates of the 1960s, which were designed to reflect the new and bright future of the post-war period, where, in spite of the Cold War, architects suggested that technology could serve humans rather than destroy them. In Chapter 4 literary scholar Patricia Silva McNeill examines the utopian and dystopian aspects of Brasília by looking at responses to the city by the writer Clarice Lispector and the filmmaker Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. The brainchild of Lúcio Costa, Brasília embodied the dreams and hopes of a nation for a modern and democratic society based on order and progress. However, its construction

Introduction

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soon exposed the failures of utopian urban planning. This sense of failure is also addressed in the revisionist remarks of the architect, Oscar Niemeyer on the city’s fiftieth anniversary. Brasília was perhaps too much concerned with poetry and too little with the harshness of reality. In Chapter 5 the architect Elena Solomides takes us to post-war Britain and the big building boom of the 1960s, when inner-city slums were demolished in favour of well spaced out estates of high-rises, and the Modernist dream of living in the sky was about to be realised for the urban poor with the help of government funding. The chapter looks at the high-rise both as an alternative world in its own right and as part of an alternative Britain. While it traces the utopian beginnings of the building boom it also shows the inherent problems and weaknesses of the high-rise as a typology and examines the various transformations the buildings have undergone both in terms of their inhabitants and in terms of their public image. As in the case of Brasília, which could not match the lyrical ideals of its founders, the high-rises fell short of the aspirations of their architects. In both cases, the alternative world that emerges is different from the one that was originally envisaged. Chapter 6 also focuses on post-war Britain of the late 1950s and 1960s. Here literary scholar Christopher Daley examines a set of alternative worlds created by the writer J.G. Ballard as both a reflection of the times and an apocalyptic projection of the near future. Daley contextualises Ballard’s texts within the emerging consumer culture in Britain and draws parallels to developments within the visual arts, above all Surrealism, Pop Art and the influential This is Tomorrow show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1956. He traces Ballard’s particular vision of the near future as an alternative cultural landscape that is heavily indebted to Modernism, Pop Art and an American-style consumerism, with reference to the short story ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956), the ecological disaster novel The Drowned World (1962) and the Cold War story ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964). The third part of the book focuses on alternative lives. In this part, too, the 1960s, with their explosion of counter-culture movements and alternative communities, plays a strong part, though the four chapters that make up this section go beyond this particular time period and into our present and future.

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The section opens with a chapter by visual culture scholar Maya Oppenheimer, who identifies a present trend in visual and material culture towards preservation, both in the context of objects and bodies. She discusses a series of brief case studies of pertinent examples – safe-guarding objects and souvenirs of importance (freezing, chemical storage), the significance of placing objects under glass (museum cases, snow globes, photo frames) – before moving on to examine the application of the same preservation methods in the cosmetic industry and in cosmetic surgery. She observes that while we may collect object histories and respond to images of the past, to possess age is undesirable. The core of her chapter extends ideas of the above examples, meant to furnish an idealised past, and explores the contradictions that arise when we enliven these moments by taking the preserved body in the present into a utopics of the past via re-enactment (specifically amateur leisure practices). The theme of age and our fear of it are discussed further by literary scholar and journalist Boukje Cnossen in her chapter on the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose work she describes as characterised by a mixture of disturbing dystopia and romanticist utopia. In Chapter 8 Cnossen examines Houellebecq’s bitter critique of capitalism and advanced consumerism. In Houellebecq’s words the western world of the end of the twentieth century becomes a sinister playground for ‘une génération de kids définitifs’, in which ‘rights are no longer exclusively limited to the political and the economic’ and ‘sexual gratification becomes almost a civic duty’. Reminiscent of the obsession with recreating a perceived golden past, which is also discussed by Oppenheimer, Houellebecq’s characters nostalgically long for the lost values. Cnossen argues that the dynamics between this utopian romanticism, on the one hand and the dystopian cynicism, on the other, can be perceived through the model of an accelerated world, which speeds up further and further, until it collapses into standstill. Houellebecq’s fictional worlds can be read as a scathing criticism of contemporary society and yet, Cnossen ultimately finds that they also express hope for an alternative to the banal sameness of consumer-culture. In Chapter 9 film scholar Susanne Kord turns her gaze on the alternative worlds of cinema, in particular the mythical genre of the American

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Western. While previous chapters have engaged with the influence of American-style consumer culture on the West, we are now looking at the specifically American construction of the individual and the nuclear family and how these have changed over recent years. Kord analyses two recent popular Westerns, Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Tommy Lee Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005). She argues that in these films, the utopian myth of the lone male legend, which is traditionally associated with the Western, is gradually being replaced by a new myth, the ‘American Dream’ of the middle-class family, in which the lone legend is re-cast as family man and breadwinner. The old American frontier, as well, assumes a new dimension, moving from a utopian ‘frontier’ understood as the symbol of discovery, exploration, and Manifest Destiny, to a dystopian and defensive vision of a national border that must be protected against ‘illegals’. The chapter argues that both films indirectly show that legends are difficult to let go of, particularly if the myth that replaces them is as dreary as traditional family values and the American Dream. The section closes with a chapter by the artist Marjolaine Ryley. While the rest of the volume comprises scholarly texts, Ryley’s contribution takes a more informal, autobiographical and creative shape. At the core of her essay is her artistic research project ‘Growing up in the New Age’ (2011–12) that explores the alternative world of the 1960s hippie movement, from communes in the south of France, squatting in South London and ‘free school’ education to the many forays into all things ‘New Age’, set against the social and political context of the era. Using a range of approaches including photography, film, writing, collecting, re-using archival materials and the web, ‘Growing up in the New Age’ sets out to reconsider the social utopias of the 1960s and early 1970s and what we might learn from them today. Based on Ryley’s own experience and the memories of her parents, friends and acquaintances the project began to piece together an alternative world: an imaginary place akin to the childlike, psychedelic experiences of Alice in Wonderland, a magical but uncertain place fluctuating between a beautiful dream and a chilling nightmare. For this volume Ryley has combined reflections on her work ‘Growing up in the New Age’ with creative texts and reverie.

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The final part of the book takes us into outer space, even though, as some of the chapters in this section show, outer space can look remarkably like a 1960s domestic interior. In Chapter 11 the sociologist Peter Dickens discusses the pictorial construction of alternative worlds in the cosmos with close reference to the work of Chesley Bonestell and other space artists who, in close collaboration with NASA strategists, convinced the American public of an alternative future. Looking at a series of images from the 1950s to the present Dickens discusses these visual worlds within their social, political and ideological contexts and examines how they reflect developments in contemporary culture back on Earth. Literature and film scholar Ingo Cornils also focuses on the relationship between Earth and its reincarnations in the fictional alternative worlds in outer space. His chapter focuses on the German television science fiction series Raumpatrouille (‘Space Patrol’, 1966), which has long maintained a cult status in German-speaking countries, where it is celebrated on a par with the original Star Trek series broadcast in the same year. Much has been made of its underlying ideology by critics who saw in it an awkward melange of undigested Prussian and Nazi militarism and Cold War paranoia. Yet, as Cornils argues, to the viewers, the series communicated very different messages: a vision of a world where mankind is able to deal with the frontiers of the time, be it between genders or between nation-states. The visual style of the series is futuristic and functional, reflecting a collective desire at the time to escape the sense of claustrophobia pervading the post-war era and the ‘no experiments’ attitude of the conservative government. Heavy use of glass, metal, and extruded plastic suggests a conscious break with (conservative) tradition, a conscious link to Bauhaus clarity and an attempt to create transparency. Technology is the means by which unheard-of things are done, be it the ability to live at the bottom of the sea or the everyday task of travelling amongst the stars. Of particular interest in this chapter are the innovative solutions the series’ set designers came up with. Their heavy use of cutting-edge 1960s design and technology to envision an alternative world, just months before the cultural revolution of 1967/68 changed the world for real, suggests a rare moment of confidence. The section closes with a chapter by the visual culture scholar Rachel Steward, who focuses on the alternative worlds of space and their cinematic

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appearances. However, where the previous two chapters were concerned with the construction (and in some way also the colonisation) of worlds which were imagined to be located in the cosmos – light-years away and attainable only in the future – Steward speaks of a post-astronautic present. She is more concerned with the threshold where our sky meets outer space. The alternative worlds at the core of her study are firmly and knowingly located within reach of the Earth, whether this be the blue line of the Earth’s atmosphere as traversed by Simon Faithfull’s ridiculously domestic ‘escape vehicle’ (a chair tied to a weather balloon), the blue plastic dome of a painted sky in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1988), the sky- and cloud-reflecting surfaces of Jacques Tati’s ludic Paris in Play Time (1967) or the frozen arctic sea, which works as a stand-in for a distant planet in Werner Herzog’s Wild Blue Yonder (2005). While NASA has stopped its human space programme, and it is now left to unmanned space vehicles to explore the outer reaches of the universe, Steward posits that Earth itself with its promise of the blue sky has become a worthwhile destination for today’s grounded astronauts. In sum, this collection of essays offers a myriad of journeys into an alternative past and the future, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific Ocean, from Brasília to London and on to outer space, from science to literature and art. We hope that some of these journeys will not only inform but also inspire the reader to remain alert to the dynamics of alternative thinking in our globalised world.

Bibliography ‘Anders Leben. Wilder denken, freier leben, grüner wohnen. Jugendbewegung und Lebensreform in Deutschland um 1900’, ZEIT Geschichte 2 (2013). de Berg, Henk, ‘Utopia and the End of History’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester (eds), Utopia: Social THeory and the Future (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Claeys, Gregory, Searching for Utopia. The History of an Idea (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011).

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Cooper, Davina, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013). Eco, Umberto, The Book of Legendary Lands (London: Maclehose Press 2013). Gioni, Massimiliano, ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’, [accessed 4 June 2014]. Gordon, Michael D., Helen Tilley and Gyan Prakash (eds), Utopia/Dystopia. Conditions of Historical Possibility (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Hardy, Dennis, Utopian England: Community Experiments 1900–45 (London: Routledge, 2000). Hviid Jacobsen, Michael, ‘Zygmunt Baumann on the Transformation of Utopia’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester (eds), Utopia: Social theory and the future (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 69–96. Jameson, Frederick, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005). Kelly, Kevin, Out of Control. The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (New York: Perseus, 1994). Manuel, Frank E., and Fritzie P., Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). Moylan, Tom, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1986). Reichardt, Sven, and Detlef Siegfried (eds), Das Alternative Milieu. Antibürgerlicher Lebensstil und linke Politik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Europa 1968–83 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010). Thompson, Peter, and Slavoj Zizek (eds), The Privatisation of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Walters, James, Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance between Realms (Bristol: Intellect, 2008). Winter, Jay, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). Wright, Erik Olin, Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso, 2010).

Websites [accessed 10 April 2014]. [accessed 14 April 2014]. [accessed 10 April 2014].

Part I

Shaping the Earth and the Sea

Ricarda Vidal

1 Atlantropa: One of the Missed Opportunities of the Future

If we can imagine it, we’ll probably be able to do it. — Margaret Atwood I love those who strive for the impossible.

— Goethe, Faust II

Figure 1:  Herman Sörgel, Schaubild von Atlantropa (Map of Atlantropa), 1932. Note the dams at the Dardanelles and Gibraltar as well as the land connection between the Italian peninsula and Sicily. The Gibraltar dam would be built across the shallowest, rather than the shortest, part of the Straits. It curves gently from Tarifa in Spain to Tanger in Morocco across a stretch of 23 km. The city of Tarifa and some of the adjacent land would be destroyed in the process of the construction. © Deutsches Museum Munich, archival signature: TZ 04602.

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In the spring of 1928, a Spanish newspaper published an article by the German architect Herman Sörgel which proposed the creation of a Eurafrican super continent by building dams across the Strait of Gibraltar and the Dardanelles and partially desiccating the Mediterranean Sea (see Figure 1). The dams would contain vast hydroelectric power plants which would provide power for the entirety of the new continent. Initially called Panropa and later renamed Atlantropa, the new continent was presented as the solution to European problems of over-population, unemployment, lack of natural resources, and a limited energy supply. Though Atlantropa was based on a racist colonialist world system where a unified white Europe would control the African continent and its resources, Sörgel saw the creation of the super continent as key to world peace. He vigorously promoted his project until his death in 1952, with exhibitions, posters, talks, articles, journals, radio programs, films, and even an Atlantropa Symphony. He edited his own newspaper, the Atlantropa Mitteilungen, and established an Atlantropa Institute in Munich. During Sörgel’s lifetime thousands of articles about Atlantropa (many written by Sörgel himself or by his supporters) appeared in newspapers and specialist journals across Europe and beyond. Even though Sörgel failed to get enough political and financial commitment from any government to start construction on the project, Atlantropa was seriously discussed by engineers and architects as well as by politicians and journalists, before it was finally dismissed as unfeasible in the mid-1950s. The fact that Sörgel’s audacious plan to redesign the Earth was taken seriously by so many of his contemporaries speaks of an unflinching trust in the powers of technology and a firm belief in (wo)man’s ability and right to create the world anew. It was also an expression of the need to believe in an alternative world, an earthly paradise fashioned by engineers. In this chapter I will briefly present Sörgel’s plans for a restructured world before focusing on his expert mixing of science fact and science fiction, which allowed him to promote his project over decades and helped him win so many supporters and to inspire reactions from architects, engineers, artists and writers during his lifetime and until today. I will draw on the writings of Alexander Gall and Wolfgang Voigt as much as on my own research in the extensive Atlantropa archive at the Deutsche Museum in

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Munich.1 Where Gall and Voigt focused on the historico-cultural context I will explore Atlantropa from a visual-culture perspective with a focus on Sörgel’s use of myth and fiction before looking at the project’s afterlives in two recent artist films. The following chapter, written in collaboration with the Earth-scientist Daniel Garcia-Castellanos will address the geophysical realities of the formation of the Mediterranean and the scientific facts at the basis of Sörgel’s plan as well as possible future continuations of the original plan.

The Plan2 Above I have already mentioned the construction of the dams at Gibraltar and the Dardanelles. Sörgel believed that it would take no more than fifteen years for the dams to be built and for the hydropower plants inside to start producing energy. He correctly assumed that once the influx from the Atlantic and the Black Sea was stopped, the Mediterranean Sea would slowly but steadily evaporate.3 After the water level had fallen by 100 meters,

1

2

3

See Alexander Gall, Das Atlantropa Projekt: Die Geschichte einer gescheiterten Vision. Herman Sörgel und die Absenkung des Mittelmeers (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 1998) and ‘Atlantropa: A Technological Vision of a United Europe’, in Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser (eds), Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850–2000 (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2006), 99–128, as well as Wolfgang Voigt, Atlantropa: Weltbauen am Mittelmeer; Ein Architektentraum der Moderne (Hamburg: M.A.T. Music Theme Licensing GmbH, 2007). My summary is based on Sörgel’s books Atlantropa (Munich: Piloty & Loehle, 1932) and Die drei großen A (Munich: Piloty & Loehle, 1938) as well as the many newspaper articles about Atlantropa and the hundreds of plans, maps and drawings, which are collected in the archives of the Deutsche Museum Munich (DMM) (preliminary No. NL092). For more recent research which confirms Sörgel’s claims, see Kenneth J. Hsu, The Mediterranean Was a Desert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

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a land bridge would emerge between the Italian peninsula and Sicily and the gap between Sicily and Tunisia would be narrow enough to build an additional dam and hydropower plant, thus resulting in two Mediterranean basins. Detailed plans for the dams and their power plants were drawn up by renowned architects and engineers. Plans for the Gibraltar dam also included an Atlantropa National Park designed by Peter Behrens and Alexander Popp, which was to include monuments to the values of Atlantropa, landscaped gardens, nature and wetlands conservation areas, as well as hotels and recreational facilities. Behrens, co-founder of the German Werkbund and famous for his industrial glass and steel structures, also designed a gigantic high-rise for the locks at the Gibraltar dam, which was to become the administrative centre of the dam, and was above all meant as a powerful symbol of the new continent. While the water level in the Western basin would not be lowered any further, the Eastern basin would be drained by another 100 meters. Based on contemporary research into the seabed of the Mediterranean and on measurements undertaken by the Swiss engineer Bruno Siegwart these calculations yielded the maximum of new land, that is, 660,200 km², while ensuring that the Mediterranean remained navigable. The process of desiccation would be speeded up by pumping seawater into the Sahara where it could be used for irrigation and making the desert arable.4 A network of roads and railways with bridges across the three dams would be built to link the two continents together and ensure smooth travel along the intercontinental trade routes. Sörgel calculated that it would take approximately a century to create the new geography, during which the old harbour towns would gradually expand onto the new land as it emerged from the sea. This gradual expansion was carefully planned along 4

While Sörgel was certainly aware that seawater would have to be desalinated to be of any use for irrigation, a note from Albert Einstein lets us assume that his earliest plans for the irrigation of the Sahara did not include any provision for desalination. On 5 June 1929 Einstein wrote to Sörgel: ‘I noted the following in your article […] as far as I know seawater is unsuitable for the irrigation of agriculture.’ See letter by Albert Einstein to Herman Sörgel, 5 June 1929, DMM, preliminary No. NL092/0446, my translation.

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the lines of Modernist urban theories. Many of the renowned architects of the time were attracted to the challenge of Atlantropa, which also held the promise of the tabula rasa – uncontested and seemingly unlimited virgin land on which to build cities from scratch. Besides those already named above and, of course, Sörgel himself, the list of architects who were actively engaged in designing new towns and buildings for Atlantropa included Hans Poelzig, Hans Döllgast, Lois Welzenbacher, Erich Mendelsohn and Fritz Höger, amongst others.

Figure 2:  Georg Ferber and Wilhelm Appel, aerial perspective of the New Genoa after the sea level has been lowered by 100 meters, 1932 © Deutsches Museum Munich, archival signature: TZ 04843.

The plan for the New Genoa by the Munich architects Ferber and Appel is typical of the new cities for Atlantropa (see Figure 2): where the old coastline was, a saltwater lake has been created which is connected to the new town and the new coastline via a network of canals. Thus some of the character of the old seaport can be preserved as the coastline recedes. Sörgel planned a similar solution for Venice, albeit on a much

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larger scale. In order to preserve the historic town, which would have been some 400 km inland after the lowering of the sea level, he suggested the creation of an artificial lagoon which should be so big that one would have the illusion of the open sea from the campanile on Saint Mark’s. To return to the New Genoa: while the old town becomes a historic site (and likely future tourist attraction – just like Venice), the new town that would spring up along the new sea front would be laid out along wide streets, which would be dedicated to the speed of transport and progress, lined by modern buildings with the light and air promised by Le Corbusier’s City of Tomorrow. The design for Genoa combines elements from the radial city as well as the garden city. Its layout with its central monumental axes and radiating streets anticipates much of Niemeyer and Costa’s design for Brasília, the focus of Patricia Silva McNeill’s chapter in the present volume. In fact, Brasília would not have been out of place in the new Mediterranean. While Sörgel believed that he would eventually find approval and support from the countries around the Mediterranean, he anticipated problems with the United Kingdom, which he felt was unlikely to give up its empire or integrate with the proposed European Union. Since the dam was going to cross the Strait of Gibraltar at the shallowest rather than the narrowest stretch (see Figure 1), it would be possible to build it without British cooperation. Further, Sörgel planned the construction of a canal through France, the ‘canal des deux mers’ from Bordeaux to Toulouse and Narbonne, so that the Atlantic would be connected with the Mediterranean and ships could travel from Northern Europe directly to Southern Europe without having to travel around Spain and pass through Gibraltar. Thus Sörgel hoped to break British sovereignty in the Mediterranean and believed that the UK would eventually ‘be forced to give up its politics of “splendid isolation”, join the continent and build the Dover–Calais dam or tunnel.’5

5

Sörgel 1932, 93, my translation.

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Apart from minor changes and continuous updates, the plans for the restructuring of the Mediterranean, which Sörgel published in the book Atlantropa in 1932, remained more or less the same throughout the two decades he worked on the project. However, Sörgel was not only interested in the Mediterranean basin and the new land underneath the sea, but also in the African continent, to which he dedicated much of his time in the later 1930s. Apart from his plans for irrigating the Sahara he also proposed to dam the Congo and create a gigantic sweet water lake of 900,000 km² in the Congo basin. A second giant sweet water resource would be created by connecting what he called the ‘Congo-sea’ with Lake Chad, which could be extended into a ‘sea’ of its own. Hydropower plants would be built both along the Congo and Chad ‘seas’ and produce more energy than the plant at Gibraltar. Sörgel also believed that the flooded Congo and Chad basins would work as a counter-balance to the loss of weight resulting from the desiccation of the Mediterranean. Further, he hoped that the creation of two large bodies of water in the centre of the African continent would result in a more moderate climate which would make life more pleasant for the European settlers. Africa, in other words, was to become an extension of Europe not just in the economic sense but also geologically and climatically. Once Europe’s surplus population had evenly spread out over the new supercontinent, Sörgel envisaged a harmonious and peaceful population of ‘Atlantropeans’. Reflecting the widespread distrust of politics of the times, he imagined that this new society would be brought about without the help of (war-mongering) politicians and rely first and foremost on the powers of technology to link communities and nations. As he put it in the verses of his Atlantropa Symphony: ‘Not with canons, but with turbines,/ not with deceit or murder:/with dams and with machines/technology will win/and finally bring peace to all/with its liberating word.’6

6

Herman Sörgel, ‘Anregung zu einer Atlantropa Sinfonie (Friedens-Sinfonie)’, Atlantropa Archive, DMM, TZ04785, my translation.

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Water Power and World Peace Bearing in mind the racism and colonialism that mark the plans for Africa, it is difficult to see Atlantropa as a project for peace. However, in the war-torn Europe of the first half of the twentieth century it was primarily conceived and perceived as such. Originating in late 1920s Germany in the throes of the world economic crisis when the atrocities of the Great War were still fresh in everyone’s mind, and developed in the 1930s when the next bloody conflict became increasingly inevitable, it was first and foremost meant as an antidote to war. The particular atmosphere of 1920s and 1930s Munich, where Sörgel lived, also provided some impetus. After all, this was the city where Hitler had his first great successes and the Nazis gained support at a pace which made Sörgel’s call for peace increasingly urgent. The general attitude towards technology in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s, and in particular during the Great Depression, was divided, with cultural pessimists bedevilling technology and advocating a neoromantic return to nature. At the same time, however, technology was painted as a way out of the crisis.7 Like many of his contemporaries (e.g. the engineers Eugen Diesel or Heinrich Hardensett), Sörgel continued to believe in the beneficial traits of technology even after the experience of the gigantic material battles of the Great War. Having seen what technology could do when employed for destruction he wondered what it could do if employed for construction. Wolfgang Voigt writes about ‘those architects who speak of “world construction” (“Weltbauen”) after 1918 – after the brutality of the world war,’ that they shared ‘a chiliastic hope, a longing for cosmic depth, a technology liberated from misuse and an undeterred pacifist mindset.’8 Sörgel read the ideas put forth by the American Technocratic Society, which had been formed in the 1920s with the aim of establishing a harmonious and equal society on the basis of technology. In 1933 he wrote the foreword to the German edition of Wayne W. Parrish’s Outline of 7 8

See Gall 2006, 108. Voigt 2007, 29, my translation.

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Technocracy. However, while he endorsed the Technocrats’ vision of the engineer as (world) leader and coincided largely with their distaste for capitalism and general criticism of the current state of affairs, he was disappointed by the lack of a practically realisable programme. Moreover, he believed that more than the belief in a high-minded ideal was needed to dissuade the European peoples from fighting each other. What was needed was a ‘work of peace so great that no war finds energies, brought about by the medium of modern and future technology which links the peoples to each other through sheer necessity and need!’9 Sörgel evokes the fear of war again and again in his publications on Atlantropa, which are haunted by images, metaphors and symbols of dystopia. He was deeply impressed by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918), from which he adopted the idea that the occident was past its cultural peak and heading towards destruction. This finds powerful expression in two posters which juxtapose an image of a burning exploding Europe above an empty black African continent with a drawing of a peaceful Eurafrican union under a protective glass dome (see Figure 3). The two images are the final two of a series of five large posters which trace the history of Europe from the origin of mankind via the discovery of technology to the disproportionate growth of the populations and, via the clash of the First World War, to the present situation, where Europe appears once again on the brink of war. The slogan that runs across the two images in Figure 3 reads: ‘Decline of the West – or Atlantropa as U-turn and new Goal’. According to Voigt, Spengler was less than pleased about Sörgel’s interpretation of his theory.10 After all, he hardly embraced technology, but saw it as the root cause of evil and main reason for the downfall of Western civilisation. While he hails the engineer as the ‘knowing priest of the machine’ and as ‘the true master and destiny of technology’ who will be able to find new solutions for the declining coal resources and ensure the continuation of industrialised society, Spengler heavily criticised engineers

9 10

Herman Sörgel, Die drei großen ‘A’ (Munich: Piloty & Loehle, 1938), 8, my emphasis, my translation. Voigt 2007, 21.

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Figure 3:  ‘Decline of the West – or Atlantropa as U-turn and new Goal’. Publicity material for Atlantropa, commissioned by Herman Sörgel with drawings by Georg Zimmermann. The images were used in several of Sörgel’s books, as slides for presentations and as posters for various exhibitions. Herman Sörgel, Die drei großen ‘A’ (Munich: Piloty & Loehle, 1938), p. 42f, Fig. 20, 21.

for propagating a society in which ‘power and performance would take the place of person and object.’11 Spengler anticipates and discredits the proposals of the Technocrats and their vision of society as a complex machine which would work best if the human element were reduced to administrating energy.12 In his reading of Spengler’s book, Sörgel seems to have blended out the criticism and focused instead on the appellation of the engineer as

11 12

Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, Vol. II (Munich: C.H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1924, 43rd–49th edition), 626f., my translation. See Frank Arkright, The ABC of Technocracy (London and New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers), 1933.

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‘Faustian inventor’ and ‘priest of the machine’.13 In Sörgel’s writing, these terms, which had a decidedly negative connotation in Spengler’s work, become wholly positive, even celebratory. In the pre-nuclear time of the 1920s and 1930s the quest for renewable energy resources was as topical as it is now when we long for a post-nuclear age. One was aware that oil and coal were limited and that resources would soon be depleted if industrialisation continued at the present pace. Playing on these fears, Sörgel posits the renewable resource of water power as the only solution to the pending energy crisis and the military conflict he saw as the direct result of the crisis. In his book Die drei großen A (The three big As, 1938) he again juxtaposes two images: one shows a map of Europe with each country enclosed by walls with the caption ‘The predator “man”. Europe is a huge cage with individual cells.’ On the following image the borders are gone and Europe and Africa are connected by a vast energy web. It is titled ‘Instead of separating walls: connecting power cables!’ Repeating again the notion that Europe can only be unified through sheer necessity and need, a caption underneath the first image warns ‘Anyone who dares to leave his cage for the sake of a mere beautiful idea would be the prey of the others.’14 On the page following the illustrations, Sörgel writes with understandable urgency: The vast energy supply net across all of Europe and North Africa, which will be enabled by the hydroelectric power plant at Gibraltar, will only reveal its true import after the next war, which will be instigated by ideology but decided by fuel, when we will be forced to exchange the combustion engine with the electric car, i.e. when white coal will finally have conquered black coal. Then we will want energy sources – electricity from hydropower – at any price! Then we will remember that the power of twelve Niagara Falls has been slumbering unused in the Strait of Gibraltar for many thousand years while the peoples slaughter each other for a few oil wells, that 240 million horse power is bound in the Congo alone, which is thoughtlessly wasted, while mankind’s technical ambitions are directed only towards self destruction.15

13 14 15

Spengler 1924, 626, my translation. Sörgel 1938, 91, my translation. Sörgel 1938, 92, my translation

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While the hydropower plants along the Mediterranean and on the Congo and Chad would solve the energy crisis and provide Europe with power for infinity, the land released from the sea and the newly restructured African continent would provide food for millions. Further, since the creation of Atlantropa entailed a massive building programme, it would also provide a solid and reliable source of employment for decades to come. Sörgel argued that if all European nations invested in the big building project of Atlantropa and everyone was dependent on the energy generated by the ‘United European Power Plants’ then no nation would be able to start a war without damaging their own economy. When power relations between Africa and Europe changed after the Second World War, Sörgel was quick to adapt his plan to the new situation, inviting the leaders of the emerging African nation-states to join the Atlantropa Institute. In the 1950s the list of members of the Institute included Senegal’s President Leopold Senghor and Superintendent Dagadu of Ghana. As already indicated above, Sörgel’s many publications profess a profound distrust of politics, which he saw as empty words, dangerous ideology or simply deceit and betrayal. Such scepticism towards politics was shared by many in the first half of the twentieth century. It is prevalent in Spengler’s work as well as in the dreams of the Technocrats. Hence Sörgel’s vision of a unified Europe was based on his belief in the powers of economy rather than politics – this conviction grew only stronger in the course of the twenty-five years he worked on Atlantropa. In 1950, he wrote in the Atlantropa Mitteilungen: The primacy of politics as Hitler proclaimed it, will be replaced by the primacy of economy. What really unites and unifies the peoples is not so much paper contracts as power and transport networks which bind them and make them dependent on one another, i.e. which force peace upon them […]. As long as there is no primacy of the economy, i.e. as long as economists and technicians don’t take the initiative neither effective construction nor creative production are possible.16

16

Herman Sörgel, Atlantropa Mitteilungen, 1950, No. 26, 3, my translation.

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Sörgel’s outspoken pacifism and his propaganda for a unified Europe in which Germany was not to play any particular role meant it became increasingly difficult for him to find governmental support or even acceptance for his work in Germany once the National Socialists had come to power. Hitler’s regime also objected to Sörgel’s proposed expansion into Africa, which ran counter to the efforts of Nazi propaganda to persuade Germans to back an invasion of Eastern Europe. In his desire to realise his project against all odds Sörgel even included a quote from Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a preamble to his 1938 book Die drei großen A and added the subtitle ‘Germany and Italy as the Womb of Atlantropa’ alongside some suggestive maps which featured the axis countries as dominating the new supercontinent. Still, since he continued to openly criticise the government’s war propaganda and called for peace, he was banned from publishing any further works in 1939. At the same time, however, he received encouragement from friends within the NSDAP and, in 1941, was able to found the Atlantropa Institute in Munich. Nonetheless progress on Atlantropa almost stalled during the war years.17 After the war, Atlantropa had a second spring. At its peak in 1950, the Atlantropa Institute had ca. 1200 members – with national and international backgrounds. Sörgel entered into conversations with the UN, which he envisaged as the controlling body for the ‘United European Power Plants’ with the power to switch off a nation’s power supply should it show aggression towards another state. The UN were briefly interested until nuclear power apparently solved the problem of renewable energy.18 As mentioned above, Sörgel and his collaborators wrote hundreds of articles about Atlantropa, but independent journalists were also quick to pick up on the project. When Sörgel’s Atlantropa was published in 1932 some 147 articles about the project appeared in the popular press. While this was the highest press impact Atlantropa achieved and public interest left off in subsequent years, it increased again in 1936–7 and after the war

17 18

For a more detailed analysis of Sörgel and the National Socialists, see Gall 1998, 72–86. Voigt 2007, 122.

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from 1948–51.19 In comparison to the myriad of articles in the popular press, there are only a few articles in the more serious specialist journals of the times, such as architecture, engineering, mining or geography journals. These are often more critical and express concerns about the feasibility of the plan and its climatological and geophysical impact. In the popular press in contrast, both on a national and international level, Sörgel is above all praised for his vision of universal peace and while most reports treat Atlantropa as an unfeasible utopia, they often also express a desire to believe that its realisation might be possible. Thus, in May 1948 the New Yorkbased UN World writes: ‘Harnessing Gibraltar for mankind’s good does sound like a dream, but in this 20th century no dream – not even that of cooperation among nations is quite impossible.’20 And in November of the same year Ici Paris writes: ‘Twelve kilometres of concrete wall to guarantee universal peace. That wouldn’t be too expensive …’21

Fact, Fiction and the Power of Faith In 1946, Sörgel wrote in the Atlantropa Mitteilungen: ‘WAS IST ATLANTROPA? – Eine Erkenntnis, ein Bekenntnis, eine Werkgemeinschaft.’22 This can be translated as ‘What is Atlantropa? – a revelation, a commitment, a collaboration.’ However, the German words ‘Erkenntnis’ and ‘Bekenntnis’ carry clear religious overtones and could also be translated as ‘gnosis’ and ‘denomination’/‘confession’. Clearly, Sörgel was aware of the power of faith needed to realise his project. Atlantropa became a sort of religion, with its inventor as the prime missionary. While Sörgel was no religious fanatic he happily used the structures and framework 19 Gall 2006, 104. 20 n.n., ‘A Dam at Gibraltar’, in UN World, May 1948, 49. 21 ‘Le plus grand projet du siècle: Je peux faire vivre 60.000.000 d’hommes an asséchant la Méditerrannée’ Ici Paris, 8–14 Nov. 1948, n.p., my translation. 22 Herman Sörgel, Atlantropa Mitteilungen, 1946, No. 3.

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of religion. Thus, in November 1930 he wrote an article for the Kölnische Volkszeitung, ‘The Panropa Project and the Bible’, which included several references to scripture and concludes: ‘What the Bible tells us about the Great Flood can easily be reconciled with science.’23 Sörgel does not only reconcile the Bible with science but also draws on myth and fiction. Though he compared Atlantropa to existing technological macro projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Project – a series of dams built on the Tennessee River which helped make the region fertile and prosperous – the Suez Canal, or the draining of the Zuiderzee in Holland, he often referred to fiction and the more fantastic proposals for past and present macro projects. In the first publication from 1928 he not only cites Goethe’s fictional vision of land reclamation in Faust II but also conjures Dinocrates, architect under Alexander the Great, who suggested reshaping Mount Athos into a giant sculpture of Alexander holding a city for 50,000 inhabitants in his hand.24 Compared to projects of this calibre, Sörgel argues, it is easy to imagine that Atlantropa would be built. That Dinocrates’s city was a mere paper dream does not seem to have bothered him. Sörgel’s vision of the Mediterranean was clearly informed by the typical education of the German bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century, where he was taught Latin and Greek, read the Roman and Greek classics and learnt about the aesthetics of antiquity. In particular in relation to his plans regarding the irrigation of the Sahara, Sörgel repeatedly referred to somewhat vague Roman sources where the Sahara appears as ‘the corn chamber of Europe’. While the Sahara project would recreate the mythical

Herman Sörgel, ‘Das Panropa-Projekt – und die Bibel’, Kölnische Volkszeitung, 8 November 1930. The article was without doubt inspired by a fan-letter Sörgel had received in April 1929 from a retired guardsman, M. Gessler, who congratulated him on his project, which he felt ‘must become reality, because it is the Word of God’. The letter included all the Bible references Sörgel later used for his article. See letter by M. Gessler to H. Sörgel, 21/04/1929 (DMM, preliminary Nr. NL 92/0446), emphasis in original, my translation. 24 Herman Sörgel, ‘La cuenca del Mediterráneo y la nueva Europa: Un proyecto ideado por Herman Soergel, Munich’, Gaceta de Munich/Alemania Ilustrada/Heraldo de Hamburgo, 1 March 1928, No. 3 (10–11) 11. 23

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fertility of the continent in Roman times, the lowering of the Mediterranean waters aimed to return the continent to a much earlier state. In fact, Sörgel’s plan was inspired by H.G. Wells’s Outline of History (1919). His map of Atlantropa (Figure 1) is based on Wells’s speculative history of the formation of the Mediterranean, which dates the existence of a Eurafrican continent along the lines of Atlantropa some 50,000 years ago. Wells writes: But if this reasoning is sound, then where today roll the blue waters of the Mediterranean there must once have been great areas of land, and land with a very agreeable climate. […] Certainly there must have been Grimaldi people, and perhaps even Azilian and Neolithic people going about in the valleys and forests of these regions that are now submerged. The Neolithic Dark Whites, the people of the Mediterranean race, may have gone far towards the beginnings of settlement and civilization in that great lost Mediterranean Valley.25

Wells dates the refilling of the sea basin to something between 30,000 and 10,000 AD and describes it in dramatic language: Suddenly the ocean waters began to break through over the westward hills and to pour in upon those primitive peoples – the lake that had been their home and friend, became their enemy; its waters rose and never abated; their settlements were submerged; the waters pursued them in their flight.26

Wells repeats several times that he is an amateur and his Outline is hypothetical. His language is tentative and speculative. The caption underneath the map, which so inspired Sörgel, reads: This map represents the present state of our knowledge of the geography of Europe and Western Asia at a period which we guess to be about 50,000 years ago. Much of this map is of course speculative, but its broad outlines must be fairly like those of the world in which men first became men.27

25 H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, Vol. 1 (London: George Newnes: 1919), 71. 26 Wells 1919, 71. 27 Wells 1919, 47.

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In Sörgel’s confident articles and pamphlets the guesses and hypotheses of Wells become certainties. If the Mediterranean had looked like this and people had lived there, then could we not recreate this original state of the Earth? Atlantropa becomes a way of recreating what is stylised into a mythical paradisiacal state before the catastrophe, which was, of course, particularly appealing in the war-torn Europe of the first half of the twentieth century. Today, we know that Wells was relatively close to the truth – the Mediterranean waters did indeed dry up and expose land connections between Africa and Europe. However, both the state of desiccation and the subsequent refilling of the basin happened between 5 and 6 million years ago, before human civilisation (see the following chapter). While Sörgel worked closely with engineers and architects who ensured the technological feasibility of the project, his main concern was always the big picture rather than the detail. While often scientifically over-simplistic his argument was always compelling. In the introduction to his heavily illustrated Atlantropa book from 1932 he explains that the imagery made it possible for amateur readers to quickly grasp the core ideas without having to read any of the text.28 Figure 4, which was part of the first book and reappears in subsequent publications, is a fairly typical example of this rather unscientific use of visual ‘evidence’. The image above is titled ‘A People without Space’: the swimming-pool full of bathers with a steaming factory in the background is hardly a representational image of Europe’s population. However, it is a great symbol of urbanised, productive Europe bursting at the seams. Juxtaposed is an image titled ‘Space without a People’: an aerial shot of an African mountain chain. It is difficult to take the comparison between these entirely different photographs seriously as an illustration in support of Sörgel’s claim that Africa is ‘a vacuum’. Even an amateur must take issue with such obvious visual manipulation. Yet, used as a propaganda tool in the colonialist atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s, the images had impact.

28

Sörgel 1932, v.

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Figure 4:  ‘A People without Space’ – ‘Space without a People’, Sörgel’s book Die drei großen ‘A’ (1938), p. 53. Sörgel had already used these illustrations in his first book Atlantropa (1932).

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However, while newspaper journalists were quick to celebrate the overall plan, specialists were somewhat perturbed by Sörgel’s rather unscientific approach. While it was acknowledged that individual plans for Atlantropa, its dams and new towns were very detailed, the biggest criticism from within the scientific community was levelled against the fact that there were next to no in-depth studies of the geophysical and climatic consequences of the project. In an article in the German journal Erdkunde (Geography) from 1950, three geographers, C. Troll, J. van Eimern and W. Daume, examined the Atlantropa plans and eventually concluded that, while the project was laudable in its scope and audacity, it was also dangerously under-researched and ultimately unable to fulfil the promises it made.29 Van Eimern and Daume concentrated on examining the geographical feasibility and climatic impact of the African developments and claimed that Sörgel’s hope to moderate the extreme climate of central and northern Africa through the creation of inland seas was based on guesswork rather than sound scientific research. Further, they showed that the most recent research did not support Sörgel’s claims. Troll reproached Sörgel for an unwillingness to engage with actual climatological, hydrographical, orometric or agrological facts in favour of propaganda. He chose a quote by C. Gillman as a preamble to his article, which neatly sums up his main criticism: ‘We must consider and face facts, not phrases.’30 As Troll points out, what transpires from Sörgel’s oeuvre is a preeminent concern with fiction. In fact, Margaret Atwood’s claim ‘If we can imagine it, we’re probably able to do it’ might well have been Sörgel’s motto. In the second volume of the Atlantropa Mitteilungen from 1946, he writes:

29

C. Troll, J. van Eimern, W. Daume. ‘Herman Sörgels “Atlantropa” in geographischer Sicht.’ Sonderdruck, Erdkunde, Vol. IV/3–4 (1950) (Bonn: Ferdinand Dümmler), 177–88. W. Daume sent the article to Sörgel, who underlined several paragraphs and jotted a number of comments in the margins, where he felt his work had been misrepresented. See Atlantropa Archive, DMM, preliminary No. NL092/0007. 30 C. Troll, ‘Das Atlantropa-Projekt – Wunsch und Wirklichkeit.’ Sonderdruck, Erdkunde, Vol. IV/3–4 (1950) (Bonn: Ferdinand Dümmler), 177–80, 177.

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Ricarda Vidal Men like Churchill, Smuts, Shaw, Einstein, Thomas Mann trace their sagacious insights to a grand and influential name [H.G. Wells]. But as individuals they have little political power, or at least not enough to realise a contemporary reasonable organisation of the world; […] If these men joined hands in a shared idea, then the idea could become a deed and eventually the reality H.G. Wells invented, intended and desired with all his soul. Idea and power have to unify, to consolidate, to boost and affect each other.

Apart from Einstein, Sörgel’s list contains only philosophers, politicians and writers – representatives of power and fiction. Sörgel was convinced that, if only power and fiction could be united, reality would follow suit. Moreover, the 100-year time frame of the project and his unwavering belief in progress and technology allowed him to rely on future developments within technology to take care of unforeseen problems as and when they would arise. His main concern was to get the man in the street behind him and to get started. However, even though he continued to actively seek support for his project, he seems to have slowly lost faith by the mid1940s. In April 1945 he started work on a fictional account of Atlantropa, which he titled Atlantropa-Land: One of the Missed Opportunities of … the Future.31 The manuscript, which he apparently wrote mainly for himself rather than for publication, contains various fantastic, and at times surreal, accounts of life in Atlantropa, where Sörgel seems to have given free rein to his imagination as well as to his frustration. In some sense AtlantropaLand reads like a rebellion of the imagination against the constraints of reality. Here we encounter strange new creatures and culinary delights of the new continent alongside fictional maps and detailed descriptions of life in the rising new culture of Atlantropa.

31

Atlantropa-Land: Eine der verpassten Gelegenheiten … der Zukunft, 1946, unpublished manuscript, Atlantropa Archive, DMM, preliminary No. NL092/0122.

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Atlantropa on Film Between the early 1930s and his death, Sörgel wrote several film scripts for feature films and documentaries about Atlantropa as he felt this would be the best way to reach the broadest public. However, the lack of funding, and in the 1930s also the opposition of the Nazi regime to his pacifist project, meant that none of the feature films could be realised and the documentary could only be made in the early 1950s. However, it is a sign of how serious Atlantropa was taken, that in 1936 a film was made in order to discredit it: Ein Meer versinkt (The Sunken Sea) by Anton Kutter. The film is shot like a news report of an international congress of scientists and statesmen who come together to discuss the Atlantropa Project, which is first presented by its engineer (obviously Sörgel, though not named as such) and then heavily criticised by a geophysicist professor. While the pro-Atlantropa part uses very crude and clumsy model animation techniques, the catastrophes evoked by the professor are illustrated in spectacular and realistic detail and with considerably more imaginative animations. The geophysicist’s primary concern is that the proposal will go against nature – he immediately qualifies nature as ‘human nature’ and man’s propensity for violence: contradicting Sörgel’s claim that the joint power network would ensure a power balance and interdependence of all states, the professor predicts an international power struggle over control of the dam and the newly won land; and he is also worried about the reaction of fishermen and others making a living from coastal areas – ‘will they not turn against the dam and will it not be easy to destroy it with a simple explosion?’, he wonders as we watch the ‘simple explosion’ and its catastrophic consequences.32 Further, the geophysicist warns of the salt deserts which would result from the drying out of the sea, as well as of the climatic change which would result from diverting the Gulf Stream, the unbalancing of the Earth which would result from the shift in weight 32

Speech of the Professor, Ein Meer versinkt, Dir. Anton Kutter, Bavaria Film, 1936, my translation.

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distribution after the Mediterranean was lowered, and finally the likelihood of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions which would also result from the loss of weight from the evaporated sea. We see animations as well as stock footage of earthquakes and volcanoes, houses crumbling, people running etc. The film ends with tumult amongst the members of the congress and the departure of the defeated engineer. Needless to say that Herman Sörgel was enraged by the film, which he felt deliberately misunderstood and misrepresented his project. In a lengthy court case he accused the Bavaria Film, which had produced the film, of breach of copyright and tried to get it banned. It is perhaps ironic that he officially lost his case, precisely because the film’s representation of Atlantropa, which it simply called the Mediterranean Project, distorted his research and publications to such a degree that the similarities were too small to speak of copyright infringement.33 All the criticisms contained in the film had previously been voiced by scientists and engineers in journals, newspapers and private letters to Sörgel. More recent research findings have also shown that the concerns were well justified.34 In particular Philip Fauth, who acted as scientific adviser to the film, had written various letters to Sörgel. The fact that Fauth was not an expert in geoscience but a schoolteacher who referred to himself as an amateur astronomer, enraged Sörgel even more. In several letters he personally attacked Fauth and Kutter for their unscientific methods. He criticised the film not just for its content but also for its bad cinematic qualities in the first part, which he calls ‘completely uncinematic’ and objects to the sensationalism of the second part of the film. In a letter to the State Film Censorship Board he wrote: ‘obviously [my] life’s work is good enough to be destroyed for a few earthquakes, fireworks and a bang in the cinema from which the intellectual impostors of the film industry will pocket hundreds of thousands of marks.’35 33 See Atlantropa Archive, DMM, preliminary No. NL092/056. 34 See Atlantropa: Der Traum vom neuen Kontinent. Dir. Michel Morales, WDR, NDR, BR, ORF, 2005 35 Letter by Sörgel to the State Film Censorship Board Berlin (Reichs-Filmprüfstelle Berlin) Deutsches Museum, preliminary No. NL092/056, my translation.

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However, in his own unrealised film scripts36 he used the same explosions, booms and bangs he had criticised in Kutter’s film. A film script for a feature film on Atlantropa, which he wrote in 1933 includes burning continents, storms, attempted murders and a terrorist attack on the dam. Sörgel obviously envisaged making full use of the possibilities of trick film. The plot is more or less a love story which ends with the inauguration of the road over the Gibraltar dam and, as a sign of Sörgel’s eagerness to please the Nazi regime, a celebratory march of German and Italian troops, which would have been worthy of Leni Riefenstahl. Between 1937 and 1948 he worked on a new film script, which is more complex than the earlier one, but no less dramatic. After a spectacular opening sequence which includes trombones and fanfares and a burning world, the film starts amidst the ruins of Europe. Again there is a love story and again terrorists unsuccessfully try to prevent the dam from being built and also try to explode it. In contrast to the 1933 script the Atlantropa project now is a truly international affair, though led by the German engineer and his wife, a leading engineer in her own right. As with the 1933 script, the plot is technocratic and heavily dependent on the power and influence of the visionary engineer. The illustrator Heinrich Kley provided a number of preparatory sketches for the manuscript, which Sörgel eventually published in the Atlantropa Mitteilungen. The plot of both scripts with its visionary main character, its audacious plan, its trials and tribulations, its love story and final triumph of the engineer recalls the basic pattern of the German ‘engineer’ novel of the early twentieth century as described by Dina Brandt in her book Der deutsche Zukunftsroman 1918–45.37 Sörgel’s papers at the Deutsche Museum archive include a handwritten list of what he calls ‘technical novels’, which are likely to have provided inspiration for his film scripts – amongst them are Bernhard Kellermann’s best-selling Der Tunnel (1913), Werner Scheff ’s

36 37

The scripts for Sörgel’s feature films can be found in the Atlantropa Archive, DMM, preliminary No. NL092/0060. Dina Brandt, Der deutsche Zukunftsroman 1918–45 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007), 69–79.

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Die Arche (1918), Hans Richter’s Der Kanal (1923), as well as Thea von Harbou’s screen plays Metropolis (1927) and Frau im Mond (1929).38 Sörgel planned to shoot three versions of the film for a Germanspeaking, an English, and a French audience – the atmosphere, colour, lighting and parts of the script were to be adapted according to the individual country it was aimed at. The film was then supposed to be dubbed into the other European languages. As potential financiers he looked to Unesco and the Vatican, here again emphasising Atlantropa’s main objective of world peace while also pointing to the quasi-religious faith Atlantropa inspired and demanded. While none of the Atlantropa feature films were made, Sörgel eventually managed to shoot a documentary about his plans for the creation of the super-continent, which was also translated into English, Spanish, French and Italian. Compared to the ambitious plans for the feature films the documentary is quite modest and even though it played in cinemas around Germany, it did not have the impact Sörgel had been hoping for, or indeed, which his feature films might have had.

Atlantropa in Fiction While Atlantropa never really made it onto the big screen, it was vastly successful in literature and inspired nine novels during Sörgel’s lifetime, many of which were serialised in the big national newspapers and all of which were enthusiastic about the project. Sörgel was, however, careful to point to the fact that Atlantropa was by no means science fiction but a serious plan. Thus, when Georg Güntsche’s novel Panropa was serialised in the Kölnische Volkszeitung in 1930 it was announced with the following advert: ‘This is a novel of the future […] but it is not a utopia in the usual sense of the word, not a product of the imagination. Rather this novel has 38

See Atlantropa Archive, DMM, preliminary No. NL092/0434.

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a real background, […] a gigantic plan which is to be taken seriously.’39 For those readers who wanted to know more, Sörgel had arranged for an article on Atlantropa to appear in the same issue. While most of the Atlantropa novels were of dubious literary value, they ignited interest in the project amongst the masses whom Sörgel was so keen to reach. The most successful of the Atlantropa novels – and also the only serious literary work – was John Knittel’s Amadeus from 1939. The English translation as Power for Sale appeared in October 1939 in the UK and USA, where a review in the New York Times praised it as a serious social utopia which was ‘prophetic in tone’ and a revelation for generations to come.40 It was reprinted after the war and translated into Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish and became an international success. While the novel focuses on the construction of a gigantic dam in Switzerland, the Atlantropa project is presented and discussed at great length by the novel’s protagonists. The novel tells the love story of orphaned heiress and aspiring pianist Pauline and Amadeus, the visionary engineer behind the dam project, who is also on a mission to promote the Atlantropa Project. Knittel was an active member and supporter of the Atlantropa Institute and helped Sörgel make contacts, win sponsors and new members and generally promote his ideas. He also supported the project financially. In fact, it is thanks to him that Sörgel was able to shoot the documentary, for which Knittel also provided the German voice-over. However Amadeus remains his most important contribution to Sörgel’s cause, giving the project broad international exposure and inspiring readers of all age groups in the way Sörgel had envisaged for his feature films. In his fervour, the fictional Amadeus mirrors Herman Sörgel. Many of his pro-Atlantropa speeches were inspired by, or include direct quotes from, Sörgel’s publications. The book’s characters discuss Sörgel’s ideas and read his 1932 Atlantropa book, which is praised for its ‘many clear

39 Advert for Georg Güntsche’s novel Panropa, Kölnische Volkszeitung, 18/09/1930, n.p., my translation. 40 See Voigt 2007, 114.

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and dramatic illustrations’.41 Knittel also dedicated an entire chapter to a detailed description of a fictitious Atlantropa exhibition, which is mo­delled on the various Atlantropa exhibitions Sörgel organised in the 1930s and some of which Knittel had attended.42 One can clearly hear the echo of Sörgel, when the visionary Amadeus exclaims ‘I’m an engineer. I admire everyone, who does something to abolish poverty and misery. Science and technology are already transnational. The rest will follow suit.’43 Amadeus also shares with Sörgel his humanistic education and his love of music, which he discusses frequently with Pauline. In those conversations music and engineering are both represented as sublime: ‘“If you speak of divine symphonies, that’s almost the same as when I speak of God in wires and in the ether – these are differentiating powers, which originate in the same great source.”’44 However, like Sörgel, Amadeus and later also Pauline agree that the power of music, that is, the power to inspire, has to serve the higher cause of technology.45 The novel ends with the celebratory inauguration of the dam and the suggestion that the next project to be realised would be the Gibraltar dam. Knittel’s preface to the book, which explains the reality behind the Atlantropa Project, sets the mood for readers to feel directly involved in the plot. Amadeus’s pro-Atlantropa speeches are then also directly addressed to the readership. When he persuades his colleagues or his rivals to support the cause of Atlantropa, or more generally the cause of a peaceful use of technology to address the big problems in human society, this is always

41 John Knittel, Amadeus, Vol. 1 (Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1940), 195, my translation. 42 Knittel 1940, Vol. 2, 39–62. 43 Knittel 1940, Vol. 1, 92, my translation. 44 Knittel 1940, Vol. 1, 86, my translation. 45 Sörgel not only wrote a choral for an ‘Atlantropa Symphony’, but managed to inspire others to compose music to celebrate the project: a piece by Kurt Hasenpflug titled ‘Atlantropa’ was broadcast on Bavarian Radio in November 1951. See letter from A. Schröter to Sörgel, 21 November 1951, Atlantropa Archive, DMM, preliminary Nr. NL092/001 (7).

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also a direct appeal to the reader. The book informs and convinces just like Sörgel’s publications did. In 1948 Knittel wrote a foreword to Sörgel’s book Atlantropa: Wesenszüge eines Projekts, a somewhat updated edition of the 1932 publication. In his criticism of Atlantropa, Carl Troll took particular issue with Knittel’s preface to Sörgel’s book, which he felt considerably detracted from the book’s scientific credibility: he judged that it had ‘obviously [been] written with honest enthusiasm but without knowledge of the material and [was] built around buzzwords.’46 In fact, Troll states that it is precisely for the populist success of Atlantropa that he and his colleagues felt that the project needed to be taken seriously by geographers and climatologists. Further, he argues that Sörgel’s preference for propaganda over sound scientific research likely contributed in great part to the eventual failure of the project. However, while Atlantropa might have failed as a realisable macro-engineering project, it has succeeded in other, perhaps more utopian ways. I would argue that it is above all thanks to the elaborate fiction behind Atlantropa and the passionate belief in progress that it continues to fascinate – although, these days, mixed in with the fascination there is a certain kind of nostalgia for the times when we could still believe in the benefits of technology.

Afterlives From its inception Atlantropa has inspired people to think outside of the box, to come up with different solutions to old problems and, above all, to believe in the possibility of a pan-European union and world peace, which was especially pertinent in the 1930s and 1940s when the political circumstances gave little cause for such optimism. Sörgel’s dream of a united Europe has, of course, since been realised and the significance of the Union 46 Troll 1950, 178, my translation.

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for a lasting peace between the European nations was publicly acknow­ ledged with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, even though the Eurozone crisis, which has developed since the Great Recession of 2008, and the recent gains of Eurosceptic and far-right parties in the European elections of 2014 might make us wonder about the future. While nuclear power has been developed for peaceful purposes, the spectre of the atomic bomb continues to haunt us and the dangers of atomic energy manifested themselves in spectacular fashion in the explosions at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. Atlantropa’s promise of an infinite source of energy to power two continents and to provide work for the masses of unemployed remains appealing. Over the last few years, Atlantropa has received some attention from the popular media with a number of documentaries and short films being made,47 as well as from scientists. While the next chapter will expand on scientific re-engagements with the Mediterranean project, I will now conclude by looking at two short films: ‘The New Continent’48 (2009), a YouTube compilation put together by a certain DrGull1988, and the artist film Atlantropa (2009) by Samuel Stevens. Combining dramatic images with short but powerful inter-titles and the bombastic music of Hans Zimmer’s score for Gladiator (2000), ‘The New Continent’ gives an overview of Sörgel’s project from its inception to its end. With a series of historical photographs from the Great War, the 47 For example, Atlantropa was the subject of a documentary by Austrian Television ORF in 2000, by German Television ZDF in 2003 and by the German channel WDR in 2005. In 2005 a 60-minute documentary was made in co-production between German and Austrian TV, which was republished in 2007 for the second edition of Wolfgang Voigt’s book Atlantropa: Weltbauen am Mittelmeer. The most recent article which I have found about it is from 23 January 2011 in the Mittelbayerische Zeitung, a regional paper published in Sörgel’s birthplace Regensburg. Atlantropa also makes an odd appearance in Gene Roddenberry’s 1979 book version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, where Admiral Kirk stands on a huge dam near Gibraltar, which blocks the Atlantic from the Mediterranean, and uses it to generate electric power. In 2001 the architects/artists Edit Suisse Group reassessed Atlantropa with a sound and slide installation. A search on youtube also reveals several films inspired by Atlantropa. 48 .

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revolutions, political instabilities and the economic crisis of the 1920s and 1930s, it establishes the mood of despair which gave rise to such audacious visions like Atlantropa. The project itself is then presented through an extensive series of illustrations from the Atlantropa Archive – accompanied by softer more melodious music. So far Sörgel would have wholly approved of the film as well as of its distribution on YouTube, where it has been watched more than 10,000 times to date. In fact, the dramatic trajectory of the film recalls the dramatic opening sequences of a burning Europe he described in the manuscripts for his unrealised film scripts. However, two-thirds of the way through the film, the music changes again and Atlantropa is criticised for its racism and colonialist aspirations. Despite the filmmaker’s disapproval of its colonial traits, Atlantropa appears as a true utopia in contrast to the world on the brink of collapse we have seen in the beginning of the film. It is presented as an impossible venture of the past, which can, however, still be taken seriously for its spirit of pacifism and the vision of a united Europe and Africa, which has the potential to go beyond colonialism. The film and likewise many of the comments left by the viewers speak of admiration for the audacity of the plan. Neither the film nor the commentators appear concerned about the environmental impact of the project, which is no longer perceived as a serious proposal but rather as an admirable utopia of the past. What emerges is a certain sense of longing to dream again of such big ventures and to be able to believe that they could be realised, that world peace could actually be achieved through the mere construction of a giant dam. In his short film ‘Atlantropa’, Samuel Stevens, too, picks up on the colonial aspects of Atlantropa and the relationship between the united Europe and Africa. He uses Atlantropa as a vehicle to criticise current policies of immigration between the two continents. In the film, the Gibraltar dam is replaced by a bridge, which, we learn, was built in 2005 as a symbol of peace between the now unified Europe and the African peoples.49 The film

49 In fact, on 24 October 1980 Spain and Morocco signed a bilateral cooperation agreement to carry out ‘upon the principle of equal sharing of charges, a process of studies on the feasibility of a fixed link between Europe and Africa across the Strait

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appears to be a documentary about the impact the closure of the bridge only eight months after completion has had on relations between Europe and Africa. The reason for the closure is apparently fear of a terrorist attack, and it is not only the bridge, the symbol of peace, that has been closed, but all frontiers with Europe’s Mediterranean neighbours. Instead of the images of a burning, war-torn Europe which worked as opening sequences for Sörgel’s own film scripts or ‘The New Continent’, Stevens shows us images from the African side, desolate migrants, barren land, fences and watch towers. Although the film purports to be set in the near future, it does not take long to realise that the images we are watching are not fiction but the actuality of the Spanish-Moroccan border in Ceuta. By criticising Sörgel’s racist and colonialist attitudes towards Africa, Stevens makes us acutely aware of current European immigration policies towards Africa. While Sörgel’s great aim of a unified Europe has been realised, Atlantropa is politically as unviable as Anton Kutter’s geophysicist prophesied it would be in 1936: like the dam, the bridge is considered too vulnerable to the threat of an explosion. And there is a quarrel for sovereignty over the bridge just as Kutter’s geophysicist had predicted for the dam. Eventually the bridge is revealed to be no more than a strategy of colonialism, a tool to strengthen British sovereignty in Gibraltar and Spanish dominance in Ceuta. Stevens’s film bleakly concludes that the core element of Atlantropa, the link between Europe and Africa must be condemned to failure not because of its technological unfeasibility but because of the impossibility of transcontinental collaboration. of Gibraltar.’ The Spanish-Moroccan consortium investigated a connection by bridge and tunnel, eventually deciding that a tunnel would be the more cost-efficient and safer option. The joint research is carried out between two state-owned agencies, SNED (Societé d’Etudes du Détroit) in Rabat, Morocco, and SECEG (Sociedad española de estudios para la comunicación fija a través del Estrecho de Gibraltar, S.A.) in Madrid, Spain. A report from 2005 presents the current research into the construction of a multi-tube rail tunnel which would be similar to the Channel Tunnel. However, given the tensions between Europe and Africa and the current financial crisis it is unlikely that the tunnel will be built in the near future. See José Maria Pliego, ‘Open Session: The Gibraltar Strait tunnel. An overview of the study process.’ Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 20 (2005): 558–69.

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Sörgel, with his scepticism of politics would have agreed: the linking device, be it bridge or dam, would not have been enough to hold Atlantropa together. Hence his insistence that the unity and continuing stability of the supercontinent depended to a very large degree on the vast energy net which would stretch all over Europe and North Africa and link the individual nations through mutual dependence. Though Stevens’s vision of a transcontinental bridge is modest compared to Sörgel’s plans for the Mediterranean, in the end it seems to be the more utopian project. After all, it assumes a desire for unity and economical collaboration where Sörgel assumed a need for interdependence, which would make a war not only unnecessary but impossible. For him, Atlantropa ‘would be a work of peace […] brought about by the medium of modern and future technology which links the peoples to each other through sheer necessity and need’ – the need for renewable clean energy. Now, after Chernobyl and Fukushima, with wars ‘over a few oil wells’ going on and fuel prices rising constantly, it is high time to think about alternative energies and unusual solutions once again.

Bibliography Anon., ‘A Dam at Gibraltar’, in UN World, May 1948, p. 48f. Anon., Advert for Georg Güntsche’s novel Panropa, Kölnische Volkszeitung, 18/09/1930, n.p. Anon., ‘Le plus grandiose projet des temps modernes: Abaisser de 200 mètres le niveau de la Méditerranée pour refaire la carte de l’Europe et de l’Afrique’, Les Echos, No. 752, 18 May 1930, p. 29. Anon., ‘Le plus grand projet du siècle: Je peux faire vivre 60.000.000 d’hommes an asséchant la Méditerrannée’, Ici Paris, 8–14 November 1948, n.p. Atlantropa. Dir. Samuel Stevens, 2009. Atlantropa: Der Traum vom neuen Kontinent. Dir. Michel Morales, WDR, NDR, BR, ORF, 2005. Brandt, Dina, Der deutsche Zukunftsroman 1918–45 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007). Dietz, Thomas, ‘Das Mittelmeer ablassen’, Mittelbayerische Zeitung, 23 January 2011, [accessed 19 May 2011]. Edit Suisse Group, ‘Atlantropa’, in Cabinet Magazine, No. 10, 2003, [accessed 15 February 2011]. Ein Meer versinkt. Dir. Anton Kutter, Bavaria Film, 1936. Einstein, Albert, Letter to Herman Sörgel, 5 June 1929 (Atlantropa Archive, DMM, preliminary No. NL092/0446). Enderis, Guido, ‘Proposes to Lower Mediterranean Sea: German Would Dam Outlets and Reduce Level 660 Feet to Irrigate Deserts’, New York Times, 11 April 1928. Gall, Alexander, ‘Atlantropa: A Technological Vision of a United Europe’, in Erik van der Vleuten and Arne Kaijser (eds), Networking Europe: Translational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850–2000 (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2006), pp. 99–128 (108). ——, Das Atlantropa Projekt: Die Geschichte einer gescheiterten Vision. Herman Sörgel und die Absenkung des Mittelmeers (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 1998). Gessler, M., letter to Herman Sörgel, 21 April 1929 (Atlantropa Archive, DMM, preliminary Nr. NL 92/0446). Hsu, Kenneth J., The Mediterranean Was a Desert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). Knittel, John, Amadeus (Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1940). The New Continent, 2009, . Pliego, José Maria, ‘Open Session: The Gibraltar Strait tunnel. An overview of the study process’, Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 20 (2005): 558–69. Simonet, P., ‘Du rêve à la réalité “L’Atlantropa”’, Le Figaro, 26 March 1951. Sörgel, Herman, ‘Anregung zu einer Atlantropa Sinfonie (Friedens-Sinfonie)’, Atlantropa Archive, DMM, TZ04785. ——, Atlantropa (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth; Munich: Piloty & Loehle, 1932). ——, ‘Atlantropa’ film script, 1933, Atlantropa Archive, DMM, preliminary No. NL092/0060. ——, ‘Atlantropa: Der Neue Erdteil – Das Land der Zukunft’, film script, 1937–42 (first draft) with drawings by Heinrich Kley, Atlantropa Archive, DMM, preliminary No. NL092/0443. ——, ‘Atlantropa: Der Neue Erdteil – Das Land der Zukunft’, film script, 1937–48 (final draft), Atlantropa Archive, DMM, preliminary No. NL092/0060. ——, Atlantropa-Land: Eine der verpassten Gelegenheiten … der Zukunft, 1946, unpublished manuscript, Atlantropa Archive, DMM, preliminary No. NL092/0122. ——, Atlantropa Mitteilungen, 1946, No. 3.

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——, Atlantropa Mitteilungen, 1950, No. 26. ——, ‘La cuenca del Mediterráneo y la nueva Europa: Un proyecto ideado por Herman

Soergel, Munich’, Gaceta de Munich/Alemania Ilustrada/Heraldo de Hamburgo, No. 3 (1 March 1928): 10–11. ——, Die drei großen A (Munich: Piloty & Loehle, 1938). ——, ‘Entgegnung auf Einwände zum Atlantropa Projekt’, Atlantropa Mitteilungen, 1950, No. 26, p. 4. ——, ‘Das Panropa-Projekt – und die Bibel’, Kölnische Volkszeitung, 8 November 1930. Spengler, Oswald, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, 43rd–49th edn (Munich: C.H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1924). Troll, Carl, ‘Das Atlantropa-Projekt – Wunsch und Wirklichkeit’, Sonderdruck, Erdkunde, Vol. IV/3–4 (1950) (Bonn: Ferdinand Dümmler), pp. 177–80. Troll, C., J. van Eimern, W. Daume, ‘Herman Sörgels “Atlantropa” in geographischer Sicht’, Sonderdruck, Erdkunde, Vol. IV/3–4 (1950) (Bonn: Ferdinand Dümmler), pp. 177–88. Voigt, Wolfgang, Atlantropa: Weltbauen am Mittelmeer; Ein Architektentraum der Moderne (Hamburg: M.A.T. Music Theme Licensing GmbH, 2007). Wells, H.G., The Outline of History, Vol. 1 (London: George Newnes, 1919).

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2 Alternative Mediterraneans Six Million Years Ago: A Model for the Future?

In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder set out to describe the entirety of the natural world from its (mythical) origins to its present geography as it was known to the Romans. In his Natural History, he describes the narrow entrance to the Mediterranean Sea at the Strait of Gibraltar and the two steep mountains that flank it: At the narrowest part of the straits stand mountains on either side, enclosing the channel, Ximiera in Africa, and Gibraltar in Europe. These were the limits of the labours of Hercules, and consequently the inhabitants call them the Pillars of that deity, and believe that he cut the channel through them and thereby let in the sea which had hitherto been shut out, so altering the face of nature.1

Pliny’s is a pioneer record of the belief that Africa and Europe were once connected by a land bridge across the Gibraltar Strait and that the Mediterranean Sea was a closed-off, desiccated inland sea. As we partly show in this chapter, this belief has had a continuous impact on our culture, fuelling a diversity of alternative ways of imagining the Mediterranean region, from Galileo’s Dialogue2 (1632) and Jacinto Verdaguer’s ‘Atlàntida’ 1 2

Pliny the Elder, Natural History [Historia Naturalis], Vol. 3 [~77 AD]. Trans. by H. Rackham (London: The Folio Society, 2012), 140. Galileo Galilei, in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), has his character Simplicio argue against the mutability of the Moon: ‘From the oldest records we have it that formerly, at the Straits of Gibraltar, Abila and Calpe were joined together with some lesser mountains which held the ocean in check; but these mountains being separated by some cause, the opening admitted the sea, which flooded in so as to form the Mediterranean. When we consider the immensity of this, and the difference in appearance which must have been made in the water and

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(1876)3 down to twenty-first-century geo-engineering. Pliny’s description raises the question how much he and his contemporaries really knew about the formation of the Earth. While obviously lacking the expansive knowledge of geology and landscape evolution we have accumulated over the last 2,000 years, they clearly understood that the Earth is not static but prone to sometimes very dynamic changes. Today, we can only speculate about the origin of the myth recounted by Pliny. But research conducted by geologists, geophysicists, and marine biologists during the past one hundred years is providing strong evidence that the Mediterranean basin was once indeed largely desiccated and was later refilled in a catastrophic event, just as Pliny recounts. This chapter will trace the history of these investigations and explain the geophysical evidences behind the Herculean myth before addressing how these mythical and scientific stories have inspired a number of macro-engineering projects during the last century. We will pay special attention to Herman Sörgel’s Atlantropa project from 1928, which proposed a recreation of the natural desiccation of the Mediterranean in the geological past by building a dam across the Gibraltar Strait and creating an Afro-European super continent (see previous chapter in this volume), and to more recent proposals within the last twenty years for equally gargantuan projects in the region which aim at regulating global warming.

3

land seen from afar, there is no doubt that such a change could easily have been seen by anyone then on the moon. Just so would the inhabitants of earth have discovered any such alteration in the moon; yet there is no history of such a thing being seen.’ Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems – Ptolemaic & Copernican (1632), trans. by Stillman Drake (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953) 48f. Jacinto Verdaguer, arguably the most outstanding poet in the Catalan language, based his epic poem L’Atlàntida (Atlantis, 1876) partly on the classics and partly on research by contemporaneous geologists.

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The Significance of Salt: The Messinian Salinity Crisis A phenomenon peculiar to much of the Mediterranean coast is the presence of extensive salt outcrops and mines (see Figure 1). Though Pliny does not make an explicit connection between these and the formerly desiccated Mediterranean basin, he was well aware of them. In fact, the Romans used the gypsum from those salt mines as window glass. Gypsum is the second most abundant salt in seawater after halite (normal table salt).

Figure 1:  Landscape near Sorbas (Andalusia, Spain). The whole mountain in this picture is made of gypsum salt crystals deposited during the Messinian Salinity Crisis. So is the unsettling house in their midst. Many similar outcrops are found along the Mediterranean coast, testifying a period during which this sea became an enormous salt pan. The blocks have fallen due to a steep river gorge later formed at their foot. © Daniel Garcia-Castellanos.

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In 1867, the palaeontologist Karl Mayer-Eymar realised that the salt outcrops around the Mediterranean all had a similar age. Though at the time there were no precise dating techniques that could put a number to that age, Mayer-Eymar noticed that the salts where always located directly underneath the more recent, distinctive Pliocene sediments that testify normal marine conditions similar to the present Mediterranean. In reminiscence of the impressive salt mines near the Sicilian town of Messina, he named that period the Messinian stage. Today, the dramatic environmental events during which this salt was deposited all over the Mediterranean are known as the Messinian Salinity Crisis.4 However, the presence of salt alone is not yet proof that the Mediterranean was indeed the closed-off inland sea that Pliny, and later Herman Sörgel (following H.G. Wells’s speculative Outline of History from 1919 – see previous chapter), envisaged. To show this, we need to look at the water balance of the Mediterranean basin. During the Messinian period, just as today, the Mediterranean received less water from its rivers and from rainfall than it lost by evaporation. This water deficit is nowadays compensated by an inflow of Atlantic water of about eight times the discharge of the Amazon River, or a thousand times the discharge of the Niagara Falls. The strength of this current is well known to sailors as it adds a speed of several meters per second to their ships in one of the busiest thoroughfares in the world. Less known is the slightly smaller outflow current underneath that brings dense, saline water from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The inflow current keeps the level of the Mediterranean stable in spite of the excessive evaporation, while the outflow preserves the Mediterranean from becoming hypersaline and hence a dead sea. To increase salinity and trigger salt deposition in the Mediterranean it suffices to reduce the outflow, avoiding the exit of the high-salinity Mediterranean waters, but there is no need to cancel the inflow or to have a sea level drop by evaporation. We can draw a parallel here to artificial salt pans, which evaporate sea water while keeping the brine at a constant level that is maintained by the inflow of

4

Kenneth J. Hsu, The Mediterranean Was a Desert: A Voyage of the Glomar Challenger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

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more sea water. Hence the widespread presence of salt rocks of Messinian age does not necessarily mean that the Mediterranean actually went dry. In 1849, Italian chemist J. Usiglio observed that although the sea contains ten times more halite than gypsum, the latter precipitates first during evaporation due to its lesser solubility. This could explain the abundance of gypsum on the Mediterranean shore compared to the scarcity of onshore halite. However, if the deposition of salt was related to a pan-Mediterranean environmental change related to the closure of the Gibraltar Strait, then salts should also have accumulated in the deeper parts of the sea. Proof of this was found in the 1960s, when studies of the reflection of seismic waves (echoes of vibrations sent from a boat) showed a ubiquitous salt layer a few hundred meters below the sea floor, which is in some parts more than a kilometre thick. Today it is estimated that this layer contains two million cubic kilometres of salt rock, about 10 per cent of the salt dissolved in the entire global ocean. In the 1970s, 3,000-metre-deep drillings proved the presence of salt deposits off the shore of Mallorca, delivering further evidence that the classic onshore outcrops had an equivalent in the open sea. Furthermore, the drillings also retrieved anhydrites and pebbles, suggesting that, at one point, the Mediterranean had nearly dried out and been reduced to a series of brackish lakes (see Figure 2). Everything pointed to the existence of a great saline basin during the Messinian encompassing not only the shallow margins of the Mediterranean, but also the deeper inner parts of the sea. But the evidence for a true desiccation implying a considerable lowering of the sea level was still weak. 

Drowned River Valleys: Main Evidence for a Desiccated Mediterranean Though not much attention was paid to it at the time, the main indication that the sea had truly been desiccated dates back to preliminary studies for the Aswan Dam (1,200 km upstream from Alexandria) during

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Figure 2:  Artistic representation of the geography of the western Mediterranean during the isolation of the Mediterranean about 5.5 million years ago. The fossil record shows that mammals related to camels and rodents, took the opportunity to cross between Europe and Africa. Drawing: Pau Bahí.

the late 1950s by the Soviet researcher Ivan S. Chumakov. He discovered a deep narrow river gorge hundreds of metres below today’s sea level. This gorge, which runs below the riverbed of the Nile, cutting increasingly deeper as it nears the river delta and reaching a depth of more than 2,000 meters below Cairo, had been filled by loose sediments that hindered the construction of the dam. Similar gorges excavated during the Messinian and filled with later gravel and marine fossils, have since been discovered below the present deltas of the rivers Rhone, Ebro, and Po (see Figure 3). These Messinian gorges have features unique to drowned river valleys.5

5

Urgelés et al., ‘Basin Research, New constraints on the Messinian sealevel drawdown from 3D seismic data of the Ebro Margin, western Mediterranean,’ 2010, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2117.2010.00477.x.

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For example, the excavation of the main Messinian canyons led to the formation of a complex network of smaller tributaries, and the channel along which the river water was flowing, at the bottom of the valley, shows typical river terraces. Today, the amount of evidence accumulated leaves little doubt that those valleys were excavated by rivers flowing more than 1000 metres below the present sea level.6 This, together with the numerous fossils of large terrestrial African mammals found in Iberia (including ancestors of camels and hippopotamus) and dating back to the Messinian period, strongly supports the idea that the Mediterranean was literally empty to at least that depth 5.5 million years ago.

Figure 3:  Valley excavated during the desiccation of the Mediterranean at the mouth of the Ebro River (Spain), as seen through the reflection of seismic waves. The technique makes it possible to read the canyon morphology even if buried under hundreds of metres of sediment deposited after the refilling of the Mediterranean. Author: Roger Urgelés.

When H.G. Wells wrote his Outline of History in 1919, which was so crucial to Herman Sörgel’s plans for Atlantropa, he based his speculative history of the formation of the Mediterranean on the current research of the time, which lacked accurate dating techniques. For example the view was widely held among geologists that the Earth itself was only 20 million years old, whereas current dating techniques put the Earth’s age at 4.5 billion years. Today it is estimated that the widespread salt deposition, known as the 6

Johanna Lofi et al., ‘The Messinian Salinity Crisis Markers in the Mediterranean and Black Seas,’ Seismic Atlas by the Commission for the Geological Map of the World. Societé Geologique de France, 2011.

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Messinian Salinity Crisis, and the desiccation of the Mediterranean, took place between 5.96 and 5.33 million years ago, around the time when the first hominids started to walk in Africa, but long before homo sapiens or Neanderthal cultures. The antecedence of these events to any form of culture is today out of question and has been dated by several independent methods such as the natural decay of isotopes in rocks or the composition changes recorded in sediment layers in response to long-term climate changes related to changes in the Earth’s orbit, known as Milankovitch cycles.7 Thus, Wells’s dramatic description of a catastrophic flood filling the Mediterranean and wiping out the agricultural society of the primitive peoples who settled around the Mediterranean lakes 35,000 years ago, has no scientific basis.8 Likewise Sörgel’s vision of a return to a golden past becomes entirely fictional (see previous chapter). Curiously Pliny, by attributing the creation of the present-day Mediterranean to mythological times, that is, before human civilisation, comes closest to the truth. We can only guess what Herman Sörgel would have made of these findings had he survived the accident that killed him in 1952. After all, while they provided geological proof of the previous existence of his alternative Mediterranean with more scientific accuracy than Wells’s speculations, they also showed that the land that was exposed was mainly uninhabitable salt desert.

Why the Strait Closed: The Formation of a Land Bridge between Morocco and Spain The partial desiccation of the Mediterranean can only mean that during that period the sea was separated from the global oceans. Earlier we mentioned the two currents flowing through the Strait of Gibraltar. The excess 7 Hsu 1983. 8 H.G. Wells, Outline of History, Vol. 1 (London: George Newnes, 1919), 71.

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evaporation in the Mediterranean is compensated for by the current from the Atlantic, which brings relatively fresh water in, while a smaller current flowing underneath flushes out dense, salty water. If this undercurrent did not exist, there would be no mixing with the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean would become a giant salt pan. However, in order for the Mediterranean to have dried out, as the discovery of the drowned river gorges suggests, both inflow and outflow must have been blocked by a land connection across the Strait of Gibraltar. The closure of the Atlantic-Mediterranean gateways during the Messinian period is related to the progressive approaching of the African and European continents, which led to the uplift and growth of the mountain chain that today encompasses the Betic Cordillera in southern Spain, the Gibraltar Rock, and the Rif in Northern Morocco. Based on high-precision GPS measures, we know that this continental converging continues today at a rate of about 4 millimetres per year, being responsible for most of the seismicity in southern Spain and northern Morocco. However, the main evidence supporting the theory of regional uplift is the presence of marine sediment over the entire region that is now more than a kilometre above sea level. In order to understand how an area several hundred kilometres wide can be uplifted to such elevations, researchers needed to reconstruct the motion of the tectonic plates on the Earth’s surface. We know today that the early Mediterranean basin formed long before the Messinian due to the growing separation between the European and African tectonic plates. When, for reasons that are not yet understood, this motion reversed some 80 million years ago and the continents began to converge, Iberia was trapped in between and forced to subduct underneath Africa, and a piece of the Iberian continent sunk into the Earth’s mantle (the melted rock layer on top of which the continents rest) (see Figure 4). This piece of Iberia can still be detected today down to a depth of 600 km through the distortion it exerts on the waves produced by earthquakes.9 One of the

9

Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, A. Villaseñor, ‘Messinian Salinity Crisis Regulated by Competing Tectonics and Erosion at the Gibraltar Arc,’ Nature 480 (2011): 359–63, doi: 10.1038/nature10651.

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Figure 4:  Geography of southern Spain and northern Africa during the period of restricted connections between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, ca. 5.5 million years ago. Through several seaways in the Betic and the Rif mountains Atlantic waters (left) were replacing the Mediterranean evaporation (right). The eventual closure of these seaways that led to the drop of the Mediterranean level was related to processes occurring several hundreds of kilometres deep into the Earth. Artist: Manuel Mantero.

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competing interpretations among the geoscientific community is that, due to its excess weight, this piece of continent tore apart and sunk further into the mantle, while the overlying Iberia became relieved from that weight and then uplifted, closing the seaways between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Initially, this closure had to compete with the erosion produced by the inflow of Atlantic water into the Mediterranean. It was this competition between uplift and erosion along the seaway that allowed a long-lasting salt pan stage, explaining the enormous amount of salt precipitated in the bottom of the Mediterranean. As the tectonic uplift exceeded erosion, the last seaway closed and the Mediterranean became completely isolated. The lack of oceanic water supply and the arid climate of the Mediterranean Sea subsequently led to a lowering of the water level by more than 1,000 metres over a few thousand years. We can only form a rough idea of how long this dry Mediterranean stage lasted. We do know that it ended abruptly 5.33 million years ago when the Atlantic waters found an entrance through the present Strait of Gibraltar, refilling the Mediterranean in a matter of months or years.10 Strong evidence for this is the 200-kilometre-long and 600-metre-deep valley excavated along the Strait by the huge flood that refilled the Mediterranean. Computer models suggest that the incoming water excavating the channel may have been about a thousand times larger than the flow of the Amazon River, moving as fast as 140 km/h. We also know that the desiccation stage of the Mediterranean before that flood lasted half a million years at most. So geologically speaking it was a short period (note that even the following five million years until the present have produced relatively small changes in the overall geographic configuration of the region).

10

Paul-Louis Blanc, ‘The opening of the Plio-Quaternary Gibraltar Strait: Assessing the Size of a Cataclysm,’ Geodinamica Acta 15 (2002): 303–17. Also see Garcia-Castellanos et al., ‘Catastrophic flood of the Mediterranean after the Messinian salinity crisis.’ Nature 462 (2009): 778–81.

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Closing the Strait of Gibraltar: Climate Control or Macro-Engineering Hubris? During the Cold War the technophilia of Modernism, which had given rise to plans for massive interventions into nature, was dampened by a growing awareness and fear of environmental damage amongst the general public.11 As the threat of climate change grows, research on how to control the environment is blooming under the names of geo-engineering and macro-engineering and proposing a myriad of new alternative worlds. Global climate concerns have popularised concepts such as carbon dioxide sequestration (the removal from the atmosphere of the greenhouse gas produced during fossil fuel combustion) or solar radiation management (regulating the solar energy retained in the Earth by changing the reflectivity of its surface). While at the beginning of the twentieth century macroengineers set out to actively change the Earth’s climate – Herman Sörgel’s African developments or the Soviet Dawydow Plan for the diversion of large Siberian rivers to the fertile but dry continental interior come readily to mind – by the beginning of the twenty-first century we see ourselves confronted with the need to control the climate and contain the massive changes threatened by global warming. In this context, the Gibraltar Strait has once again become the subject of macro-engineering creativity. While today’s geo- and macro-engineers certainly do not set out to recreate a mythical ‘pre-catastrophy’ paradise in the Mediterranean, Sörgel’s visionary plans for Atlantropa have been the focus of several recent studies. While interest in the desiccation of the sea and consequent land reclamation is low, the Gibraltar dam and its in-built hydroelectric power plant have inspired several new studies. For instance, in 2008 Mohamed El-Kassas, professor emeritus in environmental sciences at the University of Cairo, published an article in Al-Ahram where he looked at aspects of Atlantropa (in particular the proposed dams) as a possible solution to 11

See Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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climate change. Arguing that global warming will lead to a rise in seawater levels between 60 and 80 cm, El-Kassas sees the Gibraltar dam not as a way for cutting off and desiccating the sea, but as a way of regulating water levels and protecting low-lying coastal areas around the Mediterranean.12 He also argues in favour of a dam as a way to combat global warming and the progressive desertification of the Mediterranean, which is increasingly seen as a security risk in the region.13 A dam, which could regulate the water level, possibly paired with irrigation facilities and other climateregulating constructions, could then, just as in Sörgel’s time, once again be seen as a project in the service of peace. This, at least, was suggested by Cathcart et al. in 2006.14 In fact, the geographer Richard Cathcart is one of today’s most prolific spokesmen for Atlantropa. Since the 1980s he has repeatedly updated and recalculated aspects of the project with the aim of making it feasible and with a fervour which comes close to Sörgel’s own. He is the author of several studies linking the construction of a climate-regulating Gibraltar Strait dam to gigantic art installations. In an article jointly written with Viorel Badescu, he explains how macro-engineering is not only a question of regulating the environment, but also of aesthetics: In fact, since our species’ arrival, all global Nature is quickly becoming fake; restoration ecology via Macroengineering is therefore bound to be a confused multiple reflection of variable artistic tastes displayed by all UNO-member ecosystem-nations. ‘Mother Earth’ can be economically provided with ‘clothing’ that is ever-changing

12 13

14

Mohamed El-Kassas, ‘The Gibraltar Barrage’ Al-Ahram Weekly Online, No. 919 (23–9 October 2008),  [accessed 22 November 2012]. The impact of climate change on security in the Mediterranean was addressed in a NATO congress in 2003. For the congress proceedings see William G. Kepner, Jose L. Rubio, Fausto Pedrazzini (eds), Desertification in the Mediterranean Region: A Security Issue (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006). Richard B. Cathcart, Viorel Badescu, Ramesh Radhakrishnan. Macro Engineers’ Dreams. 2006, n.p.

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In 1998 Cathcart proposed to build the Gibraltar dam as a gigantic landart project: After AD 2002, why not establish an Atlantropa International Sculpture Park at a unique place which, during the past 5–6 million years of Earth’s Geological Time, has changed the deduced and observed climates of our precious home planet owing to its natural opening and closing because of plate tectonics?16

His proposal would entail a lowering of the sea level by only 50 metres (as opposed to Sörgel’s two-basin solution of minus 100 metres for the Western and minus 200 metres for the Eastern basin), which would expose new land of around 8 per cent of the sea’s present-day surface. Like Sörgel’s dam, Cathcart’s, too, would contain a giant hydroelectric power plant, which would be able to produce enough energy to serve Europe and North Africa. Newly developed super-conducting cables would solve the problem of transmitting energy over large distances without too much loss. Further, the dam would be used to store global warming gases such as CO2 and chlorofluorocarbons for an indefinite time or until technology had advanced far enough to make use of these gases. Quite in the visionary spirit of Atlantropa, Cathcart insists that the dam would not only work as an antidote to global warming, but could also be appreciated as a tourist attraction by future space tourists. With reference to Bruno Taut’s artistic designs for moulding the Alps into giant crystal sculptures from the 1920s, Cathcart planned his dam to be ‘colourfully self-illuminating’ and best to be appreciated from above.17 Hence he proposed the construction of ‘an internationalized theme park between Europe and Africa at the Strait of

15 16 17

Richard B. Cathcart, Viorel Badescu, ‘Architectural Ecology: A Tentative Sahara Restoration,’ International Journal in Environmental Studies, 61/2 (April 2004): 145–60, 149. Richard B. Cathcart, ‘Land Art as global warming or cooling antidote,’ Speculations in Science and Technology 21 (1998): 65–72, 70. Cathcart 1998: 70.

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Gibraltar’ where tourists could book scenic flights to altitudes of 100 km to appreciate the gigantic ‘outdoor utility sculpture’ of the Gibraltar dam.18 The park and dam would also contain an international airport, a railway and road system and a giant shopping mall stretching from Europe all the way to Africa as well as a number of flats and homes. Herman Sörgel, who envisaged a similar (though in comparison more modest) theme park around the Gibraltar barrage and its power plant, would surely have been delighted. In 2011, Cathcart revisited the idea for a giant ‘utility sculpture’ at the Gibraltar Strait in an article jointly written with the engineers Nicola Pugno and Alexander Bolonkin, which proposed a version of the Gibraltar dam as a vast ‘Sea Art’ project.19 The dam would no longer be made from concrete, nor would it contain a power plant. Rather it would consist of a gigantic billowing textile barrier, which would extend from the bottom of the sea to one metre above sea level. Thus, as the global sea level increased, the level of the Atlantic would rise, whereas the Mediterranean could be maintained at its present level. The evaporation of the Mediterranean could then be regulated via a sluice system in the textile barrier. Eventually this would result in a gigantic step or terrace across the surface of the Strait of Gibraltar, with the western face of the textile barrier being completely submerged in Atlantic waters and the eastern face protruding by one metre. The article refers to the barrier as an ‘aerial and submarine artwork’ and draws comparisons to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s huge textile land-art projects ‘Valley Curtain’ (1970–2) and ‘Running Fence’ (1976; see Figure 5). The authors suggest that the technical knowledge developed for the installation of Christo’s temporary artworks may well be useful for the installation of a permanent textile barrier at the Gibraltar Strait. In a turn towards previous plans within the field of engineering rather than art, they also refer to a proposal by the engineer Andrew Noel Schofield for a textile storm surge

18 Cathcart 1998: 65. 19 Pugno, Nicola M., Richard B. Cathcart, Alexander Bolonkin, ‘Sea Art: The Mediterranean Sea Terrace Proposal.’ S.D. Brunn (ed.), Engineering Earth (Dordrecht: Springer Science + Business Media, 2011), 1441–7, 1443.

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barrier for the river Thames from 1971. However, rather than expanding further on the pragmatics and technological groundwork of Schofield’s plans, these are described as a ‘watery version of “Valley Curtain”’.20 Clearly, and in an echo of those criticisms directed by contemporary geographers at Herman Sörgel for emphasising beautiful ideas over sound scientific research, here, too, art takes precedence over engineering.

Figure 5:  Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972–1976, photo: Wolfgang Volz © 1976 Christo. The fence, which was made of white nylon, was nearly 40 km long and 5.5 m high. It ran through rural California, crossing fields, roads and farmland before plunging into the Pacific Ocean. It was conceived as a temporary intervention into the landscape and was completely removed after two weeks.

While the link to Atlantropa is only made as an aside in the joint article from 2011, Cathcart has also included the proposal for a Sea-Art

20 See Cathcart, Badescu, Radhakrishnan, 2006.

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project in the open-access book Macro Engineers’ Dreams (2006), where it appears in a chapter titled ‘21st-Century Atlantropa’.21 Even though the textile barrier would exclusively serve the conservation of present sea levels and there is no provision for a power plant, the chapter describes the sea-art project as ‘a safer and significantly less costly means for a truly 21st century Atlantropa to come into concrete reality.’22 However, such claims are immediately qualified by the authors’ assertion at the outset of the chapter that ‘macroengineers are fearless synthesizers with a strong distaste for the piecemeal approach to geophysical and social reality.’23 What we find extraordinary about the proposal for the Gibraltar textile barrage is not so much its engineering feasibility or even its dubious utility as an antidote to the effects of global warming, but its aesthetics, which is not only likened to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artworks, but also to the sunken fence, the so-called ‘haha’, of English Garden design.24 In a hubris which must strike us as essentially Modernist with its embrace of technology and its insistence on aesthetics, without hesitation the macro-engineer declares the world’s oceans a huge garden to be shaped and formed to his own imagination. While we may now have the technological skills and perhaps even the audacity to attempt the construction of such giant projects as the Gibraltar barrage, whether in concrete or textile, we still lack the necessary understanding about the mechanisms controlling climate and the environment, both at local and global scales. We also lack the fundamental knowledge to predict the impact of such constructions with any accuracy. Our present knowledge of the geological past has shown evidence that a land bridge between Africa and Europe would by no means result in a utopian landscape. Rather, the newly exposed land would be arid and unsuitable for agriculture. Underground waters, too, would have high salinity. Further, marine life in the Mediterranean would be unable to survive in the

21 22 23 24

Cathcart, Badescu, Radhakrishnan, 2006: n.p. Cathcart, Badescu, Radhakrishnan, 2006: n.p. Cathcart, Badescu, Radhakrishnan, 2006: n.p. Cathcart, Badescu, Radhakrishnan, 2006: n.p.

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hypersaline conditions of a partially desiccated sea. The shrinkage of this large surface of water would also lead to changes in the global heat and water balance, as well as in atmospheric circulation and weather, the magnitude of which is at present unpredictable. In this respect the extreme events of the Messinian Salinity Crisis and the environmental response of the planet may well enable climate-change scientists to improve the predictability of their computer models. At present the accuracy of these computer models is limited by the large number of poorly constrained parameters involved in the calculations. This problem could be overcome by using the Earth’s response to the Messinian Salinity Crisis as a test scenario. While macro-engineers do not appear to be too troubled by these unknowns (possibly because many of them consciously work within a purely speculative realm), our society is now somewhat more reluctant to embrace such large-scale interventions into nature than it was in the early twentieth century. But even if we were still willing to take our chances with the unknown powers of nature, it seems unlikely that the social and political reality will in the foreseeable future allow for the transcontinental co-operation needed to realise a project of the scale of a Gibraltar dam. However, it seems more than likely that as scientific knowledge of the geological past of the Mediterranean grows, it will continue to inspire geo- and macro-engineers to dream up ever more intricate alternative geographies for future societies.

Bibliography Blanc, Paul-Louis, ‘The opening of the Plio-Quaternary Gibraltar Strait: Assessing the Size of a Cataclysm’, Geodinamica Acta 15 (2002): 303–17. Cathcart, Richard Brook, ‘Land Art as global warming or cooling antidote’, Speculations in Science and Technology 21 (1998): 65–72. Cathcart, Richard Brook and Viorel Badescu, ‘Architectural Ecology: A Tentative Sahara Restoration’, International Journal in Environmental Studies 61/2 (2004): 145–60.

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Cathcart, Richard Brook, Viorel Badescu, Ramesh Radhakrishnan, Macro Engineers’ Dreams, 2006, . Darwin Hamblin, Jacob, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). El-Kassas, Mohamed, ‘The Gibraltar Barrage’ Al-Ahram Weekly Online, No. 919, 23–9 October 2008, [accessed 22 November 2012]. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems – Ptolemaic & Copernican (1632), trans. by Stillman Drake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953). Garcia-Castellanos, Daniel and A. Villaseñor, ‘Messinian Salinity Crisis Regulated by Competing Tectonics and Erosion at the Gibraltar Arc’, Nature 480 (2011): 359–63, doi: 10.1038/nature10651. Garcia-Castellanos, Daniel, F. Estrada, I. Jiménez-Munt, C. Gorini, M. Fernàndez, J. Vergés and R. De Vicente, ‘Catastrophic flood of the Mediterranean after the Messinian salinity crisis’, Nature 462 (2009): 778–81, doi: 10.1038/nature08555. Hsu, Kenneth J., The Mediterranean Was a Desert: A Voyage of the Glomar Challenger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). Kepner, William G., Jose L. Rubio and Fausto Pedrazzini (eds), Desertification in the Mediterranean Region. A Security Issue (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006). Lofi, Johanna, J. Déverchère, V. Gaullier, H. Gillet, C. Gorini, P. Guennoc, L. Loncke, A. Maillard, F. Sage and I. Thinon, ‘The Messinian Salinity Crisis Markers in the Mediterranean and Black Seas’, in Seismic Atlas by the Commission for the Geological Map of the World (Societé Geologique de France, 2011). Pliny the Elder, Natural History [Historia Naturalis], Vol. 3 [~77 AD]. Trans. by H. Rackham (London: The Folio Society, 2012). Pugno, Nicola M., Richard B. Cathcart and Alexander Bolonkin, ‘Sea Art: The Mediterranean Sea Terrace Proposal’, in S.D. Brunn (ed.), Engineering Earth. (Dordrecht: Springer Science + Business Media, 2011), pp. 1441–7. Urgeles, Roger, A. Camerlenghi, D. Garcia-Castellanos, B. De Mol, M. Garcés, J. Vergés, I. Haslam and M. Hardman, ‘Basin Research, New constraints on the Messinian sealevel drawdown from 3D seismic data of the Ebro Margin, western Mediterranean’, 2010, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2117.2010.00477.x. Wells, H.G., The Outline of History, Vol. 1. (London: George Newnes, 1919).

Philip E. Steinberg, Elizabeth A. Nyman and Mauro J. Caraccioli

3 Atlas Swam: Freedom, Capital and Floating Sovereignties in the Seasteading Vision1

Introduction: Launching the Seastead Idea We begin this article at a reception in the Millennium Tower, the anchor of a city-sponsored effort to transform San Francisco’s gritty South of Market neighbourhood into ‘SoMa’, an up-scale, residential zone that would be linked to the adjacent financial district through ‘canyons of sleek glass’.2 The Millennium Tower was designed as a multifunctional space that would represent a new ‘dynamic urbanity that pulls housing close to office space and transit, all threaded by attractive strands of open space’.3 However, as often happens with New Urbanist projects, at some point between conceptualisation and construction many of the design innovations fell victim to financial exigencies. The building that eventually was constructed is an isolated high-income condominium tower that has few tangible connections with either the nearby financial district or the surrounding neighbourhood, and critics have deemed the project inappropriate for a city that, in contrast with so many of its counterparts in the

1 2

3

This article was first published in Antipode, 2011, 1–19 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330. 2011.00963.x. King, J., ‘Life on the ground key to new high-rise area.’ San Francisco Chronicle, 2 May 2008, [accessed 13 June 2014]. King 2008.

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US, retains a vibrant mixed-use downtown.4 The Millennium Tower thus can be seen as a memorial to the naïve belief that an organic community can emerge in a highly engineered environment. As such, it provided a fitting setting for the gathering that was taking place there on the evening of 28 September 2009. The reception was being held in the fifty-fourth floor home of Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who, through his founding and managing of PayPal, Inc., the world’s largest e-payments company, made it onto Forbes magazine’s 400 Richest Americans list in 2008.5 On this evening, Thiel was inaugurating the second annual conference of The Seasteading Institute (TSI), an organisation that seeks to ‘further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities, enabling innovations with new political and social systems’ on semi-stationary, floating platforms.6 The organisation is the brainchild of Wayne Gramlich and TSI Executive Director Patri Friedman, whose co-authored online book outlines both the material viability and financial affordability of the seasteading project.7 Like the Millennium Tower, the seastead is promoted simultaneously as the apotheosis of and an antidote to globalisation, an insular and uncorrupted city-state where capitalism can regain its originary energy and where the spirit of human entrepreneurship can flourish.8

4 5 6 7 8

King 2009. Miller, M., and Greenberg, D., ‘Forbes 400 richest Americans; #377: Peter Thiel’, Forbes, 17 September 2008, [accessed 13 June 2014]. TSI [The Seasteading Institute] (n.d.), A brief introduction to the Seasteading Institute, [accessed 13 June 2014]. Gramlich, W.C., and Friedman, P. (n.d.), Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas, accessed 13 June 2014]. Thiel, P.A., ‘The optimistic thought experiment.’ Policy Review 147 (February/March 2008), [accessed 13 June 2014] and Thiel, P.A., ‘The education of a libertarian,’ Cato Unbound, 13 April 2009a, [accessed 13 June 2014].

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The tenor of the conference that followed over the next two days ranged from that of a science fiction convention (potential seasteaders in attendance, who were overwhelmingly male, wondered what they could do to attract women to live on seasteads), to a seminar in libertarian economics (references to Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Mancur Olson, and Ayn Rand abounded), to a scientific meeting on ocean engineering (architectural renderings were displayed and critiqued), to a psychedelic conclave of free-thinking anarchists (participants winkingly speculated about how seasteads could be havens for hallucinogenic drug use).9 Indeed, the entire seasteading venture might easily be written off as an impractical fantasy of social misfits and political dreamers who would like to make their own states (we mean this literally; one of the presentations at the meeting was ‘How to start your own country’). While we certainly are not suggesting that seasteads will be established at any time in the future, this reservation should be qualified. Given the inconsistencies within the details of seasteading, we are not even certain that the movement’s leaders truly see seasteads as practical alternatives; their purpose may be more to spur thinking about current limits that the state system places on ‘freedom’ so that others will dream up and implement more practical alternatives.10 Such intentions are precisely why seasteading is worthy of our attention: not as a potential reality, but as an articulation of a set of ideas. These ideas, which join a romanticisation of marine/ island utopias, a libertarian glorification of individual entrepreneurship, the paradoxical belief that planning can be used to engineer communities that 9

One of this article’s authors (Caraccioli) attended this conference as well as the opening reception, and our analysis is informed by his observations. Material from the conference, including videos of most presentations, can be viewed at . 10 For instance, TSI’s Executive Director, Patri Friedman, has written, ‘Maybe seasteading is a hopeless dream, but I think there is at least a small chance that it can revolutionize the world by transforming government into a dynamic, competitive industry, which will benefit everyone, not just libertarians’ (Patrissimo [a/k/a Patri Friedman] ‘Comment on C. Miéville, Floating utopias: the degraded imagination of the libertarian seasteaders,’ In These Times, 28 September 2007, [accessed 13 June 2014].

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foster personal freedoms, and a suspicion of the state’s capacity to guarantee these freedoms, all emerge from the specific conditions and ideologies of early twenty-first-century US (and, especially, Californian) capitalism. In the sections that follow, we trace each of these foundations and how they intersect, in an effort to understand the seasteading movement, not so much as a harbinger of late-capitalist post-modernity but as its symptom.

Seasteading and the Search for a Floating Utopia In turning to the sea as a source of individualist escape, TSI follows a history of utopian dreamers. Within Western society, the ocean has long been conceived as providing a barrier to society that makes an island exist as a land of its own, without the corrupting influence of the modern world. Islands, as in the model of Plato’s island polis, are often conceptualised as spaces that are perfectly bounded, whole and separate.11 The idealisation (and gendering) of the island as a place of ownership, where any man can be a king, has a long history in Western literature.12 From this perspective,

11

12

See Anckar, D., ‘Archipelagos and political engineering: the impact of non-contiguity on devolution in small states.’ Island Studies Journal 2 (2007): 193–208; Hay, P., ‘A phenomenology of islands.’ Island Studies Journal 1 (2006): 19–42; Lowenthal, D., ‘Islands, lovers, and others.’ The Geographical Review 97 (2007): 202–29; Royle, S., A Geography of Islands: Small Island Insularity. London: Routledge, 2001; Steinberg, P.E., ‘Insularity, sovereignty and statehood: the representation of islands on portolan charts and the construction of the territorial state.’ Geografiska Annaler 87B (2005): 253–65. See for example Ballantyne, R.M. [1857] The Coral Island. New York: Dutton, 1949; Defoe, D. [1719] Robinson Crusoe. New York: Norton, 1994; More, T. [1516] Utopia. England: Penguin Books, 2003; Shakespeare, W. [ca. 1610] The Tempest. New York: Signet Classics, 1998; Stevenson, R.L., Treasure Island. London: Cassell and Company, 1883; for literary analysis, see Bongie, C., Islands and Exiles: the Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998; Carpenter, K., Desert Isles and Pirate Islands: The Island Theme in 19th Century English

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an island is a blank canvas, on which solitary, independent individuals can paint whatever they desire most. As such, the island is idealised as the perfect site for autonomous actors to exert their freedom as they try out new ideas. The realities of island life, however, do not live up to this masculinist, individualist ideal. Islands exist within oceans, and they have always been constituted as much by connections across their borders as by the seemingly isolated practices that occur within their shorelines.13 Today’s island societies, as much as those on the mainland, are forged within the flows, relations, and hierarchies of global capitalism. Indeed, the marketing of island ‘difference’ – whether through the image of the tropical beach as a vacation resort or the offshore financial centre as a haven for runaway capital – fosters integration and ‘normalisation’ so that over time a disjuncture grows between the marketed image and the everyday experiences of resident islanders.14 Even the metaphysical separation of land from water that underlies the myth of island isolation and difference, wherein the presence of uncontrollable water is seen as providing a buffer that safeguards an island’s uniqueness, is undermined by island states as they extend their authority into Exclusive Economic Zones in which they assert ownership Juvenile Literature. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1984; DeLoughrey, E.M., Route and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007; Edmond, R., and Smith, V., Editors’ Introduction, in R. Edmond and V. Smith (eds), Islands in History and Representation. London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 1–18; Ellis, M., ‘“The cane-land isles”: commerce and empire in late eighteenthcentury georgic and pastoral poetry’, in R. Edmond and V. Smith (eds), Islands in History and Representation. London: Routledge, 2003, 43–62. 13 Hau’ofa, E., We are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008; Jolly, M., ‘On the edge? deserts, oceans, islands.’ The Contemporary Pacific 13 (2001): 417–66; McCall, G., ‘Clearing confusion in a disembedded world: the case for nissology’ Geographische Zeitschrift 84 (1996): 74–85. 14 Baldacchino, G., Island Enclaves: Offshoring Strategies, Creative Governance, and Subnational Island Jurisdictions. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010; Palan, R., The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomadic Millionaires. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003; Pattullo, P., Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean, 2nd edn. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005; Wilkinson, P.F., ‘Caribbean cruise tourism: delusion? illusion?’ Tourism Geographies 1 (1999): 261–82.

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of resources such as fish stocks and offshore oil and natural gas deposits,15 just as it is undermined in the ideologies of expansionist continental nations that construct the ocean both as the signification of expansion’s limits and as its next conquest.16 In short, the ocean is constructed both as a venue (and meme) for achieving difference (and escape) from society and as an opportunity for extending society’s dominant structures: a space of contradictory ideals that shape social imaginaries that, in turn, are reflected in (and reflective of ) political practice. Since the quest for an island escape is utopian, it is not necessary for the idealised island to have a material referent at all.17 Indeed, many would-be escapists have pursued wholly imaginary islands, or ‘islands of the mind’,18 and the platforms proposed by The Seasteading Institute might better be thought of as such ‘islands of the mind’ rather than practicable engineering projects. Already in the Middle Ages, Europeans directed their attention to ‘phantom islands’ where they could virtually engineer pathways for escaping the misery of the real world.19 Today, the role of phantom islands has been transferred to artificial islands. As Jackson and della Dora note, artificial islands reproduce the iconic role of islands in the Western (or now global) imagination, but in an even more profound way because the artificial island is a potentially attainable feat of human engineering and thus can become an actant that will influence the world beyond the island’s borders: ‘Unlike [Sir Thomas] More’s “Nowhere” [“Utopia”] which was never meant to be achieved […] [artificial] island utopias today are explicit both in their efforts to territorialize themselves as parts of wider global complexes, and in 15 16 17 18 19

Steinberg, P.E., ‘The maritime mystique: sustainable development, capital mobility, and nostalgia in the world-ocean.’ Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 17 (1999): 403–26. Connery, C., ‘The oceanic feeling and the regional imaginary’, in W. Dissanayake and R. Wilson (eds), Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, 284–311. Manuel, F. and Manuel, F., Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Gillis, J.R., Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Johnson 1994; Nicolson, A., ‘The islands.’ The Geographical Review 97 (2007): 153–64.

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their promises to bring a future promise to fruition’.20 In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a range of other visionaries have sought to apply engineering prowess to join the heterotopia of the ship21 with the historic idealisation of the island, enabling permanent habitation in the ‘free medium’ of the sea.22 For these visionaries, the island utopia is less an escape than the forward wedge of a political project. In the case of TSI, that political project is libertarian. Libertarianism, which typically traces its roots to the classical liberalism of John Locke (1690), is a diverse philosophy, but it is characterised by the core belief that the fundamental human right is that of self-ownership.23 Libertarians thus view with suspicion any institution or social norm that might interfere with the individual’s right to pursue his or her own happiness. Libertarian philosophy is often paired with the techno-optimism of novelist Ayn Rand, wherein it is believed that Rational Man seeking his own satisfaction will be the engine of social advancement.24 Politically, libertarians are a difficult group to classify. While their aversion to regulations and redistributions that might hinder capitalist entrepreneurship and human achievement often align them with extreme 20 Jackson, M., and della Dora, V., ‘“‘Dreams so big only the sea can hold them”: manmade islands as anxious spaces, cultural icons, and travelling visions.’ Environment and Planning A 41 (2009): 2086–104, 2097. 21 Foucault, M., ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–7. 22 Keith, K.M., Floating cities: a new challenge for transnational law. Marine Policy 1 (1977); 190–204; Miéville, C., ‘Floating utopias,’ In M. Davis and D.D. Monk (eds), Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. New York: New Press, 2008, pp. 251–61; Steinberg, P.E., The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; Steinberg, P.E., ‘Liquid urbanity: re-engineering the city in a post-terrestrial world’, In S.D. Brunn (ed.), Engineering the Earth: The Impacts of Mega-Engineering Projects. Berlin: Springer, 2011, 2113–22. 23 Vallentyne, P., ‘Libertarianism.’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2009, [accessed 13 June 2014]; Zwolinski, M., ‘Libertarianism’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008, [accessed 13 June 2014]. 24 Rand, A. [1943], The Fountainhead. New York: Signet, 1996; Rand, A. [1957], Atlas Shrugged. New York: Signet, 1996; Rand, A., The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: Signet, 1964.

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conservatives, their objection to policing, militarism, and the enforcement of social norms contains an anarchist tendency as well. Since ‘big government’ is identified as the enemy, the libertarian political project (particularly in the United States) often eschews transformation of the existing polity in favour of an agenda where relative autonomy (for the libertarian community and for the individuals within it) is achieved through a degree of secession.25 Proposed libertarian city-states (or commonwealths) have ranged from survivalist compounds and individual states within the US, to the offshore floating platforms proposed by TSI. As Miéville notes, TSI is far from the first libertarian group to turn to the ocean as an ideal environment for locating its political aspirations. In his analysis of the proposed libertarian cruise ship Freedom Ship and other ocean-borne libertarian utopias, Miéville identifies a ‘lunatic syllogism’ that leads libertarians to turn their gaze seaward: ‘“I dislike the state: The state is made of land: Therefore I dislike the land.” Water is a solvent, dissolving “political” (state) power, leaving only “economics” behind’.26 Similar points are made by Atkinson and Blandy (2009) in their analysis of the permanent-residency luxury cruise ship The World and by Steinberg (2011) in his study of the proposed floating software engineering sweatshop SeaCode. While we align ourselves with these works, they all focus on contradictions that would emerge were the visions actually to be realised: class conflicts, legal loopholes, engineering hurdles, etc. These are all challenges that would come about with an actualisation of the dream; the escapist compounds would have to be physically built and function before such difficulties could become true problems. Miéville, in particular, points to these concerns as reasons to dismiss such projects, as they reflect an idealism that would prevent them from ever getting off the ground. However, the actualisation of a seastead, as we mentioned above, may not be the point. The articulation of such dreams may be enough to spur greater imaginings about libertarian philosophy and the desired role

Gallaher, C., On the Fault Line: Race, Class, and the American Militia Movement. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. 26 Miéville 2008: 256. 25

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(or lack thereof ) of the state, and thus in the remainder of this article we focus less on seasteading’s (im)practicability and more on the social forces that drive its idealisation.

The Anarcho-libertarianism of Seasteading: Where Economic Man Meets Burning Man Some of TSI’s credibility as the visionary of a new political order comes from the success that its leaders have already had in the economic and technological arenas. Executive Director Patri Friedman is a former Google software engineer (and grandson of Nobel Prize winning economist and libertarian icon Milton Friedman) whose dream is to create practical approaches to libertarianism that will convince sceptics to accept his vision.27 Wayne Gramlich, who with Friedman was TSI’s cofounder, is also a software engineer and an early Sun Microsystems employee. Peter Thiel, in addition to being the cofounder of PayPal and TSI’s largest financial backer, was an early investor in Facebook and other successful high-technology ventures. The philosophy and organisational structure of TSI has deep roots in Silicon Valley’s proto-libertarian ‘Californian ideology’ that lionises the risk-taking, convention-flaunting individual as an engine of entrepreneurship and technological innovation.28 The idea that entrepreneurial indi­viduals working in cooperative networks can produce a path-breaking 27 Friedman, P. (n.d.) Patri’s politics, [accessed 13 June 2014]; Patri Friedman’s father, Santa Clara University Law School professor David Friedman, is also a noted libertarian scholar. 28 Baker, C., ‘Live free or drown: floating utopias on the cheap’, Wired, 19 January 2009, [accessed 13 June 2014]; Barbrook, R., and Cameron, A. (n.d.), Californian ideology: A critique of West Coast cyber-libertarianism. The Hypermedia Research Centre, [accessed 13 June 2014].

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product without the need for formalised oversight from a bureaucratic institution (whether a corporation or a state) is characteristic of the region’s high-technology sector. As is exemplified through the prevalence of both venture capital financing and open-source software engineering, development in the technology industry has long been structured around individual innovation and creativity.29 In both the TSI and Silicon Valley product development models, individuals identify a potentially viable new frontier, develop a feasible plan with the help of technical consultants (software engineers in the case of a high-technology start-up, naval architects in the case of TSI), attract support within the competitive marketplace of venture capitalists who buy in to the scheme, and provide avenues for future profitability that, it is hoped, will be realised as like-minded individuals apply their entrepreneurial talents. As Sheller notes, there are a variety of axes that connect software development with the construction of islands as both material and virtual places.30 While we endorse her analysis, we extend it here by suggesting that these two practices – software development and island creation – are united by a libertarian celebration of the individual who can make his or her own island. For Thiel, the libertarian ties are explicit. Thiel founded PayPal as an attempt to create a web-based currency that would undermine government tax structures31 and since selling the firm he has used much of his fortune to support libertarian causes.32 In an essay published by the Cato Institute (a major, Washington, DC-based libertarian research and public policy institute), Thiel declares, ‘There are no truly free places left in our 29 Cohen, S.S. and Fields, G., ‘Social capital and capital gains in Silicon Valley.’ In E.L. Lesser (ed.), Knowledge and Social Capital. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000, 179–200; Saxenian, A., The Origin and Dynamics of Production Networks in Silicon Valley. In R. Swedberg (ed.), Entrepreneurship: the Social Science View. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 308–31. 30 Sheller, M., ‘Infrastructures of the imagined island: software, mobilities, and the architecture of Caribbean paradise.’ Environment and Planning A 41 (2009): 1386–403. 31 O’Brien, J.M., The PayPal Mafia. Fortune, 17 September 2007, 96. 32 Baker 2009; NPR [National Public Radio] Libertarian island: no rules, just rich dudes, 21 May 2008, [accessed 13 June 2014].

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world, [so] […] the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country.’33 He goes on to suggest that while the internet is perhaps the most likely candidate to emerge as a ‘free place,’ seasteading should also be pursued, and he has backed up this endorsement with at least $750,000 in donations to TSI, as well as active philanthropic support for other libertarian causes.34 While libertarianism as espoused by Rand is most typically associated with unleashing humanity’s entrepreneurial potential, the philosophy has also been taken up by many with a more bohemian bent, who seek out a society with few legal restraints not to make money but simply to do their own thing.35 Both Friedman and Thiel have alluded to recreational drug 33 Thiel 2009a. 34 TTF [The Thiel Foundation] (n.d.) ‘Homepage for Peter Thiel’s philanthropic organization,’ [accessed 13 June 2014]; The relation between TSI, software development, and libertarian ideology is also apparent when one considers the connections between TSI’s vision and the video game BioShock. In this game, billionaire industrialist Andrew Ryan (an anagram for Ayn Rand?) creates an underwater city called Rapture and hails it as a libertarian paradise: ‘A city where the artist would not fear the censor […] where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality […] where the great would not be constrained by the small’ (Take-Two Interactive Software. BioShock. 2009 [DISC] XBOX 360. New York: Take-Two Interactive Software). Ryan was modeled after Ayn Rand’s protagonists, as game creator Ken Levine sought to capture her characters’ ‘intensity or purity of belief ’ (Crecente, B., ‘No gods or kings: objectivism in BioShock.’ Kotaku, 15 February 2008, [accessed 13 June 2014]). Despite the game’s plot, in which Ryan’s experiment in laissez faire governance goes horribly awry, many of its online fans speculate just how a city like Rapture can be constructed in real life, with some explicitly noting that the surface-level vision of Friedman and his associates might be more practical than Rapture’s underwater location (2K Games Forum (n.d.) Could a city like rapture really exist? (forum thread), [accessed 13 June 2014]). 35 Gibson, M., ‘Robert Nozick’s framework for utopia’, 9 September 2009, [accessed 13 June 2014]; Nozick, R., Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974; Nozick, R., Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

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use, and that part of the allure of seasteading is the creation of a sphere in which these activities would be allowed.36 Friedman himself has revealed that his political and social philosophy was formerly best expressed by his experiences at Burning Man,37 an event in which thousands of artists and would-be artists travel to a provisional space in Nevada’s remote Black Rock Desert to unleash human creativity for a week, and then depart leaving behind no trace of their presence. At Burning Man, the focus is on immediacy and the process of artistic expression, a process that is more important than the objects produced by that expression. The rules at the event are simple: there are no rules, except ‘the rules that serve to protect the health, safety, and experience of the community at large’.38 This has led to Burning Man’s reputation as a festival for drug users and other fringe groups, but its ‘live and let live’ ethic and its celebration of the productive nature of human creativity also aligns well with libertarian philosophy. TSI has tapped into regional enthusiasm for Burning Man by sponsoring its annual Ephemerisle Festival, which one libertarian blogger has called ‘Burning Man at Sea’.39 Like Burning Man, Ephemerisle is promoted as an event where everyone is a participant, not an observer, as everyone will bring something to contribute to the experience. The first Ephemerisle was located in the Sacramento River delta in September 2009, but TSI plans to

36 37 38 39

Baker 2009; Thiel 2009a. Baker 2009. Burning Man. ‘What Is Burning Man?’, 2010 [accessed 13 June 2014]. Taylor, B., ‘Ephemerisle: partying on the high seas.’ Posted on the FR33 Agents blog, 2009, [accessed 13 June 2014]; While Ephemerisle’s promotional literature does not explicitly reference Burning Man, Friedman states on his personal blog that he would like to have something ‘like the Burning of the Man’ (the climactic event that concludes every Burning Man festival) at Ephemerisle (Friedman, P., ‘Ephemerisle group activity ideas. Patri’s Peripatetic Peregrinations’, 18 August 2009b, [accessed 13 June 2014]). Links between the two events and the broader Seasteading project are developed by Sussberg (Sussberg, J., ‘Ephemerisle documentary’, 2009, [accessed 13 June 2014]).

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move the event further away from land in subsequent years, culminating in a move into international waters where state laws cease to exist.40 With these plans to move away from states entirely, TSI seeks to use the extraterritorial status of international waters to generate an even more extreme experience of escape from terrestrial norms, laws, and constraints than the original Burning Man could hope to accomplish. TSI’s goal thus is to set an example for the more enduring institution of marine-based freedom that one would hope to construct on a seastead. The connection between Burning Man and seasteading, mediated through the example of Ephemerisle, is important because the success of seasteading relies on the involvement of individuals who are willing to live in an unconventional fashion and be the vanguard of a new political and economic movement. Silicon Valley engineers like Gramlich may be too networked into the land to go out and seastead themselves. Instead, seasteading, like a new piece of software or a new technology, would require ‘early adopters’ who would take the time to work out the bugs and, in the process, transform the raw vision of a few idealists (or engineers) into a usable ‘product.’ Indeed, Friedman speaks of pioneer seasteaders more as customers, or early investors, than as collaborators: We need to go out there and find, identify, and recruit the brave pioneers who will live on [the seasteads] full time. One method we’re considering for this is a contingent contract […]. The idea here is that somebody would sign-up to move only if certain conditions were met: enough other people were found; the thing actually was going to get built; it had actual amenities like internet access, working bathrooms; met their cost requirements. They could even specify different amounts of space they would get with different cost levels, and the business-minded among you will note that by getting this data from our potential pioneers we actually generate a demand curve

40 Friedman, P., ‘The Seasteading Institute announces the First Annual Ephemerisle Festival of Politics, Community, and Art,’ 2009a, [accessed 13 June 2014]; TSI, however, cancelled the 2010 Ephemerisle Festival, citing financial difficulties in covering increased insurance expenses (Friedman, P., ‘Ephemerisle 2010 Cancellation’, 18 June 2010, [accessed 13 June 2014]).

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If seasteading is ever to get off the ground, it seems likely that the bulk of the individuals in this ‘customer base’ will be adventurers who are more excited at the potential psychedelic possibilities than the corporate benefits of libertarianism. As one cautious supporter of the movement has pointed out, ‘There’s a reason people do this and that’s because they don’t fit into society. There’s probably always been some set of people that have this pioneering spirit, and because the frontier has vanished, it’s not there for them anymore […]. Still, there are a lot of wacky people involved.’42 Both Friedman and Thiel see such eclecticism as part of the creation of a new political ecosystem, a social and technological necessity to counter the pessimism and inefficiency of traditional, state-bounded politics.43 The challenge for TSI is to take the raw, anti-establishment energy of its bohemian Burning Man/Ephemerisle wing, which is expressly devoted to not creating a sustainable, permanent, or obviously engineered product, and to harness it into constructing a viable post-statist commonwealth, the goal of its more legalistic (and capitalistic) entrepreneurialist/Randian wing.44 Brian Doherty, senior editor for the libertarian magazine Reason, revealed some of the tensions between these two groups at the end of a visit to Ephemerisle 2009: I am not entirely certain I can see the throughline between [Ephemerisle] and the ultimate seasteading goal of independent freeholds out in international waters.

41 Friedman, P., ‘The future of seasteading – the Poseidon Project.’ The Seasteading Institute 2009 Annual Conference, 2009d, [accessed 13 June 2014]. 42 Hastings, S., ‘Experiences with HavenCo and SeaLand’. The Seasteading Institute 2009 Annual Conference, 2009, [accessed 13 June 2014]. 43 Thiel 2009b. 44 This challenge is also present in Burning Man itself. Behind the apparent spontaneity of Burning Man is a highly organized planning infrastructure (Brown, D., Burning Man: Behind Black Rock. Austin, TX: Gone Off Deep Productions, 2005).

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Seasteading, to be viable moving forward, has to have all of the aspects of a human civilization, the most important aspect of which is that it has to be productive, not merely consumptive. Seasteading has to involve economic activity, and [Ephemerisle] is not that.45

Even TSI Director of Operations James Hogan, who apparently believes that a ‘throughline’ can be drawn between Ephemerisle and TSI’s more orthodox entrepreneurialist-libertarian ambitions, acknowledges that it will be ‘challenging’ to construct a sustainable community while retaining the creative spirit that gives that community its entrepreneurial energy: People who are affected by Burning Man always say, ‘It’s a shame the real world isn’t more like that.’ With Ephemerisle, there is an existing movement dedicated to making the world ‘more like that!’ You don’t just have to lament about leaving the magic of the event behind, you can contribute to a cause that has a plausible (if challenging) plan for actually disseminating that through human society.46

In a sense, the challenge faced by TSI as it seeks to blend the anarchism of its bohemian wing with the corporate orientation of its entrepreneurialist wing echoes that faced by every utopian project: how does one establish the utopia as a viable, ongoing society without simultaneously threatening the ‘magic’ (or difference) that gives the dream its meaning?47 In the case of seasteading, this challenge is intensified because of the way in which the project seeks to create a new kind of urban formation physically and juridically on the margins of the state system. Thus the next sections of this article examine the ways in which seasteading proposes to transgress norms of urban form and territorial sovereignty, and how those transgressions are limited by the movement’s internal contradictions.

45 Quoted in Sussberg 2009. 46 Hogan, J., ‘Ephemerisle thoughts. James Hogan Blog’, 9 October 2009, [accessed 13 June 2014]. 47 Mannheim, K. [1936], Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985; Ricoeur, P., ‘Ideology and Utopia’, In P. Ricoeur (ed.), From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991, 308–24.

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Seasteading as New, New Urbanism As we suggested with this article’s opening in the Millennium Tower, the hubris of seasteading might be equated with that of New Urbanist design. Although island utopianism is more typically associated with escape from the city than with building an island in a city’s image, in fact both the seasteading and New Urbanist movements (and, for that matter, festivals of free expression like Burning Man and Ephemerisle) share the seemingly paradoxical ideal that spontaneity and organic energy can be achieved through planning. Like many utopian movements before them, seasteading and New Urbanism share a belief that individual liberty can be fostered through the engineering and ordering of a planned, insular environment. The movements thus have a complex relationship with the anti-authori­ tarian aspect of libertarianism. Léon Krier, the ‘intellectual godfather of the New Urbanism movement in America’,48 proposed New Urbanism as an alternative to zoning that would allow the synergies of place to be freed from restrictive regulations. New Urbanism, as formulated by Krier, shares many tenets with libertarianism. Indeed, Krier’s defence of the movement could almost have been written by Rand: New Urbanism … does not impose social master plans. Instead, it allows the infinite variety of human talent and ambition to build harmonious and pleasing environments. It channels competitive forces to flourish as good neighbors while pursuing their own self-interest … Market forces are vectors of human energies and enterprise. No city can be built without them. Planning laws have in the past often strangled such activities rather than let them flourish. New Urbanist principles have the simplicity and practicality of moral precepts rather than the tyrannical sophistications of utopian reform. They are not so much prescriptive as they are permissive. In that perspective, the common

48 Kunstler, J.H., ‘Book review: Léon Krier’s Architecture: Choice or Fate.’ The American Enterprise’ (September/October 1998): 79–80.

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interest, in the form of public spaces, is the product of neighbors realizing their contrasting and variegated self-interests.49

Krier’s Randian faith in human innovation notwithstanding, many libertarians are suspicious of New Urbanism as a particularly pernicious form of planning. Friedrich Hayek, arguably Krier’s counterpart as the ‘intellectual godfather’ of libertarianism in America, rejects planning (including, presumably, New Urbanism) as an unwarranted market distortion.50 More recently, libertarian planner Peter Gordon has decried New Urbanism as ‘heavy on intervention’ and has dismissed it because it is ‘tied into the “civil society”, or communitarian, discussion’.51 Gordon argues that while traditional planning stifles innovation and interferes with the free market by assigning functions to specific zones, New Urbanism is even more invasive because it attempts to design whole spaces and, in so doing, engineer human values, behaviours, and life patterns. The debate among libertarians regarding New Urbanism remains lively,52 with some taking the middle ground that the New Urbanist goal of communitarianism is admirable, but only if promoted through marketbased incentives. Our aim is not to take sides in this debate but rather to use it to point to similar contradictions in the parallel project of seasteading, where the definition, delineation, and governance of territory also can

49 Quoted in Salingaros, N., ‘The future of cities, the absurdity of modernism: interview with Léon Krier.’ Planetizen, 5 November 2001, [accessed 13 June 2014]. 50 Hayek, F.A. [1978], The Constitution of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Hetherington, K., The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge, 1997. 51 Moore, A., and Henderson, R., ‘Plan obsolescence: urban planning skeptic Peter Gordon on the benefits of sprawl, the war against cars, and the future of American cities’, Reason Magazine ( June 1998): 42. 52 e.g. Staley, S., ‘Libertarians at the gates of new urbanism.’ Reason Foundation Website, 28 April 2003, [accessed 13 June 2014].

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simultaneously serve as an expression of, a means for, and a barrier to the development of individual freedom or self-determination.

Sovereignty, Territory and ‘Aquatory’ The complex positioning of sovereignty – wherein state power is simultaneously an expression of individual self-determination, its guarantor, and its enemy – is normally mediated through the institution of territory, as the modern state uses its control of territory to define residents’ citizenship. As an ideological strategy for nation-building, sovereigns seek to represent state territory as permanent and inviolable. However, when this definition of territory is mobilised over and against the historical and experiential negotiations of mapping, naming, and bordering that have defined the contemporary international system, key ambiguities begin to emerge.53 Sovereigns typically respond to these ambiguities by associating their states with historical and geographical locations of social stasis. By affirming the stasis of a particular political order, the state achieves its identity, but it also foreshadows the possibility of its dissolution. Indeed, the very presence of other sovereigns (as existential threats to an absolute sovereignty) is a key element in the mobilisation of sovereign power and control: first, as the defence of territory; and second, as the defence of a territory’s collective identity. Such disembodied and de-personalised foundations for sovereign rules and practices – including the invocation of self-determination as the building block of any notion of social freedom – make the enterprise of sovereignty inherently conflictive and opposed to prolonged stasis. Seasteading seeks to rework these unstable and contradictory relationships between notions of individual sovereignty, state sovereignty, and

53

Elden, S., ‘Land, terrain, territory.’ Progress in Human Geography 34 (2010): 1–19; Sparke, M., In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

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territorial inviolability by designating marine space as ‘aquatory,’ an epistemic connector that builds on the lineage of social and political-economic reformers who have sought to use the liminal political, geophysical, and cultural status of the sea to construct heterotopic societies that are partially inside, but partially outside the structures of the state system.54 As Hetherington stresses in his discussion of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, such sites are not purely oppositional.55 For instance, TSI’s efforts to expand the reach of economic ‘progress’ and consumption are still tied to the networks and flows from which modern capital reigns, much as the flight of members of the ultra-rich to permanent residency cruise ships is an adaptation to the particularities of capitalism and the prevalent institutions of fixed property and territory, rather than a renunciation of the desire to achieve belonging through accumulation.56 Thus, there are a number of similarities between seasteading and other sea-based projects that seek advantage from the relative externalisation of the ocean, such as luxury cruise-residences, off-shore clinics, pirate radio stations, or even ‘floating maquiladoras’ that ‘[blur] the distinction between locationally fixed, territorially bounded land as the space of society and the ocean as an external space in between’.57 However, there is also a significant difference. While these other endeavours seek to exploit the structures of world capitalism by occupying its maritime interstices, seasteading’s ultimate and explicit goal is to fix what has gone wrong with capitalism by appropriating the very medium through which capitalism and globalisation

54 Atkinson, R. and Blandy, S., ‘A picture of the floating world: grounding the secessionary affluence of the residential cruise liner.’ Antipode 41 (2009): 92–110; Keith 1977; Miéville 2008; Steinberg 2011; see also Foucault 1986; Hau’ofa 2008. 55 Hetherington 1997. 56 Atkinson and Blandy 2009. 57 Steinberg 2011: 2116–17; see also Miéville 2008; Peters, K.A., ‘Sinking the radio “pirates”: exploring British strategies of governance in the North Sea, 1964–91’. Area 43 (2011): 281–7.

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have grown: the maritime world that is idealised as a frictionless surface of choice, freedom, and boundless mobility and opportunity.58 At the root of The Seasteading Institute’s faith in the sea as the harbinger of a new political-economic order is an idealisation of the sea as a dedicated surface of mobility. Mobility is seen as enabling choice, and choice, as Patri Friedman’s grandparents, Milton and Rose Friedman, emphasise, is the necessary condition for a vibrant market.59 Thus, Patri Friedman takes Connery’s observation that water is ‘capital’s favored myth element’ 60 to its ultimate conclusion, harnessing the liberatory character of maritime mobility to the construction of a new kind of social formation: Aquatory is a fundamentally different medium than territory. Its fluidity greatly lowers the cost of movement […]. What happens if we base not just transport, but an entire society, on this fluid medium? What if we make it easy to not just move goods from one place to another but easy to move buildings from one place to another? What will that enable? Can we take globalization to the next level, from competition for goods and manufacturing to competition for good government?61

This point is developed further on TSI’s website, where the organisation promotes a modular form of architecture in which individual seastead components can be detached and moved between larger structures: ‘If you don’t like your government, you can literally ‘vote with your house’ by detaching your seastead and sailing off to another city. In the long run, this will turn the oceans into a laboratory for innovation in social and political systems’.62 Friedman contrasts this dynamic process of perpetual 58

See Connery, C., ‘Pacific rim discourse: the US global imaginary in the late cold war years.’ In R. Wilson and A. Dirlik (eds), Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995, 30–56; Sekula, A Fish Story. Düsseldorf: Richter, 1995; Steinberg 2001. 59 Friedman, M., and Friedman, R., Free to Choose. San Diego: Harcourt, 1990. 60 Connery 1995. 61 Friedman, P., ‘Keynote address: the seasteading vision.’ The Seasteading Institute 2009 Annual Conference, 2009c, [accessed 13 June 2014]. 62 TSI [The Seasteading Institute] ‘Seasteading FAQ’, 2008, [accessed 13 June 2014].

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reterritorialisation with the ‘fixed, static arrangement’ of communities surrounded by dominant groups and interests found on land. Seasteading is heralded as ‘an aspirin to thin the blood,’ providing a structural remedy to an otherwise ‘sclerotic’ situation where ‘bad government is like a hardening of the arteries’.63 For TSI, structural limitations to economic and social growth (e.g. taxes, regulations) cannot be challenged by ideology alone, but rather through technological innovation and development.64 Overall human freedom, as supporter Michael Strong argues, grows everyday with the number of ‘countries,’ ‘enclaves,’ and ‘free zones’ created in the world and waiting for new opportunities: We should have more governments in the next ten years than we have at present. More diversity in governments in the next ten to twenty years than we have at present. And ultimately I want to argue [that] as grim as things look from a libertarian perspective now, I think it’s plausible, within my lifetime, to see a world in which […] governments competing around the world, entrepreneurial creation of government around the world is the norm rather than the exception.65

TSI’s vision is one in which multiple governance possibilities coexist, competing with each other for capital and for citizen-residents. Promoters of seasteading seek a regulatory environment that encourages innovators to ‘think big’ but that also facilitates implementation of these ambitious plans through manageable pilot programs that then can be picked up by corporate angels and well-resourced imitators. Thiel calls this vision a 1950s ‘space-colony model’ of ‘embedded, exponential technological growth,’

63 Friedman 2009c. Here Friedman is referencing Mancur Olson’s (1982) concept of ‘sclerotic’ state institutions (see Olson, M., The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 64 Thiel, P.A., ‘Keynote Address: Back to the Future.’ The Seasteading Institute Conference 2009, [accessed 13 June 2014]. 65 Strong, M., ‘Free Zones: An Additional Option for the Cambrian Explosion in Government.’ The Seasteading Institute Conference 2009,