#hydrothermal vents in the Mediterranean

[technicallywrite]

Me looking at my browser history: Oh. Yeah. That answers that.

There are two kinds of fic writers:

1. Fuck it, it’s fiction

2. Let me look up real estate listings, so I can plot out subway routes and schedules and see if this walk really is long enough for them to have this conversation.

Guess which kind I am.

[exit-path]

Hey want some ocean facts?

[ID: one information panel among many at the Hall of Biodiversity. This one tells some fun facts about the world’s “Oceans”, the heading of this panel. The panel shows a photo of two whales, swimming in the ocean. Below, it reads as follows:

Coverage: 70% of the Earth’s surface

Ecosystem Benefits: source of medicines and foods • regulate the atmosphere and mediate global climate • photosynthetic plankton produce and replenish most of the oxygen in the atmosphere • break down, dilute, and store pollutants and wastes • play a key role in the global cycling of water and many nutrients, including carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus

Covering almost three-quarters of the earth’s surface, the salty waters of the seas and oceans are home to many bacteria and protoctists, as well as all but one of the major groups (phyla) of animals — half of which, in fact, live exclusively in these marine waters. Marine ecosystems range from shallow continental shelves to open oceans, to the deep seas. Hydrothermal vents emerging from some regions of the

ocean floor support ecosystems of unique, bizarre species, all of which obtain their energy from bacteria that can live off these plumes of boiling, sulfurous water. Marine environments are being increasingly polluted by atmospheric fallout, oil from shipping and other sources, and disposal of industrial and other human wastes.

The footer reads:

Examples: Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, and Indian Oceans • Bering, Mediterranean, Aegean, Red, Caribbean, and Baltic Seas • Hudson and Chesapeake Bay

/end ID.]

[pauls-broken-a-glass65]

TOP FIVE SEA CREATURES

Hello love!!!❤😍

I love that!!

Luckily for you, a few weeks ago, I saw a website that talked about it and there are some of these sea creatures that I found quite interesting :)

1. Giant Tube Worms: Crushing pressure, freezing temperatures, and zero sunlight isn't enough of a challenge for giant tube worms. They've adapted to thrive at the edge of hydrothermal vents, which spew superheated water saturated with toxic chemicals. This colony was photographed 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) below the ocean's surface on the East Pacific Rise near the Galápagos Islands.

2. Wolffish: An orthodontist's dream, an Atlantic wolffish displays the hardware it uses to crush mollusks, shellfish, and sea urchins. These tough-looking predators swim as deep as 2,000 feet (600 meters) and range from the Scandinavian coast to Cape Cod to the Mediterranean.

3. Giant Spider Crab: Thought to be the largest arthropods on Earth, giant spider crabs spend their time foraging on the ocean floor up to a thousand feet (300 meters) deep. These rare, leggy behemoths, native to the waters off Japan, can measure up to 12 feet (3.7 meters) from claw tip to claw tip. 

4. Atlantic Wolffish Pair: The sinister-looking Atlantic wolffish makes its home in the rocky coastal depths up to 1,600 feet (500 meters) below. Reaching 5 feet (1.5 meters) long, wolffish have conspicuous dentition suited to a diet of hard-shelled mollusks, crabs, and sea urchins. This mated pair was found in a deep-sea den off the coast of Maine.

5. Six-Gill Shark: Six-gill sharks, like this one off the coast of Vancouver, cruise the ocean floor during the day, sometimes as deep as 8,200 feet (2,500 meters), then move toward the surface at night to feed. They can reach impressive lengths of 16 feet (4.8 meters) on a diet of other sharks, rays, squids, crabs, and occasionally seals!

[lsmontoya]

What about intelligent beings that don't need to breathe?

In worldbuilding exercises for fantasy or science fiction worlds, it's assumed that the imagined alien beings breathe. But what if they don't? It's that even possible from a scientific standpoint?

Breathing is necessary to bring in oxygen and excrete carbon dioxide. Oxygen is essential for life because it allows our cells to break down sugars and turn them into energy.

On Earth, most life is aerobic. But, are there organisms that don't use oxygen? Yes! Here are some examples: Clostridium botulinum, which lives in the bottom of the sea near hydrothermal vents; the Loricifera found in the sediment of a 3,000 meters deep brine basin in the Mediterranean; and the recently discovered Henneguya salminicola, a salmon parasite, the only known anaerobic animal.

What all these organisms have in common is that (1) they live in harsh environments and, (2) they're minuscule. Anaerobic metabolic processes don't produce as much energy as aerobic processes, so it makes sense they're only present in microscopic life.

Even though anaerobic life is uncommon in our day and age, it's currently believed that the beginnings of life on Earth were anaerobic.

Back to worldbuilding. Could we have sentient beings who don't need to breathe? Their metabolism, which is their organisms' processes to sustain life, would be radically different from ours. Maybe they have another way to bring in the chemicals needed to produce energy, something other than a respiratory system. Perhaps they absorb it from the liquid of their planet instead of air. Maybe they get all they need from some ultra-rich energy food.

A human breathes 12 to 20 times per minute. Imagine if these aliens didn't breathe at all. What would they think of us, inhaling and exhaling all the time? They might not even understand what it is that we're doing!

[mitchbattros]

Hidden World Of Undersea Volcanoes And Lava Flows Discovered Off Italian Coast

Hidden beneath the waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea near southwestern Italy lies a newfound volcanic mosaic dotted with geothermal chimneys and flat-topped seamounts.

This complex is new to both science and the planet, geologically speaking; it's only about 780,000 years old. Scientists aren't particularly surprised to find volcanism in the region, which is home to active volcanoes like Mount Vesuvius and Mount Etna. But the new complex is unusual because it was created by a rare kind of fault, said study leader Fabrizio Pepe, a geophysicist at the University of Palermo, in Italy. "This is a very complex area," Pepe told Live Science. Restless region The western Mediterranean is seismically restless because of the collision of three tectonic plates: the African, the Eurasian and the Anatolian. Making matters more complex is a small chunk of crust called the Adriatic-Ionian microplate, which broke off of the African Plate more than 65 million years ago and is now being pushed under the larger Eurasian Plate in a process called subduction. Mount Vesuvius is one of the volcanoes created by subduction. Previously, scientists discovered a series of undersea volcanic arcs created by this tectonic unrest, starting near the Sardinian coast, with increasingly younger arcs southward and eastward. These arcs were like an arrow pointing ever farther eastward, prompting Pepe and his colleagues to search for an even younger arc about 9 miles (15 kilometers) off the coast of Calabria, called the "toe" of the "boot" of Italy. There, based on seafloor mapping, seismic data and magnetic anomalies, the researchers found a 772-square-mile (2,000 square km) region of lava flows, volcanic mountains and hydrothermal chimneys; vents in the seafloor allow hot minerals to spew out and form chimney-like structures. They dubbed the new area the Diamante‐Enotrio‐Ovidio Volcanic‐Intrusive Complex, after three flat-topped seamounts (underwater mountains formed by extinct volcanoes) that dominate the seafloor. STEP by step Those fractures are what allowed magma to rise to the surface at the Diamonte-Enotrio-Ovidio complex, creating an undersea landscape of lava flows and mountainous volcanoes. These volcanic seamounts are now plateaus because they protruded from the ocean when the sea level was lower, and they eroded into their present, flat-topped shape, Pepe said. The volcanic complex is inactive, but there are small intrusions of lava in some parts of the seafloor there, the researchers reported July 6 in the journal Tectonics. However, the area could become active in the future, Pepe said, and active volcanism is ongoing on the eastern side of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The researchers are working to build a volcanic risk map of the complex to better understand if it could endanger human life or property. They are also investigating the possibility of tapping the complex to produce geothermal energy. Read the full article

[sciencespies]

Microbes living deep below Earth's surface could be remnants of ancient life forms

https://sciencespies.com/nature/microbes-living-deep-below-earths-surface-could-be-remnants-of-ancient-life-forms/

Microbes living deep below Earth's surface could be remnants of ancient life forms

There’s an enormous variety of life thriving deep beneath Earth’s surface. A new analysis of two major groups of subsurface microbes has now revealed that their evolutionary path to life in the dark has been more curious than we expected.

In our planet’s first 2 billion years of existence, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Once the air on our blue planet changed, not all life forms adapted, with many microbes retreating into less oxygenated parts of the planet.

Patescibacteria and DPANN are two ubiquitous groups of such subsurface microbes – bacteria and archaea, respectively – that appear to have very simple genomes. This has led many to suspect that without the ability to breathe oxygen, these microbes might need to rely on complex interactions with other organisms to supplement their simple lifestyles. 

Now, it seems we may not be giving them enough credit. New research indicates that instead of having a symbiotic dependency on other major groups of organisms, most Patescibacteria and DPANN live as completely free cells. 

“These microbes [..] are really special, really exciting examples of the early evolution of life,” says Ramunas Stepanauskas, who studies microbial biology and evolution at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.

“They may be remnants of ancient forms of life that had been hiding and thriving in the Earth’s subsurface for billions of years.”

Previous work on Patescibacteria and DPANN has gathered a small number of examples near the surface of the Earth, and mainly in North America, but this new study goes deeper and wider than ever before, analysing nearly 5,000 individual microbial cells from 46 locations around the globe, including a mud volcano on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, hydrothermal vents in the Pacific, and gold mines in South Africa.

“Our single cell genomic and biophysical observations do not support the prevailing view that Patescibacteria and DPANN are dominated by symbionts,” the authors write.

“Their divergent coding potential, small genomes, and small cell sizes may be a result of an ancestral, primitive energy metabolism that relies solely on [fermentation].” 

Fermentation is one of the metabolic options living organisms have for breaking down glucose without the help of oxygen, and many life forms use fermentation for energy production, especially the microbes that don’t breathe air at all. 

However, using fermentation is less efficient than breathing – it produces only 2 ATP per glucose compared to 38 ATP per glucose with aerobic respiration – so this type of metabolism comes with the cost of putting organisms in the metabolic slow lane. 

Patescibacteria and DPANN are just fine with that, however. Based on the new analysis, the two groups contain no trace of what’s known as an electron transport chain, a metabolic process that makes energy by dumping electrons onto oxygen. Their relatively simple, potentially ancient survival tricks simply don’t need it.

Genomic research and direct experimental tests on samples representing the two groups showed no evidence of respiration, and close examination of cell-to-cell links revealed most were on their own, not attached to hosts like some of their surface cousins.

The authors can’t deny that some symbiotic relationships could have been shaken apart by human handling, but gentle mixing was attempted when sorting the cells. 

Even if the team is underestimating cell-to-cell interactions, genomic analysis found no evidence of evolutionary enrichment from symbiotic relationships compared to other phyla.

Rather, genome content and lab analysis of cell physiology suggests these microbial groups contain few, if any, other ways of producing energy than fermentation.

“Our findings indicate that Patescibacteria and DPANN are ancient forms of life that may have never learned how to breathe,” says Stepanauskas.

“These two major branches of the evolutionary tree of life constitute a large portion of the total microbial diversity on the planet – and yet they lack some capabilities that are typically expected in every form of life.”

The study was published in Frontiers in Microbiology.

#Nature

[emmagreen1220-blog]

New Post has been published on Biology Dictionary

New Post has been published on https://biologydictionary.net/extremophile/

Extremophile

Extremophile Definition

Extremophiles are organisms that have evolved to survive in environments once thought to be entirely uninhabitable. These environments are inhospitable, reaching extreme conditions of heat, acidity, pressure, and cold that would be fatal to most other life forms. Because extremophiles live on extreme ends of the spectrum, they can indicate the range of conditions under which life is possible.

One important thing to note, however, is that extremophiles are “extreme” only from an anthropocentric perspective. For example, while oxygen is indispensible to ourselves and much of life on Earth, many organisms flourish in environments without oxygen at all.

Extremophiles can be divided into two broad categories: extremophilic organisms, and extremotolerant organisms. As the suffix “philic,” translated to “loving,” suggests, extremophilic organisms require one or more extreme conditions in order to thrive, while extremotolerant organisms grow optimally at more ‘normal’ conditions but are still able to survive one or more extreme physiochemical values.

Most extremophiles are microscopic organisms belonging to a domain of life known as archaea. However, to say extremophiles are restricted to this domain would be incorrect. Some extremophiles belong in the bacteria domain, and some are even multicellular eukaryotes!

Importance in Research

The enzymes secreted by extremophiles, termed “extremozymes,” that allow them to function in such forbidding environments are of great interest to medical and biotechnical researchers. Perhaps they will be the key to creating genetically based medications, or creating technologies that can function under extreme conditions.

Astrobiologists have also taken interest in extremophiles for their remarkable resilience in freezing environments. Extremophiles, or “psychrophiles,” that are active in such environments raise the possibility of life on other planets, as the majority of bodies in the solar system are frozen. Additionally, the biochemical properties of such psychrophiles, such as the ability to use arsenic rather than phosphorus to create energy, furthers the possibility of extraterrestrial life. And, because extremophiles can indicate the range of conditions under which life is possible, they can also provide clues about how and where to look for life on other solar bodies.

Types of Extremophiles

Of course, different environmental conditions require different adaptations by the organisms that live those conditions. Extremophiles are classified according to the conditions under which they grow. Usually, however, environments are a mix of different physiochemical conditions, requiring extremophiles to adapt to multiple physiochemical parameters. Extremophiles found in such conditions are termed “polyextremophiles.”

Acidophile

Acidophiles are adapted to conditions with acidic pH values that range from 1 to 5. This group includes some eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea that are found in places like sulfuric pools, areas polluted by acidic mine drainage, and even our own stomachs!

Acidophiles regulate their pH levels through a variety of specialized mechanisms— some of which are passive (not exerting energy), and some of which are active (exerting energy). Passive mechanisms usually involve reinforcing the cell membrane against the external environment, and may involve secreting a biofilm to hinder the diffusion of molecules into the cell, or changing their cell membrane entirely to incorporate protective substances and fatty acids. Some acidophiles can secrete buffer molecules to help raise their internal pH levels. Active pH regulation mechanisms involve a hydrogen ion pump that expels hydrogen ions from the cell at a constantly high rate.

Alakaliphiles

Alkaliphiles are adapted to conditions with basic pH values of 9 or higher. They maintain homeostasis by both passive and active mechanisms. Passive mechanisms include pooling cytoplasmic polyamines inside the cell. The polyamines are rich with positively charged amino groups that buffer the cytoplasm in alkaline environments. Another passive mechanism is having a low membrane permeability, which hinders the movement of protons in and out of the cell. The active method of regulation involves a sodium ion channel that carries protons into the cell.

Thermophile

Thermophiles thrive in extremely high temperatures between 113 and 251 degrees Fahrenheit. They can be found in places like hydrothermal vents, volcanic sediments, and hot springs. Their survival in such places can be accredited to their extremozymes. The amino acids of these types of enzymes do not lose their shape and misfold in extreme heat, allowing for continued proper function.

Psychrophile

Psychrophiles (also known as Cryophiles) thrive in extremely low temperatures of 5 degrees Fahrenheit or lower. This group belongs to all three domains of life (bacteria, archaea, and eukarya), and they can be found in places like cold soils, permafrost, polar ice, cold ocean water, and alpine snow packs.

One way they survive in extreme cold can be attributed to their extremozymes, which continue to function at low temperatures, and a little more slowly at even lower temperatures. Psychrophiles are also able to produce proteins that are functional in cold temperatures, and contain large amounts of unsaturated fatty acids in their plasma membranes that help buffer the cells from the cold. Most notably, however, some psychrophiles are able to replace the water in their bodies with the sugar trehalose, preventing the formation of harmful ice-crystals.

Xerophile

Xerophiles grow in extremely dry conditions which can be very hot or very cold. They have been found in places like the Atacama Desert, the Great Basin, and the Antarctic. Like their psychrophilic friends, some xerophiles have the ability to replace water with trehalose, which can also protect membranes and other structures from periods with low water availability.

Barophile (Piezophile)

Barophiles are organisms that grow best under high pressures of 400 atm or more. They can survive by regulating the fluidity of the phospholipids in the membrane. This fluidity compensates for the pressure gradient between the inside and outside of the cell, and the external environment. Extreme barophiles grow optimally at 700 atm or higher, and will not grow at lower pressures.

Halophile

Halophiles are organisms that require high salt concentrations for growth. At salinities exceeding 1.5M, prokaryotic bacteria are predominant. Still, this group belongs to all three domains of life, but in smaller numbers.

Overcoming the challenges of hypersaline environments starts with minimizing cellular water loss. Halophiles do this by accumulating solutes in the cytoplasm via varying mechanisms. Halophilic archaea use a sodium-potassium ion pump to expel sodium and intake potassium. Halotolerant bacteria balance the osmotic pressure by using glycerol as compatible solutes.

Examples of Extremophiles

Snottite

Also known as a “snoticle,” snottites are made up of colonies of cave-dwelling, extremophilic, single-cell bacteria. These colonies look similar to stalactites, but have the consistency of, well, snot. These bacteria colonies survive extreme toxicity and acidity, among other extreme physiochemical conditions. They survive by using chemosynthesis to turn volcanic sulfur compounds into energy and sulfuric acid waste.

Giant Tube Worms

The giant tube worm is a deep-sea extremophile found near hydrothermal vents living in conditions of high pressure, high heat, and no sunlight. Waters near hydrothermal vents can reach temperatures of 600 degrees Fahrenheit, and the pressure can reach up to nearly 9,000 psi! With no digestive tract of their own, they survive in such conditions with the help of their symbiotic partners: extremophilic bacteria that live in the midgut of the giant tube worm. The bacteria, which may account for up to half of the worm’s weight, use chemosynthesis to turn oxygen, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon dioxide into organic molecules that the worm can use as food.

Tardigrades

Technically more extremotolerant than extremophilic, these eight-legged microscopic creatures are one of the most resilient organisms known to man. They have two survival strategies: one in case of flooding, and one in case of freezing or drought. In the occurrence of a flood, tardigrades inflate themselves like balloons, allowing them to float up to the surface where they have access to oxygen. In the case of drought or freezing conditions, tardigrades have the remarkable ability to replace more than 97% of the water in their bodies with a type of sugar called trehalose. This reduces the need for water and prevents ice crystals from forming that would otherwise form with water and harm these organisms. Using these survival techniques, these creatures have survived temperatures from -458 degrees Fahrenheit to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, pressures six times greater than that found in the deepest parts of the ocean, lethal doses of radiation, and even the vacuum of space! Still, the longer tardigrades stay in non-optimal conditions, the lower their chances survival.

Loricifera

These microscopic organisms were first collected from the depths of a Mediterranean Sea basin where the salt-saturated brine they inhabit do not mix with or get watered down by the waters above it. They inhabited the marine sediment, thriving in this salty, sulphidic, freezing, highly pressurized environment without oxygen or light. This is possible because, unlike us, Loricifera have hydrogenosomes that require no oxygen, instead of mitochondria, to produce energy!

Grylloblattidae

Grylloblattidae is a family of psychrophilic insects that are found in cold environments like mountain tops, glaciers, and ice sheets. They prefer temperatures between 33.8 and 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit—just above freezing. When temperatures drop below freezing, these insects burrow down through the snow and stay near the soil—otherwise they risk death by ice-crystals forming in their bodies.

Quiz

1. A Psychrophile _________. A. thrives in extreme heat. B. grows in high salinity. C. is cold-loving. D. XXXX

Answer to Question #1

C is correct. “Psychro” translates into “cold,” and “phile” translates into “lover of.” Therefore, a psychrophile is a lover of cold. A thermophile thrives in extreme heat. Halophiles grow in high salinity.

2. An extremotolerant organsim is ______________. A. an organism not found on earth. B. adapted to extreme conditions. C. adapted to moderate conditions and can live in extreme conditions. D. adapted to moderate conditions only.

Answer to Question #2

C is correct. Some extremotolerant organisms can survive in space, but they are found on Earth. While they are adapted to more moderate, or normal, conditions, they are able to survive in extreme conditions.

3. The microbe Picrophilus torridus lives at pH levels of 0 (very acidic). What type of extremophile is this? A. a xerophile. B. a barophile. C. an alkaliphile. D. an acidophile.

Answer to Question #3

D is correct. A xerophile lives in dry conditions. A barophile lives under high pressure. An alkaliphile thrives in alkaline (basic) solutions. An acidophile thrives in acidic solutions.

References

Educational Resources. (2017, April 10). Retrieved May 18, 2017, from http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/index.html

Extremophile. (2017, May 15). Retrieved May 18, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile

Giant tube worm. (2017, May 05). Retrieved May 18, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_tube_worm

Grylloblattidae. (2017, May 10). Retrieved May 18, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grylloblattidae

Loricifera. (2017, May 14). Retrieved May 18, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loricifera

Niederberger, T. (n.d.). Extremophile. Retrieved May 18, 2017, from https://www.britannica.com/science/extremophile

Snottite. (2017, April 14). Retrieved May 18, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snottite

Tardigrade. (2017, May 15). Retrieved May 18, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

[jeniferdlanceau]

"MIPIM is one big performance with the purpose of speaking cities into existence"

Is it possible to speak buildings into being? The exhibitors at annual property fair MIPIM may try, but they need to come up with far more extreme fictions, says Sam Jacob in his latest Opinion column.

"The beginning, as every one knows, is of supreme importance in everything, and particularly in the founding and building of a city," so says Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian.

In his Life of Romulus, he tells us of the varied myths of the founding of Rome. His explanations show how the superstitious and the practical were intertwined in the classical world, how gods mingled in the same space as everyday life.

For Plutarch and the ancient world, the origin of cities often involved both improbable myths and rational practicality. One one side would be advantageous geography, rich natural resources, climate and good planning. On the other would be strange stories.

Think of the Athens that sprung from the olive tree gift of Athena, or the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan that was the prophesied by an eagle holding a snake perched on a flowering prickly pear cactus, or the Viking cities sited by throwing logs from a longship and seeing where fate washed them ashore.

These are stories rather than histories. Retroactive imaginings that provide things like moral validation, character and destiny. They seem anachronistic when you compare them to today's world of city-making, which operates with bureaucratic banality, impersonal corporateness and flat PR spin. But if cities don't come from superstitious belief, where exactly do they now come from?

This is the annual property industry jamboree where the mechanics of modern city-making are laid bare

On the shores of the Mediterranean, millennia after Plutarch, is MIPIM. This is the annual property industry jamboree where the mechanics of modern city-making are laid bare. Here, inside a hulking lump of geometric concrete affectionally known as the bunker, you find the whole food chain: developers, agents, investors, lawyers, politicians and everyone else. Even architects. Each pitching to the other, each selling up the chain.

MIPIM is a place where it can be hard to distinguish extravagant buffets from models of vibrant new urban quarters, where vases seem interchangeable with skyscrapers, where the rhetorics of the property industry are spread slickly over the surface. And though, like any trade show, everything here is all surface, MIPIM's shallow surface affords a deep view of an industry that usually remains heavily veiled.

Here, banners, models, fly-throughs, free gifts, Oculus Rift headsets, tote bags, business cards, dinners, yachts, brochures and panel discussions form the modern machinery of city-making. It is this machinery that produces the holes in the ground, the cranes in the sky, the hoardings and the piles of materials that will provide our cities of tomorrow.

From this, we can understand that the universe is five-sixths dark matter, a hypothetical substance that can't be observed directly, only inferred by its gravitational effects on the motions of visible matter. Likewise when we observe the city, we are only seeing part of its reality, the visible one-sixth.

MIPIM takes us one step closer to being able to see the dark matter of the city, the invisible forces exerting influence on its substance. It reveals that little bit more of the interaction between the visible and invisible, of how investment and politics shape projects. How pension funds, mayors, agents and more exert tidal forces on the built environment.

MIPIM takes us one step closer to being able to see the dark matter of the city

MIPIM shows that modern city-making is neither smooth nor inevitable. Far from it. It shows just how difficult it is to put things together. Though termed real estate, city-making is an activity that spends most of its time in an unreal state, a haze rather than a form. Only rarely do real things emerge from this fog. Mostly they stays in a state of generative flux – a soup made from vast amounts of effort, money and expertise that boils as if in a hydrothermal vent, in the hope that something real might at some point be catalysed and emerge into the world.

It is to the spectre of the unreal that much of MIPIM's rhetoric is addressed, and why so much of the rhetoric is presented in figures. 8 Billion Euros Under Management! 5 Million sqm Total Surface! 14 000 + New Homes! 128 000sqm + New Retail Space!

Because figures give a sense of metric fact and objectivity. They suggest something worked out, thought through. Statistics, in the face of the haze of the unreal, act as a structure, an armature of solid possibility.

"This time, its really real" say local development leaders. They talk of "real places for real people" while ministers are quoted in super graphics saying: "It Isn't Just A Slogan, It's A Reality". The idea of the real is invoked repeatedly in the face of so much unreality.

It all echoes the words of Jay-Z, who in his autobiography Decoded, wrote: "I believe you can speak things into existence." MIPIM is one big performance whose purpose is exactly that: an attempt to speak cities into existence.

It's useful to think of classical myth and contemporary business in the same frame, to imagine their deep similarities rather than their obvious differences. In fact, to remember that they are intrinsically connected through the golden thread of civilisation.

Though termed real estate, city-making is an activity that spends most of its time in an unreal state

MIPIM might be the place where we go to try to write contemporary city-making myths, but beneath its 21st century corporateness we might discern faint echoes of classical traditions. Beneath the obvious differences, our modern rituals contain deep similarities.

We could think of all the stands and tents, for example, as pop-up temples, each with its own dedication. The athletic efforts of the property industry cyclists who ride from London to Cannes to raise money for charity might subconsciously be channeling the original Olympian role of religious dedication. And of course MIPIM’'s famous drinking culture must surely echo Bacchanalian ritual.

And if we squint a little more, we might even be able to make out Plutarch himself arriving here at the bunker, his delegate pass hanging in the folds of his toga. And if he were to visit, what might he make of the new narratives of city-making on display? What, as he stroked the crumbs of another canapé from his beard, might he make of the origin stories we tell about our cities?

Plutarch might well look around and nod his head, recognising much of what he sees. Yes, he would say, things are spoken into existence. Places become real through first being imagined, then being performed, and at some point the performance is no longer just a performance but a way of precipitating reality.

But looking around at the paucity of imagination in the stories we try to tell, he would shake his head. At the terrible slogans, awful branding, shocking graphics, the abject nature of the messages and the way they are communicated, he might also shake his head. Offering his business card – one of the 1,000,000 MIPIM claims are exchanged each day – he would suggest you attend his keynote presentation in the main area later that day.

So we gather in the vast theatre buried in the bunker. To warm applause, Plutarch takes the stage, adjusts his Madonna mike and looks deep into the auditorium before proclaiming the thing we've come to hear: "The beginning, as every one knows, is of supreme importance in everything." Striding to the centre of the stage, he continues "…and particularly in the founding and building of a city."

From here with a swish of his toga, Plutarch might tell us that for all our sophistication we still need origin myths. Stories, narratives, ideas that give cities a place to come from and a place to go. Because still, thousands of years later, origin myths have the power to shape the city yet to come.

Places become real through first being imagined, then being performed

"Of course," Plutarch might continue. "You still need numbers. Don't think for a moment that the Roman Empire was founded on whimsy. We knew a thing or too about organisation and about how to get things done. It wasn't because we believed the fictions of our city's origin myths. It was because they helped us make our cities real."

And that, perhaps, is the silent cri de coeur behind every MIPIM exchange. The desire for real-ness amongst all that real estate. The sensation that drives the megamodels to be quite so mega, the superbuffets quite so super. Because that might be enough to make things real.

Later at drinks in the Manchester Bar, in his new guise as a 21st-century urban consultant, Plutarch would take us aside and convince us to commission an expensive report. This dossier, worth every penny, would tell us that the secret to making cities real is to be found by looking in exactly the opposite direction from the place we are looking. Sack your corporate PRs, the report would say. Dump your brand consultants. Instead, find yourself some real myth-makers. Hire poets and visionaries, people from whom really convincing fictions – the more extreme the better – will emerge.

Myth, Plutarch's report would conclude, is the only way that cities, even now, are spoken into existence. And without compelling imaginative stories, our cities are doomed to reflect the banal origin myths we use to create them.

Sam Jacob is principal of Sam Jacob Studio, professor of architecture at University of Illinois at Chicago, director of Night School at the Architectural Association, and the editor of Strange Harvest.

The post "MIPIM is one big performance with the purpose of speaking cities into existence" appeared first on Dezeen.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8217598 https://www.dezeen.com/2017/03/23/sam-jacob-opinion-mipim-big-performance-speaking-cities-into-existence/