An Artist’s Off-the-Wall Vision for Creating Fracking Towns
- 6:30 am |
Blackpool, England, sits on the northwest coast of the country. It’s almost three hours by train from London, but a world apart: once a summer destination for vacationing families, the town has seen its tourism industry decline as travelers head overseas instead, and has fallen into economic ruin in the process.
It does, however, sit on a bed of shale rock—the same geological substance that yields natural gas during hydraulic fracturing. “That could create a huge economic gain if done correctly,” says Jason Lamb, a recent graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. “With all the downside of fracking, is there a way that you could implement fracking with long term benefit to the community?”
Lamb elected to frame his entire graduating thesis around that very delicate question. His proposal—which is entirely speculative and presented in the form of these black-and-white hand drawn renderings—imagines a town that gets an economic jolt from Chinese investment in fracking, and serves as a sort of utopian ideal for water reuse and urban farming. “A lot of the drawings have these Chinese [architectural] references,” he says. “A lot of British architecture ended up over there after the war, and this is kind of a reversal of that, so now Chinese architecture creeps back in to seaside towns.”
Lamb calls Blackpool a “test bed” for this particular kind of self-sustained urban planning. In it there are 35 fracking stations in town that use pressurized water to release natural gases, and then, via a series of pipes and pumps, recirculate that water back into the infrastructure for repeated use. Once the fracking has extracted as much as gas as possible, that water would be treated and used for urban farming.
The plans were conceived largely around job creation. He envisions families moving out of the town’s center to make room for fracking infrastructure (jobs) and into floating villages, with urban greenhouses (jobs) and fishing markets (jobs). To avoid turning this fictional town into the Detroit of the fracking industry, Lamb has plotted out new ways to use all the infrastructure in the future, like fish farms in former gas tanks.
Hydraulic fracturing is a wildly contentious environmental issue—so much so that it’s been banned in France and Bulgaria, and, of course, has many loud opponents in the United States. Supporters are attracted to the bounty of energy that can be gained from the process, while opponents cite local pollution from the chemicals involved and climate change as reasons not to drill (among many others). Those are serious concerns to grapple with, and in that regard, Lamb’s vision has quite a ways to go.
For the project, the issue of chemical seepage into soil or the atmosphere isn’t addressed, but water and noise pollution are. “Everything has a secondary purpose,” he says, of the water in particular. To abate the harsh noise pollution associated with fracking, he imagines surrounding each station with dense, tall, elephant grass: “During fracking it could serve as an environmental buffer.” Explore the town of Frackpool in the images below: