Still pursuing this idea of a radically repurposed backyard swimming pool: what new forms of micro-real-estate might emerge?
Your own property holdings consist of nothing but temporary leases on other people's pools: you rent them, drain them, fill them with soil, and grow cash crops for the global marketplace. Or you turn those pools into fish farms. You rent Zaha Hadid's new aquatic center for the 2012 London Olympics – and you raise salmon there. Sushi chefs visit, checkbooks in hand – till your lease runs out. At which point you obtain six months' access to a series of family swimming pools in the suburbs of Brighton. Or Melbourne. Or rooftop pools in New York, where you breed rare fish to sell to lobby aquariums and local restaurants. A whole sub-industry of aquatic property rights is formed, with you at the unexpected origin, cultivating infrastructural micro-sites and inking deals on these inland seas so easy to repurpose in their hydroponic flexibility.
Soon you're subletting people's kitchen sinks and bathtubs, public washrooms and summer kiddy pools.
They're your very own Odd Lots.
Your own property holdings consist of nothing but temporary leases on other people's pools: you rent them, drain them, fill them with soil, and grow cash crops for the global marketplace. Or you turn those pools into fish farms. You rent Zaha Hadid's new aquatic center for the 2012 London Olympics – and you raise salmon there. Sushi chefs visit, checkbooks in hand – till your lease runs out. At which point you obtain six months' access to a series of family swimming pools in the suburbs of Brighton. Or Melbourne. Or rooftop pools in New York, where you breed rare fish to sell to lobby aquariums and local restaurants. A whole sub-industry of aquatic property rights is formed, with you at the unexpected origin, cultivating infrastructural micro-sites and inking deals on these inland seas so easy to repurpose in their hydroponic flexibility.
Soon you're subletting people's kitchen sinks and bathtubs, public washrooms and summer kiddy pools.
They're your very own Odd Lots.
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3 Comments:
I remember my Italian great-grandmother doing this in her tenement apartment in Paterson. Every now and then, in preparation for a Sunday feast, she would buy a whole bunch of live eels during the week and leave them in a bathtub full of water for a few days. Considering this was in the early 80s, I suspect it was a holdover from the pre-refrigeration era, but it's definitely green. And really scary.
Gump, that's a great story!
There was an WSJ article earlier this year about turning pools into mosquito fish hatcheries to deal with the problems of mosquito breeding in foreclosed homes. Pest control workers have been going around dumping larvae-eating mosquito fish into the pools and letting them breed to drive out the skeeter larvae.
The concept is intentionally anti-sustainable, though: the fish are doomed to starve as soon as their job is done. It's still neat to think about suburban swimming pools reverting to vernal pools. A few more years of mortgage crisis and the foreclosed backyards of Contra Costa County could become the next big stop for migratory waterfowl on the Pacific flyway.
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