Las Urbanistas

Dean C.K. Cox for The New York Times

Alcoa is building an aluminum smelter in eastern Iceland, part of a project that is reshaping the wilderness. But a coalition of groups says Iceland is sacrificing its most precious asset — its pristine land — to foreign industry.

NORTH OF VATNAJOKULL GLACIER, Iceland — In the depths of winter there is almost nothing to see here but snow and rock: snow across the uneven, unearthly landscape, snow on the mist-shrouded mountains, snow stretching to what looks like the edge of the world.

Dean C. K. Cox for The New York Times
Wild reindeer grazed recently near a road leading to the Karahnjukar Hydropower Project in eastern Iceland.

But tucked into Iceland’s central highlands, where the Karahnjukar mountain meets two powerful rivers flowing north from Europe’s largest glacier, a nearly completed jigsaw of dams, tunnels and reservoirs has begun to reshape the wilderness.

This is the $3 billion Karahnjukar Hydropower Project, a sprawling enterprise to harness the rivers for electricity that will be used for a single purpose: to fuel a new aluminum smelter owned by Alcoa, the world’s largest aluminum company. It has been the focus of the angriest and most divisive battle in recent Icelandic history.

The culmination of years of effort by the center-right government to increase international investment in Iceland, the project has already begun to revitalize Iceland’s underpopulated east. But it has also mobilized an angry and growing coalition of people who feel that the authorities have sacrificed Iceland’s most precious asset — the pristine land itself — to heavy industry from abroad.

Now, with proposals on the table for three more power-plant-and-aluminum-smelter projects, environmentalists say the chance to protect Iceland’s spectacular, and spectacularly fragile, natural beauty is running out.

“If all of these projects get through, then it’s a total environmental apocalypse for the Icelandic highlands; they’ll have developed every single major glacial river and geothermal field for heavy industry,” said Olafur Pall Sigurdsson, one of the organizers of Saving Iceland, a coalition of groups opposing further development.

“It is a very rare nature that we are the guardians of, and we are squandering it,” he said.

The basic issue of how to balance development and nature is the same here as in environmental fights everywhere. But the details are always slightly askew in Iceland, which sits temperamentally as well as geographically on its own, floating between Europe and America.

One of the most unspoiled places in the developed world, Iceland is slightly larger than Indiana, with a population of about 300,000 people (Indiana’s is 6.3 million). Two-thirds live in the capital, Reykjavik; the rest are spread across 39,800 square miles of volcanic rock, treeless tundra and scrubby plains. Seventy percent of the land is uninhabitable.

Icelanders tend to view their unpredictable environment — carved from volcanoes and ice and full of stunning waterfalls, geysers, fjords and glaciers — with respect and awe. The air is so pure that the Kyoto Protocol gave Iceland the right to increase its greenhouse emissions by 10 percent from 1990 levels.

The pending proposals call for four more dams, as many as eight new geothermal and hydroelectric power plants, two new smelters (one owned by Alcoa) and the expansion of capacity at an existing smelter. If all are built, foreign companies would have the capacity to produce as much as 1.6 million tons of aluminum in Iceland a year.

They are also allowed to pollute: another Kyoto exception gave power-intensive industries that use renewable energy in Iceland the right to emit an extra 1.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year until 2012.

As a whole, the new smelters would require about eight times the amount of electricity currently used for all of Iceland’s domestic consumption, putting a huge strain on the country’s rivers and thermal fields, said Hjorleifur Guttormsson, who was Iceland’s energy and industry minister from 1980 to 1985. Mr. Guttormsson, a naturalist, said pollution was another concern: aluminum plants are heavy emitters of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen fluoride and other chemicals.

But Alcoa says it has fitted state-of-the-art pollution controls in its new plant and has already fulfilled its companywide pledge to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from their 1990 level.

A spokesman for the company, Kevin Lowery, said the new smelter would produce 1.8 metric tons of carbon dioxide for every metric ton of aluminum it produced — a total of 541,000 metric tons a year — compared with 13 metric tons of carbon dioxide per metric ton of aluminum for a coal-fired smelter. “The emissions from this facility will be less than for any other facility of this size elsewhere in the world,” he said.

Jon Sigurdsson, minister of industry and commerce, said the proposals were subject to multiple hurdles, including, in some cases, local referendums. The government has always applied rigorous environmental standards to development projects, he said, and is preparing legislation that would set out a master plan for the country, designating which areas are to be protected and which have the potential for development.

“We stand on the threshold of a new era,” he said. “We wish to take both sides into consideration in a new general framework that will accept environmental concerns as being as important as other concerns.”

Sigurdur Arnalds, a spokesman for Landsvirkjun, the national power company, which is developing the Karahnjukar project, said: “Democracy will have the final say. Naturally, we will not build up every possibility we have; we have to stop someplace.”

Iceland is a prosperous country, but its prosperity is concentrated in Reykjavik. The government has long sought ways to bolster the economy by exploiting the country’s second- biggest natural resource, after fish: electric power, derived from a vast network of rivers and from underground geothermal fields.

But since the power cannot feasibly be exported, the idea has been to import demand. Aluminum seems a perfect fit. It is a power-intensive industry that needs easy access to ports for importing raw materials and exporting the finished product. Iceland has clean, available power, abundant coasts and proximity to the lucrative European market.

Iceland’s first aluminum plant was built in the 1960s; there are now two, both near Reykjavik.

“The government has done everything in its power to make way for these plants,” Kolbrun Halldorsdottir, a member of Parliament from the Left-Green Movement, said. “They have been fixed to this scheme like Saudi Arabia is fixed to oil. They don’t believe in entrepreneurship, job opportunities in our culture, tourism. They only believe in aluminum.”

The Karahnjukar project, years in planning, had the support of the center-right coalition government, which has been in power for 12 years. In opinion polls, the majority of Icelanders have consistently supported it, too, saying it would bring jobs and money to the eastern fjords.

But environmentalists say the project will devastate some 3 percent of Iceland’s land mass, destroying or affecting 60 waterfalls; causing widespread soil erosion that will send sand and dust blowing across the highlands and onto farms; and flooding an area covered in unusual moss and used by reindeer, nesting pink-footed geese and myriad birds, like the gyrfalcon and the ptarmigan.

They say, too, that the dam is inherently unstable, built on an unusually thin, fractured crust of earth near one of the most volcanically volatile areas in the world. Just south, the Vatnajokull glacier is melting rapidly from global warming , adding to the geological uncertainty.

In 2001, the Icelandic Planning Agency rejected the Karahnjukar plan, ruling that any economic benefits would not compensate for the potential environmental harm. But Iceland’s environment minister at the time overturned the decision, set some new conditions and allowed the project to go ahead.

Opponents now say that many Icelanders did not appreciate its scale or potential impact.

“People were kind of misled, and I don’t think even the politicians really understood what was going on,” said Andri Snaer Magnason, a poet, playwright and novelist. Last year, Mr. Magnason, 31, published “Dreamland,” a devastating polemic that puts Iceland’s environmental issues into a global perspective. The book has sold 18,000 copies — the equivalent, in percentage terms, of 18 million copies in the United States.

In September, Omar Ragnarsson, one of the country’s most respected television reporters, announced that he could no longer cover the Karahnjukar project with a journalist’s impartiality and would campaign against it. In a country where public demonstrations are rare, he led an antidam rally in Reykjavik, attended by 8,000 to 13,000 people.

When seen up close, the project dominates the landscape. At 2,400 feet wide and 650 feet tall, the dam is the highest of its kind in Europe. The reservoir, which will eventually cover 22 square miles, stretches out across one side, where land used to be; an empty riverbed carved far down in the rock stretches from the other side, where water used to be.

The harnessed water is to be sent through 45 miles of tunnels blasted into the mountains to a new hydropower station built deep inside a mountain in the Fljotsdalur Valley.

Finally, the electricity is to be sent along 32 miles of overland transmission lines to the Alcoa smelter, a milelong building on the edge of a fjord in the town of Reydarfjordur.

The smelter is supposed to begin producing aluminum by this summer, and the initial effects are obvious: there is a building boom going on in the east. “It’s like gold fever, or when everyone is drunk — and you know that the hangover will come,” said Greta Osk Sigurdardottir, a cattle and dairy farmer who lives in the area and who opposes the project.

Reydarfjordur, population 650, has its first mall. Housing prices have gone up. People are moving back, and the extra money has begun to give the town modern amenities, said Helga Jonsdottir, the mayor of Reydarfjordur and five other villages.

But others are not so happy. Gudmundur M. H. Beck spent his first 57 years in Reydarfjordur, raising sheep and chickens on his family’s farm. When 18 electricity pylons were built across the land and the government passed regulations forbidding grazing there, Mr. Beck took his animals to the slaughterhouse and moved north, where he lives near unspoiled mountains and lakes and is taking history classes, he said.

“This is the most horrible thing that has ever been done here,” he said. “I really have no words to describe it.”

The smelter is low, but dominates the coast. Shopping at a sporting-goods store at the mall, Krilla Bjork, 61, said she was thrilled at all the new stores and houses. Of the smelter, she said, “It’s not beautiful, but I accept it because it’s necessary.”

Renderings by Jody Brantner and Page Goolrick

NO STONES THROWN Page Goolrick would add a glass-enclosed penthouse atop two combined apartments on East 12th Street. It would be set back about 10 feet, providing a generous terrace.

AS Page Goolrick blithely climbed the five flights of stairs that led to two top-floor apartments in a refurbished East Village tenement, she wasn’t talking about the exhausting (for some) walk, or the workers who were tiling the stairs beneath her — occasionally cursing the interlopers who were messing up their job.

 

Renderings by Jody Brantner and Page Goolrick
Page Goolrick would use privacy glass to partition off the downstairs bedrooms at opposite ends of the combined apartment.

Michael Falco for The New York Times
Ms. Goolrick’s design would nearly double the space of the original footprint.

Instead, she spoke of Paris.

“What this building needs is one of those little iron-caged elevators, like they have in a building I’m working on over there,” she said. “It could fit right into the stairwell.” How cosmopolitan.

She also took a cosmopolitan approach to how she might renovate, at least on paper, the adjacent apartments at 315 East 12th Street, between First and Second Avenues. They are for sale at $670,000 and $600,000 unrenovated, with no co-op board approval needed and down payments of 10 percent.

Separately, they are less than inspiring, but “together they could be wonderful,” Ms. Goolrick exclaimed, whipping off her Dr. Zhivago black toque and her cream-colored coat, tossing it on the (minimal) kitchen counter in one of the apartments and getting out her tape measure.

Ms. Goolrick — who in addition to her work on apartments in Paris and New York City is designing desktop accessories for the Museum of Modern Art — peeked into the small bathroom, and nodded. “Yes, another window — another exposure.” The apartments have three exposures and, not surprisingly for the top floor, lots of light.

And there, in the distance, was the Williamsburg Bridge, silhouetted in the skyline.

Right now, the apartments are cut up into two handfuls of small rooms, too many to really visualize without a floor plan. The partitions are not logical; in one, you walk through the front door and into the kitchen, which you have to traverse before entering the living room — how delightful for the cook.

“Let’s get rid of the all the partitions!” said Ms. Goolrick, and no one objected, even if there are vaguely original details: some moldings under the windows, for instance. But the apartments cry out not for gutting — because the plaster looks firm on the walls and the floorboards look solid — but for a more nuanced remake. The apartments have “good bones,” she said, complete with nine-foot ceilings (she measured them). Combined, they could make a grand three-bedroom.

“Right now,” she said, “the building is better than the apartment.”

Walking around, and having dreamed up the idea of combining the apartments, she saw new possibilities: “hidden pocket doors, so if you wanted, you could see the whole sweep across the front of the building: nine south-facing windows.”

The tiny bathrooms and the Americans With Disabilities Act would pose a challenge, she said, “with all those A.D.A. regulations that come into play if we want to expand.” Even though the apartments are on the sixth floor of a walk-up building, the disabilities act still is relevant. (Perhaps its proponents were anticipating that little French elevator.)

Ms. Goolrick walked back out into the corridor and stood in the hall outside the two apartments. “If we’re combining the apartments, why not ask the co-op board if we can buy this space and fold it into the apartment?” she said.

That’s a possibility; co-op boards have increasingly been selling off unused or redundant space to shareholders.

Now, Ms. Goolrick said, she was ready to climb yet another flight: to the roof. And what a roof it was! While many New York City roofs are full of pesky vents and water towers, this one seemed relatively empty, especially in the all-important space over the two apartments.

She got out her camera and started shooting, leaning out rather dangerously over the parapet, and talking enthusiastically to no one in particular. “What about the roof — is it buildable?,” she asked Leslie Lalehzar of the Warburg Realty Partnership, the listing agent.

Ms. Lalehzar replied that the sponsor — the building’s owner, who is selling off the apartments — had not decided yet.

“Perfect!” Ms. Goolrick said.

A week later, she had all she needed to design her proposal: one combined apartment with a glassy-band-shell sort of penthouse for the roof.

“This was a coincidence,” she said, “because we’re currently doing three projects where we combine two or three apartments.”

But this one, the fantasy combination, was even more like a maze than the others, she said. She and her assistant Jody Brantner “joked about doing the drawings, aided by a little white rat,” Ms. Goolrick said.

In her solution, she eschewed her earlier idea for omnipresent pocket doors, substituting privacy glass for the partitions, which would change from near transparent to opaque at the flip of a switch. The downstairs bedrooms are set at opposite ends of the combined apartment, giving privacy to several age groups in a family.

“When I came in, all I thought was, ‘What dingy little apartments,’ ” she said. “But when you take out the walls, it’s a tabula rasa. The place cries out to be excavated.” On the roof, Ms. Goolrick has placed a loftlike, steel-windowed penthouse, where the new owners — whoever they are — could sit and look out at the bridge.

(The rear elevation of the penthouse is almost windowless because it looks up at a much taller office building, with what seems like miles of ugly ductwork crawling up the side.)

And even though the beige brick tenement building is not a landmark or even in a landmark district, the architect has set the penthouse back about 10 feet, making it invisible from the street — and, of course, making a stylish terrace.

And, finally, what about that elevator? She looked sheepish. “Well, I’d like to,” she said, thinking back to Paris. “We’re working in a building on the Île de la Cité, and it costs only about $10,000 a floor for a small hydraulic elevator. That would be $50,000 for five floors.”

“But the rules are different here in the United States. They probably wouldn’t let you.” She sighed. “I’ll add it to my wish list for this project, though.”

Illustration by James Yang

By RANDALL STROSS; Published: February 4, 2007

 

THESE still are early days for the Internet, globally speaking. One billion people online; five billion to go.

The next billion to be connected are living in homes that are physically close to an Internet gateway. They await a solution to the famous “last mile” problem: extending affordable broadband service to each person’s doorstep.

Here in the United States, 27 percent of the population lacks access to the Internet, according to a study completed last year by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Among those who do have access, about 30 percent still rely on slow dial-up connections. The last mile for households with no or slow connections may be provided by radio signals sent out by transmitters perched atop street lights, as hundreds of cities have rolled out municipal Wi-Fi networks, or are in the process of doing so.

The impulse behind these projects is noble. It’s a shame, however, that lots of street lamps and lots of dollars — a typical deployment in an urban setting will run $75,000 to $125,000 a square mile, just to install the equipment — do not really solve the last-mile problem.

If you’re sitting with your laptop at an outside cafe, you’ll be happy with the service. But if you happen to be at home, you realize that service to the doorstep is not enough: you still need to buy equipment to bolster the signal and solve the “last mile plus 10 more yards” problem — that is, getting coverage indoors.

Wi-Fi signals do not bend, and you usually can’t get much of a useful bounce from them, either. Because Wi-Fi uses unlicensed bands of the radio spectrum, by law it must rely on low-power transmitters, which reduce its ability to penetrate walls. Travel-round-the-world shortwave, this ain’t.

Trying to cover a broad area with Wi-Fi radio transmitters set atop street lights brings to mind a fad of the 1880s: attempts to light an entire town with a handful of arc lights on high towers. But overeager city boosters around the country soon discovered that shadows obscured large portions of their cities, and the lighting was not as useful as had been expected. Municipal Wi-Fi on streetlamps, another experiment with top-down delivery, may run a similarly short-lived — and needlessly expensive — course.

WiMax, which will be a high-power version of the tower approach, comes in two flavors: mobile, which has not yet been certified, and fixed, which is theoretically well suited for residential deployment. Unfortunately, it’s pricey. Peter Bell, a research analyst at TeleGeography Research in Washington, said fixed WiMax would not be able to compete against cable and DSL service: “It makes more economic sense in semirural areas that have no broadband coverage.”

An intriguingly inexpensive alternative has appeared: a Wi-Fi network that is not top-down but rather ground-level, peer-to-peer. It relies not on $3,500 radio transmitters perched on street lamps by professional installers but instead on $50 boxes that serve, depending upon population density, more than one household and can be installed by anyone with the ease of plugging in a toaster.

Meraki Networks, a 15-employee start-up in Mountain View, Calif., has been field-testing Wi-Fi boxes that offer the prospect of providing an extremely inexpensive solution to the “last 10 yards” problem. It does so with a radical inversion: rather than starting from outside the house and trying to send signals in, Meraki starts from the inside and sends signals out, to the neighbors.

Some of those neighbors will also have Meraki boxes that serve as repeaters, relaying the signal still farther to more neighbors. The company equips its boxes with software that maintains a “mesh network,” which dynamically reroutes signals as boxes are added or unplugged, and as environmental conditions that affect network performance fluctuate moment to moment.

At this time last year, two of Meraki’s co-founders — Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket — were still Ph.D. students at M.I.T., pursuing academic research on wireless mesh networks in the course of building Roofnet, an experimental network that covered about one-third of Cambridge, Mass., and offered residents free service.

Last year, Google invited Mr. Biswas to give a presentation about his experience providing wireless Internet service to low-income communities. At the time, Google was testing its first municipal Wi-Fi network in its hometown, Mountain View, Calif., using transmitters attached to street lamps.

After Mr. Biswas’s talk, a Google engineer told him that people using Google’s network said they could get online at home only by holding their laptops against a window. Mr. Biswas said he was not surprised. Using municipal Wi-Fi for residential coverage, he said, was “the equivalent of expecting street lamps to light everyone’s homes.”

Mr. Biswas and Mr. Bicket realized that their mesh-network gear designed for residential use could avoid that problem, and hasten the extension of Internet access worldwide. They founded Meraki, took a leave of absence from M.I.T. and, along with a third co-founder, Hans Robertson, moved to Silicon Valley. In short order, Google and then Sequoia Capital, one of Google’s original venture capital backers, invested in Meraki.

Moore’s Law, with its regular doubling of transistors on a single silicon chip, makes possible the miracle of a Meraki “mini,” as the company calls its basic product for the home. It contains a Wi-Fi router-on-a-chip, combined with the same microprocessor and same memory that formed the heart of a Silicon Graphics workstation 10 years ago. These components are now cheap enough today to be included in a box that sells for $49.

The fact that 200 million Wi-Fi chips will be manufactured this year leads to economies of scale that will drive down the price of extremely intelligent network equipment. Meraki’s products are still being tested, but word-of-mouth has attracted 15,000 users in 25 countries.

One early adopter was Michael Burmeister-Brown, a director of NetEquality, a nonprofit in Portland, Ore., that provides free Internet access to low-income neighborhoods. He had not been impressed by Portland’s municipal Wi-Fi service. Because the Wi-Fi transmitter has to be both close and within unobstructed view, the limitations brought to Mr. Burmeister-Brown’s mind the sign on the back of 18-wheel trucks: “If you can’t see my mirror, I can’t see you.”

In Portland, the access points were installed only at every other intersection in residential areas — creating an “I can’t see you” problem. MetroFi, the service provider, advises residents who are not close to a transmitter to buy additional equipment to pull in the signal, with a starting price of $119 — and that is without the “professional installation” option.

For NetEquality, Mr. Burmeister-Brown decided to try out the Meraki equipment in several neighborhoods. In the largest, consisting of about 400 apartments, five DSL lines were used to feed 100 Meraki boxes, which cover the complex with a ratio of one box to every four apartments. Each box both receives the signal and passes it along, albeit at diminished strength. For an initial investment of about $5,000, or $13 a household, the complex can offer Internet access whose operating costs work out to about $1 a household a month.

The bandwidth can match DSL service, but here it is throttled down a bit to deter bandwidth-hogging downloads. Nonetheless, Mr. Burmeister-Brown says everyone is able to enjoy Web browsing with what he describes as “really snappy response.” The sharing of signals among neighbors does not compromise privacy if standard Wi-Fi security protocols are switched on.

Meraki’s products are not yet for sale, and its networks have not been tested with extensive deployment across a large city. Nonetheless, the intrinsic advantages of its grass-roots approach, with next-to-nothing expenditures for both equipment and operations, are impossible to ignore.

MR. BISWAS says there are about 800 million personal computers in the world, but only 280 million are connected. The rest are “stuck in the 1980s” — close to being connected, but not quite.

Meraki does not wish to go into the Internet service provider business itself, but it aspires to equip any interested nontechnical person to become a “micro” service provider for his or her local community. If the provider wishes to use advertising to cover costs rather than charge an access fee, little would be needed in order to cover the minimal outlays for equipment and operations.

This low-cost network model offers the prospect of broadband service reaching inside many more households. One billion and one. One billion and two. One billion and three … .

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.