BY ADAM MANDELMAN

Cleaning up after the Burning Man festival is serious business.
From the August 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
Every year, in the weeks leading up to Labor Day, a temporary metropolis emerges from the barren alkali flats of Nevada?s Black Rock Desert. Meticulously surveyed, the concentric circles and spokes of Black Rock City?s dusty streets fan out across some seven square miles of dry lake bed (or ?playa?), providing an iconic geography for one of North America?s more bizarre annual rituals: Burning Man.
But the chaotic arts and music festival, known for its high hedonism, is as much an exercise in evanescent urban planning as it is a radical social experiment. Come Labor Day, Burning Man?s deeply ingrained leave-no-trace ethos takes over. Attendees pack up gear, artists break down installations, and theme camps dismantle projects so elaborate that one wonders whether Burning Man is actually an engineering fair. Show up to the event a month late, and you?ll be hard-pressed to find any trace of the booming city of 70,000 that once sprawled across the desert. Gone are the flame-throwing mechanical octopus, the enormous Dr. Bronner?s foam dome, and the countless 75,000-watt sound systems pumping bass across the arid playa. ?It?s the mythological city that suddenly springs forth before disappearing into nothingness?. It?s the biggest flash mob on the planet,? says Dominic ?D.A.? Tinio, Burning Man?s manager of playa restoration. Known unin...