Climate change is not something we directly see or touch. Rather, to understand how the climate is changing, we rely on mediating tools: maps of sea level rise projections, or models of changing atmospheric patterns. These ways of seeing a landscape shape approaches to climate change adaptation. Planning for large-scale regions like deltas too requires what Latour calls “immutable mobiles” - representational tools that help experts understand and act on a delta. These representations are technical, but they are also political, privileging one view of the world over others. Take the hydraulic model, which envisions rivers as linear channels of flow, devoid of ecology and society. These conventional ways of depicting risk and adaptation at the regional scale tend to see deltas through a narrow disciplinary scope: a river becomes a model.
In this research studio, we analyze how environmental change is represented in our site and develop new representational tools for thinking across large spatial scales and intervening in complex systems. Just as architects make drawings rather than buildings, planners make maps rather than regions. Interrogating the representations that plans rely upon is one way to design more critically with a damaged planet.
The curriculum is split into four parts: (1) analyzing existing representations, (2) critiquing how these representations have transformed our site, (3) re-presenting our site based on these critiques, and (4) proposing an intervention.
Part 1 & 2: Analysis & Critique
Part 3: Re-Presentation - Humanizing Metrics
Representing flood infrastructure in New Orleans with an emphasis on metrics and levees has resulted in the levee effect and the oversimplification of a complex system. This project proposes to re-present the system with its human and environmental entanglements.
In order to demonstrate these cause-and-effect relationships, I created an interactive website that allows users to explore the complexities of the city’s flood infrastructure system. I first examined these relationships at the human-scale using my previously drawn sections sections. These sections depict each component of the system individually (levees, green infrastructure, catch basins, drainage pumps, and canals). I then considered how these components interact with each other at the city-scale using 2D maps, 3D axons, and diagrammatic sections. In each drawing, users can click on icons that provide more context about the system’s social, political, and environmental challenges.
Part 4: Intervention - Democratizing Infrastructure
View Part 4: Intervention Here