An inverted marina for the Delta

As a coda to the recently-completed Peak Water studio, the DNP will be blogging on some of the work of the students.

The students, the DNP hopes and encourages, might blog too. We shall see.

Ariel Mieling’s project most directly addressed the issue of public and private space in the Delta.

Mieling’s site was the southeastern tip of Mandeville Island, once owned by Steve Wynn of MGM Grand and Bellagio fame, and now (or at least the last the DNP knew) by something called the Tuscany Research Institute, coincidentally (or not) also of Las Vegas.

Her proposal for an “inverted marina” is a critique of the private nature of the space of the Delta which, despite its key public role in the state’s water system, remains a subsidized libertarian landscape of tax shelters, cheap water, and private hunting clubs. As Mieling puts it

The dichotomy of public waterways and private levees is reflected in the differences between land and water fishing in the Delta ... A marina extends pleasure onto the water. An inverted marina captures the pleasure of water for use from the land.

Ms. Mieling envisions creating a new cut off island from her peninsular site, then flooding the subsided island’s interior to make it navigable and constructing ring piers accessible from the levee with different fishing habitats within the rings.

Mieling also proposes the construction of a water education destination facility with four aquariums that show the Delta’s ecosystem in 1850, 1900, 1950 and 2000. Classrooms and a lecture hall,  a swimming pool, bait shop. washrooms and bioremediating water treatment landscape would all be powered by photovoltaics.

The DNP, like Ms. Mieling, supports a more democratically conceived and occupied Delta future—one that is not entirely controlled by risk-averse technocrats, far-flung power centers and slippery legislators who think that their responsibilities can be more effectively adjudicated by the reptilian rules of the state’s proposition system.

We like a Delta future where lots of little girls can spend Saturdays fishing with their dads without threat of trespassing, and do not believe that such a future creates a risk for water security or supply.