Design, synthesis and agency

An abstract just written for a conference in Amman, Jordan called Conservation of Architecture, Urban Areas, Nature & Landscape: Towards a Sustainable Survival of Cultural Landscape:

Design, synthesis and agency: Mediating the production of real estate, artificial ecosystems and water in the California Delta

John Bass
Associate Professor, University of British Columbia

Problems of resource scarcity are emerging as major political and existential issues in all parts of the world. The mythical playground of California is no exception. The state faces increasingly difficult tensions between its desire to continue growing and the limited resources it has available to fuel that growth. This is especially true regarding the resource of fresh water for its thirsty metropolitan and agricultural regions.

The geographical epicenter of this scarcity-induced tension is the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, about 100 kilometers northeast of San Francisco, and the largest fresh water estuary on the west coast of North America. The Delta was a tidal estuary that was reclaimed from 1850 to 1900. The Delta’s highly organic soils have since subsided, and most of the Delta’s poldered land now sits at 25-30 feet below surrounding rivers.

Over the last one hundred years the state grew, and its caretakers explored places that could provide the fresh water to support that growth. Logically, the Delta’s fragile, flood-prone islands and meandering rivers and sloughs became the nexus of the state’s complex and extensive water storage and redistribution infrastructure. Ever-increasing demands for the Delta’s fresh water have helped to bring its ecosystem to the brink of collapse and threaten to literally and politically inundate its unique historical settlements, manmade islands and place-specific infrastructures.

The state’s legislative response to the tension between environmental crisis and water supply an objective to achieve the “co-equal” goals of restoring the Delta’s ecosystem and securing the water supply for the state’s urban and agricultural water consumers. Habitat restoration and water supply securitization, yes—but nowhere in this legislation, passed in November of 2009, is there an expressed objective to conserve the Delta’s unique physical and cultural landscape.

The presentation will describe several scales of speculative proposal that folds into the “co-equal” goals this third goal to conserve this unique and valuable area. An overview will describe the state’s water issues vis-a-vis the Delta and the various policy and engineering proposals that have been put forth to address these issues. These include changes to the Delta’s land management practices and a number of systemic and site-specific infrastructural interventions.

Illustrated with a number of speculative and polemical design proposals, it will be argued that while these land use and management practices and engineering artifacts are too narrowly conceived on a singular functional focus, they provide the basic framework for design synthesis.

Drawing a distinction between preservation as a method of fixing in time and place a beloved artifact and conservation as a method of caring for a living, changing one, the approach inherently acknowledges that fundamental physical changes are inevitable in the Delta, and explores ways that the Delta’s many latent resources might be developed to subsidize those changes and conserve essential cultural, historical, and human aspects of this place.

For more information, please visit http://www.deltanationalpark.org/intro/

Thematic keywords:
Landscape scale conservation
Ecosystem restoration
Environmental conservation and conflict resolution

Leaving now for a month-long visit to Chandigarh, India. Working on a book on the tensions between those who believe that that city, as a monumental relic of modernism, needs to be preserved, and those who see it a growing city that needs to change if it is to avoid becoming a tourist-first place. Hopefully there will be an occasional encounter with extraordinary and ordinary water moments. One extraordinary one, the stepwell (reservoir) above, at 10 stories deep, the deepest in India.

Will blog as time allows. Happy summer to everyone!