Town v. Country 5: Envisioning a risk landscape

updated August 14th

My ability to view the August 12th California Water Issues Forum came to an abrupt end about an hour and a half into the event, in the middle of Phil Isenburg’s anodyne remarks.

Up to that point, pretty much everyone who spoke used words as a palliative. The exception was Dr. Jeffrey Mount of UC Davis, who seemed willing to describe the water situation in the Delta with an appropriate degree of desperation. Although not scoped out to the statewide situation, Dr. Mount’s remarks were succinct, and covered the various aspects of and future scenarios for the Delta’s tenuous ecology—floods, risk analysis dealing with levee maintenance and repair, climate change, subsidence, water salinity levels, etc.

But what gave me pause about his comments was what I think for Dr. Mount was a throw-away remark about urbanization in the Delta. To paraphrase, he was reassuring people that farming would still be a part of the Delta landscape for a long, long time, and that farming was surely, even obviously, a more appropriate land use than having people live there. Indeed, there was the trace of disdain in Dr. Mount’s voice as he considered the idea that more people might occupy the future Delta. But why shouldn’t one consider the potential of the cultural ecology of the Delta?

Like many, Dr. Mount applies culture (water supply, urbanization, economic issues, etc.) to public policy outside of the Delta, and nature (habitat creation, ecosystem health, etc.) to policies within the Delta’s boundaries. Isn’t it worth contemplating a synthetic, superrural vision that integrates all that habitat with living, working and playing people and food and energy production?

Dr. Mount’s vision of the Delta’s future is a kind of pure, technocratic dream—the management of a narrow but powerful coalition of interests—water users and environmental advocates. It is hard to disagree with most of Dr. Mount’s conclusions—that the Delta is a complex and unnatural ecosystem that requires management by experts—experts on indigenous and invasive species, salinity control, water supply and use.  But conclusions ultimately must become spatial and programmatic, and this sublimation is where I take issue—with the vision projected onto those conclusions.

If one wishes to assess the spatial character of these conclusions, the best document to refer to is an interactive map of “a multi-purpose, eco-friendly Delta” that Dr. Mount produced in collaboration with the Public Policy Institute of California. If Dr. Mount looked more closely into his own vision, he would see that the traces of levees that once surrounded his now-abandoned lower Delta islands have gradually acquired riparian landscapes along their riprap faces. Bridges, boat landings, marinas, barns, and other buildings will be reoccupied or abandoned. Surely, this will be a paradise for fishermen, windsurfers, birdwatchers, campers, and other forms of living, working and playing.

Undoubtedly, the Delta will have to be a carefully managed landscape. But why can’t thoughtful people like Dr. Mount envision the Delta as an ecology of natural and cultural processes, with a possibly increasing but certainly finite number of people working and playing there?

The PPIC and Dr. Mount have used risk management analysis that correlates land value with levee repair as the basis for another map. This analysis supports a view that projects much of the Delta’s lower elevations as inundated and abandoned to human occupation. Could we ask them to apply the economic assumptions used in their risk management map to explore how new types of human occupancy, smaller scales of more expensive private property and more diverse recreational land uses might be overlayed on their well-researched but limited vision?

At UBC, where I teach, I hope to offer a Master’s level architecture studio in the spring with colleagues in Europe and California. The PPIC map may be our starting point.