Excerpt from Fresh Water

FRESH

WATER

FRESH WATER design research for inland water territories

WA

Published by Applied Research and Design Publishing, an imprint of ORO Editions.

Gordon Goff: Publisher www.appliedresearchanddesign.com info@appliedresearchanddesign.com

Copyright © 2019 Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica M. Henson.

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Editors: Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica M. Henson With contributions by Elizabeth Baranski, Sean Burkholder, Kristi Cheramie, Danielle Choi, Sandra Cook, Danika Cooper, Brian Davis, Andrew Dawson, M. Elen Deming, Lowell Duckert, Marcella Eaton, Billy Fleming, Jessica M. Henson, Justine Holzman, Forbes Lipschitz, Walton Kelly, Nina-Marie Lister, Mary Pat McGuire, Thomas Nideroest, Samuel Panno, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Matthew Seibert, and Matthew Tucker Book Design by Pablo Mandel and Maureen Hollboll www.circularstudio.com Project Manager: Jake Anderson

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FRESH

ATER DESIGN RESEARCH FOR INLAND WATER TERRITORIES

Mary Pat McGuire Jessica M. Henson

Contents

WaterLines 8 Foreword D. Fairchild Ruggles 10 Preface and Acknowledgments Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica M. Henson 13 Blueprints: Introduction Lowell Duckert

20 Boxed In, Boxed Out: Water, Policy, and Design in Landscape Architecture Billy Fleming 26 Battling Both River and Time: The Incredible Lost Story of How the Army Corps Redefined Flood Control Infrastructure Matthew Seibert and Kristi Cheramie 42 Wet + Dry: Rethinking the Mississippi River Cross-section Jessica M. Henson 57 Pre-Mortem: A Landscape Approach to Northern Manitoba Marcella Eaton 71 From Drain to Delta: Green Infrastructure for Working Landscapes Forbes Lipschitz

WaterSheds

WaterBodies

84 Metaphor as Method M. Elen Deming

146 Tides in the Body Danika Cooper

192 Watermarks Nina-Marie Lister

91 Points, Lines, and Planes: Depave Chicago Mary Pat McGuire

152 De-Naturing Preservation: Technological Landscapes of the Illinois River Valley Danielle Choi

197 Contributors

104 Port Futures: Revaluing Rivermouths in the Great Lakes Basin Sean Burkholder and Brian Davis 116 Sponge Farm: A New Way of Thinking Elizabeth L. Baranski, Samuel V. Panno, and Walton R. Kelly 126 When the Only Water Left is Gray: The Quest for Inland Water Territories Thomas Nideroest

162 Wet Lands: Agroecological Experimentation in Essex County Justine Holzman and Sandra Cook 172 Between Wildness and Utility: Interpreting Geography Through Fresh Water Infrastructure Andrew Dawson 182 Hydrosocial Territories of the Anthropocene Matthew Tucker

Foreword D. Fairchild Ruggles

Because water is critical for human survival, it is an elemental force in our consciousness.

We depend on fresh water for sustenance, yet it seems to appear by divine will, raining from the heavens, gushing upward from mysterious subterranean springs, flowing from trickles and streams to become powerful rivers that do not simply traverse the landscape but give it life and form. While water visibly creates rivers and lakes, less observable is the way that it affects the land. Much of the character of the land that we inhabit has been shaped by water, although its present or former presence is not always discernible to the eye: deserts exist due to water’s scarcity, swamps are the result of its abundance, and when the great Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated from the northern half of the North American continent, it left behind a vast, flat, Midwestern landscape and immense lakes. For millennia, humankind has sought to understand the ways of water and to manage its behavior through design, engineering, and social organization so as to enhance its benefits and mitigate its destruction.

As a force for creation and destruction, water figures in much of the world’s earliest literature, from the Epic of Gilgamesh flood story in which an evil king’s hubris causes divine flooding, to God’s punishment of immoral humanity in the 40-day flood in Genesis which Noah survives by building the ark. In Hindu belief, the Ganges River is the great mother, falling to earth in the Himalaya, entwining herself in the hair of Shiva, and winding her way in streams to the Gangetic plain of India and Bangladesh. The Ganges is also a crossing place, both literally as a body of water and conceptually as a crossing point in the journey from life to death, and thus enabling rebirth, attracting millions of pilgrims annually to bathe in its purifying waters.

Similarly, the concept of spiritual transition occurs in Christianity through baptism, beginning with John’s baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River. In Judaism, purity is restored by the ritual bath, the mikvvah.

In Egypt, the Nile was imagined in antiquity as the God Osiris, god of the dead but also associated with agriculture and wine. A benevolent king, he was murdered by his jealous brother who first cast him on the river’s waters in a sealed casket and then cut the body into pieces which he scattered across Egypt, the genitals cast into the Nile. According to myth, the fecundity of Osiris’s genitals was such that it caused the river to swell with an annual inundation and then subside, a metaphor that extended to the fertilization of the agricultural landscape by the nourishing flood which brought not only water but also rich silt. In the modern world, we seek scientific explanations for floods and droughts so as to better manage them, yet we remain susceptible to metaphor and anthropomorphism, giving human names to hurricanes such as Katrina (2002) and Maria (2017).

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Fresh Water

In lived practice, designers and engineers have struggled to develop systems for managing water, treating it both as a resource and a dynamic force that shapes the environment. Early forms of water management took the form of dams, reservoirs, and wells for collecting water, with canals and aqueducts, both above ground and subterranean, for transporting water from source to village or field. Machinery—waterwheels, levers, and pumps—was invented to lift the water from place of storage to place of consumption. Finally, human society developed political processes for ensuring the fair distribution of the supply through water clocks and judicial courts, as well as for allocating the cost of either draining the land or obtaining and storing water to enhance the land, either through tax levies or required labor. In arid landscapes, such as northern Africa and the southwestern United States, the challenge was to obtain water; in wetter landscapes, such as the Netherlands and Illinois, the challenge was to remove it to maximize the amount of land available for habitation and agriculture. In a capitalist society, the drive to increase the area of usable land was directly linked to its value as a commodity.

The studies in this volume focus on the North American context, but they follow upon centuries of global concern for freshwater as an environmental and economic resource that humankind must manage wisely for its own survival. Where the contributions in this volume distinguish themselves is in their emphasis on water relationships stitched together through land, infrastructure, and human communities over the last 150 years in the specific geographies of the Mississippi River, Nelson River, and Great Lakes Basin. Authors observe not only the rivers but the entire contingent watershed of each, not only the lakes but the topography that gives them form. For example, the upstream-downstream relationship, which is structured by water flow, has a profound effect across and throughout the land. In North America, as the essays in this volume explain, there is ample evidence to show how the urban-industrialinfrastructural model for hydrologic manipulation is often very damaging to the downstream ecology and to the health of communities living there, especially those that are economically marginalized or indigenous.

Each of the editors of this visionary volume embodies a knowledge of water, Mary Pat McGuire, PLA has lived and worked in the multiple water contexts of the Chesapeake Bay, San Francisco Bay, the Great Lakes, and Venice’s great lagoon, where she experienced one of the highest recorded floods of its notorious aqua alta. She is the Principal Designer at the Water Lab where she collaborates with geologists, hydrologists, and engineers on urban water issues. Jessica Henson, PLA, an associate at OLIN, has worked on design projects for socially and environmentally resilient infrastructure in Philadelphia, the Midwest, and Los Angeles, her current project being the Los Angeles County LA River Master Plan. Brought together as faculty in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, they ambitiously convened a group engaged with the environment through design, policy, science, history, and literature, and challenged them to consider fresh water conceptually through the categories of connective lines, spatial and social bodies, and watersheds, and ultimately as a land-water relationship—a symbiosis, not a binary—with serious stakes for human welfare. The world urgently needs these new ways of thinking about fresh water because, while the fascination with water has always been present in the human consciousness, we are now faced with nothing less than an environmental emergency in which global warming is causing the shift of water from glacial ice to ocean, and from ocean to atmosphere, and from atmosphere to land, causing devastating storms, ocean surges, and droughts on a scale that is unprecedented in human history.

We are reluctantly realizing that the disastrous consequences of global warming can no longer be averted, because our politicians have failed to reach consensus and take action. Instead, we must turn to designers to help us understand and plan for the changing environment. Their multidisciplinary approach to environmental problem solving, large-scale perspective encompassing the urban and connected hinterland, and recognition that any discussion of the environment must also include human society and human actors, is at the heart of Fresh Water.

Foreword

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Preface and Acknowledgments Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica M. Henson

Fresh Water emerges from our shared passion and concern for freshwater systems in the North American continent. Within our respective areas of design research, we each examine the enmeshed relationships within freshwater ecosystems of large-scale water infrastructure, hydro-social histories, and the waters themselves. We have also taught studios and workshops on rivers (Henson) and urban water (McGuire), at a land-grant university in the American Midwest.

Through both research and teaching, we have reflected together on the major inland (non-coastal) watersheds of the North American continent—namely, the Mississippi, the Great Lakes Basin-St. Lawrence, and the Nelson—and the great risk they face. Historic and contemporary infrastructure to control water—from regional sewersheds to industrial agriculture to flood control projects— continues to degrade the major continental watersheds and their multi-species communities, with little relief in sight. Yet, as designers, we feel adamant and hopeful that design research can and must play a significant role in addressing these issues at the watershed-territorial scale. We believe this continental landscape, which at first may seem incommensurable in scale and complexity, is replete with opportunity for transformation through design.

Fresh Water is a response to this calling. The volume assembles scholarly design studies that uncover institutional histories, jurisdictional controls, outdated technologies, and corporate practices that have disconnected, fragmented, and degraded water. Fresh Water’s contributing authors examine the direct manifestation in the landscape—from dewatered farm fields to cross-watershed diversions. Through diverse methodologies and concepts, the authors propose design interventions to resituate, reconnect, and restore water and human society as reciprocal and co-constitutive. Their proposed projects aim to substantively reconfigure relationships and interactions among ecology, economy, and human well-being with the essence and integrity of water itself.

When we were first conceptualizing Fresh Water in 2017, the incoming presidential administration announced intentions for vast environmental deregulation and proposed eliminating Congressional funding for major national environmental programs. Included in his defunded list was critical restoration funding for the Great Lakes, one of the largest freshwater systems in the world, containing approximately 84% of the surface Fresh Water in North America.

The urgency we were already feeling to address freshwater issues was thus compounded by the political climate. Human society and the global web of species and living systems, already vulnerable to unprecedented climate change, can only be further compromised by unregulated development and continued exploitation of the planet. Meanwhile, designers, planners, and environmental researchers, in both practice and academia, have trended toward large-scale

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Fresh Water

systems-based design thinking, extending their knowledge to the climate and water challenges we face this century. Designers, in particular, excel at functional and aesthetic complexity of systems within large sites. Yet, equally complex are the political and bureaucratic contexts of our water systems, namely: jurisdictional and institutional overlaps, political- and capital-economic systems, and prolonged timescales that inhibit dialogue and change. Massive, territorial waterissues must be fully understood within their institutional, political, and social contexts in order to restore, heal, and rebuild.

In wrestling with these competing domains of power, control, and effect, Fresh Water identifies potential resolutions through design. Design dialogue was thus initiated through a symposium at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in September 2018. Over the two-day event, participants and attendants debated and discussed inland water histories and futures. Collectively, participants and attendants agreed that more inclusive design and research thinking processes are needed—ones that cross disciplines, methods, and practices, and ones that target policies and key decisions to redirect the future of our major inland watersheds. Three major themes emerged from symposium presentations that we carry through to the book: WaterLines address concepts of edge, division, separation, and boundary, whether material, spatial, cartographic, infrastructural, or institutional. Contributors address WaterLines by recognizing natural and human regimes that create boundary conditions for water systems, evident through lines in the landscape, conveyance-control infrastructure, and the interface between systems, and propose design responses to remediate these binary conditions and environments.

WaterSheds address the spatial, temporal, and material relationships of water and terrain; the role of the surficial, topographic, and material conditions relative to water forms, flows, and fluctuations; and land-water interfaces, interactions, and interdependencies. WaterSheds investigate the contested nature of land areas as they have been increasingly politicized, commodified, and engineered. Authors address questions and concerns over the role of land and landscape processes that are fundamental to the life and quality of water across cities, regions, and the continent.

WaterBodies involve the relationship of humans and hydrology—the hydro-social—addressing semiotics as well as formal and informal language of water in culture, society, and the body.

WaterBodies involve the signs, symbols, and meaning of water in the world, through an experience and understanding of water in our life and culture. Contributors explore both the legacy and future of our constructions—big and small—that write our human-water histories into the land.

Essays by Billy Fleming, Elen Deming, and Danika Cooper open the three themed sections, with each author offering a broad set of concepts that set the stage for the chapters. Across the core thematic structure of the chapters, we also identified a triad of cross-cutting themes of methods, scale, and multi-disciplinarity. Throughout the book, authors promote future-oriented and actionable research, achieved through experimentation, interpretation, engaged action, projective design, and logical systems to produce multivalent responses to deeply complex problems.

Through the research process, most of the projects establish multi-scalar, functional relationships between site-based material realities and the larger systemic, network of those sites—forming a critical basis for the role of landscape architecture within this larger terrain. Lastly, the projects are fundamentally multi-disciplinary in knowledge and methods. As designers ask new questions of water-based landscape issues, they address those through knowledge and methods both inside and outside design, drawing deeply from related and allied disciplines.

Bracketing the essays and chapters are the introductory and closing essays from our two keynote speakers. Lowell Duckert, scholar of environmental literature, first weaves together manifold meanings of water and design, by drawing from the contributions of the authors, and in so doing, explicates how human-water relationships are interpreted and co-constructed.

When Duckert writes, “How we narrate design matters,” he reminds us that our hydro-social reorientation will need to address our historic narratives. In concluding the book, Nina-Marie Lister, ecologist and adaptation planning scholar, reflects on the projects within this volume and

Preface and Acknowledgments

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the trajectory of design research to powerfully define and forge new relations among water, land, and people, in the context of the themes of lines, sheds, and bodies. In her observation, “For the relational context of the watershed (and its/our waterbodies), the design-researcher requires a more sophisticated and diverse set of methodological tools, a more nuanced, finely-tuned evaluation framework, and a richer suite of modes of representation.” Further, with these “comes the potential for new and more complex questions, deeper analyses, and more critical reflection, from theory into a more relational design praxis.” Lister states that the work within Fresh Water “is more than thick description of shifting shorelines and storylines; it is served by humility in the face of complexity, and motivated by compassionate care of our lifelines with, and in, our fresh waters. This [work] is a journey to a new praxis that realizes hope and opportunity towards sacred waters that sustain us all.”

We bring these voices and projects together to generate a new dialogue with you, our broader fresh water readership. Many of the enclosed design research projects are in their early stages and will evolve over the coming years and decades. A majority of the authors are emerging in their fields and have set out ambitious agendas to carry their work forward. Our hope is that the designers and their projects embody approaches that others can learn from, and that readers will reach out to us to partner on future freshwater gatherings and initiatives. While the symposium and contents of this book do not address all of the water issues in the vast territory of the Great Lakes, Mississippi, and Nelson watersheds, shared legacies summon us to connect across these areas.

For their direct contributions to Fresh Water, we extend our sincere gratitude to the participants in the symposium and the authors in this volume, from whom we have learned a great deal about the collective potential for Fresh Water to provocatively and intellectually reshape wet terrain. We extend special gratitude to Elen Deming for her boundless mentorship and friendship, to Dede Ruggles for her penetrating advisement, and to our Department Head Bill Sullivan for steadfast support through the symposium, exhibition, and this volume. We sincerely thank Jane Wolff for her role as WaterBodies panel moderator and interlocutor during the symposium, and for her resounding accolades for the symposium’s thematic considerations and execution. We deeply thank the Department of Landscape Architecture for providing financial support for the Fresh Water symposium and accompanying exhibition, WaterWorks, through the Stanley White Fund and Brent & Jean Wadsworth Endowment; and the Illinois Campus Research Board and the College of Fine & Applied Arts for financial support of this publication. Mary Pat extends her gratitude to Dean Kevin Hamilton for his support of design research scholarship in the College, and of the opportunity to serve as Design Research Fellow in 2016–2018, through which formation of the symposium and book first took shape. Jessica would like to personally thank her colleagues at OLIN for support during this effort and the ongoing research dialogue in the office about design for large-scale water systems and the communities along their banks. We thank key supporters who reviewed versions of materials related to the symposium and book including: Robert France, William Schuster, David Yocca, and Daniel Schneider. Our gratitude extends to Pablo Mandel and Jake Anderson and his team at Applied Research + Design Publishing for a seamless process from book concept to final proofs and to the ORO Editions/AR+D board reviewers for their advisement. We are especially thankful to our anonymous external readers, engaged by the publisher, who took the time to offer guidance and review on the structure of the book and chapters within. We also thank our generous graduate research assistants Xiaocun Liu, Yizhu Liu, Xinyuan Lu, Yang Xia, Litong Zeng, Zeyun Zheng, and Zoe Wu for research, review, and interactions related to the symposium and book; and to the many students with whom we have taught and worked over the years.

Lastly, endless gratitude belongs to our families and friends who continuously support us in our daily efforts to learn, research, and work toward a future for fresh water.

September, 2018

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Fresh Water

Blueprints Lowell Duckert

In design there is nothing foundational.

—Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus?”

Designing without nature has never been possible,1 even if one response to the conglomeration of ecological crises known as the Anthropocene has been an architectural acceleration: the urge to build bigger, faster, and stronger, the need to rise higher than the tsunami’s wave (bungalow), to reside deeper than the soil’s contamination (bunker). Gird. Seal. Dam. Wall.

“Pave” (McGuire). Such words are surely recognizable to landscape architects, these verbs that encourage fanatical and fantastical beliefs that the “outside” world can be kept “out” and that place their faith in techno-scientific mastery, foolproof feats of engineering, and the march of teleological progress (grander still: Progress). The course is clear: when topographical untidiness poses a problem, “infrastructure is the solution” (Tucker). What is more, it is the human alpha-architect who assumes the prime position (arkhi-, “chief ”) at the construction site: the material world exists solely as archetypal building blocks that stand at their foreman’s command, a series of cataloged objects erected exactly in accordance with calculated designs that cannot err. As functionality marries practicality, an ontological split ensues. By some stupendous act of scaffolding, the builder (subject) separates from the built (object). If Victor Frankenstein had manufactured fountains (but another animated figure), he would have surely abandoned those creations as well.2 The ways in which we story the shaping of water are no less vulnerable to this anthropocentric logic: from pushed-around “rivers of empire”3 that zigzag “between wildness and utility” (Dawson), to Paolo Bacigalupi’s cli-fi “water knives”—stealthy political agents who cut channels, deals, and throats in a dystopic, dried-up (though not totally unimaginable) American Southwest 4 —dazzling hydrotectures devoid of their temporal and physical connections to the surrounding waterscape seemingly appear out of nothing at all. Parsed this way, the parched treatment and terminology of “design” deserves to be redesigned. The philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour, for one, has recently offered a different approach; noting that the word design comes to English from the French “relooking,” he identifies an affiliation between the field of design and the “things” that populate the field: “the typically modernist divide between materiality on the one hand and design on the other is slowly being dissolved away,” he observes. Look: “[t]o think of artefacts in terms of design means conceiving of them less and less as modernist objects, and conceiving of them more and more as ‘things.’”5 Instead of delineating a seismic shift between nature and culture, that is, the

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tectonic (from tektōn, “carpenter, builder”) unveils human-nonhuman hybrid assemblies—or “things,” according to Latour—under complicated conjuncture, unending co-construction.

“Designing is the antidote to founding, colonizing, establishing, or breaking with the past,” he counsels, “[i]t is an antidote to hubris and to the search for absolute certainty, absolute beginnings, and radical departures.”6 How, then, to put this re-designing of design into practice? To paraphrase the rhizomatic plotters Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, one method would be to “make a [blueprint], not a tracing.”7 Look here: it is precisely this penchant for de-territorialized modes of mapping that eventuated as “Fresh Water: Design Research for Inland Water Territories” in September 2018, a symposium that has (just now) arrived in its edited form. As you will discover—or perhaps already suspect—the Great Lakes and Mississippi River are no exception to the modernist split.

The deaths and lives of and within their waters are bound up, for instance, with parasitical zebra and quagga mussels hitchhiking in- and overland, an unreliable electric barrier guarding Lake Michigan from constant invasions of Asian carp,8 and the “hypoxic dead zones” (Lipschitz) and “pre-mortem” (Eaton) spaces that continually haunt. Cohabitation with un/wanted hosts of in/ organic creatures is an imperfect, because ongoing, relationship. As many of the authors herein argue, however, we may seize upon the “fantastic notion of designing through history” (Seibert and Cheramie) in order to imagine alternate scenarios for current bodies of water both great and small—adopting the motto of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, they at least “let us try.”

“De-linearizing remains speculative,” as Billy Fleming points out; the contributions that follow share an abiding investment in “speculation”—literally a prospective “look” onto the present and into unknown futures—and bespeak an unwavering interest in human-nonhuman collaborative creativity: maps, stories, are “blueprints” in the truest sense; they demonstrate design to be a co-shaped event, an interdisciplinary and multi-temporal whirling-together of arts-sciences, “nested scales” (Deming), author-landscape architects, and their available waters. Read on to witness this multi-species sort of aqua-forming in stirring action.

This compilation is also a testament to how the environmental humanities and schools of design (to name but two) can come to congregate, and, in doing so, mutually in- and transform one another. As someone steeped in early modern literature and steered by the “hydrological turn” happening in ecocultural studies more broadly,9 I find Helen’s speech from William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (1606–7) prescient in this regard: “Or remedies oft in ourselves do lie / Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky / Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull / Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull” (1.1.201-4).10 On the one hand, her message could be construed as an incitement to act quickly, to banish sluggishness (the “dull”) in an escalating era of climate change. On the other hand, we can appreciate the slowness of “designs”—and its encouragement to decelerate, or pause—and employ it in order to care more carefully. Contrary to a popular catastrophism that would necessitate the desertion of the lakes, or require an abiding commitment to learning how to die with/in them, everything (the “all” of existence) will not inevitably collapse regardless of our well-meaning “remedies.” As Nina-Marie Lister reminds us, shorelines are “storylines” that draw human and nonhuman bodes into allegiances; their lines act as tethers, not divides. The “slow violence”11 to which all regions are susceptible, the frequent reminders of disequilibrium that plague sustainability models: these concerns provide us with the “free scope” not to sever our attachments to other selves, but rather to ponder how “we”—an expansive more-than-human we—might conduct research together, and, in so doing, redefine “ourselves.” The health of the lakes (scale out: Planet Water) is far from “fated,” even if all species’ lives do not end well. In an effort to underscore further the confluences between the symposium’s organizational themes—water-bodies, lines, and sheds—I turn briefly to a “blueprint” from the past, a short story that calls attention to the ways in which these strident collectives are exposed and expressed. I will then adumbrate a few routes the anthology avails us; what you are reading, I wager, will invite you to make impressions of your own.

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Fresh Water

Quills We open upon coupled pipes and pages: a case of the early modern bends. Predicting (accurately) that seventeenth-century London’s water-ills would worsen, Sir Hugh Myddelton, founder of the New River Company (chartered 1619) dug a forty-mile canal—the New River—from Chadwell, a little north of city, to Islington. Begun in 1609, the company’s costly spillway was finally finished in 1613 only after receiving critical financial contributions from King James I the year before. The dramatist Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) wrote The Manner of His Lordship’s Entertainment in 1613 to celebrate Sir Hugh’s accomplishment and to commemorate the recent election of his brother, Thomas Myddelton, as mayor of London. Set around the dry cistern at Islington on Michaelmas Day (September 20th), the poet’s civic entertainment was also intended to figuratively open the canal by literally lifting the floodgate at its southern terminus. The pageant’s first lines, in fact, catalyze the wished-for waters. Human ingenuity, in its improvement upon nature, coaxes the canal: “Long have we labored, long desired and prayed / For this great work’s perfection, and by th’aid / Of heaven and good men’s wishes ‘tis at length / Happily conquered by cost, art, and strength.” 12 Here “art,” as techne (“craft”), and “art,” the linguistic skills of the poet, cleverly conjoin. Waterlines adroitly intersect; the author has deliberately crossed the streams. The language of conquest turns Middleton’s entertainment into an exhibition of hydraulic mastery: the New may not be a river of (nascent) empire, but it is at least a nationalistic watercourse channeled by “good [English] men.”

What is more, the inordinate attention paid to Sir Hugh restricts the canal’s anthropocentric straits to a sole progenitor: “this [project], a work so rare, / Only by one man’s industry, cost, and care / Is brought to blest effect, so much withstood, / His only aim the city’s general good.” Eventually the poem dilates enough to include the others involved in this “one man’s” ambit. “Clerk of the work,” the speaker enjoins, “reach me the book to show / How many arts from such a labour flow”: the “overseer,” “clerk,” “mathematician,” “master of the timber-work,” “measurer,” “bricklayer and engineer,” borer and “pavior,” “labourers,” “keeper of Amwell-head,” and “walkers” are all hailed in succession (comprising, we are told, simply a small “part of six hundred more”). At long last, the lock opens and the pent-up water rushes forward to fulfill these men’s requests. Water delivery, in a word, is “perfect[ed]” by the indomitable prowess of those in assembly. With “a peal of chambers” marking the ultimate show of militaristic “strength,” the river is streamlined. No mere pipe dream, water “[h]appily conquered” has given them a reason to rejoice.

So far, the New River seems to fit the schematics of “Progress.” But let us not depart the cisternal scene so fast; subjugation is but one reading in a vaster reservoir of signification. The New River feeds Middleton’s ecological encomium. Water is present in the wet-world at riverand canal-side, flushed into tank and inkpot, tapped by “quills.” Although in-house pipes became more prevalent in London over time, only wealthier households could afford them. Exclusive spigots attached to the mainlines—called “quills” because of their similar shape—could tax the entire community’s limited quantities of potable water. The “quill” as a dual writing and watering utensil underscores Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s assertion that “[a]ll matter … is a ‘storied matter.’ It is a material ‘mesh’ of meanings, properties, and processes in which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces.”13 Middleton advances the ecological thought of humans and water as co-designers; according to his “blueprint,” London’s tubes transport verse: waterlines, then, mark the artful moment when lines of poetry wrought by water emerge. Middleton’s blandishment “[h]ow many arts from such a labour flow,” consequently, is more than metaphorical praise. Waters work works. Look to the conduit of the cistern. Rather than human subjects (a few “good men”) lapping up a nonhuman object, the object gathers sipping subjects around it: water’s attraction is thereby evinced in its gravitational, absolutely agentic pull. (Conduits, as conducere, denote a “bringing together.”) Researching the history of what Mark S. R. Jenner calls the “conduit communities”14 in early modern England not only refutes the line between human and nonhuman, it also redistributes the agency a specific

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designer is said to possess. Such actor-networks of tectonic texture divulge these watery bonds between designing and writing—building projects both—to be co-authored lines of poetry and prose gliding down ducts and via riverine flows, drippy “quills” requiring physical water for words to depart. A “blueprint,” so defined, reconsiders what constitutes the “social,” the public, and the real “work” of a city’s public works. The “[m]anner” of water, ultimately, is to materially impress upon us, leaving linguistic prints—the page, reservoir, or pageant—as a result.

What the freshwater designs of Middleton and Myddelton reveal is not simply water’s situation in literature and architecture, but also, and more importantly, its real role in re-designing them, in drafting our bodies and projects anew. To be sure, the best-laid plans of aqua-men and women often go a-dry: then (London ca. 1613) as now (Flint ca. 2014), the thirsty poor are intentionally preserved as such, water rendered a “resource” along the way: a veritable and vendible commodity at its “peak” (Nideroest), a cash-flow, its lines of work structured by socio-economic inequalities. The New River Company’s aim, it should be noted, was on pace with the gradual shift in the late sixteenth century from the more medieval and so-called “moral” economy that perceived water distribution as a public service—and therefore dependent upon civic authority and common charity—to a privatized business. We need these “stories” with all their kinks, I think—but I believe we need others, too. The participants of “Fresh Water,” fortunately, have a ready supply. Their pipes pivot us into a crucial curve: the precarious watersheds of refuge and resilience, the shelter of “deep[water] organizing.”15 They offer a lesson in how shields (sheds) of protection—even if of unstable duration—may be provided, how a “sponge farm” of gregarious-georgic lifeforms can be coaxed to grow (Baranski, Panno, and Kelly), how trips into said soggy fields can be both “intensified” and “incentivized” (Holzman and Cook). If “there is no such thing as flood control,” there is also a “community with no future” (Henson) teetering upon delugic banks. The faults in our designs are lessons in heaviness—the weight of waterlogged others—from which to learn: such are the power relations writerly waterbodies importantly pen, those who gauge how “much” more is to be “withstood” in harmful currents’ way, who repeatedly query “bodily tides” (Cooper). “Resist the urge to correct the past,” Danielle Choi advises, “in order to ask collective questions about the future.”

To adapt, and to thrive: the voices enclosed in this volume desire to muse with you about the designs of interdisciplinary methodologies and the planning for unpredictable, but nevertheless possible, futures. The “blueprint” has always been that site of projected flourish: a contingency plan replete with contingencies, a “project” is something that is literally “thrown forward”—pro(“forth”) and jacere (“to throw”)—spatially as well as temporally. Thinking, at bottom, is a relentless persuasion to story in this fashion. What are “stories,” after all, if not a paradigmatic (at least etymological) instance of the architectural-literary imagination? The word’s homonymic bridge between structural levels and lines of plot is due to the late Middle English abbreviation of the Latin historia (“history, story”). A tiered “story” originally indicated a row of windows or sculptures on the front of a building portraying a historical event. Design theorist Tony Fry might have this multifaceted definition in mind when he writes that “[p]lacing the historicity and history of human emergence in [the] wider context of connectedness and world allows us to explore our ontological designing as implicated in the very acts of ‘self and world formation’ and the ‘nature of our beingin-the-world.” So might have Jaume Plensa when he designed the cond/u/itional, inter-dependent and disciplinary commons known as Crown Fountain (2004) in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Let us lay these “storied” ecologies on wet foundations; become a “landscape architect-advocate” for waterscapes; bring as many others as we can “[in]to blest effect”; check “progress” with “process”; draw lines that highlight the liminal, lines that enmesh instead of demarcate. How we narrate design matters. We inhabit a watershed moment at/of risk, a turning point that can turn in several directions, a peril and a promise at once. In “dredge and sediment” (Burkholder and Davis): here is where I would like to leave you. Slip, reader, into the collection’s unfinished contents: examine where their “blueprints” lead, how they entreat you to re-design, and beckon you to look again.

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Fresh Water

1

2

3 4 5

6 7

Notes See Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (Garden City: The Natural History Press, 1969). “It is not a small claim, it is not a small contribution: but it would appear that the ecological method can be employed to understand and formulate a plan with nature, perhaps design with nature” (151).

I intentionally invoke the plight of Aramis, Paris’s planned personal rapid transport system that was scrapped in 1987: “Why did [my creators] treat me as cruelly, as ungratefully, as Victor Frankenstein? … Burdened with my prostheses, hated, abandoned, innocent, accused, a filthy beast, a thing full of men, men full of things, I lie before you.”

Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 82, 158.

Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife (New York: Vintage Books, 2015).

Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk),” in Networks of Design: Proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society (UK), ed. Jonathan Glynne, Fiona Hackney, and Viv Minton (Boca Raton: Universal-Publishers, 2009), 2, 4.

Latour, “Cautious,” 5.

“Make a map, not a tracing.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 12.

Blueprints

8 9

10

11 12 13 14

15 16

See Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).

“Introduction: Toward a Hydrological Turn?” in Thinking with Water, ed. Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 3–22.

William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, in The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., ed.

Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016).

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

Thomas Middleton, The Manner of His Lordship’s Entertainment, in The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 961–62.

“Introduction: Stories Come to Matter,” in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 1–2.

Mark S. R. Jenner, “From conduit community to commercial network? Water in London, 1500–1725,” in Londonopolis: Essays in the cultural and social history of early modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 250–72.

Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Tony Fry, Becoming Human by Design (London: Berg, 2012), 9.

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