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 The volume assembles scholarly design studies that uncover institutional histories, jurisdictional controls, outdated technologies, and corporate practices that have disconnected, fragmented, and degraded water.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
