Preface and Acknowledgments Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica M. Henson

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 The volume assembles scholarly design studies that uncover institutional histories, jurisdictional controls, outdated technologies, and corporate practices that have disconnected, fragmented, and degraded water.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

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

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