Contested Edge: River - City Couplings

3 units

This seminar will investigate the contested edge between the Mississippi River and the adjacent occupied land - between development and commerce based on our human needs and desires and a river indifferent to our presence. Over one hundred years ago, Twain warned us about the futility of our attempts to control the volatile Mississippi River: Ten thousand River Commissions cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here or Go there, and make it obey. For reasons of river navigation, irrigation, hydropower, and flood protection, the river has been dammed, straightened, deepened, and segregated from its natural floodplain. These massive engineering feats have caused severe and perhaps irreparable ecological damage by upsetting natural flooding cycles, disrupting flows, draining wetlands, and inundating habitats. The results, while temporarily beneficial to some communities, are the progressive intensification of floods and the destruction of riparian zones. Traditional static infrastructures will continue to play a necessary role but cannot adequately handle increased floods and droughts resulting from global warming and our own intransigence. Rather than continually building harder and higher to protect communities from high waters, knowing from experience that the wild Mississippi will continually topple our efforts, this seminar will explore gentler, smoother transitions between land and water, city and river. Looking toward a more resilient condition, we will explore this ecological crisis as an opportunity for constructing a more livable, coupled, edge as a continuum between river and settlement - one requiring us to bend, accommodate, refrain, and think more creatively and strategically. The work of the seminar will be to create both a River Manual and to initiate an interactive web repository of data, strategies, maps, history, river city coupling examples, focused on the Mississippi River at the St. Louis region. Students will contribute with research, mapping, graphic design, and web construction.