Fourteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Throughout history, low tech and land-based infrastructures have conveyed and captured water, organized settlement, moved people and goods, and established large-scale landscape transformation. Civilizations, such as those inhabiting Chaco Canyon throughout the 9th to 13th centuries, organized complex urban, infrastructural, and economic armatures throughout the arid and water-scarce Colorado Plateau in the American Southwest. These interventions are highly relevant and are continued to be used globally by ecologists, landscape architects, designers, land managers, and traditional farmers to modify and intervene at a variety of landscape scales. This paper uses “design as research” and creates a taxonomy of historic, traditional, and modern land-based and low-tech infrastructural interventions, encompassing temporary, ephemeral, and informal typologies that modify land for water management, agricultural production, ecological generation, and fire management. The research analyzes and organizes these interventions through drawing and digital modeling, encompassing a diverse range of conditions, including materiality, socio-political implications, historic use, ecological generation, and spatial organization. The underpinning hypothesis, “How can we use embedded information in historic, low-tech, and land-based infrastructures to create new typologies that are adaptive and embrace uncertain futures?” positions the future built environment as impermanent, emergent, and adaptable, rather than fixed and permanent. By unpacking these interventions, we can speculate on new urban and landscape frameworks that are responsive to increased flooding, desertification, changes in ecological systems, climate change migration, and environmental justice inequities.