Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica M. Henson Publish Book
This visionary volume—developed in conjunction with an international symposium held at the University of Illinois—addresses regional, territorial, and continental water issues through interdisciplinary design research in landscape architecture.
The geographical and hydrosocial context of the major inland (noncoastal) watersheds of the North American continent—the Mississippi, the Great Lakes Basin–St. Lawrence, and the Nelson—remains an underexplored field for design research. Major spatial, temporal, biological, and geological manipulations of water bodies, systems, and flows raise critical questions about how to redefine human-hydro relationships and to reverse the deterioration of freshwater systems across the territory. Fresh Water assembles scholarly papers from designers who reframe complex issues of industrial agriculture, energy production, urban sewersheds, water law, transportation tributaries, and cross-watershed diversions to propose new inland water futures. Design contributors interrogate the institutional regime and control of inland water, integrating diverse disciplinary knowledge to support multiscalar interventions that challenge land and water policy to consider a range of new and urgent partnerships and projects this century.