Lost River, Renewed Ecosystem
Sitting in line with the Some Kind of Nature (SKN) atelier agenda, this project finds itself underpinned by theories of posthumanism, polyphony and actor network theory (ANT). It undertakes an exploration of purged courses of river Mersey near Warrington, the river’s channelisation and its impact on ecological links, along with potential use of the lost river bends in their current context.
These theories advocate for a shift from the dualistic perspective of design that pits humans as entities against nature, proposing a unitary understanding of design that focuses on the relations between actors and their influences on the processes within a network. With the understanding of urban borderlands as a space where these networks are observed and boundaries between built and unbuilt environment blur, this project asks the question:
How can ‘Urban Borderlands’ threatened by flooding be linked to wetlands and floodplains that, while acting as flood mitigation ‘devices’, become biodiverse, unitary landscape nodes responding to multispecies conflict and facilitate new connections?
The project imagines these landscapes as a frontier situated within the scenario of climate change which respond to the difficulties faced by the site locally within its context. It does so by developing a design toolkit based on the inputs from the policies and precedents, along with theories, which focuses on three major aspects:
Habitat: Deals with measures to improve and enable the non-humans through design
Water management: Provides strategies for creating and enhancing waterways
Connectivity: Implement proposals for enhancing connectivity across the spectrum
Designing these frontiers can be seen as a way for landscape as a profession to respond to issues faced by the borderlands where landscape architects can enhance the built and unbuilt environment, with the help of natural processes.
