Parker VanMeter Stewart — Proposal for the 2017 Linda & Turan Duda Traveling Fellowship
BUOYANCY TROUBLED WATERS The god am I, whose yellow water flows Around these fields, and fattens as it goes Tiber my name – among the rolling floods. Renowned on earth, esteemed among the gods. This is my certain seat. In times to come, My waves shall wash the walls of mighty Rome! —Virgil, 29-19BCE1
Life and society depend on water. Water is and continues to be the foundation of all social development.2 Modern urbanisms, however, fail to appreciate how essential (and delicate) the connection between water and civilization is. Urbanity has domesticated shorelines, tamed rivers, but in the end, water does as it pleases. Relations between water and cities are historically fragile as cities (especially new development in Asia) continually display a form of habituation that disregards water dynamics. Water has disappeared from the urban realm, visually and as a collective conscious of urbanities. Water has become an absent presence in the modern city, an engineering trick – out of sight, and, consequently, out of mind. Floods and civilizations have always been companions. The very factors that make the areas of MEGA-cities in southeast Asia attractive for settlement are the same ones that make them vulnerable to devastation. For the United States, the New Orleans Deltaic Region is ground zero for all things disasters – hurricanes, oil spills, flooding rivers, sinking lands, disappearing wetlands, rising seas.3 In North Carolina, impoverished towns like Princeville are washed out every other decade.4 However, it is important that New Orleans and Princeville are not alone. Water is a global issue.
TREADING WATER Waterfronts, buoyant or saturated, are a chance to explore what public means in Southeast Asia’s urbanisms where new notions of realism, collective identity, and public discontent are resulting in unprecedented events. Flooded rivers and sea level rise provide an opportunity for the addition of public spaces in cities. Southeast Asia’s dense MEGA-cities and MEGA-slums repeatedly allow development that covers natural waters to also wash away needed public space and ignore social unrest. Ironically, to combat sea level rise and flooding we must, ourselves, bring water back into the city. In so doing, we often reintroduce public space into the capitalistic fabric of the city. These new water urbanisms can receive emerging (both known and yet unknown) public activities
that would otherwise be obstructed by the presence of Southeast Asia’s centralizing bureaucracy and the irresistible but fatal spread of temples of commerce along urban waterfronts. New waves of public space and improved urbanisms along the Chao Phraya, Ganges, and Mekong watersheds are rising above the floods. Weaving (natural) water and urban structures washes the urban reality with social benefits. Is it time to abandon the coastline? Is it too late for an SOS from our sinking cities? Ten of the world’s fifteen largest cities are in low lying coastal fringes vulnerable to rising sea levels and coastal surges.5 The lifeline that we must throw is to rethink our understanding of the complicated ground we occupy – a ground we cannot continue to dominate with hardline and static interventions, but rather a ground we should begin to design with adaptive and dynamic negotiations. As water submerges the city, what is most interesting is what floats to the top – a lack of social services and political unrest. Cities themselves are nothing but a continuous process of capitalistic floods that bring demolition and construction where social opportunities for renewal are found. Rising currents, however, threaten to topple the fragility of urbanities that are already treading water and drowning in social unrest. Therefore, architecture cannot continue cautiously answering the same questions, reformulated over and over each flood – this is precisely where architecture’s potential lies. Architecture is at the edge of the water and we can see the answer lying at the bottom – yet, architecture timidly dips its toes in. We must push architecture into the deep.
PROPOSITION I propose to study the architecture and water urbanisms of southeast Asia, a vast geographical area where scale is evidently one of the major challenges, particularly given the last decades of enormous demographic and economic growth. Southeast Asia is home to MEGA-cities in MEGA-deltas that are (literally) on the verge of drowning in water. Investigating the emerging wave of water urbanism practices, and bringing them together with the millennia old traditions of water urbanism in Asia, is the main motivation for this travel study. Three watersheds; the Chao Phraya, the Ganges, and the Mekong, will serve as the framework of my travel. Each of the proposed waterways that I will float down simultaneously represents profits, power, and danger, yet are the centers of public life. In these three watersheds, I will
visit and document projects realized and proposed, areas which have influenced new water urbanisms, and related institutions and schools. I will conduct interviews with made contacts and, if possible, with the architects of proposed projects. I will also choose one project in each watershed – to be determined by accessibility – to document in detail through photography and drawing perspectives, plans, sections, and user interviews. While my focus will be on those three watersheds, others will get necessarily drawn into my investigation. The Cheonggyecheon River in Seoul and Singapore’s Bishan park, for example, have shifted thinking towards an amphibious mindset, conceded that water could flow into the fabric of the city itself (enriching urban reality), and are frequently associated with the three watersheds. Upon return, I will prepare a print publication as well as a travel portfolio in addition to a public lecture at the College of Design. This travel study proposal comes after several semesters of related academic research. In the Spring of 2015, Prof. Burak Erdim’s Rebel Cities course introduced themes in the exchange of architecture cultures which I have used as a framework. While studying abroad in Prague, Prof. Igor Kovacevic and I worked with notions of public space along the river Vtlava. In the fall of 2016, Prof. David Hill and Matthew Griffith’s studio in Manteo, N.C. introduced buoyant architectures in saturated floodplains to me in depth. And, in Prof. Kristen Scaffer’s Comparative Histories course this semester, I have been performing research and developing comparisons of New York and Chicago’s treatment of their urban waterscapes specifically in preparation for this proposal. I have a personal, long-term aspiration to work globally, particularly in developing countries, so this travel would precipitate an eventual career. But, my simple aspiration from this travel is to enrich myself as an architect by witnessing the work of these saturated cultures, tracing the evolution and development decisions of their urban shorelines, and experiencing these cities in an expanded way. The following map describes my suggested travel plan and is annotated with explanations of potential activities and sites in each city. 1. Aldrete, Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome, 6. 2. We think of fish as living a contained life — contained within a fishbowl, river, or sea. We forget that the world is primarily an aquatic environment. 3. Rowe, A City and its Stream, 36. 4. Princeville, N.C. has endured two 100-year floods within 17 years (Hurricane Floyd, 1999 and Hurricane Matthew, 2016). Hurricane Matthew destroyed 8 of every 10 homes in Princeville; flooding reaching as high as ten feet. 5. Bergdoll, Rising Currents, 16.