STUDENT AWARD | MERIT
TILTH & TANKS: ADAPTING ABANDONED INFRASTRUCTURE FOR HEALTH EQUITY IN THE ONION CREEK FLOODPLAIN Andrew Lesmes (University of Texas - Graduate Level) GENERAL DESIGN
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“The residents of Dove Springs, many of whom live near or within the Lower Onion Creek floodplain in Southeast Austin, are particularly familiar with climate stressors and shocks; tree canopy inequity exacerbates the daily experience of extreme heat in Austin’s increasingly long summer heat waves, and devastating floods in 2013 and 2015 claimed several lives, destroyed hundreds of homes, and resulted in floodplain buyouts which displaced hundreds more residents. One of these buyout neighborhoods, Yarabee Bend, exists today as a suburban street network devoid of all but four occupied homes, its lots legible only by the curb aprons, canopy voids, and partially-removed rights-of-way that remain. Just northeast of Yarabee Bend, across William Cannon Drive, an abandoned wastewater treatment site sits above Onion and Williamson Creeks. Within this site, six decommissioned sedimentation tanks – each a 130-foot, perfect circle
where spontaneous plant communities grow atop buried biosolids, – are striking remnants of a hastily-constructed city site operated for little more than two decades before being abandoned. These remnant infrastructures present opportunities to promote health equity in the floodplain and strengthen human-soil relationships. Along Yarabee Bend’s former lot lines and roadways, new hybrid landscape types begins to restore floodplain functions and overlay a larger strategy of perennial crop experimentation within former residential lots; the circular, monumental tanks of the William Cannon wastewater site become an experiential garden sequence that re-interprets the history of abandoned infrastructure as community asset. “
