Landscape Infrastructure
Investigating Spatial Strategies for Integrated Urban Water Systems
(Supervisors: Jorge Fiori, Eduardo Rico)
We are urbanizing at faster rates than ever before, particularly along coastal regions, or what is being defined as Estuarine Urbanism. Yet current design practice promotes the development of buildings and blocks without considering where food and water is coming from, how energy is being produced and where waste is expelled. The aim of this research is to investigate the future of infrastructure, specifically relating to water. This research seeks to examine why the current design of infrastructure is a problem for resource management and how the breakdown of current infrastructure presents the opportunity for new forms of design practice to emerge. I plan to critique current dependance on centralised infrastructure and investigate how landscape infrastructure could better address the multiscalarity of contemporary urban water demands. This investigation attempts to illustrate how landscape infrastructure could provide new forms of spatial practice that would create more productive engagements with urban water resources, where urban ecologies are linked to urban economies.
Biography:
Serena Lehua Jarvis graduated with distinction from the Bartlett, Faculty of the Built Environment with a MSc in Building & Urban Design in Development (2011), where she received a special commendation on her dissertation. She earned a BA in International Relations from Bucknell University, during which she studied in Switzerland at the University of Geneva. Serena worked as the Book Editor and Junior Graphic Designer at Reed Hilderbrand Associates Landscape Architecture firm in Massachusetts. In 2012 she started her doctoral research at the Architectural Association.
