ADS3: Post–Industrial Wetlands: Commoning Unstable Ground

Wetlands, swamps, bogs, and marshes are all incredibly rich habitats. For centuries they have been drained to ‘improve’ land for farming and real estate, displace people avoiding state control, or eradicate mosquito-borne diseases within settler–colonial regimes. In 2023/24, ADS3 will look at the legacies of desiccated land that are struggling to fluctuate between wet and dry. Situated at the frontier of mineral and financial extraction, these murky post–industrial landscapes are increasingly emerging out of the ruins of capitalism. Some are reflooded in an attempt to be returned to an impossible past state, while others materialise out of abandoned quarries and mining pits. These emergent ecologies become habitats for new anthropogenic environments. Whether ‘natural’ or newly formed, post–industrial wetlands can offer new models of inhabitation through soil and water nourishment across human and non-human populations. Guided by these swampy formations, the studio will question ways in which the built environment can forge new alliances to rethink the redundant infrastructures of modernity. How can we think through wetlands to design support structures for spatial justice? Through the lens of CLIMAVORE – a framework that explores how to eat in the era of human–driven climate change – ADS3 will use architectural tools to map ecological and legal struggles in landscapes trying to stay afloat and in place.

Like many other ecosystems, wetlands have been transformed by human actions and extractivist processes from the Industrial Revolution onward. This transformation has only accelerated since the second world war. As a result, seasons have shifted at unexpected rates, altering the food production and harvests that follow them. Prolonged dry spells during the rainy season in Ghana and Ivory Coast are threatening cocoa supply in the world’s top producing countries. 2021 marked the earliest cherry blossoms in China, where spring and summer are believed to arrive 3.3 days and 4.6 days earlier per decade respectively. Rice farmers, who grow their crops in wetlands, are shifting their planting calendars as both drought and extreme rainfall reduce rice yields. In Europe, the first day of spring has advanced by six to eight days in the past 30 years. Wine harvesting in Burgundy, France, now starts in mid-August, almost a full month earlier than only a few decades ago. Signs that formerly allowed humans to organise life around seasons have become indicators of an imminent crisis. They expose new waves of ‘global weirding’ or ‘season creep’. A vicious loop makes the idea of seasons even more superfluous. The more industries extend seasonality, the more seasons shift, and as seasons shift more, the more industries seek damaging technological solutions to fix a global food system on the brink of collapse.

Under such emerging seasonalities, how can the built environment respond to the ongoing crisis that confronts those inhabiting them? CLIMAVORE is a research framework that explores how to eat as humans change climates. New human-made ‘seasons’ are affecting temperature and precipitation, blurring the lines between spring, summer, autumn, and winter, together with yearly monsoon events. Instead, periods of polluted seas, soil exhaustion, or fertiliser runoff are more influential on our foodscapes. CLIMAVORE advocates that new multispecies approaches to food landscapes, such as wetlands, can highlight the cultural and ecological value of species and spaces that are being pushed to extinction. ADS3 questions how we can secure and enhance ecologies in flux through the commoning of land and expanding food belts, which support agroecological practices. As the global aridity lines move towards the Poles, how can certain ingredients guide policy making and legal efforts to make sure wetland inhabitants stay empowered? How can their environments be kept wet and murky?

Eating in the twenty–first century needs to happen within an ecosystem. In the climate emergency, the very term ‘ecosystem’ – first coined in England in the mid-1930s, but intrinsic to many indigenous beliefs across the world – must be revisited. Especially when extractivism has broken so many of the links and relations between organisms and our gut. If we no longer know what ‘system’ to return to, how can we test other possible forms of equilibrium for the environment without displacing human and nonhuman bodies? How do we unlearn decades of limitless steroid enhanced growth and yields? And how can spatial practice contribute to reimagining damaged space?

CLIMAVORE engages with our metabolic pathways – the sequence of chemical reactions in living and non–living organisms that define what the world eats and how creatures devour one another. In this way, understanding metabolism is a tool that allows us to see, feel, taste, smell, and hear the climate emergency at all possible scales – from our gut to the edges of the planet. Drought, flash floods, and wetland draining are only some of the new seasons emerging today. The responsibility for planetary collapse cannot only depend on individual choices, so CLIMAVORE is also a means to reimagine and redesign our role as humans and the structures we inhabit. In 2023/24, ADS 3 will dismantle preconceived ideas and understandings of seasonality. We will develop sensibilities that follow the new indicators of the climate emergency at the end of seasons. The studio will explore regenerative food systems, landscapes, and infrastructures. We will address the climate crisis and its impact on the built environment, embracing the agency of more-than-humans in shaping architecture toward more equal cohabitation models.

From the coasts of Italy and Sri Lanka to the banks of the Tigris–Euphrates and the Mississippi delta, wetlands have been drained by technocratic regimes to get rid of what they saw as undesirable: useless space, nonconformist humans, feral animals, wild plants, untamed bacteria, and uncontrollable disease. 35% of the world’s wetlands have been lost in the past 50 years, ending up as wastelands to dump surplus matter. They have become vehicles of what Max Liboiron has termed ‘waste colonialism’ – a logic in which pollution from unexpected particles makes its way into the DNA of the marginalised bodies who are concentrated in the most vulnerable environments. In the past decades, as wetlands have been acknowledged for their climate resilience, these landscapes have been increasingly protected. They are now appreciated by hedge fund investors and neoliberal policymakers as a way to extract new forms of value through displacement. Protection has become a new form of extraction.

As migratory bird stopovers, filtering zones, carbon sinks, and buffers against sea flooding, wetlands contribute to urban ecologies, pushing cities to soften their concrete-laden shores and allowing their banks to flood. Environmental wetland protection and legislation can risk erasing the complex historical layers of multispecies inhabitation that have shaped them. Whether ‘natural,’ or newly emergent, wetlands are key to pastoralist modes of living that have fed people and cities over millennia. Even as they are progressively encroached on by urbanisation and infrastructure, the vibrancy of wetland ingredients ranges from wild rice and aquatic plants, to mud crabs and water buffalo milk.

In 2023/24, ADS3 will journey from the pristine and protected marshes of Ramsar to anthropogenic swamps that are emerging from post-extractive landscapes. We will investigate wetlands as political, legal, economic and social assemblages. The technological mastery of wet environments has always been a colonial tool, whether through the use of cartography to demarcate rivers from dry land, satellite surveyance, aerial fumigation, or infrastructures such as dams and levees. But what happens when wetness takes over? When former mines or quarries become flooded, and make way for new swampy terrains? Such examples offer us opportunities to question notions of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ landscapes, as well as new models of kinship, as former sites of industry are rehabilitated through new alliances. Following the insights of the anthropologist Anna Tsing, we will examine how new forms of life are constantly emerging out of the ruins of capitalism.

ADS3 will draw from the indeterminacy of wetlands to rethink space and architectural tools and representation. With their murky formations that resist quantification and measurement, wetland ecologies allow us to think beyond binary notions of wet and dry, clean and dirty. Conceptualised as queer spaces of unproductive decay and invasive species, wetlands have been home to autonomous social networks and political alliances that resist normative structures. As more and more extractive and obsolete infrastructures require decommissioning to stop the drainage of precious grounds, there is a pressing need to redesign a shift from wetland disappearance to embrace new climate and spatial models. We will learn from postindustrial wetlands as archives of past environmental change, which contain histories of their own development. Through new models of technological, human and more-than-human entanglements, we will advance ecological networks to produce critical knowledge and action toward spatial justice.

We will kickstart the year with group work in building a shared wetland glossary, which understands their different taxonomies, residents, conflicts, borders, and ingredients. YR1 and YR2 students will then produce individual design projects located on an individually–selected site with shifting boundaries between wet and dry. These can include ‘natural’ wetlands that are gone, wetlands that still exist, drained wetlands that are being restored, or new wetlands which have appeared after mining or other industrial activity.

If architects are to regain their agency within the climate emergency, there is a need to also become critical ecologists, experts, artists, and activists. ADS3 will encourage interdisciplinary thinking and collaborations to bring together the fields of architecture and spatial practice with social engagement, food politics, environmental policy, performance, and fieldwork. We will develop methodologies of research, documentation and intervention to critically think through ecologically sensitive contexts – reimagining them not only through a cartographic lens, but also as fields of expanded scales and temporalities, multi-species networks connected through metabolic relationships. Our studio sessions will be complemented by ongoing discussions and guest lectures with interlocutors involved in the CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA initiative, as well as organised studio trips, fieldwork and exhibition visits.

Bios:

Merve Anil is a Research Associate for CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA, working on the Istanbul-based Water Buffalo Commons project. Prior to joining the RCA, she was a Diploma unit master at the AA from 2018-2023. Merve is trained as an architect with a background in urban policy, having previously developed Local Plans for Local Authorities as a Public Practice Associate. She has also worked at AHMM Architects in London, and OMA in Rotterdam.

Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe are the founders of Cooking Sections. In 2015 they coined the term CLIMAVORE, and set it up as a research framework, platform and agency to study food systems for the new seasons of the climate crisis. Tackling the extractive practices that led to them, their work advances new infrastructural horizons through collaborations with marine biologists, botanists, farmers, chefs, fisherfolk, anthropologists, oenologists, soil scientists, herders, and many others living on the frontiers of the climate emergency. They are the Principal Investigators of CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA.