Thesis Studio by Anna Darling
With Advisors Ellen Neises + Sean Burkholder

University of Pennsylvania, Master of Landscape Architecture
2019

Introduction

The aim of this studio is to use design speculation as a way of generating ideas and opening conversations about the wicked problem of groundwater over-withdrawal in the Southwest.

La Fuente Water Collective

11-27-2047

The site for the studio is the San Pedro River Basin in Southeast Arizona, about an hour outside of Tucson, where I grew up. It has been a hotbed of debate about groundwater withdrawal for decades because of the competing tension between development and conservation. Currently, new developments that would double the population of the Basin in 20 years are being approved despite the acknowledgement by the State that there is not enough water to sustain these inhabitants, let alone a non-human population.

La Fuente Water Collective, Groundwater View

11-27-2047

At the same time, the San Pedro River is one of the last remaining perennially flowing rivers in the southwest with a riparian habitat, making it an ecologically vital migratory corridor for hundreds of species.All the while climate change will make this region increasingly difficult to live in, with hotter summers more intense flash floods, and longer droughts.

These problems are unfixable. Rather than attempting to further quantify, explain, or solve these issues, I’ve explored a different future for life in the Basin. Using the upcoming adjudication of water rights for the San Pedro river as a catalyst of change this speculation imagines settlements in the next 20 to 50 years where people embrace living in the flux of groundwater pumping in order to keep water in the river.

As Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby write in Speculative Everything “Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality.”

This studio imagines an alternative reality for the San Pedro Basin. One where the ties between life above and water below are manifest in the design, construction, habitation, and regeneration of this landscape.

Index

News

A Glimpse of La Fuente

Snapshots

Views of the La Fuente

Life

Video Messages from Basin Residents

ground/surface

speculative settlements for uncertain water futures

CONTEXT INDEX