Fields and Flows: Harmonizing Township Development with Riverine Health Through the Local Industrial Use and Cycling of Sedimentary Materials

Abstract

As hydrosocial creatures, rivers and streams are intimately connected to our existence and are strongly influenced by fragmentation and flow disruption. Across the globe, waterways are depleting at alarming rates; since the Eighteenth Century, our species has increased its use of freshwater over thirty-five-fold, with much of the disruption occurring over the last 50 years. This proposal, centered on the eighteenth century Shubenacadie Canal network in Nova Scotia, Canada, demonstrates responsible water infrastructure design through modern sensibilities toward material use, environmental impact, and human habitation. It uses sedimentation as a generator of industry, and canals as points of application, providing the rationale for a distributed infrastructure tied to a local material culture. Integrating components of an industrial process helps improve fragmentation, provides better local and regional cohesiveness for inhabitants, and ultimately protects our critical waterways by improving the landscape through an ecologically centered design approach.