STUDIO:  ARCH 8999 THESIS EXHIBITION, Fall 2019
ADVISERS: Ali Fard / Esther Lorenz, University of Virginia  

OVERVIEW: In 1970, the futurist Alvin Toffler speculated that the rapidly increasing ease of global travel and communication would lead to the “demise of geography.” [1] Thirty-five years later, the journalist Thomas Friedman famously declared that these same trends, brought forward into the Digital Millennium, had rendered the world “flat.” [2] Yet, for all the positvistic presumptions of its inevitability, a fully cosmopolitan, “Urban Age” [3] utopia has yet to arrive, and seems increasingly unlikely to do so. While modernity has dramatically re-wired the world’s economies into an inextricable, global web of production and supply chain logistics, and facilitated instantaneous communication and nearly barrier-less mobility across the entire planet, it is less clear that these forces inevitably lead to the societal homogenization of regional geography requisite for a truly cosmopolitan future. It is hard to imagine a world where we will no longer care to ask each other where we are from, because the answer will be so inescapably immaterial. Yet, places must change, and for reasons both voluntary or inescapable, people will relocate and leave their imprints upon new geographies. The coming decades are expected to see much of both. What happens, then, to the identities we have constructed around particular geographies and their attendant set of qualities when the material world changes much faster than the elasticity of our collective imaginations?

This thesis project interrogates the question of whether there is anything inherently definite, material, or immutable about our collective conceptions of geographic, regional identities. Accordingly, it supposes that these identities are constructed over time, are perpetually in flux, and will continue to change and adapt, even within our own imaginations, in relation to their surrounding environments: at a multitude of physical scales, and with no singular or inevitable end-state. Methodologically, the project explores the implications of this ambiguous premise through the medium of exhibition, which, through the curated juxtaposition of a series of spatial narratives, aspires to both catalyze and thematically guide a temporally situated discussion over how collectively held conceptions of regional geographies have been informed not only by their specific physical contexts, but also by their surrounding forces and spatial and temporal changes. As the world rests tenuously on the precipice of major societal, technological, and ecological changes, the project asserts that is more imperative than ever to engage in a critical and open-ended re-reading of geographic identities as figures informed by context, yet constructed within our collective imaginations through time. Are we, as Toffler and Friedman suggest, witnesses to the inevitable demise of regional geography in a globalized world, or has our collective understanding of place always been imaginary, and therefore, capable of reinvention?

[01] AN ERA OF UNPRECEDENTED CHANGE

The climate is noticeably changing, creating more unpredictable weather patterns, artificially exacerbating the damages of “natural” distastes, re-writing eco-systemic relationships, and affecting our ability to rely on the stability of the natural world as a way to structure societies and their attendant support systems, such as agricultural production. As a society, we will have to adapt not only how we live, but also our understanding of the culturally driven narratives we hold about the places we inhabit. Simultaneously, we are living in a world increasingly less defined (socially, politically, economically, and physically) by the geographic limitations of mobility infrastructure, communication technologies, and financial markets. How we conceptualize our geographic identities, and the relationships they have to to the world around us informs how we make decisions about what infrastructures we choose to fund or build, what social mores we hold and promote, what institutions we defend and what cultural narratives we collectively value.

[02] OUR CURRENT GEOGRAPHY IS NOT A GIVEN FOREVER

The next eighty years are expected to bring substantial changes to our continent's climate. Although these changes will not affect every place uniformly, altogether they have the potential to dramatically re-shape our current understanding of regional geographies. As nature and civilization become increasingly inseparable, we can expect that these climactic changes will yield dramatically different financial costs for different regions, re-writing their imaginary lines and exacerbating the existing inequalities between them. These costs will not be contained to preexisting statistical areas, but will play out unpredictably across vast and variegated, urbanized territories. This map employs points for broadcast stations and cellular transmitters as a means of visualizing the density and geographic extents of contemporary human settlement.

[03] IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. IN THE MIDDLE OF EVERYTHING.

The geographic focus area selected for the index at right captures a complicated and sometimes paradoxical overlay of flows, spaces, and conditions. Straddling the confluence point of three prominent river systems (The Mississippi, The Missouri, and the Ohio), the focus area not only includes a variety of ecological and geological conditions: alluvial plains, carbonate aquifers, and bituminous coal deposits, for example, but also a variety of transportation and logistical modalities: the Passenger air hubs of Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas, the freight air hub in Memphis, the trucking empire of Texas and Arkansas, and the railway hubs of Chicago and Kansas City. From a demographic standpoint, the area has also served as a firsthand witness to many of the major shifts and migrations in American history, from the expulsion of Acadians in the 18th century, frontier parties in the 19th, and Northern-bound African Americans in the 20th.

Despite its location amid such a flurry of activity, there is no clear or obvious regional appellation to assign the core of the focus area. For one, the Mississippi River has long been seen as the political and cultural threshold between the East and the West, while the Ohio River formed a large portion of the political border between the antebellum North and South. Geologically, the area straddles two disparate mountainous regions: the Ozarks and Texas Highlands to the West, and the Appalachians to the East, and sits conveniently positioned between the petroleum capital of the Gulf Coast and the coal seams and shale plays to the Northeast and West. Culturally and imaginatively, it is where the edges of the great plains meet the peripheries of the southern delta, the Great Lakes, “Appalachia,” and “Tex-Arkana.” It is all of those things, and yet it is also none of them. The Index presents a cursory tableau of these potentials, and invites our interrogation as to their relevance, meaning, and utility. For a changing world, perhaps we need new definitions, or none at all.