Waste to Governance

Energy and sustainability, Essay, No Density, Sonia Sobrino Ralston, Urban Paradigms.

Climate change, Data storage, Energy, Energy landscapes, Environmental protection, Essay, Infrastructure, Pollution, Sea Level Rise, Soil contamination, Waste fields, Waste management, Water, Waterfront.

Research by Sonia Sobrino Ralston
September 2021
Harvard GSD Landscape Architecture Core III
Professor Robert Gerard Pietrusko

As sea levels rise, toxicants are leached into soils, and environmental change increases, environmental data informs the spatial practice of retreat and design for climate. However, much of the environmental data we collect and use from organizations such as the EPA, while incredibly reliable, is difficult to access both intellectually and practically. This project imagines a new form of digital watershed governance that lays a grid for potential sensing stations across the territory to produce alternative forms of landscape sensing that support existing work on climate data. This grid of potential sites offers a suggestion for the collection of data as a political praxis to experience the granularity of climate change at the level of the neighborhood and watershed, rather than layers of geospatial data housed in the depths of government agencies’ websites.