Date of Award
Spring 5-31-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA)
Department
Landscape Architecture
First Advisor
Johanna Barthmaier-Payne
Second Advisor
Tom Weis
Third Advisor
Gavin Zeitz
Abstract
In the context of channelized rivers, urbanized floodplains, and sea level rise that this project situates itself within- we may look back with disdain for the decisions that have dramatically altered the dynamic, singular landscapes of our riparian systems. Burying the Providence River under a highway, squeezing it into a thread of its former floodplain, dredging, damming, and hardening the Woonasquatucket, Moshassuck, and Seekonk that merge their flows into the Narragansett Bay. But a river is, despite it all, still a river. Today, flooding follows the glacial outwash formation, or the original floodplain that carved these rivers far before our time.
The floodplain is hardened with material conglomerations that have been sorted, shipped, mined, mixed, and deposited in formations that are wholly human. They will erode nevertheless, returning bit by bit perhaps to the mineral state of their origin, but at different rates, with different bonds, in new territories. Restoration seeks to undo these altered landscapes to a state of former being, but urban floodplain landscapes paint a more complex image of restoration practices. This project explored how existing materials can be recalibrated to support strengthened, more complex riparian edge habitats in urbanized landscapes- with attention to the function of flood mitigation and the desire to translate a narrative of site history.
This project proposes edge conditions at three sites that utilize (rather than remove) on site materials, [discarded construction debris, stone wall at varying stages of intact], trying to understand their mineral compositions to balance erosion into our waterways through designs that address nutrient exchange, mitigation of leaching, and shoreline stabilization. The design repurposes these materials alongside the introduction of woody debris intended to break down into substrate for intertidal growth at elevations of projected MHHW in the next 100 years of sea level rise.
Recommended Citation
Sosland, Maya, "Mass to Mineral: Edge Complexity for an Urbanized Floodplain" (2025). Masters Theses. 1443.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1443
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