URB_430A Urban Design Seminar: ‘Territories-Watersheds-Infrastructures’

This seminar was a collaborative, community-engaged, multi-scalar field documentation and mapping project that positioned the Mississippi watershed, its tributaries, and the St. Louis region within its broader watershed, particularly highlighting the complicated intersections of river management, industry, and recreation.

In early October 2019, students designed and installed a series of site-specific exhibits just north of downtown St. Louis at the Continental Cement Company. The exhibition complemented a panel discussion on board CCC’s platform barge on the Mississippi River, occurring as part of “Mississippi: An Anthropocene River,” a project sponsored by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) from Berlin. Group installations were partially inspired by two canoe trips students took from the Chain of Rocks to the Gateway Arch, both guided by Big Muddy Adventures.

The work not only was used to represent ideas, but as objects of action for a set of dialogues about responsibility, agency, and possible futures for the Mississippi River Basin, especially when weighed in relation to stresses to the river, such as climate change and future industrial uncertainties. This fascinating industrial site straddles the intersections of the Mississippi River, the barge industry, a riverfront bike trail, a floodwall, the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge/Interstate 70, multiple rail lines, and even the erased Mississippian culture’s “Big Mound.” The work was scattered across the site in various platform zones for dialogues, including the roof of the cement silo and the active barge used for loading cement. These dialogues included representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Big Muddy Adventures, Continental Cement Company, the City of St. Louis, Great Rivers Greenway, Missouri Confluence Waterkeeper, Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center.