Michael Leeb
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system. Landscape, on the other hand, implies a breadth, a horizon, a wider view. Not having ever been to Akamina, I wonder what we will see when we zoom out from the dam. Are there people, animals, plants; new ecosystems and new human activities that can or will happen here? I wonder if infrastructure can make landscape at the outset, or whether humans have to inhabit and become intimately acquainted with it, that it acquires personal and cultural meaning.
do their best to divert natural systems and preserve developments that do not even attempt to take into consideration issues of landscape in their construction. M N: If infrastructural projects unwittingly manufacture landscapes, what kinds of landscapes are being manufactured at Akamina? Conventional flood mitigation infrastructure is usually a single engineered solution for a specific problem, strategically located at a single point in the river
interesting points of comparison here, both in Canada and abroad — post- Katrina reconstruction in New Orleans, for instance,
R J: here is an upstream/ downstream tension in the management of flood infrastructure. If the creation of the park and the restriction of land use within it seem to valorise the upstream, the current infrastructural changes clearly indicate that the downstream is seen as more valuable. What does it mean when the anthropogenic aspects of the landscape are taken as the most permanent, especially when the natural conditions are ones of flux? There are some
and current debates surrounding the de-
engineering of flood-prone rivers (the Mississippi, the Louisiana rivers) straightened and forced into concrete channels by the Army Corps of Engineers in the twentieth century. This technical overview of flood prevention infrastructur eillustrates
the perverse logic of human landscapes that
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