The irrigation of the countryside constructs an invasive sensibility affecting not only villages and towns but local and regional ecologies. Changes initiated by the canals and wells have been studied through charts and tables, but little has been investigated through drawing and mapping as an intermediary between this space and the data collected. The ways in which water, soil, agriculture, infrastructure and culture format the ground plane, continue to percolate with little regard for their anxious, pictorial surrogates – maps, which largely focus on static forms of representation, ignoring natural and artificial systems, and soil structures and cropping patterns. Among the difficult tasks facing design today is how to bring design to a social and environmental project. For architects and urbanists, infrastructure projects engage both authenticities and imaginaries, creating new problems and unforeseen relationships. Unfortunately, the dearth of proposals from designers and urbanists for spaces outside the consolidated city, explains the current malaise of both the open territory of the countryside and the historic, dense city. The Ganges Canal is the most salient example of the possibilities and hubris of total design. Its size and magnitude extend to such territorial and managerial excesses that it simply becomes untenable. Within its overarching structure, cause and effect are seemingly incoherent. What opportunities arise for rethinking infrastructure as a decisive mechanism to bring about change through design? One possibility is to rethink the autonomy of hydrological, road and rail infrastructures and the potential of laminating these infrastructures to precipitate more environmentally attuned proposals and prospects of this highly unique series of territories. *
Due to the lack of sufficient information on soil structure and animate characteristics of the ground in the Ganges River Corridor, instru- ments were devised by Anthony Acciavatti to measure the ways in which the river and canal system affect the ground over time. This series of devices employ low-tech methods of measur- ing with global positioning systems to reconfig- ure the relationship between figure and ground, solid and wet, rigid and flaccid. The Surface Accumulation Sleeve (above) was developed by the author to take horizontal and vertical sections of the ground through the measurement of surface soil samples. The wear- able prosthetic takes surface soil samples across a kilometre stretch of land running perpendicu- lar to the river edge or the canal system. Loca- tions are determined using a GPS unit attached to the prosthetic. The samples are scanned and disaggregated to better understand and to propose how the river and canal distributes land and debris throughout the year.
1 Ian Stone. Canal Irrigation in British India: Perspectives on Technological Change in a Peasant Economy . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. p 18. 2 John Strachey. India: Its Administration and Progress . London: Macmillan, 1903, p 230, and Ian Stone (note 5, below) p 17 3 John Strachey. India: Its Administration and Progress . London: Macmillan,
1903. p 230 4 Ibid, p 229
5 See Ian Stone. Canal Irrigation in British India: Perspectives on Technological Change in a Peasant Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 6 According to the Irrigation Department, Uttar Pradesh (2008). 7 This is not meant to be confused with Karl August Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism: A comparative Study of Total Power published in 1957. Hydraulic pastoralism refers to a notion of an aesthetic of water consumption and distribution that is uneasily lodged within the crosshairs of tradition and modernity.
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