I am co-curating an exhibition in conjunction with the University of Toronto, InfraNet Lab and Alphabet City, which includes a daylong symposium. Called Hydrocity, the symposium/exhibition will be “devoted to studying the relationship between urban forms and the hydrological systems in which they are embedded.”

If the twentieth century has been marked by our global thirst for fuel, the twenty-first century, will be defined by our collectively growing need for water. Impending water shortages are changing patterns of urbanization and requiring increasingly elaborate infrastructures by which to source, collect, divert and transport water to the urban centres that hold a growing majority of the world’s population. These population centres will in turn need to be redesigned and retrofitted to conserve, collect, repurify, and recirculate increasingly precious water resources while at the same time rethinking and rebuilding their cities’ relationships with the complex watersheds on which they are built and upon which they depend. The resulting liquid infrastructure is poised to redefine our notion of natural and artificial landscapes, as disparate ecological environments are networked and conflated. What forms of urbanism and landscape systems will emerge, and what design potentials exist, in this expanding liquid infrastructure?

Participants in the symposium include such top-notch hydrospatialists as Alan Berger, of P-REX; Katherine Rinne, of Aquae Urbis Romae; and Aziza Chaouni and Liat Margolis, whose have also organized a traveling exhibition with a similar theme, The Out of Water Project.

As for the exhibition, some projects have already been selected, but the curators are very keen to include other visionary projects — “built, unbuilt, dreamed, etched, scripted, carpet-bombed, etc.” — that address the same issues, preferably recent and unpublished.

To be considered, send a PDF (3 pages or less and under 6Mb) of any project by October 15 to editors[at]infranetlab[dot]org. Space is limited, so earlier submission is preferred.

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