 Good afternoon. I'm Rosalie Ginevro, and I'm the executive director of the Architectural League, and I'm so pleased to have been asked to introduce and talk with Delape de Cuna this afternoon. I first met Delape and his partner Anuradha Mathur around 2000 when they were winners of the Architectural League's Competition for Young Architects and Designers. That year, the theme of the competition was second nature, and the brief post-questions including, how does one define and respond to nature in its altered state? What are the ramifications of the shift away from nature as an untouched ideal? Does nature in its modified form evoke an alternate set of rules and strategies for good design? There could be no more appropriate responders to that theme than Delape de Cuna and Anuradha Mathur. The description of Delape and Anuradha's work presented in the exhibition from the competition noted that they believe design begins with an appreciation for landscape as a shifting living material phenomenon. The work that they started in the 1980s and when they got out of school playing out this understanding of landscape and that they pursued with intense rigor and imagination since has produced a body of research representation and proposition that's remarkable for its originality and for its consistency, depth, sophistication, and for its beauty. These qualities are all in evidence in projects such as Soak, which analyzes and proposes a new way of thinking about Mumbai, urging that the temporal dimension is critical to any productive understanding of the relationship of the city to water. Deccan Traverses, which looks at Bangalore and seeks to recuperate traditional and informal cultural practices and attitudes towards water and landscape and to make vivid the losses imposed by the overlay of colonial mentalities and practices from the 19th century forward. Excuse me. And Mississippi Floods and Ocean of Rain, both of which look at how representation, whether visual or linguistic, deeply conditions our understanding and actions. These and other projects are represented on their newly launched website MathurDeCuna.com. Delape received his Bachelor of Architecture degree at Bangalore University, a Master of Housing at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, a Master of City Planning at MIT and a PhD in Planning Theory at UC Berkeley, obviously someone who likes school. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Parsons, Harvard, and the Shristi School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, among other universities. As those of you who have worked with Delape in studios here at Columbia, I'm sure know, he poses truly profound questions that force us to confront the most fundamental issues about how we understand and interact with the environments that we have inherited and those we might create. His talk today, River Versus Rain, which is drawn from his forthcoming book, The Invention of Rivers, Alexander's Eye and Ganga's Descent, to be published this year by the University of Pennsylvania Press, will pose just that sort of probing challenge to conventional frameworks and methodologies. So please join me in welcoming Delape. Thank you very much, Rosalie. Yes, we really have been taking a lot about issues of nature and the way in which we discuss it. I often tell my students in classes that I teach when someone asks you what is the need for a different answer, because it's always a good question and you'll regret it anyway by the end of the end of the conversation. So keep from it. But today what I want to talk about is really the thesis of this upcoming book, as Rosalie said, The Invention of Rivers, Alexander's Eye and Ganga's Descent. It really speaks of the design of something that is fundamental actually to almost all design and that is the river. I'm not talking actually about the engineering of the river and the design of it. I'm talking actually about the creation of it in order for this it to be there as an it to design it and to actually inspire all the infrastructure that we work with in pipes and drains. They are really products of river thinking, but also concepts like the city and civilization, they're all linked to the river. In fact, you trash the river, you trash much actually, but what you take for granted in conversations and in design. So I want to begin with a monsoon. Can we get the lights down? Yeah. If I can just pause that for a second. Yeah, thank you. So I grew up with a monsoon and the smell of rain, you know, there's a word for it called Patrick, which is actually rain on past earth. But when you look at the monsoon, and this is really the churning of the ocean, it comes from the southwest. It's a wind. Monsoon is a wind. It comes from the southwest of the Indian Ocean and it brings with it actually an immense amount of rain that rains down on the subcontinent and actually various parts of the tropics for three months. It's a lot less heavy today than it was, but I know that the people have spoken of it. It's raining for 14-15 days, actually non-stop. And when I'm talking about rain, it's pouring, it's pouring rain. But this is becoming a monsoon, not the coast of India. It's a profound wetness. And if you listen, you can hear the crickets. And the world comes alive actually from a very... from a past world into this wetness. And so things come alive, insects come into being, snakes come into being, reptiles of all sorts. And the biomass increases actually a hundred-fold, a thousand-fold perhaps. It's hard to say. But things that are brown don't rain. You have the club forest. The rain doesn't necessarily actually touch the earth, it actually remains in the forest. And of course we experience it in many different ways. You have a few times of rain like this in this part of the world. There you have three months of this trenching down the wall. So how did we arrive at this? This kind of dryness actually. Water has a place on an earth surface actually. That is, you know, that is actually by and large dry land. So you have now water in channels that, you know, it's a very different world. You have water actually that has a place, even without land, just drawing by the National Geographic, which shows rivers actually that are holding their place without land to hold them. So you have the blue lines and you have the brown lines for rivers that run dry and rivers that are blue, are perennial. But they don't need water to support them. So now water has a place without an edge. When that happens actually, you can modify the place to any way you want. I mean, you can straighten out this place. And once you straighten them out, you can modify it. I mean, Rosalie spoke of our work in Mississippi. I mean, this was what drove it. If you look to the left, you know, you have the first drawing actually of the Mississippi. You know, you straighten out the Mississippi in the father of waters. Once you study it actually and its movements as in this, as this did in his map, we have a history, you then have volumes. And you know that you can then design this entire system by and then you engineer that system. When you go to India, this is actually taken even further. Not only do you understand the river actually by volumes, you now have drawings like this that are inspiring the linking of the river. This is actually 1890 map by a British engineer called Arthur Portman. And India is now connecting the Ganges that is here with the rivers in the south and the rivers in the west. So there's a massive canal system actually being contemplated. Massive damning in that now is making this into a single hydraulic system. And then you get this. Once you actually put water in its place, water doesn't like being confined anymore than we like being confined. And so it was this. It's confined. And the sad part actually and the tragedy is not so much actually in the flood. The tragedy is that we blame rain actually for the flood. It's like as a brain is not finding the channels that it's supposed to find. So what we have today actually is a designer involvement that in the flood issues of flood. I mean design a certain you bring in imagination that engineers are looking for. And certainly the Army Corps of Engineers has reached out to designers in recent past to find solutions. The designers bring a temporal imagination. They bring a material imagination. They bring an ecological imagination to place. And so we have now the placing of water. Not actually nearly the hands of engineers, but very much part actually of the design process and very much part of the studios that we do here. But this is actually the second act of design. There is a first act of design that actually is about the drawing of the line that separates land from water. And so this part actually as interesting as it can be is preceded by this act of design. Now where does this design come from? I mean who does it? Who has actually declared land and water to be through distinct entities? The only explanation that I come across actually is an attribute design of God. And if you read the book of Genesis in the Bible you will find it was literally a surveyors manual. On the first day God separated light and darkness. On the second day he separated water from water below. If you think of what that means he actually made the rain stop. In order that you may see a surface of the earth, if you don't have the rain stopping you don't see a surface of the earth. You can't distinguish where that surface is. Which is why surveyors don't go up when it's raining. They wait until the rain to stop. So maps are fair weather landscapes. So if that happened on the second day then on the third day you basically got separated land from sea from water. So this kind of articulation actually is then recognized by others. I mean you read the book of Joe. Joe, he speaks of actually God telling the sea, halt there. Your proud waves can come no further. You read the book of Jeremiah. You find a similar kind of statement where you book of problems has that. And so is this an active code? And what I find actually fascinating is that every scientist accepts this. Ecologists accept this. Designers accept this. This line is there. It's natural. And we even think that animals see this line actually between land and water. So this act of separating land from water, even though actually I do this and I can get water. In my hand water, in not water, I would say wetness. And I want to distinguish actually between the two wetness and water, even though I may slip. Pardon me if I do. But I would like to make a distinction between wetness and water. Water comes with this distinction from land. Wetness actually is profuse wetness. It takes many different forms. So water can be a form of wetness, but wetness is not a form of water. And may perhaps you can explain this at some point. So for the last five years, actually, I've been thinking about this act. What does it take to separate land from water? As an act of design? And the result is this book, the invention of the river, Alexander's Design, becomes descent. And I have a right that actually two elements that are essential actually to the designing of rivers. One is actually that it demands a particular time. And the second is that it demands a line. So what does that mean? I think each one of them demands a particular time. And it was this time. And, you know, there are many ways of actually looking at time. We look at time by the solar calendar. But I don't know in the lunar calendar, but there is an existential time that we know actually by the hydrologic cycle, which is actually transformations of wetness, one way or the other. And you will see every child learns this. All of us learned it in sixth grade, seventh grade, some decent all over the world, which is popular in those grades. We just look at these. I mean, you know, these are children's imaginations that are quite fantastic. I mean, I love this one actually, where the sun is actually on the light pole. And then, you know, look at that one, which is a raindrop. You know, the whole water cycle is in a raindrop. And how the child actually thought about that. I mean, I'm fascinated, you know. But then you get the boring stuff, actually, of hydrologists. And this was one of the first ones, the hydrologic cycle. It can be much more complex than the, you know, than we think about it. But I love Paul Clay, the artist, the Bower's artist, actually, who portrays it actually in four parts. And I will use this actually to make a case. If you look at what Paul says, actually doing, I mean, this is rain, and that is evaporation. And then you have flow formation, flowing the, flowing down the, you know, on the land surface, actually, and then coming down to the sea, evaporating from the sea, cloud formation, and then raining down again. That's the water, you know, or the water cycle or the hydrologic cycle. Now, what we have done is actually we have taken, you know, we've taken this to be our moment of reality, our time of reality has been constructed, has been constructed in this, in this particular moment, sorry. In this particular moment, actually, of flow formation. And so the rest, actually, of the moments we make into a familiarity. So rain comes in those, you know, evaporation happens. These are all a federal phenomenon. You don't live in them. You actually treat them as visitors. And so we made a point of this, actually, in our work on Bombay, which I'm not going to show you today. Unfortunately, even though the posters are actually some of them do suggest our drawings from Bombay, but we did suggest what to be, what is it actually to design Bombay, not as an island, but to design it actually as an estuary, you know, in a moment of rain. So it would mean, actually, in making these, I think I'm sort of seeing the wrong thing. Anyway, let me move on. What happens is in this particular moment of flow formation, when I'm able to actually separate the waters above from waters below, that's what I do. I'm with this red line, you know, which actually defines the surface of the earth. And I define then, move from here to define land and sea. You know, so these two, actually, elements really come from this particular moment of time, in which I'm able to do it. So what I get then is a drawing of the surface of the earth, where I can actually separate water from land. And so I have actually, you know, the possibility of making maps like this, in this particular moment of time. And these maps actually serve us as our, you know, as a basis of design. Now, if I do that, I'll take on the line for a second. Now, there are many kinds of lines. I mean, there are lines, actually, of meaning, lines that, you know, that call out alphabets, lines that call out contours, you know, all sorts of lines. But what I'm talking about is a particular line that is endowed with a gift, actually, of separation. So on the one hand, you have this, you know, you have land and sea, that I can separate this way. So just think about it. I'm not drawing a line, there's any kind of line. I'm drawing a line that is actually endowed with the ability to stop the sea, you know, from encroaching. I can thicken that line into an ecotone, as a number of ecologists do today, but I can't erase it in any way. Then over here, I have, actually, not just a line that separates this line of flow calibrate. So I know my time from before and after. So I know flow. I understand flow. So rivers are the basis of flow thinking. And then I actually endowed these lines with the possibility of containing water, actually, to a channel. So think about what that line is doing. It is not any kind of line. It's a very particular line that I'm drawing. There's another aspect of this line, actually, that becomes critical. If I look at one of the three essentials of a river, a river has, you know, has a course, it has a source, and it has, actually, I mean, flood. You may think this is old, actually, but flood is intrinsic to the definition of a river. I mean, you think of the Nile and the Nile flooding, you know, I mean, as a thing, it is because it's a river, that it is, you know, that it is, that it floods. I mean, the flow exceeds its, but think about, actually, what this means. Co-source and flood are related, actually, to the act of drawing a line. As designers, we draw lines. And when you draw a line, actually, what are you doing? You're drawing a flow. You're starting at a point and you're actually erasing in order to change, change the ground, actually, of that particular line, right? I mean, you can re-draw it, and which is exactly what engineers do with the river. So flow, starting point and erasure, run in parallel, and it goes source and flood. But just think about what this sort of leads to. I mean, if you think of flow, you know, think back, actually, to Heraclitus. Heraclitus said, actually, that you can't step in the same river twice, river twice. And, of course, there's a lot of, actually, questioning of what this means, what it had, you know, Heraclitus mean by this, and so it is actually seen as a philosophy of change, you know, that change actually is universal, the change is particular, all that is being discussed. But no one has raised the question, actually, of the line that Heraclitus asked people to cross, when he said, step into the river. When you say step into, you know, crossing something, no one has spoken about that act, actually, of a threshold that has been called out. Who called that out? The starting point, I mean, if you think of the number of people who have sought the source of the night, you know, for the last 2,500 years, people have looked for the source of the night until 2006, actually, when it was declared, you know, in the National Geographic, that finally some group, you know, discovered something way out in Rwanda, I think, or something like that, in the forest, that said that that's the source of the night. They're looking for a point. Now we all know that it rains all over the place. Why could we actually search for this point? It's because you're searching for the end of a line. So this line actually has an existential ground, and that is more serious than one thinks. It's a visualization, actually, that has become a reality. And then when you look at flood, flood is nothing but water crossing a line. So when I ask students, actually, what is flood, and they say that, okay, it's an ecological phenomenon, they say no, it is actually an artistic act. You draw a line, water crosses it, and you get a flood, flood, flood. Now you draw that line. So the question, actually, of where this line is drawn, to some extent, is lesser than the necessity of the economic world or the river. So the question then that I ask is, is it possible to inhabit another moment? Is it possible to design actually in a moment of rain? And I do believe, actually, that a place like India or any part, actually, of Southeast Asia and Africa, and perhaps even the Native Americans, lived in this moment of rain. And not in the moment actually, of flow formation, which demands the literacy, actually, of the line and the time of flow formation. So if you look at this, actually, as a possibility, the question really, you know, that one needs to ask is, was India colonized by rivers? Or has India been colonized by rivers? And does this explain, actually, the the dissonance, the cognitive dissonance, and the mess, actually, that we just simply call under development, or we call, you know, chaos, or we, you know, we just name these things, actually, and it really comes from this very fundamental dissonance where people are embedded, actually, in a world of wetness, but the maps they read tell them that this is water and land, and they can't let them to meet in any way. So I looked at this and said, where did this come from? And it took me back to Alexander, and it took me back to the school that he was educated in, and that was, it goes back to the school of Miletus, which is the school of science, that actually began, actually, the investigation that we know as science, and led by Thales. And what these folks did, actually, was that they invented the word map. Now, people may dispute this invention, but they certainly theorized it and problematized it. And they raised the first question, actually, why does the Nile flood? The first scientific question that required empirical proof. And so, if you think of where this question took them, I'll come to that in a minute, but to introduce Alexander, you know Alexander, you know Alexander is great. I mean, in the third century, fourth century BC, he comes to India, actually, by Egypt and Central Asia. And you know him, actually, as Alexander the Great, and many people now know him as Alexander the Butcher. But what I know him as, actually, is Alexander a scholar, actually, was a student of Aristotle. He was a scholar, so he was not just building an empire, he was also building empirical knowledge. And that empirical knowledge is what we as designers use today. So let's go to the Nile, actually, for the second, and you look at the Nile, you know, these folks actually land up in Egypt and ask this question of the Egyptians, why does the Nile flood? And the Egyptians look at them saying, you know, and it was the first moment of underdevelopment, actually. This was the moment when they said that you guys just don't know your place. You know, we have to teach you about your place. And so if you think of how the Egyptians saw the Nile, did they see the river? Did they see a river? We are all educated to see the river, actually, and we see the Nile flood. What they saw, actually, was this. They saw their land on water and the water rose from the depth. Now they knew a neighboring ground, actually, where the water, the rain, the Nile fell from the sky. But that was another, it was a foreign land, which they, of course, were used with barbarians. But the way in which these folks did it, actually, they drew the line and then they saw the flood. Now it raises the number of questions, why did they draw the Nile at that point? Because it rose for three months of the year, actually, in the same months of the monsoon in India. Okay, it rose for three months of the year and it spanned this much. Why was that not the normal Nile? Why did they choose this as the normal Nile? You can raise those kind of questions. But another question to ask is, why did they see a line in the first place? And so they drew the line and then asked the native, you know, why does the Nile flood? And the native was to look to them and say, you are drawing the line and you are saying floods. You know, I mean, it's your problem, not mine. You know, so that did not occur, you know, so you find this in Herodotus, if you read Herodotus, the father of history, you will find, actually, these sort of statements that the native did not know anything. I mean, they did not know where the Nile began also, you know, the source of the Nile. They never saw the Nile, they never saw the Nile beginning the Nile. So you get, actually, a number of issues that I won't get into, I don't have the time, but the formation, actually, or several ground, the idea that Herodotus actually came up with the gift of the Nile was precisely because he saw the river in a contained format that then allowed it to flood, that then made land, and so he got each of the gift of the Nile, and he constituted settlement, and today the word settlement just falls off, you know, out of our mouth, actually, as a basis for understanding cities, the city of the quintessential settlement. How do we understand, actually, habitation of the ground, the settlement? It really comes from the river of imagination. I'll just pass that over. But one of the things then that the question raised is that how did the folks actually live in a world where water rose and fell, that's how the Egyptians lived. They lived in a land where wetness rose and fell, as opposed to actually on a river where, you know, flood is prevented, actually, with embankments. If I actually move to the next slide, you get a sense, this is Mississippi, and you will see actually that the Native American lived on lands, whereas of course, since Columbus arrived in this part of the world, you have the rivers fought out, and then you have a levy. So these are the two high grounds. These, of course, have mostly been destroyed, and interestingly, archaeologists study them for artifacts. Actually, they should study them. We should study them as designers, as one way of appreciating actually the rights and foes of wetness rather than the flow of a river that then floods, as in the case of, these are pictures of the 1927 flood from a Mississippi book. So what is this wetness that struck Egypt, actually, and that struck India? It is the Mansoon that I showed you earlier. It's the same Mansoon that comes from the southwest actually that lands in the Ethiopian highlands actually on the ground. It lands in the Hills of Oman. It lands in the Western Ghats in India, in the Himalayas, the Chittagong Mills. These are where, you know, it's sort of the last frontier actually of this wetness. Now, what happens actually with the Nile is from the Ethiopian highlands, the Blue Nile, actually goes down to Egypt. It goes to the legal side, and it raises the water in Egypt. So Egypt is under blue skies, and that is why it puzzled the early Greeks actually, Therese and others, to help it to flood under blue sky, you know? Because, I mean, if you read Ovid, you will understand actually that, you know, the notion of flood is a disastrous thing. And here in the Nile, it was just a beautiful thing. It just rose very gently, because it was 2,000 miles down from where the rain fell. But it doesn't mean it's a flow. It's a system of holding that holdings extend by saturation, extension, saturation, extension, saturation, it's a very different form of flow on the sea. So rain actually moves by holding systems, not by flow systems. So if you think of how Alexander arrived in India, he comes down here in the rain shadow behind the mountains. That's where the Silk Route is, to China. So the rain is coming in from here. He comes in actually behind the mountains, and then he crosses the mountains here and comes in to India. And this is what he hits. He hits a place like this. Maybe not the man in this thing and not the same kind of boats, and perhaps not, you know, not the same constructions, but this is the wetness that he comes into. And with this kind of wetness, and what does one do, actually? I mean, it's so unsettling that it did not remain very long. In this place, and he returned it. So we all know actually that he returned from India and then eventually died in Babylon, actually in 323 BC. But I say he fled the rain. This is something that he could not actually handle. He could not keep water in channels. But this is the man who was extending the map. And not just on the ground. And so basically he was extending the imagination and the ground. He was extending this particular map. If you just think of this, this is where the Indus is supposed to be the easternmost position. Over here now, if that was then his map, actually, who was known as the father of geography, 200 years later after Alexander, or 100 years later after Alexander, draws the Ganges. And the first person to use the word Ganges is Alexander, actually. That is on record. He knows, he hears of this, of this so-called water and, you know, wetness that he defines as a river and he hopes that it will take him down to the eastern sea and then around actually to the state of Gibraltar, enter the Mediterranean from here. He says, who will pass Libya and come back to Greece? That was his plan. Of course, in the end he could not get beyond actually this portion and then he returned returned to Babylon and then on basically returning to Greece died here. So he said the historians say that the soldiers mutinied, et cetera, et cetera, but that may be true. I mean, they could not deal actually with, can you imagine the insects, the mosquitoes, the, you know, this life that comes, you know, with the monsoon, just too much to bear. I mean, you have to be cultured into it. I mean, today we have a lot less of it, but it is certainly something that unsettled, unsettled people in those days. Unfortunately, we have taken Alexander's eye. Alexander's eye is something now that has embedded in the system. So he may have fled India, but he left his eye behind, you know, and it takes a cultivated eye actually now to see rivers. So that means it takes an education to see rivers, but we do see rivers now, you know, and they have become lines. And I want to actually suggest how once you see them, you make them. But it's made out of that. So if that is Ganga, and I want to make this distinction, Ganga is rain, Ganges is river. So what he came up with, Ganga is the Sanskrit word, and many people use these interchangeably. I suggest that you cannot use them interchangeably. Actually, when one refers to wetlands, one refers to, refers to flowing, you know, basically flowing water, and any geographer will tell you that rivers drain the land. And so basically, rivers are drains in the surface of land. But if you think of what the Ganga is, it's a rain and it's a wood holding, it's holding wetness. What is interesting is that this notion of the river has even entered mythological readings. So you will find actually the story of Ganga is, and I'll just be very pleased about this, is that it was a king actually by the name of Bhargidhat, who actually pleaded with the gods to send down rain, you know, to send down Ganga. Let's just say, he used the proverb now, send down Ganga, because he wanted actually to put the ashes of his ancestors that were left abandoned at some particular point, I won't go into that story, to put the ashes in her water. He needed her water in order to put the ashes in her, let's say the wetness that she brought with her. Ganga refused to come down until the gods pleaded with her to come down. And then she said, I will come down, but I will, my fall will damage actually habitation on the earth. So Shiva actually volunteered to take her fall on his head. And then the story goes, as you might read it today, she flowed down the locks of his head and came down, basically forming the river Ganges. And Bhargidhat led her to where the ashes were actually, and then he was able to actually perform the last rites of his ancestors. Now the thing is this, that it fell on Shiva's head, but Shiva's a god. And actually, Shiva's the god of the earth. And so you talk about the sphere of the earth and you talk about the sphere of water and you talk about the sphere of air. Vishnu is the god of the air. So she falls from Vishnu, this sphere of Vishnu to the sphere of Shiva. And Shiva, actually, if he's a god, it's probably his infinite hair. So if you think that she fell down, actually, his infinite hair, it was more green than it was rivers. So it's not about locks of his hair, but it is actually about his hair. And so if you read it differently, you will see rain rather than river. But everybody today insists on seeing this as the river. And if you pick up any Sanskrit text, you will see Danga being used as Danga. In any English translation, it is said, it is called River Ganges. How do the word river come in, actually, into those translations? And you see that there's another imagination that comes with it. So anyway, what you have today is a river. And it takes this imagination that I spoke about in order to see actually rivers. And it takes an education to see river. And I must tell you, with this one incident, actually, we were in Dhaka actually a couple of years ago during the studio at the Bengal Institute. And what is fascinating is that, we were on a boat, actually, with students. And this was during the monsoon. And we were upstream somewhere. And these little children, and some of you have been on site because this will notice when you go into the developing world, you know, you attract populations. And so there were these children that just came running to us. I mean, we were in a big boat, actually, in this stream. And they come running, fully clothed. And they don't see an edge. They just run into the water. They run into this, I think, and come swimming to us. And it was amazing. I mean, you know, we would have taken off, put on our swimsuits, you know, and then gone into the... But these kids just didn't seem to know the distinction, actually, between land and water. I mean, Bangladesh is one of the wettest countries on Earth. I mean, what is fascinating is that if you think about, if you think about these little children, they're probably going to school and they're being taught geography and they probably fail their class, actually, you know, because they can't see this land water in the map, and they're not in their environment. They don't see it. I mean, and so, you know, here, you're teaching them, you know, that if you look at the Earth from above, there are two components, land and water. And then, you know, water drains the land. And it doesn't make any sense to them. Apparently, where we were, and they came running, actually, was a portion where the water runs out after the monsoon passes. It's sort of false. And so it's ground that they play on. So for them, rain coming on and this thing doesn't make any change in their world. But this is how it was done. How the line was drawn. Eventually drawn in scientific ways by the British in the 1800s, the 1800s and 1900s. And when they grew it, actually, they used this method of triangulation, but they grew much more precise. But many of these people were actually following the footsteps of Alexander, you know, and saw themselves as such. They described the enterprise as following the footsteps of Alexander. So you had now the rivers actually taking shape. And then you have this. I mean, for the Varanasi students, we'll understand, actually, that this is where Varanasi is, actually. And so you have now these rivers called out and taken shape. And now this is what we take as natural. So we even assume that animals see this. So we design our ecology, we define our ecology, we study our history, you know, everything on this ground, actually, of a separation of land from water. Once you call out rivers, then you start seeing them shift. You know, you see the shifting line. And so, yes, what Rosini said, actually, what our interest in shifting landscapes was certainly actually a fascination with this act of drawing the line and then shifting. But now that we stand back and look, it's actually a defiance of a wetness culture, of a rain culture. Once you actually call up rivers, you also can train them. This is the training, actually, of the Ganga to go in a particular way, you know. So then you can leave them and then you dam them, you know. So just think of all the infrastructure that we create, actually, once you call out a river. Then you call out a river and you drain the land. This is what geography tells us. And then they become drains, you know. And so you see the massive pollution, actually, in India's rivers and drains, you know, you don't have to wonder why it's there, actually. It is actually the subject of geography. And the cause, actually, is a discipline by geography of the surface of the earth. And then you have, actually, channels and then you have floods. And if you just think about it, channels become both the cause and the solution of flood. So we say that flood is actually a bad drainage. So you put in channels and then the channels cause flood. So this is another word for this and that is addiction. You know, we are addicted to rivers, you know. And so the question really is, can we just get out of this old paradigm of thought? Then we declare rivers to be seasonal. Once you define them and then there's no water in them, you say, okay, that's a riverbed. You know, and then you have a riverbed like this, you know. You know, you had Gandhi, actually, gathering on the riverbed like that. So-called riverbed. You know, you have fares, actually, that happen on the riverbed. But once you define something as seasonal, the urge is to make it a drainage. You know, and so now there is a fight, actually, to bring water to these places of, you know, of seasonal wetnesses. You're making them into perennial water bodies in order to create real estate. You know, so river thinking, actually, has not only, you know, sort of been one of these, you know, sort of been a colonial enterprise, it is now actually pushed on the ground of capitalism. So the displacement of populations that, you know, from these areas is actually tremendous and it's actually very sad. But the cause is not actually in these capitalist enterprises themselves. It's actually in the drawing of the line and the singling out of riverbed, you know. So this is what an RCE student should be familiar with this. And if you just think about what seasonality does to the definition of flood, is this. So this is actually, this is the moment, actually, when three years ago, when the waters were high during the monsoon. You can see the temple there? That's the temple there. So the water actually rises 50 feet, you know, 40 to 50 feet. And so in fact, you know, just play a little video for you, actually, of this scene. You will begin to see, actually, the problem of defining flood. I mean, you won't believe this, but there are discussions that we have been part of with engineers in India that are basically discussing what constitutes a normal flood, you know. I mean, and so when you say a normal flood and they say, no, one hundred years flood is normal. No, no, one 50 years flood is normal, you know. And so they're talking about it like this. I mean, it's not an absurdity. There's some of you may know this because then you must have walked here. The students in Varanasi would have walked on the guards. There are no guards here. Is she both of these? Yeah. It's the same place. This is basically, we started with the Dasheshwami, the guard, and we ended it in Sindhya guard. There's a little more to come now. So that's a rise of 40 to 50 feet. And then you have this. It's one of the best kept secrets, actually, of this holy city that is so proud of its guards. Guard's meaning steps down to the water. They clean it every year of the massive amounts of silt that come down from the Himalayas, you know. And this is actually nothing. This was actually taken towards the end. But all these temples are filled, actually, with mud. And then they clean them up like that. So the question is, I mean, this is the face now that you see, actually, that is advertised everywhere, is the face of Varanasi that is drawn like this. You know, this sort of picturesque thing. But did the river flood like this? I mean, did it rise to this extent? And if it did, actually, would they be cleaning it for the last time? They call this their oldest city in the world. You know, that these guards have existed, actually, for 2,000 years. Because I'm talking about years. I mean, is this true? Can it be true? I mean, would they have those pipes and would they have this kind of mass cleaning operation every October, you know, for two, three months, cleaning the temples? Or is there another way in which to inhabit this place? So this is what we are seeing. If I'm on the water in a low-water situation, that's the high, the water is 30 feet above me, 40 feet above me, you know, is the water. So what I'm going to call your attention to is this particular instance. So this is actually an elusive bluff on which you have the guards coming down. You have another place over here called Rajgarh where they have actually conducted excavations. People never lived here on top of the elusive bluff 2,500 years ago. They lived here on this. And this is what the excavation shows. So people actually lived on this level, which is actually the low-level water, actually, of the Ganges today, you know, at that level. So one must ask, how did water rise? I mean, how did they live, actually, with 50 feet of water above them? I asked the archaeologists and they tell me, oh, they built levees. I said, 50 feet levees? 50 feet levees, you know. I mean, would they build 50 feet levees and would they, and did they have pumps? You know, because rain, it's a place of rain, it would gather and it would drown behind, actually, these levees. So these are the historians, but totally caught up in this, in an erroneous structure in Format where they don't even understand, actually, what they're seeing in a situation of rain. So I asked the question, where do the waters go? I mean, and the students asked this question, too. And you see, actually, there's a world of Koons, which are tank systems and rain-holding systems behind here, actually, which held rain. But it wasn't only this. The whole mass, actually, of jungle and forests were holding water, that it never rose more than 2-3 feet at one time. We have actually destroyed this entire surface and the water has come down and so we have literally made a river in the last 2,500 years, where once, actually, there were holdings that were so vast and so intense that there was no such thing as a river. So this is how the British did it and it's continued operation, actually, of draining these tanks and they built these channels and so today you have an... I just took this picture this time in Varanasi where you have this tank, which is really the river infrastructure sitting at the top of a tank, which is a rain infrastructure. But again, I sort of want to emphasize, actually, that everything holds, including walls in Varanasi. So that's a kund on the right side and the wall on the left and the dampness, actually, that is held in the wall. It's not something that you can get, actually, with an aluminum and glass and steel facade. And today we are building with these materials to reject, actually, wetness. So this is my ode, actually, to the color balls of Varanasi and the act, actually, of eating palm where people eat and then spew forth. And that's what you get, ultimately, but my point is that everything holds wetness, including vegetation, reservoirs and walls and the works. But if you just think about the multitude of holdings, I should rush now. I wanted to take you to the mountains and make one more point, actually, with how rivers are drawn in mountains. If you think, actually, of the way in which you leave the maps were drawn, rivers actually began in mountains. So you had a mountain range that was drawn in elevation and then you had a river that began from it. But what this meant, actually, was that the river, that the whole mountain range was recognized, actually, as Aristotle described it, a sponge that absorbed the rain and then it flowed from there. Nobody went into the mountains following rivers into mountains. And so even pilgrims in India went to Hathawar and some of these students went to Hathawar and then went into the mountains and they dispersed, pilgrims dispersed into mountains. Actually, they never went to a single source. They respected, actually, the mountains as their entirety, as a source of rivers. But unfortunately, they've come down to this notion, actually, of a point source. And where did this actually come from? And this is a drawing, actually, by Athanasius' culture in the 1600s. And his understanding actually fed into a particular worldview, actually, of hydrology. Which was that how did rivers actually get that water? If you ask that question, how did it get water? And they all said it came from the sea. Why? Because rivers flowed to the sea and the sea is never full. And so back to the source, you must know what to go. I mean, it's said in the book of Atlastica, like it clearly asks this, and a number of other... I mean, Aristotle said it, Plato said it, a number of others said it. But the question is, how did it return to source? Did it return by clouds or did it return to the earth? And so that was a huge debate. And nobody believed that rain was enough to actually feed rivers. And so they said that it has to go through the earth. And so his drawings actually suggest this movement. So the dark ones are actually returning to the earth. And in that process, they take out the salt. And so there's a whole distillation. If any of you are interested, actually, in model-making and how you... in model-making of distilleries, you should actually look at Akinet's spiritual attributes. He's got this massive degrees of actually understanding the earth as a distillery that sent water up to the... But another source, actually, that was wonderful for me, was medieval maps. There's a sign they misunderstood, actually, on the ground of Jobefima. They're not geographic drawings at all. They're hydrological drawings. And if you just look, there's a detail of paradise. The paradise, the story of paradise, it begins for rivers. And one of them is the Ganges. That's been part of the myth, actually, for the last 2,000 years. But I was interested, actually, in the river that feeds these rivers. And that is the river of Eden. The river of Eden feeds these four rivers of paradise. And these four rivers of paradise flow out of the garden, really. And they go back into the earth. Can you see that? They go back to the earth. And it was a wonderful way of, actually, anybody who searched for paradise could never find it. Because at any point they reached, it only went into the earth and it came out somewhere else. So paradise is always this elusive thing, actually, that prevented finding. But what this does, actually, is inspire a whole set of... This is the Chabah, actually, the Persian garden. But it also feeds, actually, the notion of cities and the center, city center, you know, which is a spring, actually, that comes out of the earth. But that is precisely because you recognize the garden, the river of Eden, coming through the earth. And these are the four rivers that then flow from it. But then there's another reading which fascinates me. And that is that these four rivers, actually, are fed by oceanus. And oceanus, if you look at this, is fed by a wind, the east wind. So the garden of Eden is always in the east. And it's fed by the east wind, which is the wind of rain, that flows into the garden, actually, and then, I mean, that flows into the garden, and then it flows out. So that, if you look at it in Hindu script, that when I mentioned the sphere of air, that actually intersects with the sphere of earth, actually through the medium of the garden. Now, if you're thinking of where rain begins, it begins in mountains, and then it begins in this mountain or mountains, which is Tibet. You know, if you think of this mountain of Tibet, this whole entire plateau, actually, out of just 14,000 feet or 14,500 feet, which is actually the height of Mount Blanc in the Alps, you know, the highest mountain in Europe. So this was a massive mountain that deformed the earth, and it just drew people in search of paradise, including Columbus. You know that Columbus was searching for India, but he was not searching for India. He was searching, actually, the source of the energies, and, you know, as a place of gold. And in searching for this deformed mountain. I'm sorry, I'd love to just speed up. But, you know, I mean, these are myths, actually, that encouraged the drawing of mountains. And so mountains were drawn, and the Himalayas were drawn once they were made. And so, eventually, you get points now at the end of the lines that define rivers. And you have now pilgrims going to Gangotri, actually, as a single source of the energies. So how did this multiple in the whole mountain range become a single point? And that's what the book is about, also to some extent. And now people go there, and then this was the tragedy that we got caught in, actually, a couple of years ago. When we were in the mountains, and one of these in the sky, this is Akka, and this range of... And we were stopped, actually, because of landslides, and that was what was the result, actually. We were lucky to survive. You know, I mean, thousands of people did not survive this. What's called the Himalayan tsunami. So it was wonderful, actually, being there, and it was frightening. But it told us, it told us something. You know, I'm just going to, if you don't mind, just skip the next three slides. It was about the delta, and how the lines on the delta are drawn, and buns are created on those lines, and people are living behind them like this. You know, I mean, if I put my ear to this, actually, I can hear the crabs coming through. And the water, actually, if you look at this, this is actually the level of water rise. And so it actually, people are living, actually, at a lower level than the sea. I mean, they're at a level lower than the sea. And they're not going to be there for very long, unfortunately. You know, and we have been telling them to actually build mounds, live on mounds, don't live behind levies, but levies is what is being promoted, actually, by the government there. So just to conclude, I want to say, you know, that if I may read a couple of minds, we do not take rivers as givens. We don't take them as reality. We take them to be products of design. They suffer severe contradictions. Like I said, I mean, you define the flood, I mean, you define the river, and then you define the flood. I mean, just imagine, they define you, someone defines you, and then finds the you, actually exceed that definition, and then you are at fault, not them, you know? I mean, is that sort of situation? They suffer severe contradictions and do not make sense in any places of rain, you know? So we argue, actually, for rain, not as water. We argue for rain, actually, as wetness. So many people actually move immediately to rainwater harvesting. And to me, that's a big thing that most people are promoting. We don't encourage rainwater harvesting, you know? We encourage, actually, the shift in imagination to wetness. So that ground of actually visualizing the world in which we live and design in is what actually has contributed to most of our design projects. So I think what Rosalie spoke about in Bombay are decking traverses, you know, and the thing, I think this talk has just been the imagination behind it, actually, and the need, actually, for that imagination. So it basically means that we design not to nearly solve a problem. You know, whether this problem is scarcity, flood, or poverty, et cetera, et cetera, you know, we design to fight river colonialism, both on the ground and in the imagination. And this colonialism has been at work for the last 2000 years. So I'm not talking about British or colonialism, which is only the last bit, actually, of river colonialism. It has been going on since Alexander. And before Alexander's school of militias, when they went to Egypt and said, this is a river that floods, you know, and said, believe it or, you know, you know, remain backward. So it means that we design to change the imagination from water and land to be quit as wetness. So it's not about water and land, it's about designing to the eminence, actually, of wetness. It means appreciating the multiplicity of the rain drop. As a last slide, I have to show this. I mean, this is Paris. I mean, as much as Cape Town, as much as Cape Town is drying out, Paris, actually, is anything. But why I put this up, actually, is that, you know, for 2000 years, nobody believed that rain was enough for rivers, if you believe in rivers, that is. Until, actually, Pierre Perrault, Frenchman, did a study of the Seine watershed. And in studying the Seine watershed, he actually proved that the rain that fell in the Seine watershed was six times the volume that flowed past Paris, you know. So nobody believed the rain drop, actually, contributed and added up, actually, to a river. But he found that it added up to six times the volume, actually, of the river going past Paris. But then, no one in India needed this proof, you know. So what does it mean, actually, now, for Paris to realize that, you know, nobody gives this a thought, nobody gives Pierre Perrault a thought, actually, now, you know, that he established that this was rain, you know. At that time, they were probably thought, you know, I mean, say, 200, 300 years ago, many people including Leonardo da Vinci would have thought that this water came through the earth, you know, through the winds of the earth. So this is a wonderful lesson, actually, that Paris is learning today. And I just thought, actually, that when you think of the colonialism that is being pushed on, actually, into the developing world, where rain, river infrastructure is being pushed, and Europe is returning to rain infrastructure. So they're moving towards holding, and rather than flowing, whereas they exceeded this massive infrastructure of rivers that people have bought into, actually, the whole developing world and are now having to live with the tragedies, actually, that are unfolding there. Thank you. Before my first question, I just want to say what an incredible visual pleasure it is to watch, to look at your own work. They also think wrapping material that you've gathered together in your historical research is just a different route. Anyway, I don't need two sentences of yours, human, from some other sources, in juxtaposition, and then ask your question about which actually goes directly to the way that you included your message. So the first one, from an interview published in Places Online, the flooding is a consequence of this history of visualization and the constructions that follow. And then the other one, which is from the preface to Invention of Rivers, furthermore, this line does not simply separate water from land. It creates water and land on either side of it as entities that can be commodified and as such coveted, made scarce and violated. So this, of course, is the theme of your whole talk, which you are completely unequivocal in this, that visualization leads to flooding and has created the situation the world that we're in. Visualization, though, is based on mental states and ways of understanding that have been created over many centuries. And you suggest that a new kind of visualization, which is the design project that you propose, can catalyze a different way of seeing the world. And so my question to you is, please elaborate, because how does a design project fight against those centuries of a clean cultural and political and economic? You know, it's interesting. I think we have a very good question. Sorry, it gets to the, gets to much of what our ambitions are today. I mean, I think about 10 years ago, and the point that we were making is that, and we said this in Deccan traverses, we said that if India actually has to resolve these issues, it has to colonize itself again. And he went actually, overturning 200 years of history at that, when we said something like that, because the infrastructure that we saw at that time, modernizing and classification schemes and art and things like that, and triangle, really, something that emerged with, let's say, Latter-day colonialism. And today, when we look at this actually as a project that began with Alexander, we are saying that it's taken us 2,000 years to get into this mess. Now it's going to take us another 2,000 years to get out of it. But what we see actually around Rosalie, what's happening today with sea level rise, I mean, we've been working in Norfolk actually for the last couple of years. And what we see in sea level rise, people think they can hold back the sea, you know, with the sea wall or with gates and even with the template. But you can argue against surge, but you can't argue against rising sea. I mean, when you're talking about rising sea, you realize actually that something more serious actually has occurred. And you see that we have constructed our own paradigm and it begins with visualization of the line, it begins visualization of the line that has actually entered our historic narrative, it has entered our archeological narrative, our mythological narrative, it's entered. It's entered in every walk of life where we actually look at the sea as other that is coming to get us. Now, we can keep fighting the sea in this manner. I mean, we can devise actually in a bit of ways. But to us, that is actually using the same mindset. I mean, and this is again to actually return to what Einstein said. He said that you cannot solve the problems of today with thinking that went into creating them. And so, if I think that this is the thinking that went into creating this issue is a visualization of the line, then I think it is my responsibility to actually at least initiate an alternative. Now, I don't know how long it's going to take. I mean, you know, it's something that we want to be pre-disciplinary. I mean, we want to actually gather people around this idea of wetness as opposed to the land we want to provide. You can't promise a timeline in a sense. But to pick up on another aspect of your question and the importance of visualizing, I think that that is the only thing that we can begin with. You know, and as designers, we feel we are uniquely equipped with that aspect. I mean, historians, social scientists and others actually work with images that are created. And that images that are now in text, actually. So many of them don't even look at images. Actually, they just take images for granted. Images speak a thousand words, they say. But images speak a thousand familiar words, you know. And if you want to actually say that it is, you know, that if you want to create the unfamiliar, you have to actually challenge that visualizing and come up with new visualizing, which you saw in that second-last slide which I had up. That's an exhibit that we're building as a sequel to Alexander and to this invention of rivers and it's called Ocean of Rain. I did not mention the term actually, even though I used the term, Ocean of Rain is a field of wetness. But how do we image it in order to construct a new imagination? Because imagination is grounded in images before it is made into text. So it is an ambitious project and we don't want to be too bombastic about it, but we just want people to realize what it means actually to really make a true paradigm shift. To the point of the paradigm shift, how do you envision, and I mean that, separate them, visualize, but envision how our understanding of the hydrological cycle can change fast enough in an era of climate change to accomplish what we need to accomplish. You know, what we're doing actually is saying, no folk, maybe coin this kind of finger of high ground that now sort of rules of the times around me for engineers here, generals. What we said actually is that instead of actually building levees that we built behind them, instead of building super levees that we built behind them, why don't we actually move to discrete systems? Discrete systems, so understanding systemically, discrete systems actually wherein you raise land. And we've had actually the backing of scientists like the Virginia Institute on Marine Sciences who really believe that what we are suggesting is one of the few possibilities that no folk can actually rely on, even if it is actually a delayed retreat from the coast. But I think we can begin in small ways actually to strategize actually the raising of ground, but with it actually the shift in appreciating that wetness rises and falls and holds rather than in waters that flow. So we are doing it through our projects and we're doing it for example in Bombay as well where we are actually promoting this understanding of an estuary which I sort of passed over very quickly. Understanding of an estuary rather than an island and a delta where you have distinct lines. An estuary actually encompasses the sea and this thing doesn't believe in lines but works this way with the rise and fall. So this move towards rise and fall can happen actually through our initiatives. I mean I would like to think that some of the students working in Paranasi actually who are building on the phone they're in very astutely, they took it on actually and found that, okay this is where communities begin actually is around these small tanks. But working with that is enough actually of a start and if you can see the few projects like this I think design can move both on the ground even if we have to make these kind of arguments for historians to also change and start writing history. You know like now for example a historian tells me that you know, oh Alexander crossed five rivers. I mean give me a break you know. I mean anyone, I mean today if you had to actually you know on horseback like Yuba, you know had to come down actually on the edge of the Himalayas will you count five rivers? I mean you know come on you know I mean what is this? I mean I mean if you just think about it I mean it's absurd. Some of these historical facts are so absurd that you know you really have to laugh. I mean but if you go to the field you will realize that and especially in a moment of rain you're not going to count anything. You know you're not going to count anything and so why can't history be written in that moment? So if I'm to write the past in that moment you know it can actually you know contribute to sort of assisting actually the project of designing with the mountains and high grounds and discrete systems as opposed to linear systems. So I'm moving away from flows to holdings. Does your example of Norfolk maybe to be inferred from that that you think that significant change and adaptation can happen on a most anecdotal level and you don't have to wait for systemic change in the way in the sense of political and systemic change that actually we take in a much more local signal? Yes actually I can. I mean if I could extend it for a second you know then I would think that you suggested this. Okay you don't have to give up on ledges for example you don't have to give up on seawalls but we can design seawalls to make high ground you know and so we give in to the system in order to construct a transition. So when I speak actually I mean as a designer I don't reject the paradigm that we're in but I actually structure a transformation and that structuring of change can only come about if my envisioning actually is not in the same paradigm but in a different paradigm and then I make a translation and so I believe that designers today must work with that imagination actually of living in two worlds one word actually that is contributing to the immediate and to the you know to the near future you know which is saying and then the other actually that I mean it's turning some of the strategies toward that other paradigm actually where we can move in smoothly so that so the lack of transition you know I think is very important and if it can happen both in the imagination and on the ground that would be something that that we are sort of that's our ambition actually to achieve that aspect of it. I'm going to ask one more question and then open it up so please get your questions ready. Could you talk a little bit about how this how this paradigm shift might apply to places that we think about now as drive businesses? That's a good question I mean you know one of the things that we I mean I'm actually working right now in the studio in in Philadelphia Pennsylvania and the University of Pennsylvania actually on the Rajasthan desert you know and but with the same thinking in a world of wetness and an ocean of rain there is no such thing as dryness it is just less wet and what we see in the monsoon actually is a moment actually of excessive wetness and then it recedes so I live actually really in the relativistic world rather than an absolute world and so when I live in a relativistic world it is one you mentioned in your introduction about our attention to temporality and the notion of shifting but I think that that appreciation of temporality which I think is now very much part of our design studios here as well and the thing of working with time is to appreciate actually the sense that wetness decreases and wetness increases and so when I look at a desert actually and I you know what we call a desert you know and I brought this question up actually with the Bedouins and you know that world I mean they don't live in dryness you know they find wetness in many different ways I mean whether we plant the crop actually bite into an apple I quench my thirst actually by biting into an apple I quench my thirst and make different ways rather than drinking water from a plastic bottle you know I mean and then I have you I mean you talk about the canard system you know in in Persia I mean all these systems actually work with wetness that was everywhere so like I was saying that I do this and I get wetness I mean can I make this you know can I use this in some way without turning it into water you know can I work with this wetness to quench my thirst so the way I see it actually is that the desert is also part of I mean I wouldn't say it is part of the monsoon world but it is certainly part of the ocean of rain because on another front if I could answer that question in another way isn't it fascinating that we see rivers everywhere actually even when they run dry we see a river bed and and that situation of actually making a place that is bound by an entity that doesn't exist it's fascinating I mean you know and we've thrown people out of the river bed like I said just because we see it as a river so rivers are not always there and yet we design in the moment of rivers so if we design in the moment of rain rain doesn't have to always be there you know in the same manner as it would Any questions? Go ahead Hi, thank you so much for fascinating thoughts I've already talked about that and I mean it's with I kind of distorted the meaning of text I meant and I found it very interesting to see the description of the hydrological cycle and how we sort of restricted ourselves to a very very small portion of the hydrological cycle and we sort of designed for that time as you're writing for example my question is if we were to embrace the rest of the hydrological cycle there's clearly a set of pedagogical tools that we would have to use and re-equip ourselves with to even begin to understand something as simple as a ground as a stable ground which doesn't which is a myth and so if we were to accept that the stable ground is a myth our very act of designing the very first notion of design has to probably start elsewhere so my question is as someone invested in teaching how do you construct such a pedagogy? That's a I mean I think it also starts there in fact when you when I think of the School of Miletus is actually initiating the river river thinking it was actually an educational enterprise and I I sort of end the book Rosalie actually with this because observation you know that's often made you know why did the I mean it's a question that's often raised and you know Samuel Johnson raised it you know why did the east colonize the west I'm sorry why did the west colonize the east and not the east the west and and I say that even if you're to answer that question if you rephrase that question it is about it's not really about it's not about east and west it's not about development developing actually but it is about river landscapes colonizing rain terrains you know or ocean of rain let's say and and it comes from I mean say river landscapes with the articulation of a school it's a pedagogical school that set up that first problem and and we are very much in that in that mode so the question is a very is a very valid one I would think actually that one way of looking at it and maybe Rosalie was getting at it with the question actually in the hydrologic cycle that it is it's I can consider myself actually in any one of those moments and in any one of those places but perhaps I can consider myself in all of them you know and working astutely as a designer with more than one infrastructure right now we are dependent on purely an infrastructure of rivers and and in that moment of rivers so when I'm thinking of pipes I'm talking about channels I'm talking about faucets I'm talking about they I mean it's all I mean city cities are actually grounded in this infrastructure and so how I would do it I mean and I think that that you know Varanasi is already a starter I think that I understood you that we're doing right now and water urbanism and that's what I sort of love about the about the water organism trajectory actually in in in Columbia is that it allows it allows us to think in more than through water urbanism at least open up a critique actually of water and urbanism so here what the students are working with they're working with river systems but they're also working with rain systems so we've introduced two moments so they're working with the temporality of rain in the second but not rain that actually flows into rivers and rains that flows into holding systems so I would be encouraging them actually to start looking at not just holding in reservoir but holding through plants holding through walls holding through you know every means possible you use to hold and and but but not just be there work with the river you know because the gods are going to be there people are you know still believe that this is a holy river etc etc and then you actually you know allow for that distinction to be made but one is actually dependent on a system that's at a national operating at a national level that is that's totally you know not in your control and then you have the small community-oriented measures that work with rain now you're to extend your question I would love to actually extend that and say okay it's not about just rain systems and not but view systems let's work with evaporator systems let's work with you know with cloud systems you know and and perhaps that is something that we should we should as faculty you know start I mean and students who I consider junior faculty at some point you know to you know to actually bring to play and that way exploit the hydrologic cycle you know I think it's one it's a beautiful direction I think to to open up open up the possibilities for the future yes thank you thanks so much for this great talk I'm wondering how much at all you're getting to collaborate with other careers of this current school sort of remember our other ways of being indigenous and in North America I know sort of like our all how it was always told us that we're I'm sorry could you could you stop again sure um I'm just wondering how much you came up collaborating with other members for keepers of remembering wetness so sort of like North American indigenous that are at the smallest that you know we are the river or other like English Columbians for like Australian and the Aboriginal members of whiteness sort of remembering still defining into your mind so you're talking about various cultures that keepers of wetness is that what you said yeah it's sort of using your framework just as maybe through this English colonial matter colonial thinking yeah I mean but it's your question actually about how to how to recover those kind of thoughts or I'm just I love what I'm wondering if you're beginning to talk to other oh I see yeah yeah I wish I I wish I could you know I mean and I would certainly love to I mean the book actually I sort of uh I I sort of exploit this term the clash of clash of cultures which was used actually by I think it was Brian Fagan who coined the term but he pointed actually in the clash between the European civilization actually and the Native American and and the way I see it actually is that these are cultures actually that and we saw it in Norfolk we saw it in Norfolk where people where people actually have inhabited that ground and they have it on the basis of high ground and you know and and rise and fall but they've never been recognized for it and and I would really love to actually push it I mean this is where you know what we've started actually you know last year we started this this we're not quite sure what to call it it's a platform called ocean of wetness wherein we are encouraging people to sort of join us and bring in these other you know knowledges and voices but but you know right now most of the understandings of of native people just been on the ground of water and and land the assumption of land and and when you don't have water you don't have land and and to work without those dimensions and without the entities you may better explain some of these folks and their practices so right now I mean I you know it is it's it's not it's it certainly is an ambition that I would love to actually work toward you know that and there is a there is a culture that was that is prior to this academic world of river landscapes. I'm still here. I'm sorry? I'm still here. Angelos, thanks again. I think the first question you had which was on a little bit why were you fantastic at the conversation we know we were having even if I did not say about Washington right well it was about holding and I think before India I had a perception of what the Danjir was you know your history you know we know a little bit about it and and then as I started to go into it we went a little bit more about it in the year we had a lecture and after a week we were researching you know my perception of what Danjir or Ganga is as I continuously walking and getting more complicated in my head to understand the system but um to a previous slide that you had showed earlier when you talked about the Danjir, the draining water and the Ganga as a whole thing about this that kind of like made it more complicated in my head of I don't understand like Ganga at least and how I want to perceive it as we continue in the studio like we are looking at Coons where we are looking at rivers where we are holding and drink a cup in the rain as we continue to understand this concept I'm wondering how if you have any advice for us on how we should start to perceive the Ganga or Ganges in the sense of holding or draining and because you know if you're just looking at holding away this like it is moving and it is flowing it is going so I was stuck out the idea of holding away as when in reality when we're there we see it moving we see it but I don't be really there at one point in time for two weeks but still I'm continually confused by like understanding how to perceive it I mean I have any advice on that I think a start a start is actually this is two sides that we have that we sort of defined in terms of river systems and and and and rain systems and I'm sort of conscious actually that much of the literature that we have for example even the maps that you're working with their role actually fair than the maps I mean so I don't take them very seriously you know on the same but I do take them seriously in one part let us say the part of the river you know I take them seriously and I say okay you know this is something to work with understand it so I see it as a flow but there are two ways to see movement actually in the Ganges you know so I call that the Ganges but let's just for a moment think about it as as a as a flow seeing something moving I should say see this moving seeing something is moving I mean I could see it as a flow at the same time I could see it actually as an overflow that means an overflow from a point of saturation you know and so I might actually devise a system by which I actually work to hold the Ganga now if there are systems actually all over India called the Annikar systems where at the end you had these kind of sort of silt dams that were constructed to hold the ground you know wetness back and wetness in the form of water so I would say that at this point in time you're seeing it with two lenses that are divided actually on either side of the guard you know as it were on two sides of the bluff but then at the same time I might bring one lens to look at the other so I might start looking at this Ganges actually as a system of holdings and so I'm saying okay what can I do now it's a heavily polluted river what would it mean to actually move it into catchments into catchments and hold it for a while and treat it biotically and send it back in if everybody I mean if I did the whole I mean all the lengths of the the whole length of the Ganges I worked that way it would be clean you know so so I'm working then with a holding system on the side of the river and at the same time if you will I mean and wish that because you all our infrastructure is designed by rivers I might bring my river thinking to the tank system at least in part because I have to fulfill needs you know and so what does it mean to actually have one tank flowing into another flowing to another I could see it actually in the overflow system but I could see it as a flow system also in tap it by infrastructure until such time I might be able to transition to rain in its entirety you know because I mean we just think of the problems that rivers create the and for resilience I mean if resilience is my goal and I want resilience the resilient communities think of our dependency on rivers I mean I think Bangladesh is a great example of this I mean they are dependent on the Brahmaputra the Brahmaputra has been siphoned off by China you know so what are they going to do they have to turn to rain I mean they get volumes of rain you know so they can't depend on a river anymore you know and so if you start thinking now that there are situations like this in Varanasi where you can't depend on the river because the river is in control of another nation or another state or another political situation or the linking of India's rivers you're not going to depend on that you know you you have to actually release yourself from there and the only way to do it actually is to turn to rain the rain that falls you know in your place or you know within I wanted to show you some images actually from South India wherein that sense of autonomy is built into autonomy and dependency actually structures a wonderful resilient kind of world infrastructure world on which habitation actually lies so but I'm going to be there with you to the end of the semester so you work on it as we move forward I mean you're feeling sustained this idea of blurring the line right I'm sorry I'm deaf so I have to might ask you can you hear me yes um I'm from Brazil and I work a lot in the amazon and with Indians in Sao Paulo so this idea of fluidity you know it's rivers as entities they're very um kind of strong in these communities but I am a little bit confused and maybe it's just because it's the first time that I hear you and I didn't understand but you're talking about blurring the line right so that we don't trace a boundary between between dryness and wetness and you know that the river is just the flow but then when you are showing the work and you are responding to the questions you talked more than once about these discrete systems where you raise the ground as if this was a solution and that the Levi's you show the pictures were not and I'm wondering because like in Manaus you have whole neighborhoods who are built on the flow and they move on the flow on the river and they move they don't need to go to high ground because they live in the wetness and the other thing is like the other person said um the idea of time you know another way that is very common for the Amaringian city to live with the waters that they move right they're not always so I'm wondering which experiences you have with this kind of ambiguity which is not only with the system of the flow but it's a whole way of dealing not just with dryness to be able to be resilient yeah I mean of course let me first begin by saying I mean I'm not talking about blurring the line I'm actually talking about doing away with it yeah I mean and doing away with it actually is not to is to basically say that I I'm not working with land and water but I'm working with the wetness and so it's a kind of a non-dualistic sort of approach to thinking anti-philosophizing and theorizing but it's a non-binary you know I mean because I mean I just find this actually quite fascinating we've dominated water we put water in the surface of land I mean in every other binary we have questioned but we never questioned land water binary you know where we made water the slave of land you know and and we just sort of accept it so one way to see what we're doing actually you can see this liberating water but on the other hand it's not just about it's about doing away with the binary in its entirety and working with wetness so that means doing away with the line but to come to your other point actually on floating I mean on you know on on systems actually that work with with a form of wetness that is water on which you live I mean it's something of course that we very well I consider that a kind of a high ground in a way you know but but but you're right I mean I should actually distinguish it in but I can give you an example actually I had a student working in Bangladesh on muslin on muslin and muslin is this cloth you know I mean it's made with cotton but it is so fine you know that you had meters and meters of it folded into a matchbox you know and so there's a much treasured by the British and so they encouraged its its making but it was made he found actually with the level of humidity you know that and the level of humidity was required and this now has died you don't make muslin anymore actually I mean it's a craft that is gone and they're trying to recover it now but just think about what it takes to recover to recover it I need to recover the humidity and then I asked him so how was it made then where was it made and then he said that there are these stories that of mermaids you know mermaids in the mist in in England mermaids in the mist that make muslin and so you put a mermaid in the mist they were making muslin in boats and that and even if they were on land if you wish they had their feet in water because they had to keep this humidity going to get this fineness actually of the thread of the cotton and so he said then so he went into asking this question so what kind of urbanism and you know what the sort of urbanism I said no that's the wrong question to ask it's not about urbanism I mean this is actually a habitation that is a mode of habitation that works beautifully with with you know in boats that that people actually lived on so why do you want to gather it into some kind of settlement you know into settlements so unsettled so I would think I would I mean especially with the amazon where you know what I admire about the amazon is that it has defied the drawing of lines the only way they can dam the amazon is to actually construct these bypasses at massive costs and then dam those bypasses you know yeah but I'm saying but that sense actually of of defining the the line has been the most difficult in a situation like this and and so I would think actually that that you know it's it is extreme wetness actually is how I would describe the boat situation where people live on moving situations like that is an extreme wetness of let's say you know if I do talk about that gradient that I was the thing about less and more that would be more you know and it certainly is very much but to understand it on the ground of wetness is not to search for land you know as this boy was doing he said no so okay so what is there you know where do they come in as if they come in to land somewhere you know and and it's interesting actually because in these neighborhoods is the opposite the movement they do is when it dries out when it goes down they search for high water so they move they move towards so they want to maintain that level of wetness actually which is just fine you know I mean I would think I mean the way in which I look at the mound and saying is that it's an appreciation of the gradient it's a wetness gradient that that moves from from from less dry to I mean less wet to to more wet and it can be seasonal now I don't expect people to be nomadic but but there is that sense of economic and infrastructural appropriation actually of lower grounds and higher grounds or in this case you know wetter wetter grounds and less wet I think you have your hand up hi thank you so much for your lecture I spent the last couple years working in New Orleans so the gulf south cities are certainly going through time in which reintegrating wetness into the landscape is the current planning paradigm in Miami and Houston after Harvey but particularly in New Orleans and I know other cities one of the difficulties of integrating water into the landscape is actual pushback from the community and public because the history has been to separate these cities from water and wetness as a source of protection and after terrible storms like Katrina Harvey all these hurricanes that hit there's certainly a feeling of that's emotional and there's a lot of fear around wetness and water so as designers I'm interested in kind of hearing action items or steps to take to combat that reality that definitely exists besides just visualization yeah I mean I'm not sure how to answer that I mean that's a landscape I'm sort of very familiar with and I know actually the sentiments of some of these places I mean even in Norfolk actually we're working I mean I went to a community meeting once and I mean it really was quite I say it's moving shaking I know what it is but but I was in this you know around tables I mean and this was some kind of community gathering and then suddenly somebody started this refrain you know the water is coming the water is coming and everybody was yelling water is coming water's coming you know I mean it was like this religious kind of flow you know and and so there is certainly a desire for dry ground and that's that has been you know sort of conditioning and and so in the kind of current situation I'm not sure I'm also I'm also sort of familiar with this with this increased wetting but it's more from the point of solicitation actually because of the sinking of sinking of land and the confinement of the Mississippi to a single channel I mean one of the things that we had actually uncovered in our book in our research is actually in the 1990s was this was this whole was a division actually at the old river control structure at Angola you know we're in you know you're 70 percent down Mississippi and 30 percent down the Achefalaya you know and just to keep this Mississippi going and to prevent it from becoming an estuary I think we just take away that control structure then just allow it to become an estuary I mean I don't know if there's anything wrong in it and we've got to figure out other ways of actually getting water to these places of course I'm thinking water but the the situation of actually resilting resilting land can only be done with channels unfortunately because that is going back to Herodotus and his observation he made some beautiful observations this man I mean and we're talking about the fifth century BC where he actually spoke about the Nile actually as you know as making Egypt but then in order to visualize it for us he actually describes you know he says that if I had to turn the Nile into the Gulf into the basically the Arabian Gulf which means the Red Sea it will fill up in so many years so he had actually seen geologically actually the structuring of this of the filling up of the basin which is actually been proved right by by geologists now but he talks about filling up the Red Sea as well you know in the city so the thing is but you can only think through channels unfortunately you know and so as a designer I would actually operate in this in this manner of you know and you have to be political about it we are facing the same politics in in Norfolk with the raising of the ground people saying who's ground are going to raise you know people got to be opportunistic about this you've got to know you know we've got to be looking at derelict sites you're looking at post-industrial sites let's raise them you know let's say so so it's the same thing with the channels actually and the deposition of silt in the lower Mississippi I would just be strategic actually about about how I do it why I do it you know and and and it has to be done politically that's I think that's your question I think it is it and you know but there's a lot of fight back in in actually demonstrating the idea because of fear immediately and you've got to got to find a way to have people relax and say listen you're thinking the long term you've got to do something you don't have to do it the way I'm saying it but let's get together actually and say where can we do it you know and and let's strategize together so somewhere we have to we have to reconstruct the public you know which is a I mean I think a project that really requires to be done in the face of in the face of sea level rise and the kind of problems that you face today especially looking at a part of the ship you know to carry people with you Zavid okay yeah this river versus rain and wetness and flow is the ship in the mine and it's really clear like how this happens because to control the process of time people try to control the river to like that's where I the boat and the same way as we grow up so my question is how because in theory I understand it's very clear how this happened but to you how these questioning these observations your regulations happened like at the beginning or I don't know I went into exile into the desert actually and it all came to me I mean the question actually is promoted by some in some sense by actually the current issues that we face with sea level rise and and it's something that has troubled us actually since working on the Mississippi wherein we saw the Indian mounds the Native American mounds in the in the the thing I need we began to see that you know people started telling us that this is another method of flood control you know and dealing with flood and we all are going to be said that they don't even see flood you know I mean what do you mean by flood I mean they didn't see a Mississippi flow from a point down you know and the it sort of rose and fell so that actually triggered a thought and so we I think there is an undertone to our work which is actually driven by political injustice or social injustice actually and the questions and when we went to India you just look at a mess that is that is that is unfolding over there I mean it is serious I mean and you guys have actually been part of it I mean this is this is a destruction actually of you know of of the surface of the earth I mean you know all our forests are disappearing all at the end and so we're beginning to see actually this larger it is coming together of social injustice actually and environmental disaster you know and and it can and and I think it's sort of you know I mean we you read the things also like for example and and I read if you have read Hokides is 12 labours for example where in one labor he's asked to clean the stables of clean orges and what does he do actually he moves the he moves the river alphas actually to clean the clean the stables and it's the only way you can do it actually in the time that he had right and but then he's hercules no so boy and now we're all hercules we can move rivers at will you know and you say that how did he lift up the river and you know like a hose pipe you know like we saw the guy doing it in the Ganges on the guards you know he was hercules you know cleaning the cleaning the guard actually of the of the of the muck so that sense actually you know I mean if it's not a god who's doing it and if it's us who's doing it I mean there's any of this possible and then everything sort of added up and we said that this doesn't make sense you know and especially actually what gets me the most actually is how ecologists accept flooding as a natural phenomenon if I ask an ecologist what is flood you'll say it is a natural phenomenon so we talk about the flood plain we talk about this we talk it's a natural how can it be natural if it's water crossing a line and I can only do it actually because I'm a designer and I'm aware of the drawing of a line everyone else just takes this line for granted you know and the same but I know the act of drawing because I teach drawing you know and I've been teaching drawing you know to landscape students for you know for how many years now you know and we go into the distinction and we tell students don't draw the object try to draw the light what does that mean you know I mean you know we are in this part of the pedagogical sort of imperative that we're in in but then when you ask I mean it all gathers around this so this book actually is really coming together of all these contradictions that as designers we just accept just because scientists say and what I don't like is how designers just follow what science says the scientists say this we all go running after that you know we're like ambulance chasers you know and then the facts change and we go do after that I mean and so why can't we think for ourselves you know I mean and and and we have our own kind of researching and that is why I make a distinction between design research actually and social science research design research is driven by possibilities I think possibilities I don't think facts alone I think of what is possible and so that sense of actually moving is to actually see possibility in history as well so I don't know if I'm asking a question but it's really you know a meeting ground I think ultimately I would say social injustice and and environmental disaster I think design research is driven by possibility is a great way to end and it's almost three o'clock so thank you so much for a really really stimulating lecture thank you very much