 Hello everybody, welcome to Land From Water, the ninth and final conversation on architecture and land in the Americas. My name is Uchea Elias, I'm the director of the Vios Center for the Study of American Architecture. The series started two years ago as a forum to learn from scholars and designers and thinkers, architects, archeologists, whose work helps to clarify the implications of land and architecture. Our hypothesis is that land is not something that comes before architecture, but rather that architecture participates in the fabrication behind us. The plural Americas in the title is intended to help reframe the mission of the Vios Center for the Study of American Architecture by reminding us that American architecture exists in hemispheric and global relations with the rest of the world, and also reminding us that there are always several Americas within the United States. So before I introduce you to today's conversation, just two pieces of Vios News, the eponymous book here, but there's many in the other room, from in which many of the insights that we've learned over the last two years are collected, has been published. It was launched as part of the Chicago Biennial Misfal. It's available in print, while supplies last, and as a PDF. So if you wanted to grab one over there, or email us, thank you. This book is serviceable. Beautiful book designed by Maria Otsuka. So get yours, and if you're on Zoom, email us and we'll send you one. Secondly, mark your calendars for April 12th at 5 p.m., where we will have a public event on the theme of architecture and abundance. It's a kind of, we can call this an occasional abundance talk. I don't know, I'm working on your feedback on that title. There's a scholarly project going on which builds on this land project that focuses more specifically on the way that American building and landscape traditions have naturalized land as a bountiful commodity and also, therefore, regulated the kind of inevitable counterpart, which is scarcity. So the two speakers will be Jennifer Trung, who will present on Benjamin La Trobe's American Order, shown here in its kind of corny-cocaine splendor on the right. And our first post-doctoral bill fellow, Marla King, who is actually sitting right here, I'm also announcing right now, who will talk on the so-called Indian cottage find in the late 19th century. So again, and Danny Abramson will give a response. Again, Friday, April 12th, 5 p.m. Okay, so let's go to today's event. As you know, season three of the land series have turned our attention to the political economy of land and of all of the elements that have kind of made their way into our historical explanations of the built environment and its political economy, water is the most difficult to theorize and say. So take air. Somehow I don't have a slide for this. I'm gonna go back to this. So if you take air, thinking about architecture and landscape as containers or conveyors of air, especially in light of climate change, has destabilized the landedness of architecture in a very specific way, which is that it has pointed us to kind of distant causality. Air is something that points to the kind of event that where something happened in one place because of air or CO2 emitted in a completely different place. And so this distant temporality and its discreteness has led to a very specific kind of theorization of the role that air can play in the industry of architecture. Or if you think about soil, and we've heard a lot about sort of this land series. The fact that buildings require intervention into the soil and often disturbance of soil has meant rethinking architecture's kind of situatedness, what used to be called its rootedness in terms of chemical inheritances. Concepts that have been very productive from the idea of chemical kinship, for example, to also thinking of history in terms of half lives. So very productive conceptual apparatus that we get from thinking about soil. But with water, things are not so simple. So water, I would say, is both more victorial. It points in a very specific direction, but also more kind of complex than water. So to take our site as an example, as we do, the rocks that are underneath our feet and still visible in Central Park. Water is a material flow that has shaped these rocks. So if you go to Central Park and you go stand on these amazing rocks, you'll see that they're, of course, layered by geological accumulation, but they're also marked by a striation in the other direction that happened during a very specific moment 12,000 years ago, when the glacier that used to top Manhattan began to melt and move and in the process, straining and marking the ground. So on one hand, water is this very kind of material force. But if you're looking for how water affects patterns of settlement even today, you wouldn't say it's a material force. You would say it's more something like a haunt. So this is a map drawn from an article, a very nice article about the natural history of Manhattan which shows in plan and section that what really matters is that there's a big crevice here, which means that the quality of land and the soil along Broadway has been very specifically affected, affecting patterns of real estate and even of the clip of urban renewal that has happened there. So there is not so much that water is a material force, it's more kind of like a sub-layer. And then, of course, finally, if you go a little bit further upstate, and this is not a picture from upstate, but it is a picture of indigenous communities feeling the toxicity of certain water that is upstream from them, if you will find that water is more of a kind of subject of real politic, kind of economic, something that has to be economically compensated for because indigenous communities know very well that land-bound boundaries, meaning fences that are on the ground, are not much use if you are next to an industrial settlement which is upstream from us. And this is the direction in which flows have to be. There's one more spot, right here. So in order to think about all of this, we have called upon two early modernists, Sal and Herr and Caroline Murphy. And the reason for this is because they're going to take us to a moment just before the most recent reinvention of rivers, just before, basically, all over the world, plains that were just a place where rainwater collects were shaped into more or less pictorial lines of rivers. And when, therefore, the idea that you could shape political economy and governance through water was a little bit more legible both in discourse and in the land itself. So without further ado, let me introduce our speakers and I'll do it in the order in which they will speak. So to my immediate right is Stella Neck. She's a professor of indigenous art and architecture of the America's AUCLA. Her work, I'm going to shorten your bios, I'm sorry. Go to our website for the very lengthy and stellar bios. Her work is shaped by her interest in spatial practices, cultural landscapes, oral and ephemeral architecture, gender studies, construction technology and hemispheric networks. She was trained as an architect as an architectural historian. She's published two books. The first is at home with the Sapa Incas. The second is the Stones of Tewanaka. Tewanaka, thank you. And she's working on the third and she's a much-permated scholar, so I invite you to go visit her list of honors as well. Immediately to her right is Carolyn Murphy, who's an assistant professor in the history, theory and criticism of architecture and art at MIT, department of which we're very familiar. Her research and teaching explored interconnected material and intellectual histories of environmental engineering, state administration and political economy in early modern Europe and global contact zones. Her current project, from which we'll read today, focuses on the alluvial designs and planning of Italy on the eve of the Little Ice Age. I love that, Little Ice Age. Primarily in Tuscany. She's also received it on her project. And our respondent today is my colleague and friend, Atia Coricova, who has lost her voice, so she will be very silent until she has to speak. Who is, of course, an assistant professor here at the London GCSEF. So, without further ado, Stella, we're gonna start with you and take it away. It's a great honor to be here. Of course, the Beale Center has a loon large in any architectural historian's life, so it's a deep honor to be invited. And so many thanks, Lucia, for having me and Michelle for the tremendous work that you did to make this all happen. It's greatly appreciated. And thank you all for coming. I understand it's exam week. Is that correct? Yes, for some people. So, thank you so much. Okay. The Incas homeland lay in the Cusco Valley, which is nestled high in the Central Andean Mountains. During the 15th and early 16th centuries, the Incas rapidly transformed their small steady state into the largest indigenous empire in the history of the Americas, and one of the largest in the world at the time. This expansion meant that the Inca Empire incorporated a diversity of environmental zones, which ranged from high montane glaciers to the driest of deserts. It also meant that the Inca ruled over an immense number of diverse peoples, many of which were newly conquered. In order to control this vast, varied and often challenging landscape, the Inca developed complex strategies in which architecture was used to inscribe and control their new territories physically, visually, and spiritually. The architect Garaciano Gasparini and the anthropologist Luis Margeles called this built environment the Inca architecture of power. In today's paper, I will discuss how this architecture of power radically reshaped the Andes, creating new physical and conceptual maps that articulated dominance through layers of exclusion. My examples will draw from what is today the Departamento del Cusco in Peru. It is within the space that laid the Inca heartland, the capital of Cusco, as well as many rural estates such as Machu Picchu and Chinchero. It is also within the space that we see most clearly the Inca's profound reshaping of both land and water. As Simon Shaman, so eloquently described in his now classic book, Landscape and Memory, forests, mountains, and valleys embody deeper social meanings, mapping out histories, belief systems, and social dynamics. In the geographically diverse and difficult terrain of the Andes, mountains were the source of origin stories, community identities, and the basis for survival. As the Inca expanded, controlling the landscape was crucial to dominating the populace. On a practical level, the vast vertical terrain of the Andes made building and farming difficult. Therefore, earth-moving projects such as terraces created much-needed land for building and agriculture. While Andean peoples prior to the Inca made terraces, no one approached the Incas in quality and quantity. Inca engineering took into account underground water systems and land stability in order to create agriculturally productive lands in even the most remote places. It's hard to overstate the challenges that Inca engineers and architects faced. The Andes is the longest mountain chain in the world and the third tallest, and the Andes, like much of the Western rim of the Americas, is geologically young. Thus, the Andean mountains have deep layers of dynamic soils that have not yet been shed from the mountains' rocky core. In addition, due to melting glaciers, there are numerous rivers and streams above ground as well as tremendous subsurface water movement below. These glaciers provide much of the water upon which Andean peoples depended and continued to depend for survival. The Andes also lies along the Pacific Rim of Fire, one of the most volatile and powerful earthquake zones in the world. The result is a dynamic entanglement of land, water, and movement that is difficult to harness, yet doing so is the key to survival. We can get a glimpse of these challenges facing Inca engineers and architects by looking at the royal estate of Machu Picchu. This 15th century country-estate residence is often attributed to the ruler Patakuti when he invaded and conquered this region. For the Inca to build was an expression of power for the state and for individual rulers. The size chosen for the royal estate was in a critical space where rare sightlines to multiple major abus or sacred mountains were visible. Hence, the location was a particularly potent one, albeit one that was a construction challenge. The site sits on a narrow saddle that lies between two steep mountain peaks. Two fault lines run across both ends of the saddle and the dramatically steep landscape was prone to slides. Though there were nearby freshwater springs that were fed by melting glaciers, finding spaces suitable for building and farming would have been a challenge. Hence, the Inca had to dramatically excavate and rebuild this landscape. While there's been much attention given to this sophistication of Inca buildings, especially at Machu Picchu, these impressive structures are the only the end of a long and complex construction process. The hydraulic engineer, Kenneth Wright, and the archeologist Alfredo Valencia Sagara estimate that over 60% of the labor that went into constructing Machu Picchu happened below the surface we see today. As has been confirmed by recent research, the Inca excavated deep into the mountain in order to remove unstable layers of soil and stone. They then constructed impressive terraces that redefined the mountainscape. One half of this stable new land, on one half of this stable new land, the Inca created a sizable terraced farmland. And on the other, they constructed an elaborate elite complex with an array of impressive buildings that could house the ruler as well as the private and public functions associated with the royal residence. The Inca built sustainably so that the excess materials produced during one stage of the building process could be used in another. For example, the lithic debris resulting from the carving of building stones was used to facilitate water drainage at the site. This crushed rock was placed in distinct layers alternating with strata of sand and eventually topsoil in terraces and in plazas. Together, these layers safely percolated excess rainwater into the ground. During this process of excavation and reshaping, the Inca developed several strategies to carefully manage water above and below ground. At Machu Picchu, the Inca constructed an elaborate canal system that brought to the site freshwater from a series of natural springs which themselves were fed by melting glaciers. The Inca canals were designed to accommodate different flow rates of water. Drainage holes and canals were laid that collected excess water from the surface and water catchment basins were made to gather and divert water away from building foundations. The Incas also made the movement of water above ground an important part of the visual and oral experience of the site, such as a series of 16 fountains that animated the royal residence in sight and sound. Hence, the complex hydraulic system that brought freshwater in, graywater out and stabilized land also stimulated the senses. Given that the canals of Machu Picchu were designed to carry far more than the average rainfall and thus far beyond what was needed, it is also clear that the Inca engineers planned for an unprecedented future. 500 years later, this landscape is remarkably stable and its extensive water system still functions today. The Inca did not describe themselves as having an empire. Instead, they saw themselves as bringing order to a disordered world. They called their land Taowintan Suyu, the land of the For you Suyus or quarters. The dramatic landscape changes that Machu Picchu was an example of this process of bringing order to a disordered space. But for the Incas, this ordering was beyond the physical to the social and the political and they use land and water to carry out their goals. An example of this can be seen in Cusco, the Inca capital. The Inca built their capital when where two rivers come together. In the Andes, this type of space is called a tinkwi and it is considered to be especially sacred and powerful. Only members of elite corporate groups called Panaca could live in Cusco. Water also defines sections within the city. As the anthropologist Jeanette Shirvandi has shown, irrigation districts organized the city and network of canals, their branches and reservoirs defined irrigation districts within the urban core. The Inca assigned corporate groups to these districts according to their rank. Hence the most important and powerful Panaca was assigned the most valuable irrigation district. The Inca did the same with the canals in the larger Cusco Valley with non-Inca corporate groups called IUs. Thus the Inca used water to define land and power. In doing so, land and water mapped out hierarchy within the city as well as Inca authority over colonized people in the larger Valley. These irrigation districts also connected much more distant Inca sites to the capital in unique ways. Sites which themselves made visible Inca authority over local communities and their sacred lands and water. According to Shirvandi, two Panaca in Cusco were the most powerful and because of this, they had the most important irrigation districts in the capital. One was Inca, which was associated with the ruler Patrikuti, the patron of Machu Picchu. They controlled the Chacan canals. The second was Capac, which was associated with Patrikuti's son Topa Inca. This irrigation district drew water from Lake Piorai, which is located 20 kilometers from Cusco, an extremely long canal system called the Chinchera Tikatika was built to bring this water to Cusco, flowing directly to Capac's irrigation district. Canals such as these show how Inca power was mapped both within the capital of Cusco and onto the larger imperial landscape. Inca corporate groups not only had rights to their irrigation districts within Cusco, but also to the lands from which their water flowed. For example, Lake Piorai, which fed Topa Inca's irrigation district in Cusco was located on the lands of his country estate, which included his royal residence at Chinchera. However, moving between the two ends of the Chinchera Tikatika canal system would have been difficult for most people since traveling the Inca empire was highly regulated in the form of roads and guard stations. To travel from Cusco to Lake Piorai or to Canita, New onto Machu Picchu meant one would have to go on an Inca highway called the Capac Nyan. In the Inca empire, roads were built solely for the use of the armies and others on official Inca business. This was a highly effective way to control movement and repress revolt in the Inca empire. The map shown here depicts the major highways built by the Incas. Anyone on a road without permission would be put to death or could be put to death. When groups rose up in rebellion, the Incas, after crushing the uprising, often banished survivors to remote locations scattered across the empire. The control of her travel would have ended the possibility of a collective group revolt and prevented displaced individuals from returning home. The building in control of roads also ended traditional migrations that had been at the core of Andean life. The dramatic vertical landscape that characterizes the Andes created distinct microclimates that can only grow a restricted number of crops. Therefore, in order to obtain needed supplies, families and corporate groups had to travel and sometimes live in different ecological zones. By cutting off these links, the Incas severed access to the lands and products that were crucial for survival, making inhabitants even more dependent on the rich storehouses of the Incas. For colonized people, our prime punish nobility, roads were not means of access but became visible symbols of dispossession and displacement. The Incas were able to exert such close control of their roads, such as the one that connected Cusco to one of its major water sources at Lake Pirae with a series of Tombows or way stations. Inca Tombows were built along the roads to serve the purposes of supervising travel and providing a place for rest and ritual. The type of Tombow built reflected the travelers that it was meant to serve, such as armies, dignitaries, station guards or messengers. One of the most important aspects of the Tombow is that they had a freshwater source for the parched travelers. Evidence suggests that there were several Tombows leading to Lake Pirae and other installations on Topa Incas country estate. Pekakachu, a small terrace site on the main road to Chinchero, lies at a critical curve in the road and it is likely an example of an Inca Tombow. Modern farming has heavily destroyed the site. What remains is shown here. Travelers would not have known of its existence until they were directly upon the site and thus would be easily caught by the guards if they were traveling illegally. The size of the site indicates that it could have held a small retinue who had granted permission, could pause for a much needed drink at a series of fountains whose remains are still found today. For those special few who are allowed to travel on the Inca Road from Cusco to Lake Pirae, they would have come upon a very special shrine. This shrine, called Cooper Baja today, consists of a series of curved terraces with the Inca characteristic polygonal stone masonry. But as what is most unusual about this shrine is that the Inca also built half-scale and miniature walls, the latter of which was of a multicolored polygonal masonry and is the only Inca miniature wall that survives today. According to oral history and Ushnu or altar, one stood at the top of the site. All of these structures are oriented towards Lake Pirae, reminding sanctioned travelers of the Inca's control over religious worship and basic subsistence needs, such as water. Lake Pirae is still a key water source to the city of Cusco today. It is important to remember that this distinctly Inca landscape with its networks of roads, terraces, and shrines effectively erased this lake's connection to the local non-Inca community. This built environment is an example of how the Incas re-inscribed the Andes as Inca. According to the historian, Murillo Rostrovsky de Diez-Cuseco, Topa Inca built his country estate, which included Lake Pirae on the Iomarca homeland. The Iomarca had a long history of conflict and negotiated peace with the Inca, even eventually becoming Inca by privilege. But Topa Inca's transformation of their lands as Inca, which included taking possession of land that included a much valued and venerated lake, was a clear statement of imperial Inca authority and power. Another example of this can be seen in Topa Inca's royal residence, Chinchero, which lies very close to Lake Pirae and its shrine. Like Machu Picchu and Cuseco, Chinchero was an impressive Inca royal estate set on a hillside, and like Machu Picchu, the Inca builders had to extensively excavate and rebuild that hillside with terraces and a complex, with terraces and a complex above and below a round hydraulic system. And like Machu Picchu, large portions of earth and stone were removed from an unstable hillside in order to create a cascade of terraces which were punctuated by a plaza and palace compound. While this allowed the fertile valley nearby to be farmed and created a habitable hillside, the renovations had great sacred implications as well. For many people, Pachamama, literally earth mother, was an important sacred force. Any action to carve into Pachamama, even for farming required special rituals. The Incas appeared to have used this perception of the landscape to heighten their power and mystique. By transforming the landscape on a massive scale, the Incas identified themselves and became identified with sacred forces. This was used to justify their domination and reshaping of the Andes and can be seen in its connection to origin stories. For example, the Incas told the story of their first Inca ancestors to arrive in the valley of Cusco. Using a slingshot to turn mountains into planes, these Inca ancestors physically and spiritually transformed the local landscape into their sacred capital. At Chinchero, Topa Inca similarly transformed a hillside to make visible his power over the region, albeit with an immense labor force. For the Inca, making visible this connection between the Inca and nature was of paramount importance and was done in multiple ways. For example, the Inca made this connection with their choice of masonry. Many of the distinctive buildings at Machu Picchu, Cusco and Chinchero, was made with a visually striking stone masonry, made of finely carved, mortalist, ashlar and polygonal blocks. The Incas used this architectural tradition as a clearly recognizable symbol of their power and rule that dominated the newly conquered landscape. Reserved for elite Inca buildings, this distinctive architecture visually proclaimed a site's high status to any traveler of visiting dignitary. The association of this type of architecture with Inca power can be seen in the writings of chroniclers compiled in the century after the Spanish invasion in 1532. For example, Juan de Batanzo states that Inca informants stressed that it was the Inca ruler himself who took a chord to measure and lay out important sites and in the case of Cusco, it was the ruler who chose the stone and helped to lay the bricks. This association can also be seen in the writings and drawings of the indigenous author and artist Guaman Pomadeyala, one of his drawings shown here to pick young Inca nobles, laying the distinctive ashlar blocks and an Inca wall. Stone has a long history in the Andes in terms of both the skill needed to work this challenging material as well as the recognitions of stone's abilities to embody sacredness. Stone outcrops did this, that did this could be called Waka. The importance of these sacred outcrops and mountains can be seen in the numerous way they appear in Inca orange in stories, such as when one of the Inca founders became part of a sacred mountain and was worshiped. Another example is the narrative that Patricuti, the patron of Machu Picchu, was reported to have called upon a collection of Waka to save Cusco in a critical battle. According to this narrative, these stones transformed themselves into great warriors and defeated the invaders of the Inca capital. Once the battle was over, these temporary warriors returned back into being Waka's. The Inca made the built environment to highlight their close ties to the sacred world, often by blurring the lines between what is natural and what is man made. An example of this division and relationship can be seen at Machu Picchu. Here, to your left, a constructed wall appears to be more like a rocky cliff face than human construction. This union between the natural and the man made can also be seen in the image to your right where an Inca building is blended into a sacred outcrop. This is also at Machu Picchu. Perhaps the most potent part of the power of the Inca architecture power that involved both land and water is the Inca use of labor. The Inca were a relatively small community and hence had to rely on others to carry out many Inca directives. This forced delegation is especially seen in Inca architecture. The labor required to build the impressive Inca terraces at Machu Picchu, the canals in Cusco, and the shrines at Lake Pirae near Chinchero was all likely supplied by non-Inca peoples. Throughout the empire, colonized populations were sent far from their homes to work as part of their labor tax for the Inca state. The Inca state depended upon its vast building projects to house the infrastructure of its rapidly growing empire. Hence much labor was called upon to undertake these works. According to the colonial sources, 50,000 workers were constricted to build Topa Inca's residence at Chinchero. Inca technological superiority in the form of terraces and irrigation systems allowed for increased productivity, but for colonized population, it meant the loss of control over one's land, water, and labor. For the Inca, land and water were deeply entangled, forming a unit in which the Inca used in their built environment to reshape the Andes and reorganize local populations. Inca architectural gestures were not a secondary means of control, but were a critical part of state expansion and conquest. Instead of relying on brute force and defensive structures to establish Inca hierarchies of power and control, the Inca leadership manipulated land and water to exert their control. They transformed unstable and rocky hillsides to create much needed spaces to farm and build and developed advanced hydraulic systems to irrigate farmlands and provide much needed fresh drinking water. But this meant that they disposed some local populations from their lands, resources, and sacred spaces while others received access according to how the Inca's ranked them. The Inca built an extensive road system that enabled the Inca to have a quick and easy access to most places in the empire with the same time preventing movement for everyone else. And by using their architecture to re-inscribe locally venerated places as their own, the Inca augmented their connection to the sacred while distancing those for local populations. In some, the Inca engineered an impressive built environment that physically, conceptually, and spiritually transformed Andean land and water and in doing so radically reshaped the Western Rim of South America. Thank you. Thank you. While we do a switch, can I ask a quick question? Yeah, might that be to imagine water cascading down these terraces or is water just in the soil right over there? Yeah, it doesn't cascade. It doesn't cascade? No. It's really great because of those different layers. It actually can store water so that it's really good for farming. So it flows, but in you don't have runoff problems. Into the ground, not forward. Yep. Thank you for your introduction earlier, Lucia. Thank you, Stella, for the fabulous paper. Thank you, Michelle, for helping coordinate this event. And I look forward to the discussion after. So thank you, Lucia, as well. And thanks to you all for coming. So when it comes to early modern land and water infrastructures, one of the most famous examples that probably jumps to mind for architectural historians, at least in the European context, is the Canal du Midi. The monumental 150-mile-long canal constructed in southern France in the late 17th century. The canal, which linked the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean via the Garonne River, was pitched as a strategic piece of political economic technology and a product highway that could deliver to foreign markets, the wheat, wine, silk, and other products harvested and produced by Languedoc struggling farmers, while also allowing the crown to consolidate its power over this historically mutinous region. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Canal du Midi is one of Europe's oldest still-functioning canals, but it's unlikely realization in the face of so many technical and political challenges has itself obscured a very basic fact. This canal was only one rare physical manifestation of a much older and more diffuse set of engineering ambitions. In my talk today, I'm going to bring us back in time by a century and to an altogether different place, the New Ducal State of Tuscany in central Italy, to explore the rise of a fervent infrastructural imaginary, which reshaped how people within and without the nascent discipline of architecture began to conceive of the possibilities for the complex, often chaotic disposition of land and water. Before proceeding, I wanna issue just a brief comment on my invocation of the term infrastructure. The word itself first emerged in the late 19th century to describe the preparatory works needed before laying railroad track. In France and in Spain, it was then translated into English in the early 20th century when it came to characterize all manner of transportation projects. Responding to such usage histories, modern scholars, mostly anthropologists have defined infrastructures as causal technologies, material assemblages that permit the movement of other matter, capital, and people to support economic systems. So while the word as such did not exist in early modernity, we must recognize that it's essential concept along with all of these functional promises, most certainly did. Starting around the second third of the 16th century, in fact, there arose at least in Italy a palpable discourse about the aquatic landscape as a space that could and most importantly should be physically recast to advance circulation, yielding economic benefits for the Duke, the state, and its subjects. While I'll touch briefly today on some material practices of recasting rivers and wetlands in this period, my principal concern will remain with discourse, ideas preserved on paper, texts mostly, some of which we see on the screen here, that chronicle an array of audacious aquatic infrastructures that remained forever in the realm of the imaginary. Though never marking the landscape physically, they point to an array of futures past, which together tell us a great deal about how early modern people thought about the intersections between the improvement of water and the improvement of wealth. The first argument that I'll advance here then is that this infrastructural imaginary in Tuscany centered chiefly on the aquatic landscape's commercial affordances, how rivers and streams could be transformed into seamless passages. While this particular utility might seem like a natural one for us today, it was not at all in this earlier period when rivers fed industrial and domestic processes, often in competition with one another, as these admittedly stylized scenes from a manual on fishing and hunting evoke, while also fluctuating uncontrollably themselves, the levels of the rivers from season to season, which I'll also get to momentarily. A second point I wanna make today has to do with expertise. Converting rivers into dedicated circulatory infrastructures raised a host of novel questions. How precisely should waterways be shaped? Where in the landscape could or should a canal flow? And most importantly, who should be trusted to advise on these questions? Who could be entrusted to do it properly? I argue that as governing elites grew interested in the possibilities of reshaping aquatic landscapes at scale, the problems of water management long the domain of hydraulic engineers and architects began to attract a host of interlopers whom I call projectors without hydraulic experience whatsoever. Great idea. Scaling from across court and government, projectors inserted themselves forcefully into discussions about the future of aquatic territory, calling attention to the fact that the problems of water spilled beyond traditional domains, architecture included, and demanded new strategic forms of knowledge of statecraft, politics, economics, geography, among other sundry endeavors. Before pressing on though, I wanna just take a few moments to sketch out the context in which this aquatic infrastructural imagination emerges in Tuscany. It came on the heels of intensified engineering activity in the wider Tuscan landscape. Activity targeted at resolving an increasingly urgent problem that of flooding. While inundations had for centuries posed occasional threats to the myriad river towns and villages of central Italy, during the central decades of the 16th century, a combination of factors associated with the onset of the little ice age, as historical climatologists call it, resulted in more frequent and catastrophic flood events with an elevated toll on life and property. Here on the right juxtaposed with an Arno River flood map from the mid 16th century, I'm showing you Florence, Tuscany's capital, under floodwaters in 1966 flood, which by all accounts was the worst since the 16th century, probably since 1557. With almost every inundation that swept through Tuscany, but especially through Florence, the Medici and government took action in an attempt to mitigate such disasters in the future. In August 1547, for example, on the heels of a particularly bad flood, memorialized here in the urban fabric with a flood marker, which is about my height when I'm standing, the Ducal government issued a slew of legislation meant to protect rivers and stabilize riparian spaces. Then two years later, in 1549, it founded a new specialized rivers management office called the Ufficali de Fiumi, literally the officials of the rivers, staffed with practically trained engineers, as well as bricklayers, carpenters and stone masons who had cut their teeth in urban worksites, as well as on Ducal Villa, garden and fountain projects. The jurisdiction of this river's office extended across the Dutch's dominions, working along a modest stretch only of the state's principal Arno River from the towns of San Giovanni Valdorno to the Confolina seen here. This office engaged in the maintenance and repair of flood defense structures, which ranged from timber posts pounded vertically into sandy shorelines to earthen and reed embankments to Gavian structures assembled from rope and stone. Beyond this modest space though, the office for the most part delegated tasks of alluvial defense and engineering to towns and private landowners by merely enforcing and policing much older riparian laws, some going back to ancient Rome and punishing those who violated them. In the end, these working methods, as I argue elsewhere, were not all that novel, pursued as they were by earlier public works offices in the state, but they were also reactive, relying on subjects, as I mentioned, to duly note problems in a timely manner. But over the course of a couple of decades, the Ufficelli de Fiumi gradually begin to revise their practices, engaging in more proactive methods of flood mitigation and expanding the scope of their tariff forming interventions to make a very long story quite short. And it's in this context, starting around the year 1570, that projectors begin to arrive on the scene, appealing to the Duke for honors and patronage. They wrote about the deficiencies they perceived in the landscape and made audacious proposals for how they should be rectified. Now, projectors often dub their ideas in prese, an Italian word that means enterprises, but also called them lavori, or works, and my favorite, disenni, or designs, the landscape, they're literally thinking about designing it. Typically, these proposals took flood containment as their pretext before outlining other plans for recasting the landscape to improve commercial circulation among other economic benefits. The clustering of benefits was, as we'll see, a characteristic rhetorical move that projectors made in a bid to sell potential patrons on their plans. So was treating aquatic territory as a tabula rasa, an endlessly pliable space bounded only by the limits of human imagination. In the time remaining to give you a fuller sense of the texture of this infrastructural imaginary, I want to walk you in detail through just one early and particularly articulate example of a project, a text from 1568 titled, A Discourse on the Reclamation of the Peas and Plains, written by the Florentine patrician and bureaucrat, Lorenzo Albici. Part of the reason why this project is so rich is because Albici wrote it as a dialogue. In the 16th century, this was a literary, essentially fictional format. One that allowed an author to explore multiple points of view by delegating them to various characters in conversation. In this text, however, Albici's fictional protagonists are real people who are named. One is himself and the other is the duke architect Davide Fortini, who was a technician in the Uffi Cialide fiumi, as well as Giovanni di Alessandro Caccini, then superintendent of a similar river's office that was founded in Pisa. Now, because Albici is known and remembered today by historians, principally for this dialogue, he is usually described as a hydraulic architect. But I reconstructed his biography based on many other sources, and I found little evidence that he actually ever worked in this capacity. So instead, he would have composed this dialogue on the Pisan Plains in 1568 after a period stationed in this region, first as a territorial administrator in the mountain town of Barca on the top of the screen, and then as a treasurer to the duke's brother, Giovanni di Cosimo di Medici, who was then working as the archbishop of Pisa. While serving out these roles, it's plausible that he became familiar with the landscapes of Western Tuscany, its flood problems and its potentials for improvement. He probably got some ideas of his own. It's also possible that he met the flesh and blood, Fortini and Puccini, his fictional interlocutors, while he was in Pisa, since they were working on ducal building and river projects there at the time. These latter two were also among the duke's most favored technicians and administrators, as well as very well-recognized experts on alluvial matters. Albizzi's title announces his ostensible subject, the cessation of floods in Pisa and the drainage of its coastal marshlands. But as the dialogue unfolds, his focus on disaster mitigation gives way to a much grander set of transformations that involve straightening, diverting, and channeling the region's rivers into commercial infrastructures to better interconnect the alternately hilly, swampy, and cregy terrain. Albizzi's proposals are too numerous to name here, but culminated in the following principal gestures. First, cutting the Circhio river near the town of Avane. Circhio up here. So apologies about the legend, which got a little cut off, but the blue line will be the Circhio and the red is the Arno and then Albizzi's plan. Or sorry, the Circhio is on the top. Albizzi's plan is in the thick red and the Arno, the existing sort of trace of it is below. Sorry about this on the screen. So Albizzi's proposals started with cutting the Circhio river near the town of Avane. Second, filling the marshes of Norica and Vecchiano and the lake of Nassu-Chukoli with its sediments, while also cutting a diversion outlet to feed into and augment the canale di River Frata, which I'll show you in a second. Then in dramatic fashion, moving the Arno from Pisa by turning its course south to Pontadera to fill in the marshes of Stagno below before turning northwards to join back up with the Biantina and down through the canale of Ushiana to fill in the Arno's former bed. These operations, which coalesce around the Circhio river and its surrounding plains and mountains, display Albizzi's keen interest in developing western and upper Tuscany, the site of quarries, mines, and silk mills, and in bringing these regions into more reliable communication with the rest of the state. And as an aside, it's interesting to note that while the Taci was beginning to develop the Porto Livorno at this time to replace the Porto Pizano, which was silting in, it appears that this larger reorientation did not register for Albizzi. It was not yet apparent to him. When he was in Pisa, this was, again, still very much in its infancy as it points to this kind of alternative future, this alternative economic plan that was never, never realized. Now, as Albizzi unfolds his vision for this space, Cacchini and Fortini repeatedly challenge him. Skeptical about the technical feasibility of his scheme, they pepper him with questions about the risks and ramifications of his interventions. In response, Albizzi tries to persuade them to see his way, insistently justifying his infrastructural ideas, very utopian, in the light of their effectiveness at preventing floods, while also delivering a host of other economic benefits, especially the advancement of commercial exchange. So I'll touch on just a few examples to illustrate this dynamic. After suggesting slight tweaks to the Cerchio River, Albizzi thinks carefully about the best way to repair an artificial drainage channel around Pisa. Many of these, such as the Riva Fratta shown here, were losing water from evaporation in the summer and silt accumulation, inhibiting navigation and the reliable discharge of swampy waters. Albizzi also complained of their stench, citing bad vapors in the summer. To improve these channels, he proposes diverting them into them more water from the Cerchio. Beyond removing the stink, he said, this operation would supply, it connected irrigation channels, support industrial milling and restore easy navigation between Luca and Pisa, such that merchants could, and I quote, retrieve grain and other merchandise from that city. The commercial and infrastructural uses of these channels all connected together, interested Albizzi greatly, but Caccini and Fortini doubted his plans, fearing that the Cerchio could not supply all the water necessary to surface all of these varied functions. Albizzi's next infrastructural proposition was incredibly bold and met with substantial resistance. He declared that to liberate Pisa from floods, it would be, and I quote, necessary to remove the Arno such that it does not pass by Pisa, not even within a few miles. Fortini instantly challenged the suggestion, stating that, quote, the customs of the businesses would all come to nothing. Albizzi replied that he'd moved the Cerchio to Pisa anyways, replacing one river with another to ensure no harm to the city's commerce. To emphasize his sincerity, Albizzi even invoked as a foil an infamous example Vitruvius made in his day architectura of the Macedonian architect Dinocratis of Rhodes in devising a city on the slopes of Mount Athos for Alexander the Great. Dinocratis, as Vitruvius tells it, neglected to consider basic practicalities such as access to water and farm fields. Distancing himself from this egregious events, Albizzi insisted that he did not wish to say it like that architect, for he had thought about whence to get sufficient water to enable navigation. Albizzi's underlying interest in the infrastructural viability of Tuscany's landscape perhaps comes into sharpest relief when he goes beyond discussing nearly alluvial cutting to suggest what he calls his Caprice or his fantastical idea to tunnel a passage through the mountains by the town of San Giuliano, eight kilometers north northwest of Pisa. This feat would, and I quote, create a convenience for travelers because the mountain street, while not that long, is very disastrous and steep. In dialogue with Cacini and Fortini, Albizzi discussed creating a two-way carriage track to speed commerce between Luca and Pisa, which he also imagined as a toll route to raise funds for Ducal coffers. He suggested putting soil and stones storied from the tunnel to use for other building purposes and teased that, quote, perhaps one could find in the body of this mountain something of such importance that the cost would not be without evident profit. So he's alluding here to some sort of gold mining or some other sort of metal. For Albizzi, the project was quite literally an investment, one whose difficulty and expense were more than justified by its commodity and utility. Convinced at last of the merits of Albizzi's infrastructural promises, Fortini and Cacini compliment him on his valiant spirit. Their exchange just thus draws to a close and its protagonists bid farewell, committing to discuss improvements to the marshlands of the Val di Chiana, another marsh, and Siena upon their next meeting. And I have not found any evidence of this discussion, so their conclusions remain a mystery. By successfully persuading the skeptical Cacini and Fortini of the benefits of his circulatory plan, the flesh and blood of Albizzi could assert that he deserved the earnest consideration of his doogal readers in the real world. At a time when it was impossible to test or model the hydraulic effects of vast terraforming enterprises and to know in advance whether and such an enterprise would succeed or fail, the approval of cautious reputable technicians probably counted for a lot. The social and professional contest that unfolds in this text between Cacini, Albizzi and Fortini then is as central to its drama, as are his audacious proposals for transforming Pisa's aquatic territory into a seamlessly navigable infrastructure network. And they together intend and give meaning to this text. While Albizzi was somewhat unique among his fellow projectors in presenting his ideas as a dialogue, others also alluded to the fraught questions of expertise subtending grand enterprises of commercial infrastructure. For example, in his 1591 proposal for draining the Valdeciana and channeling its waters into a navigable canal, the scholar and territorial governor Giovanni Urminelli preemptively addressed the doubt that some have about the viability of his scheme. While some feared that draining the valley would flood Florence, Rondinelli insisted that he had carefully considered this risk asserting that for more and very clear reasons, I do not believe it. A few years later, the noble and prelate Baldessare Nardi also turned his mind to the drainage and channeling of this valley, writing to promote this enterprise and disarmed detractors who feared it would cause flood surges in Rome. Some projectors even came to Tuscany from other parts of Europe. In the 1570s, the Flemish engineer Willem de Rat promised Duke Francesco de'Nergi a model of an audacious canal to straighten the Arno river completely so as to facilitate transit from Florence to the sea without the arduous work of transshipment. And so in this way, as the city gave way to the territory, as the principal site of government reflection and action under new increasingly powerful rulers in Italy and in other parts of Europe during the early modern period, a widening circle of experts treated the planning of land and water as a matter of conscious and deliberate forethought, a design problem aimed at generating state wealth. As we have seen, the Promethean transformations of unruly waters into commercial infrastructures could only be dreamt in Tuscany after it had grown more capable of administering its rivers in practice on the ground. But it became a necessary dream, importantly, as the state adapted to a host of related political and economic conjunctures. Inflationary pressures, for one, along with Tuscany's general turn toward internal development, once its subjugation to Spain, largely foreclosed any hopes of overseas expansion. Projectors seized on these complex issues of land and water, ones that flowed far beyond architecture and that expanded its remit in the process. Thank you. Thank you for the fascinating papers. Stella, I'll start with your papers since you went first in that Caroline answer. Stella, your book made me... Your paper made me think about attention in interpreting certain kinds of urban fabrics or certain kinds of civilizational fabrics, which is that on the one hand, you can provide a kind of materialist explanation that these are these royal land estates that are... these royal land estates are an artifact of a surplus economy. And then we can mobilize people away from agriculture to participate in construction, pay wages, build armies. Alternatively, there's a cultural explanation in the sense that these landscapes are built to reflect sacred landscapes and model themselves on it. It seemed to me while reading the paper that I read that there's this tension between agricultural productivity as reshaping the land into a sacred landscape dismantles this easy dichotomy between the sacred and materialist explanations. And I was thinking here of your story of the royal estate of Boenakapak, the grandson of Pajakudi who transformed the marshland into a canalized and lush productive region. And you describe the impetus for this project... you describe the impetus for this project as being religious significance of humans bringing order to disordered and chaotic nature. And then additionally, speaking of the transformations inaugurated by Topa Inka on his land and estate, you also talk about how this reveals the kind of... it brings forth this sacred landscape in the sense that there's a network of shines and stones and ancestral sites that are not only avoided by the engineering project, but are kind of incorporated into it. Here are the examples of the road that cut above the Orkus land. So my question here is that in terms of the Chinchero people's everyday lives, is there a kind of network of pilgrimage? Like in what way did pilgrimage play a role in how this sacred landscape intersected with the kind of engineering landscape? You know that these two kind of come together in this interesting way. Okay, so that's my first question and then I have another question, which is how was engineering bureaucratized and then financed to make this long-term project because both the projects that you're describing, they're very long-term projects, so they involve not just the construction of them, but also the maintenance and the renewal of them. And so, you know, what kind of administrative hierarchies have to be developed and maintained to manage these roads, terraces, outcrops, canals, and how was maintenance and renewal baked into the cosmology of engineering? Okay, and my last question, which I think is one of the kind of most weird puns in the sense of difficult ones, is the status of marshlands. So the most interesting feature, one of the most interesting feature of the story in relation to this question of land and water is the marshland because it counters that kind of neat boundary of land versus water, right? It's neither land nor water. And much of the recent critique of colonial engineering projects has been that they were managing that boundary between land and water and that this boundary management created, first of all, it created those distinct categories of land and water, but then it had all of these different legal ramifications and environmental outcomes because that boundary had to be fixed. It could no longer be imagined as a moving boundary. So colonial engineering to that extent could not conceive of the flood as part of the process of renewal. So the question here is that is the drained marshland, do you think of it or is the only way to think of it as a kind of engineering embodiment of a strong central and authoritarian power? Why does this marshland occupy this liminal space and how can we theorize it from this perspective of land, property, and agriculture, which doesn't kind of fit with the marshland? And you know when I was looking at your slides one of the things I noted I remembered is that one of James Scott's central arguments is that the mountains are the space of resistance and retreat. And so it's so interesting that here you have a counter example, right? Of the mountain actually as a space of managing people's bodies and inserting authority into this kind of space. So that was just a thought. I don't have a question about that. I think you should take the answers. Yes, sure. Or do you want to ask one question? Okay, ask away. Comment the way. Okay, so Caroline, thank you. We'll give you a solid question. Yeah, that's also a good point. Great question. Thank you. Thank you for your very exciting people. So your paper delves into this process by which political elites in Florence created the political and technical conditions for the canalization of the Arno River. And the story is expansive in how it draws in these multiple spheres of public life, finance, government, engineering, labor, aesthetics. So I have a couple of observations about your paper and some questions which will hopefully also give you a chance to bring the bigger project that I skimmed more than that into apologies. It was really fun. One of the points you make is that this endeavor produced a kind of hegemony or consensus among the political elite in class in Florence in terms of the sweeping legislation that they passed that inaugurated this long-term process of transforming land. So given how long this kind of project is, you know, it's not even considered to be one thing, right? It's a series of projects and something that had to happen under multiple successive governments. And so the reason I'm asking this question is to flip that received understanding of what transpired. So, you know, one kind of way to think of this is that there's this touchy touchy that transforms the land and the river. But then the other way to think about it is that it is in creating this land that the Ducal state itself gets transformed. So could you maybe speak to this as to how the state changed as a result of the physical and geographical transformation? So the second question I have is that this project required a vast form of geographical knowledge. Things like what kind of clay deposits or stone deposits one could tap into to build these earthworks. It required an understanding of water logging. It required the development of new technical expertise, mathematics, not only a fluid motion, but to calculate the volume of water in each river. So what prior knowledge or older institutional forms of engineering treaties on geology, geography meteorology, and I say that word very specifically because that's my 19th century colonial endeavor in trying to figure out pathways into the 16th century. Like what are these, what are the institutional forms of architecture and engineering that made the project thinkable? You know, that came before the project. So as a variation on that question, you have this which you didn't show today but it was in your earlier paper which is Da Vinci's intervention. The drawings for canals and we actually have a backup slide. When I was sort of looking for other images of this he's also designed weirs. So these are very concrete interventions that he's proposing. They're not just ideas. So the question is you know, you make your case, the case you make is that it was the floods. If the floods hadn't happened, they wouldn't have done this. I'm a little suspicious of that. I think that there may be more things that bring ideas that are already floating into political reality. And so I wanted to sort of maybe a little bit push you on that to figure out what are some of the other political rather than, because it's a very that it all falls on this sort of external event that makes this a possibility I was wondering if you had any thoughts over there. So on that subject you offer this definition of infrastructure and I quoted it here, anthropologists define infrastructures as causal technologies, material assemblages that permit the movement of other matters. This is a very material definition of infrastructure. But there are other ways to think about infrastructure which is that it is a state-making project. So political hegemony doesn't produce the project rather the project produces hegemony and consensus. And so, yeah that's I don't know where the question was it was there somewhere. Right. And then my final question is about the finances involved in this undertaking. Is there a way that the Florentine state had to produce new forms of debt leveraging future financial possibilities. And I think you came close to talking about it when you talked about convincing patrons to invest in projects. So this is akin to kind of the auxiliary economic benefits that you were talking about. So how did this project appreciably transform Florentine financial structures of either taxation or credit. And here of course it was interesting because what you can see was the treasure. So that to me speaks to how a certain kind of financial incentive comes before the engineering incentive. So I don't know that might be one way to think about it. Okay. And then one final kind of question for both of you that you don't have to or you could choose to answer. So you use this word two words infrastructure and then the phrase environmental crisis which are somewhat anachronistic to build your argument to interrogate the world design in Florence. And still your project deals with similar geographical and geological interventions but you stay away from those words. You know you're very careful about the words you use. But they're not anachronistic in this way. So given this given this kind of very fertile and prolific new academic work theorizing the anthropocene my question to you is do you find that language or that kind of new interest helpful or useful or unhelpful how do you interact with that given how have these new emerging critiques shaped your historical work which doesn't speak to it in a one is to one way but it's clearly emerging from that kind of new interest. That's it. Thank you. And the voice came back. The more I spoke. Speaking makes the voice. The other voice. Yes. And let me know if I get off track from your original questions. My handwriting is terrible. But the first question was about the practices sort of the local and the everyday and then this imposition of the state. And a couple of thoughts. One is the Incas have different relationships in their expansion. So they're very well known for some pretty violent military encounters. But a lot of their expansion happened because of negotiated settlement. So you know going in and saying hey you know we could go to war or you know we can have an agreement here and in places like that there's a lot of variety of considerable autonomy within those places and the Incas are also really well known for adapting how they administer according to what suits that so like using the decimal system and not using it in the north. And so there's in other words there's some situations you can imagine that local populations had a lot of access to those spaces and then you see where those violent encounters happen and you see it in the architecture because it's very standard classic Incas and in those areas where you have the negotiated ones you have a lot of local architectural influences in the architecture which is really quite fascinating because this is how they see architecture is making visible those relationships but I really love the idea also just thinking about the everyday because I think a problem that we have when we look at the Incas we're getting largely their narratives as you know then obviously the Spanish but who's being interviewed are Incas if they're indigenous with the exception of people like Guaman Poma who's not Incas and that we can buy into that state narrative and not obviously all of these colonized peoples but Sabina McCormack in her writing about the early colonial period talked about how what a problem it was for the European priests who were trying to Christianize because quote the countryside remains pagan because there's so many the ways that you interact in your everyday life that have sacred implications it's not something that can be readily eliminated and it's that act of the everyday in which those relationships are constantly being inscribed so the Incas would have had a similar issue with that right even those type encounters did that address that first question and and then the other one I love the question on maintenance because you know construction is my favorite thing but this also is really really key because there is this issue with we see stone architecture look at Machu Picchu is still there you just build it and it stands it completely erases and Caroline is doing this wonderful SAH session on construction zones at the SAH but this is key right there is a lot of which we don't see that would have been part of the Inca architecture that would have constantly been maintained so that actually had to happen but this also would have felt still been very much part of that Inca oversight in maintenance because like in Chinchero apparently you know Topa Inca supposedly says you know I want to build this and he calls these nobles and says okay you all are going to do this for me and then they call their next people who call up other people and so you're reiterating that whole hierarchy and every time maintenance has to happen right you're going to have that whole the Inca order being replaced again and again so maintenance is really really key and of course relationships to the environment you see this also very nicely planned out to the marshlands I'm glad you brought up one at Topa because I had to cut it from this top which was hard because it's such a fascinating example we've sent in longer talks than what we gave so you saw Patrikthi had Machu Picchu his son Topa Inca had Chinchero and the grandson is Wanakapak and he comes to power and sort of because of his mom and so he's not really he comes with great doubt that he should really be the ruler and it's a big chip on his shoulder to see this in the architecture he makes he sort of makes what we would in the 80s have called big mansions things only have proportion but he wants to have so most Incas build in what today we call the sacred valley and there was not a lot of land left except this marshland and what he does is and engineers do is they transform that marshland into agricultural land and it's actually became one of the richest agricultural lands in the entire sacred valley so it's a completely different use of water and land than what you saw with Patrikthi but this is also typical of Inca architecture it's incredibly context specific whether it's the landscape but also what are the actions at that site and the relationship with that environment and those local people and the specific political context so it's a really great example of how land and water could easily adapt to those and he a thing also to understand in that is when a ruler comes to be they don't have private gender so and they had a lot of children Patrikthi's rumored death 300 needless to say more than one wife but when a ruler came to be they they inherited the title and the power but no wealth and in the Andes you have I need reciprocity and so to get something you have to have something to get which encourages rulers to go out and conquer new lands because a ruler would get portions of those lands for themselves as they went out but farmlands key right you have to be growing a diversity of things so that you can say here I can exchange that so for one a cop having farmland would have been very important but you raise a really important issue about how marshlands would have been understood and in the Andes there's a lot about that coming together of things and like they have gender everything in the world is ordered according to gender pairs but they also have gender fluidity so one thing that is paired in one situation it is male and then in another situation that same thing when paired with something else's female and then everybody has multiple genders within it and so it's a long way of saying I don't know how marshlands in particular were looked at but I now want to look because I feel like that has to be one of these really sort of liminal examples so thank you for that great question and then the final thing was on language so just quickly you know I think for all of us doing indigenous studies the key is to try and go to indigenous concepts and therefore language is really really critical like I'm really trying to figure out how to think about what's the vocabulary that the Incas used to describe what they were doing because it's you know I say empire because it's easier just to sort of convey that with this talk but as I'm writing my own work it's trying to think out because this whole idea of order and disorder I think is really central so I am exploring language and I do think and I do like that it's we're being sort of opened up and challenged about this with this new critique so thank you great thank you very fascinating Stella and I look forward to asking further questions after thank you Atea these are wonderful questions and again direct me if I'm getting off first channel channel river so the first question pertains to sort of this question of how is the state constructed and is it right to sort of say that it existed before or is it being produced through the processes of engineering and that's an excellent question and what I'll say is I think a new kind of state is coming into view before I mean the concept of the state is ancient and Florentines are very much speaking of their political community as a state and had for centuries what they're trying to do here is establish a new territorial one and that is particular to the Florentine context but it's also representative of wider forces on going in Europe at this moment in the Florentine one which I'll just speak to briefly and I think this might sort of point to answers of some other questions Italy central Italy was a patchwork of these tiny towns that were conquering smaller outlying towns and villages over the course of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries and as this is happening they have to learn how to govern that bigger space and this results in a realized need for new techniques of policing governance etc and so on the one hand these projects are only possible once that jurisdiction is at least de jure sort of Florentines but in practice this remains still a new challenge and so what is happening in the 16th century after the Dutchie forms the Dutchie forms in the 1530s through 1540s 1550 is a year of many many different administrative and legislative reforms and also a point in time when external threats to the state it was sort of being besieged very violently in the 30s and 40s all of these threats sort of go away and there's now sort of a turn toward internal development and so in short the state is making itself in a new way and this territorial push is very key to that and they sort of reach to different age of precedence to as I was talking about with Stella earlier eventually they sort of look abroad for precedence of non-European empires that sort of start to become meaningful to them as models to aspire to so the state is always in a process of making itself I think and crisis to sort of jump to that question about flood crisis that is obviously a sort of modern term but this question that you asked Stella about order and disorder is also very operative in this context too and so they're always talking about floods as disorders and I'm writing on this right now and so this if they didn't have the word crisis they certainly have the word disorder and they were describing these events in this manner and then to sort of continue on that question so I think floods were one sort of productive element in this push toward engineering its landscapes and territories but it's not the only one and I didn't get to that wider context today but floods are happening at a very key inflection point in the state's history and in its efforts to transform itself into a territorial monarchy and it's because of what I just mentioned about how Florence was a republic that made itself into a state under the Medici regime it was a republic for several centuries and suddenly they have this Duke that is acting as a monarch and that has to be legitimated and this is seen through centuries of Florentine political writing as something that might be legitimate and so part of the sort of way in which the Medici and Dukes seek to legitimate the right to rule is by fashioning themselves as good rulers with care for the common good and floods are things that harm that very obviously and people talk about this rulers talk about this and it becomes something that is even equated to external enemies and so I've seen writers in the late 16th century talking about marsh lands and floods as the same things as unruly soldiers and so that I mean that meant a lot to these people so that is sort of why I think the flood is not the only cause of these it's not the only impetus for terraforming in this time period and I should also say none of this is strictly new I mean I have Leona da Vinci on the screen here these sorts of activities were ongoing on a smaller scale every town was trying to make sure the river was useful it was vital to economic life before they had hydraulic engineers doing this work they actually interested priests often with these tasks as they were seen as trustworthy and so like expertise shifts tremendously over the course of the middle ages and early modern period when it comes to water management but what is new is not that it happens it's the scale on which it happens and Leona da Vinci sort of troubles my timeline of it of course he is remarkable but this is one one sort of rare example of such an audacious plan what's new from the second half of the 16th century is the proliferation of it and it's sort of the massive scale with which these projects are sort of being proposed but also the fact that these interlopers I was sort of always thinking about these figures as interlopers and then Vera Caller who is written beautifully on projectors in the Anglophone world in the English context just published a book called The Interlopers and it's about projectors so we're on the same way but I mean this figure has it's a well known epistemic character and in the German and the English context in the early modern period I don't know a tremendous amount about any I haven't seen any literature sort of also pegging these figures in Southern European and Italian context but certainly they were there so this is sort of the discourse I'm trying to tap into and I think it's also meaningful that we don't like I mean I'll show you all texts because these guys are treasurers like they're not drawing necessarily and drawing and mapping itself proliferate from the middle 16th century partly because the state is seeking to sort of control its landscapes more than they were before they're bureaucratizing at an intensive pace and so while you have sort of isolated figures like Leonardo da Vinci I mean and not isolated there are architects are drawing architectural drawing become very sort of standardized from the late 14th early 15th centuries but sort of the question of how to draw a river how to represent a landscape these are still new problems and so this project as I showed today they're all writing and sort of talking about geography not drawing it and so in terms of let's just try to see what other question I'm missing. Can I attach a question? The last question is kind of joint one so mine will be smaller but the way in which a Vinci calls it bonifika, more better so is that in my love to read improvement? I sort of tentatively argued so and I need to sort of like bolster this so I'd love to chat with you about that after the technology. Because he translated it as something very technical you said desiccate the other people were desiccated and you said drain but really what they mean is improve the land Yes it's often translated today as reclaim like bonifika but improvement is a discourse that is so psychastic. Because bonifika means to make good which is the same as improvement improvement means you make money yeah and it's true that tells you how they saw swamps as not good so I think it is key to this and I am trying to sort of find more examples of this because I've looked at the historical etymology and in certain contexts it does mean this and I want to sort of see when that came to be used to describe these projects but it's in everything from the sort of political literature to the projectors texts to the writings of engineers working for the Ducal Prodocracies and then in terms of Etienne you would also ask about the we can also open it up The last question you gave which was Etienne the willingness of newest geographic concepts and ideas to be projected back into this modern period So say something about that Oh it's a question I got a lot and I struggled with it a little bit I was very tentative and hesitant to sort of think about infrastructure for this period at first but you know we always use words to talk about things in the past in a way that sort of captures a post-structuralist idea of infrastructure and it's useful to sort of bring people in and sort of help them to understand the concept but also to sort of get at the nexus between space materiality, movement and political economy that is central to the project and also to sort of get at the nexus between space, materiality and political economy that is central to debates about infrastructure today So for that reason I don't in any way object to your use It's more to understand I need to figure out a good way to answer it because everyone always asks and it's like an amazing and proper question The question is also how does this new kind of set of theorizing become useful for us Yeah it's an excellent question I mean I was writing a lot of this during COVID when our movement was sort of drastically halted and it sort of made apparent what the sort of struggle in certain ways it sort of peeled back the naturalized conditions about our spaces and our political societies that we sort of have taken for granted and not evenly of course I think this gets to a bigger question about this time period too maybe Stella you can speak to this is the 16th century pre-modern is it like early modern is it Renaissance and I mean I one sort of point I want to make is I think a lot of these practices are typically pegged on a later period people don't sort of often think about the early modern period as a time when you have these grand terraforming enterprises but you did it's not sort of purely an 18th century post-18th century thing so part of my reason for using that is to simply sort of make that clear it's very intentional but the work I'm trying to do now is to think of words like trafico, circulazione condotta because these were words people used to talk about that sort of the promise of movement before they had the word pre-construction but one of the ways to periodize would be a small question I had also was water conceived as abundant or not in your case you said there was too much flooding but does that mean that water itself is like a thing? was it conceived as tuna water? because that would be a way to that's very contemporary environmental thinking where is water? in your case it seems like you didn't talk about the sacredness of water anyways you have water and slopes so that's easy well no water is very very sacred so again another thing I just couldn't put in there but it's seen as really like it's the circulation of life it's a problem when the Spanish come over and there's this view that rivers are dirty and they hold disease and for Andean peoples they're like your blood vessels they're veins this is how the universe functions is because of the flow of water but I would say in the Andes, whoa water scares I mean the driest desert in the world is in northern Chile most of the communities that all live on the close they live next to rivers that are from melting glaciers Peru is one of the most hardest hit and will be the most devastated by climate change because of the tremendous melting glaciers and so I'd say there's a for the whole western slope of the Andes which is where the Incas primarily were there is a tight focus on water because of its importance and even when you have the rain you want to harvest it and that's why having those percolation systems are so key so do you want to feel the questions or my neighbor raise your hand because you had a question I had a question about agriculture and I think Stella mostly answered more on that because strongly as you completed your talks that there are people talk about digging for infrastructure and there are illusions to digging for gold what didn't get mentioned as much at least in the situation of your work is digging for agriculture and I have very much political economy in my mind because I'm teaching a class on political economy so we're reading all these British things about where the digging for agriculture is contrasted with digging for gold and this is another kind of digging for infrastructure of course those things are important and a lot of questions because it also shows implications for how to collect the taxes actually it's that process that makes the gold estate is it land revenue that you collect the taxes so I wanted to hear the text it sounded like a very early text on political economy and I was a bit surprised that maybe there's more there about agriculture but that other kind of digging that's how it might lead to the condors and gold yeah fabulous so many thoughts yes this to me is sort of nascent discourse in political economy absolutely and I think this gets codified in the late 1580s with Giovanni Botero I think the tradition sort of takes off after that and in terms of agriculture versus gold at least in the period that I'm studying the sort of big contrast that's often drawn is it better to sort of find gold locally do you get rich share from doing that or do you get rich share from sort of trading and Giovanni Botero would also there's a beautiful article also by Vera Keller about this analogy that is in Botero's texts and the texts of a lot of his readers about the sort of contrast that contrast and what he says is that markets are the same thing as mines above ground because it's trade is like mine but it's above the ground it yields more the same or more wealth than it would if you were to sort of just dig in your land agriculture is obviously another round of wealth according to some thinkers and it's sort of I think in the context I'm looking at a lot of the reclamation projects are geared toward producing more land to grow green there's fears in the late 1590s about famine sorry early 1590s and late 1590s about famine and Tuscany and so the concern becomes about growing more green but also having more efficient transit routes to move that green around to places that could not produce it locally but I think it's I don't know if there's one I wouldn't say that there's one sort of dominant view I think it depends on the different thinkers and I'm discovering this more so whereas whereas most people think so on through that and they want to want to drain I've encountered one thinker who's actually proponent of a more sort of diversified farming system around a marsh that incorporates pesca culture and sort of writing people that now but I was really astonished to see this because most of the thinkers I look at are pro drainage and this is sort of the way they try to appeal to the Duke because they think that sort of agriculture is what they want and this what the last thing I'll say on this is at least in the Italian context this I think goes back to sort of an ancient contest between agriculture and commerce too so gold I'm just going to say is like in my in this formulation like proxy for agriculture perhaps digging and mining is not really something I'm as familiar with in the just in context although there was a lot of tooth and mines and I have a colleague working on this now but the sort of contrast between like is it better for all of us to just be these leisurely nobles with our villa estates it's on is that sort of the best way to solve this problem or should we be merchants in the city trading and so that's the the sort of contest that's invoked sometimes among these thinkers too but it goes back to ancient Rome if not earlier yeah I'm going to start it they raise their hand I'll set it here and then we'll Thank you both for such fascinating talks which is one of imagining mapping visualizing power and I'd really like your response to one of the comments that this is not like a high modernist Jim Scott legibility mapping making drawing maps bureaucracy much more governance governance there is a question or my question then relates to the issue of water within visualizing and there's a key question that also into that these are long-term projects but there's also a different kind of temporality temporality seasonal shifts of baby, water flows of flooding kind of these accidental shifts was there or can you can you talk a little bit more about how these temporalities of water actually intervened and changed patterns of governance and provided opportunities but also problems to governance of great question but I would say on a functional level what we see is the ink is planning for those things so again like what Janet share body found in Cusco is they're actually making these reservoirs so that they can hold a lot of water in the evening so that the canals never have to stop and also what Kenneth Wright and his wife Ruth White they're the Wright water engineers they've done all this amazing work at Machu Picchu is similar where you see that there is a plan I mentioned how they actually it's like 80 gallons of water per minute like way more than your average rainfall that they're actually planning for and they've got to prevent this overflow so the terraces do slow down so you could have a little bit of runoff but that's where your topsoil is you really don't want to ever have that so they are always planning for like when we have very little water flow and then where we have access now but because you've got these other underground water systems and they're from melting glaciers there is a annual renewal of that again this is what climate change is threatening so unlike living away from one of these rivers where you're really dependent then on rain these are all related to these somewhat consistent access of water with different rates of flow and they're planning for those to answer that thank you so much for the question temporality is I think really important to think about and the evidence I've seen in my sources in terms of how the government is responding to sort of seasonality that's sort of what you're getting at two examples jump to mind first the in the same way that has Stella narrated the Inca conscripted non-Inca in this case of Tuscany it was the Ducal government conscripted peasants to show up on certain days to reimbank rivers that sort of needed their levees repaired for example and they had to show up with their shovels and dig or sort of help cart stone and sand with animals and this happened in the summertime and it was something that people complained about and some traders said it was unfair because this was the harvest but it happened in the summer because the fall was the rainy season and so starting in like August November especially November you had really heavy rains and that's when a lot of the flooding would occur and so this was done in an effort to ensure that the levees could be reimbanked before that happened and also because many of the rivers they were called torrents that's sort of in English today it's sort of we imagine it as sort of aggressively rushing water but in Italian the word just refers to rivers that are not stable from year to year or from season to season rather so a torrent in the summer would often be dry that's also why these projects were more efficient to do in the summer because in some cases the water would be not there or very very low so that's the season seasonality cycles that sort of come to mind first yeah that's all I can think of at the moment Thank you both so much for your presentations I think in a way to connect the temporality and say in a political economy my question is for Caroline mostly what's in it for these protectors truly I mean it seems maybe you should just question but from my understanding like the main case that you explore is the pressure these are people that are in some way entrenched within the government we're like at the higher end of the society I probably have intimate connections and these are at least from the family that I got non-expert experts these are people that are external to how to deal with these design problems and thinking of it in long term like the actual what I would imagine this project how long it will take and the finances for it it will take a long time it will take forces beyond this one individual so what is I just know better than everyone else kind of engagement they're looking for or just trying to get their name attached to it and I guess so much secondary question to it is we have this field of protectors what was their efficacy rate how did they actually have any influence in relation to these proposals Thank you for those questions great questions as for what the projector was in it for the projectors money and fame so there's I mean to put it simply but you're right these were already fingers with some degree of sort of clout within the wider ducal circles which were themselves very hierarchical and so it was about social climbing to get closer to the Duke to get more money to get some sort of permanent position where they could get sort of a stipend and also perhaps have a stipend for their families and progeny and this sort of patronage culture has been written about extensively not in this context but one sort of study if you're interested Mario Biaggioli has written about Galileo sort of operating in the court circles and the sort of importance of patronage in the sciences in the natural sciences and in astronomy the same thing I say is going on here the some of these figures so Willem de Ratte I mean I found three copies of a contract that he signed and that the Duke did not but it was sort of like open ready for signature but what was promised there was I'm not remembering the exact sums but exorbitant amounts of money for his sons and grandsons and grandsons and grandfathers so that's really interesting and it was this audacious project that did not happen the hit rate for projectors well the funny thing about projectors is if it happened we don't call them projectors so the so the canal is a canal that still exists today it's about 20 kilometers between Pisa and Livorno so there was a canal that started to be built there in stages in the late 1570s and I haven't gotten to sort of look at the construction documents for that yet but that's that's a hope of mine but I haven't also found sort of project documents for that yet either most of them are for these the Arno was very very key because you had to sort of take things off boats and put them on to smaller or bigger boats depending on if you were getting closer to Florence or further away at various stages and that was just this arduous task that people wanted to obviate but the canal I didn't have to tell you is like the main and the biggest canal I can sort of think about that actually sort of was realized and that's a modest size canal but it was still really important it kept flooding though until like I mean so these things are ongoing and even marsh drainage you have to sort of constantly make sure that the borders are sort of re-fortified and that there's always some sort of outflow of swamp waters because they will just flood again Thanks I just wanted to get back to the question of agriculture versus commerce and dispute so I appreciate about where you end the papers by kind of revealing what the larger geopolitical back office for these internal development developments and the turn from the state to the territory which if I got this right you said it was a foreclosure of a transnational economy because of the Spaniards and as you know this is kind of very similar also to what happens in the Venetian Republic at the time that the maritime economy also faltered because it loses colony and there too you have kind of an explosion of basically land reclamation projects so I had a question of A, what is the role of say expertise that's gained during a period of kind of intense maritime trade that maybe gets channeled into agricultural cultivation improvement what do you see as being the similarities and differences between say the Tuscan region and the Vento vis-a-vis land reclamation and is there also any kind of translation of expertise happening between these two context that seems to share very similar material conditions at this time? Yeah, thank you for your question I pointed to this foreclosure of any sort of Tuscan imperialism but I will say there were many ambitions and hopes and at the end of the reign of Ferdinando first in 1609 he died in 1609 but in the years before his death there was actually a voyage to what is now Brazil and they brought a handful of Tuscans in the attempt to build a colony there and that he died and then the project was scrapped so there was sort of like one expansionist ambition that sort of reared its head at the end of his rule but during Ferdinando, Francesco's reign his predecessor was much more internist, I think your connection between Venice and Tuscany are very very similar Venice was trying to sort of rid itself of Spanish influence very sort of what really wanting to retain its independence the technical links between these these settings are ones that I have not really found tons of evidence of I found evidence actually of Tuscan engineers going to other northern Italian states or being sort of requested by other rulers and the Medici princes had to sort of say you can only go for three months or something so we need you back here so that's happening a bit in the 17th century there would be some northern European engineers from the low countries who were in Venice and who also came down to Tuscany but I found a lookout for some of these connections I haven't really seen some of them and then you asked about expertise in overseas expansion and how that plays in do you mean like whether sort of like navigational knowledge like ships yeah I haven't thought about that it's a great question I am trying to find out more about river boats and I haven't really found much unfortunately but that's sort of one question I have about like navigating rivers versus navigating on the seas I think they were very different that's sort of my impression there's been tons of scholarship of course on seafaring that I'm not really looking at at the moment but I probably should and Marc it's our final question my question relates to the topic of preservation and how I'm thinking about the other biological discourse in water futures and I was thinking how the monument typically as an occupiable or relatively occupiable space differs from something in the ruins which is highly regulated often archeological and so for context I was thinking the different ways that movement is regulated like you mentioned Machu Picchu versus what you can see in the process of the sacred rally and in your book you discuss the theatrical use of space I think that's in Chicharro and other places in the enemies but I think you mentioned how architectural space creates and articulates this movement which you both spoke to a bit and it's sort of a two part question feel free to either hide or both but essentially how preservations in these communities colonel, imperial, communities particular navigate this importance of protecting history that's been to erase it versus sort of this opportunity to break away from your centric ideas of preservation in the situation of UNESCO heritage sites that often isolate architecture and artifacts from the Canadian context is there a value or is there an interest in revitalizing or reoccupying some of these spaces and canals in their sort of continued use or is there another great question and very very pertinent to what's going on in the Andes as well as a lot of Indigenous communities preservation is one of the new ways of dispossessing Indigenous peoples from their lands right I mean everyone goes to Machu Picchu and doesn't think about all the Indigenous people that were removed from that park to make that archeological zoom since I've been working at Chinchero the community has lost more and more and more of its lands because they are seen as damaging it and yet conservation efforts often fix up sites so that tourists will like them I mean tourist dollars are really really important and so there's far more destruction that happens even though it goes against UNESCO codes or what you're supposed to do to sites they are heavily redone to please tourists so conservation is a very complicated often not involving Indigenous peoples project and it's a huge topic right I mean like what I'd say like to give an example also back to Chinchero and how it impacts land and water so they have now decided to build an airport next to Chinchero and the lake and the whole idea about that's okay we'll just put a little fence around Chinchero and it's all going to be good and you know that's like building an airport in the inversed backyard right like this is a huge estate it's incredibly nuanced in its relationship the ecosystem is really critical the airport is well underway to its construction and it's to bring in tourists who don't like to do the long trip from the current Cusco airport among other reasons but you know you look at communities like Taos which own the tourism right they decide who gets in can and can't do there's definitely models in which indigenous people can and should have control over those landscapes which goes back to your point about issues of ruins right like a lot of these when I started working in Chinchero several of the WACAs were considered to be still alive people still made offerings to them they had communications with them I was working in Bolivia and I was going to measure some stones at one of these urban parks and we were asked by an indigenous religious specialist to leave because he had to talk to them you know that it's about perspective right about what is ruined and what is still alive and we see that right with the museum situation in the US with native objects in museums and how important it is for those communities not only to have them back but that they be treated in a certain way because they are seen as they're not relics of the past but they're active agents today did I get that I feel like there's a second part to that yeah they're not you know the irrigation and canals oh yes just quickly on that there's been a big effort for several decades to clean these canals indigenous communities have kept them going but particularly ones that have been in archaeological sites haven't been because they're not with the community anymore they haven't been upkeep and it's amazing the ones that have been either maintained or been put back into use how effective they are and this goes you know one of the things that made the Incas so effective is you know when they would go into a new area and they'd see something that community was doing they'd pull it into their practices they'd see massive wonderful irrigation systems across the Andes there's project going on in the North Coast all of those you see the sophistication really of hydraulic engineering in the Andes across the board and so yes they are still effective today and you know would be a way for the future if it wasn't for the melting glaciers which is the source of so much of the water okay experts but somewhat saddening you know I mean it's really incredible I was putting together my introduction thinking how do we conceive of water and it's so complicated there is something between what you were saying why is marshland policing the marshland means policing what is water and what is land and the more modern forms of land development or that you quote unquote reclaim land from water that any water can potentially become land and what we've shown is that this very gesture of being able to say that's inside and that's outside if there's water inside then it's one thing if there's not water incorporated then it's completely other that gives us a kind of realization so I'm satisfied but also thank you so much for incredible thinkers thank you Atiyah for a super insightful response into the whole crowd for coming thank you