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The Seaway: Exploring legacies of continental scale infrastructure

Fall 2023

Advisor: Rosalea Monacella

The project looks to explore The Great Lakes/St Lawerance Seaway Project as it relates the manufacturing of the largest freshwater resource on the planet into a highly manipulated, continental scale, geo-engineered infrastructure. This infrastructure is composed of networks of diverted rivers, control dams, canals, channels, locks, pipes, and pumps that all regulate and manipulate the flow of water, goods, people, and ecologies both up and down the watershed. It is a machine that has been continually remade over the last 400 years through generations of colonialism and technological interventions and in doing so has evolved with changing climates, species migration, and patterns of human settlement. The Seaway has prompted massive urban and industrial development in the region shaping what would be the 3rd largest economy in the world only surpassed by the U.S. as a whole and China.

Its latest and perhaps most dramatic stage of intervention occurred in the mid-twentieth century through joint Canadian and American action. Officially called the Seaway, the project allowed ocean vessels previously restricted to the Port of Montreal full access to the upper lakes, effectively transforming the region into a Mediterranean Sea of North America. However, these interventions have come at a price as they are vectors of species invasion, habitat destruction, toxic leakages, and sponsor the large-scale exploitation of mineral and agriculture extraction which has had detrimental impacts on the health of surrounding human and non-human populations. This has permanently altered the hydrology of the lakes as levels and section profiles have greatly fluctuated with dredging, watershed diversion, and flow reversal. All this has created a dramatic landscape in which natural and anthropomorphic cycles can no longer be discerned. There is no undoing.

The project looks to ask questions about how do we as landscape architects respond within continental scale infrastructure? How do we respond to the externalities of design interventions when we have fundamentally altered the dynamics of a space? Do the realities of our past wrongdoing have to be accepted as a new natural state?

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