Camille Wimpe
Design
Fall 2024 | Professor Nick Brown
Given the assignment to make a trail connecting to the Walking City Trail, I decided to make a trail uncovering the secret life of water in the city.
Water, one of our most precious resources, has been channelized, infrastructuralized, and hidden from public view in cities, even Coastal ones like Boston. Our human desire to control natural systems and ecologies has resulted in an exaggerated distance between our bodies and natural flows of water. Walking through cities allows us to seek out these hidden waterways, exploring how we are surrounded by architectural and infrastructural details.
These sites attempt to find a balance between historically important sites of water management and smaller moments which indicate the current relationship of city-dwellers with water, suggesting that water management is frequently an afterthought in designing streets and buildings. Gutters specifically fascinate me, both as an architectural detail that can only be experienced at the pace of the encounter, and as they relate to the idea that water in suburban and urban landscapes ends up hidden away in pipes. Gutters often appear as afterthoughts, especially in rear-facing alleys where water is sent into storm drains underground, rather than back into the natural landscapes to recharge the water table below the layers of infrastructure.
Link to full story map here