River Literacy

Abstract

Separating land from water on the Earth’s surface is one of the most fundamental and enduring acts in the understanding and design of human habitation. The line with which this separation is imaged on maps, etched in the imagination, and enforced on the ground with regulations and constructions has not only survived centuries of rains and storms to become a taken-for-granted presence; it has also been naturalized in the coastline, the riverbank, and the water’s edge. These are places subjected to artistic representations, scientific inquiry, infrastructural engineering, and landscape design with little attention to the act of separation that brought them into being. Today, however, with the increasing frequency of flood and, not unrelatedly, sea-level rise attributed to climate change, the line separating land and water has come into sharp focus with proposals for walls, levees, natural defenses, pumps, land retirement schemes, and recommendations for retreat. These responses raise questions on where the line is drawn, but they also raise questions on the separation that this line facilitates. Is this separation found in nature or does nature follow from its assertion? By presenting the river as a product of human intention rather than nature, the author makes room for worlds without it. In particular, they make room for rain, which the presence of the river has done much to malign and marginalize. It is, however, in a world of rain that the design of the river was initiated with the invention of the line of separation.