Landscape representations

 

Matthew Seibert, Dredge Research Collaborative and Louisiana Coastal Sustainability Studio

'From 1931 to 2010, the Mississippi Delta lost roughly a quarter of its landmass.' 

The way we look at landscapes depend on limitless variables, such as perspective, scale and time period taken into account. The maps shown from above can highlight various aspects. For example, the Mississippi map focuses on the land loss and land gain within a particular period of time.

“How we represent and model landscapes influences how we perceive and engage with them. Designers such as James Corner, Alan Berger, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Jane Wolff, and Bradley Cantrell have repeatedly demonstrated this point. In particular, Mathur and da Cunha have advanced a critical inquiry of cartographic conventions and received habits of landscape representation. Their work — a self-described activist practice — emphasizes the ways that conventional mapmaking and planning suppresses movement, variability, and flux. They problematize the drawing or projection of fixed boundaries onto inherently dynamic landscapes, showing “how these divisions and lines can harden in the landscape, in civic administration, and indeed in the design disciplines.”  -Milligan Brett, 2015, Migrations of the Mississipi river’ in Landscape Migration, Environmental Design in the Anthropocene.