STU 1211 / Fall 2020
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Critic: Danielle Choi
Railroads have been one of the most significant agents of the expansion of the American frontier and the growth of the metropolis, carrying materials and people while linearly trespassing vast, rugged geologies and coastlines.
In the inevitability of sea level rise, land use will change. Rather than becoming just another set of obselete infrastructures, coastal railroads can play an active role in the land's shifting uses.
This project envisions a post-coastal retreat scenario at a site on Massachusett's coastline centered around an existing MBTA railroad and the city of Revere's barrier beach, which is highly subject to inundation in the next couple of decades.
In this scenario, the barrier beach transitions from urban land use into a productive and community-owned landscape of bivalve cultivation. After the unbuilding of the most vulnerable properties due to their risks with near-future sea level rise, a landscape of labor emerges that relies on the collaboration of rails, water, and bivalves.
Bivalves, as ecosystem engineers and infrastructure,* filter fouled waters and act as a carbon sink, as bivalves leave behind shells composed of permanently-removed CO2 from the ocean.
The rail corridor acts as a spine for the movement of material and people in situ, as well as regionally in the exchange of processed bivalves, ground up shells as soil fertilizer, and byproducts to restaurants, markets, farmers, and residents.
This collectively-managed bivalve economy, serviced by the coastal rail and abandoned rails that the towns' industries originally grew upon, restores the reliance on the resources of the water and diverse social and economic services of the railroad. Simultaneously, the memory of Revere Beach as a cultural hallmark for the community is retained.
*Disclaimer: At the time of this project, I did not consider bivalves as agential beings who may potentially have sentience, and thus, this was a justification for me to propose their cultivation.
While conventional scientific knowledge says that the bivalve's decentralized nervous system is too rudimentary to render them as sentient beings,
we must remain open to the very likely possibility that nonhuman beings like bivalves and gastropods have subjective experiences beyond conventional human comprehension.
This would raise a set of ethical questions regarding their cultivation at this site.
