That Sinking Feeling: Subsidence Parables of the San Joaquin Valley

Teaching staff.
Supervisor: Danielle Choi
Co-supervisor: 

Students.
Authors: Chelsea Kilburn

This thesis explores the dissonance between the naturally blurry edge of groundwater and the structures of management that define the surface landscape of California’s San Joaquin Valley. In this region, extreme groundwater extraction causes land subsidence, thus physically and directly altering topography. The project frames a reality where imminent coastal migration leads to a soaring urban population in the Valley, further intensifying the need for extraction that not only provides drinking water but sustains some of the nation’s most productive agricultural ground. Sites of intervention consider local groundwater management typologies and imagine near-future scenarios in which design of the landscape can be used to rethink subsidence not as the effect of groundwater extraction but as a generative infrastructural force able to meaningfully shape the ground for the retention, remediation, and distribution of water that can then be utilized in the recharge of a critically overdrafted aquifer as well as in a speculative subversion of California’s constructed natural history.