MEMORY OF DISTURBANCE AT THE SUSQUEHANNA RIVER (Cornell University)

This project considers the Susquehanna River and its multifaceted disturbance regime of flooding. While focusing on the disturbance in the basin, I considered possible sites of resurgence following these floods. Resurgent communities, resurgent individuals, resurgent ecologies, resurgent places, resurgen materials. aimed to restructure community river relations by engaging communities perception and memory of disturbance. My initial inquiry proved a problematic relationship between memory and flooding. Flooding
seems to persist in the memory of those who live along the Susquehanna for approximately 5 years. After 5 years pass people let their guard down, they forget, they remove from their memory both past and future disturbances. The act of forgetting allows for a false sense of resurgence. The human response of “flood and forget” or “disturbance and dismiss” is indicative of the human temptation to build safe imagined futures, thus “stopping” what looms in the future and mentally eradicating past, present, and future disturbances. As landscape architects we often play a role in creating extremely convincing safe imagined futures. The idea of memory was the medium in which I investigated and altered community river relations.