Speculative Future Wetlands
25th April
11.30am-4.30pm, lunch included
Portland Works, Sheffield
Join Hester Buck (Cardiff University) and Dr Rowan Jaines (University of Sheffield) for a Speculative Futures Workshop that focuses on the Fen landscape in the East of England.
The Fen landscape in the East of England is often called "the breadbasket of Britain" because it is home to over 50% of England’s grade 1 agricultural land and produces a fifth of the nation’s crops and a third of its vegetables.
It is an entirely unnatural landscape and, in the face of intensifying climate change, the design of the current iteration of this landscape may have reached the end of its lifecycle. The Fen region at the forefront of climate change, whilst simultaneously managing issues such as sea level rise, drought, and flood risk. The Fen landscape also contain pockets of rural deprivation and social issues associated with a challenging infrastructure.
This workshop will use a "more-than-human" perspective to bring together a range of practitioners and researchers to interrogate potential futures for the Fen landscape through creative prompts, speculative mapping and co-production.
Hester Buck
Hester Buck is an architect, project manager and researcher. She is interested in how planting can be used as a tool to start conversations, build networks of care within the local community, and give agency to make changes to our public realm.
Hester is currently writing up her PhD between the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University and the University of the West of England’s Air Quality and Carbon Management Department. This interdisciplinary research explores how methods within participatory design and citizen science can be used to develop a greater awareness of air as a natural resource, through an exploration of the ability of moss to improve air quality.
Rowan Jaines
Rowan Jaines is a lecturer in Human-Environmental Geography at The University of Sheffield.
Her research focuses on the legacies of wetland drainage for agricultural purposes in the early 20th century.