100 Rapson Hall, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
9 am-5 pm, Friday, August 14, 2015 (lunch on your own 12:30-1:30 pm; reception to follow at 5 pm)
9 am-5 pm, Saturday, August 15, 2015 (lunch on your own 12:30-1:30 pm)
Click here to buy tickets for DredgeFest Great Lakes. Symposium tickets will also be available at the door.
The symposium at DredgeFest Great Lakes will bring together a broad mix of disciplines, corporations, public agencies and organizations in live public conversation.
Symposium participants will also have the opportunity to join us for two optional guided tours: the fluid mechanics lab at St. Anthony Falls and the plant of Liquid Waste Technology (a division of Ellicott Dredge Technologies), where dredges are designed and built. We will tour St. Anthony Falls on Saturday during the symposium and Liquid Waste Technology on Sunday. The Duluth field tour on Monday is a separate, ticketed event. More detail on the Liquid Waste Technology tour follows the symposium schedule below.
The symposium investigates the conference theme of shifting baselines across seven sessions on two days.
Friday, August 14 (9 am-5 pm)
1 Freshwater Basin
The sustainability of North America’s largest source of freshwater is in question. The quality and quantity of water moving through the Great Lakes has changed significantly over the past century due to commercial shipping, legacy industrial land use, and agricultural production.
Peter Annin, author of Great Lakes Water Wars
2 Landscapes of Dredge
These large-scale manipulations driven by industrial, economic and geological processes have produced a great excess of clean and contaminated sediment around the shores of the basin. The result is a set of landscapes within the Great Lakes whose terrain—both above water and below—is fundamentally shaped by dredging and the disposal of dredged material. Focusing on these actual places provides an opportunity to explore questions that are technological and environmental, but also about cultural identity and history.
Neeraj Bhatia, architect, The Open Workshop/California College of the Arts
Ted Smith, Marine Tech
Sean Burkholder, landscape architecture, University at Buffalo/the Dredge Research Collaborative
3 Choreographing Sediments
Sediments are constantly in motion in the basin. In some places, there is too much sediment, which requires removal through industrial operations like dredging. In others, sediment is lacking, and it must be acquired through mining operations. This fluctuating regional network of surpluses and deficits is tightly linked to both industrial operations, including the use of the Great Lakes as a regional transportation system for bulk shipping, and to geomorphological processes, such as deposition and erosion.
Chris Bennett, architect, Studio Gang Architects
Jen Holmstadt, Project Manager/Geomorphologist, Bay West (in collaboration with Mike Bares, Hydrogeologist, MPCA)
Eli Sands, landscape architecture, City College of New York
4 New Economies
Novel environmental conditions and the social reactions to those conditions present opportunities to recalibrate local and regional economies.
Patrick Phenow, MinnDOT Port Development Assistance Program
William Hanson, Vice President—Government Relations and Business Development, Great Lakes Dredge and Dock
James White, Director of Sustainable Infrastructure, Port of Cleveland
Heidi Timm-Bijold, Business Resources Manager, Business and Economic Development Department, City of Duluth
Jen Holmstadt, Project Manager/Geomorphologist, Bay West
[The symposium at DredgeFest Louisiana.]
Saturday, August 15 (9 am-5 pm)
5 Shifting Baselines
The phrase “shifting baseline” was introduced in landscape architect Ian McHarg’s famous manifesto “Design With Nature”. It has since widened in scope to become a key conceptual tool in environmental circles largely because of Daniel Pauly’s paper showing that fisheries experts tended to think in terms of the state of the environment at the beginnings of their career. Baselines shift as new generations grow up thinking that whatever they grew up with was natural. But ‘shifting’ needn’t be a passive verb. Baselines can be shifted with care and intent. We propose to think about how baselines have been shifted and how they could be shifted in the future.
David Knight, Great Lakes Commission
Matthew Tucker, landscape architecture, University of Minnesota
Jen Maigret and Maria Arquero, architecture and landscape architecture, MAde Studio/University of Michigan
Breakout Session
We’ll split into a couple groups for a mixture of focused discussion on topics of interest and a pair of guided behind-the-scenes tours.
6 Participation and Engagement
A multitude of players are implicated in both the process and results of sediment movement, including varying populations, civic actors, private industry, and governmental organizations.
Michael Ezban, Vandergoot Ezban Studio
Ozayr Saloojee and Vincent deBritto, architecture and landscape architecture, University of Minnesota
Margaux Valenti, Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper
7 Landscapes of Dredge
These large-scale manipulations driven by industrial, economic and geological processes have produced a great excess of clean and contaminated sediment around the shores of the basin. The result is a set of landscapes within the Great Lakes whose terrain—both above water and below—is fundamentally shaped by dredging and the disposal of dredged material. Focusing on these actual places provides an opportunity to explore questions that are technological and environmental, but also about cultural identity and history.
Karen Lutsky, landscape architecture, University at Buffalo
Catherine de Almeida, landscape architecture, Cornell University
[Dredgers assembled by Liquid Waste Technology at their New Richmond plant, which we will tour on Sunday.]
Optional Tours
Symposium participants will also have the opportunity to join us for two optional guided tours: the fluid mechanics lab at St. Anthony Falls and the plant of Liquid Waste Technology (a division of Ellicott Dredge Technologies), where dredges are designed and built. We will tour St. Anthony Falls on Saturday during the symposium and Liquid Waste Technology on Sunday.
LWT has been manufacturing and supplying dredging solutions for over 30 years. At the facility they design and build everything from Unmanned Remote Controlled Electric Auger dredges to large Cutter Suction dredgers. We’ll get to see some machines under construction and learn more about how they are built and used. This is a very exciting opportunity for us and we hope you can join.
This additional event is free to all DredgeFest ticket holders, but the catch is that we are unable to provide transportation. The plant is located in New Richmond, WI, about 50 minutes’ drive east of UMN. The tour will be Sunday August 16 from 10:30 to Noon.
Symposium attendees will receive a form to use to register for the LWT tour.
Exhibition
The symposium will be accompanied by an exhibition of design research on sedimentary landscapes in the Great Lakes.
Food and Drink
A reception sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture will cap the first day of the symposium. Symposium attendees should plan to bring their own lunches or to visit nearby restaurants on the lunch break each day.
Location
The DredgeFest Great Lakes symposium will be held at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Click here to buy tickets for DredgeFest Great Lakes. Symposium tickets will also be available at the door.
