ANTIFRAGILE ALLUVIUM

The Middle James River floodplain is a narrow but dynamic corridor of water and sediment which has held a wide range of cultural and economic significances historically: from its central role in the identity and vitality of the Monacan people, to its commodification and industrialization as the “Founding River” of the growing Virginia colony. Much of this historic complexity is obscured, however, in the landscape of the James floodplain today: a largely depopulated and homogenized band of corn and hay fields hidden behind a railroad berm. Our project interrogates this homogenized agricultural landscape through the lens of antifragility, and proposes a vision for alternative agricultural practices that are not merely resilient to, but benefit from cycles of inundation, erosion and deposition.

Our project starts with the appropriation of the tractor-dug ditch - a familiar (and often destructive) feature of floodplain farming - to create a scalable grid system that can respond dynamically to the ever-shifting hydrotopography of the floodplain. This grid would host a suite of other agricultural and maintenance practices - including the cultivation of hydric and ruderal crops that were first domesticated in the floodplains of this region. Rather than viewing seasonal highwater as a risk to crops, these practices are rooted in the diverse cultural and ecological adaptations of plants and people to water and sediment as sources of vitality and stability, not risk.