Grounded Growth: Groundwater’s Blueprint for Intelligent Urban Form

Grounded Growth uncovers the hidden narrative of one of the world’s largest distributed freshwater reserves: aquifers. Where we grow food and how we build in relationship to groundwater demands urban and architectural attention. Using two of the most over-pumped landscapes in the world—the Indo-Gangetic plains and Sonoran Desert—Grounded Growth features designs for new agrarian communities in each region that naturally replenish aquifers and increase agricultural production. Drawing on lessons learned from Venice’s system of cisterns, the installation’s models and drawings foreground aquifers as a shared commons that can collectively shape farms and cities. If aquifers are not engaged as a common resource, then we will see the same effects of millions of privately owned, atomistic technologies used to bleed the earth dry.