Aquaculture Landscapes

Fish Farms and the Public Realm

Michael Ezban

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315404769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Aquaculture Landscapes explores the landscape architecture of farms, reefs, parks, and cities that are designed to entwine the lives of fish and humans.

In the twenty-first century, aquaculture's contribution to the supply of fish for human consumption exceeds that of wild-caught fish for the first time in history. Aquaculture has emerged as the fastest growing food production sector in the world, but aquaculture has agency beyond simply converting fish to food. Aquaculture Landscapes recovers aquaculture as a practice with a deep history of constructing extraordinary landscapes. These landscapes are characterized and enriched by multispecies interdependency, performative ecologies, collaborative practices, and aesthetic experiences between humans and fish. Aquaculture Landscapes presents over thirty contemporary and historical landscapes, spanning six continents, with incisive diagrams and vivid photographs. Within this expansive scope is a focus on urban aquaculture projects by leading designers—including Turenscape, James Corner Field Operations, and SCAPE—that employ mutually beneficial strategies for fish and humans to address urban coastal resiliency, wastewater management, and other contemporary urban challenges. Michael Ezban delivers a compelling account of the coalitions of fish and humans that shape the form, function, and identity of cities, and he offers a forward-thinking theorization of landscape as the preeminent medium for the design of ichthyological urbanism in the Anthropocene.

With over two hundred evocative images, including ninety original drawings by the author, Aquaculture Landscapes is a richly illustrated portrayal of aquaculture seen through the disciplinary lens of landscape architecture. As the first book devoted to this topic, Aquaculture Landscapes is an original and essential resource for landscape architects, urbanists, animal geographers, aquaculturists, and all who seek and value multispecies cohabitation of a shared public realm.

Winner of the 2020 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize!

PART ONE

Situating Aquaculture Landscapes

01 SCAPE, Oyster-tecture, 2009. Detail of a cross section of the proposed Palisades Reef in New York City Harbor. The constructed reef is designed as a multifunctional public space that provides habitat for oysters, mussels, and eelgrass, dissipates wave energy, and creates opportunities for water-based recreation.

Designing Ichthyological Urbanism

Landscape architects, teamed with forward-thinking municipalities, ecologists, marine biologists, citizens, and ecosystem engineers like oysters and salmon, imaginatively design aquaculture landscapes for resilient and biodiverse twenty-first-century cities. These coalitions and their creative works are critically informed by contemporary design discourse on performative aquaculture ecologies that address urban challenges, such as sea-level rise and sustainable urban food systems; the theorization of urban animal agency in shaping the form and identity of cities; research into relations between animals’ bodies, behaviors, and urbanism; and the historical precedents of urban aquaculture.

Among the most well-known contemporary urban aquaculture landscape projects is Oyster-tecture, a proposal for multifunctional oyster habitat in New York Harbor. The project was developed by the landscape architecture firm SCAPE, and commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in 2009. Oyster-tecture features an extensive, off-shore field of nets that are stretched between pylons—an armature for a reef ecology consisting of oysters, mussels, and eelgrass. The molluscs filter and improve local water quality as they grow, and the reef attenuates strong waves that threaten the waterfront. An array of small docks set within the system enable multiple recreational activities.¹ Oyster-tecture’s form recalls historical oyster-farming practices such as the Bouchot system, a wooden stake-net system for cultivating mussels that was deployed over many hectares in the Anse de l’Aiguillon in France beginning in the thirteenth century.²

The Sunqiao Urban Agricultural District (SUAD) in Shanghai, China, by the US-based firm Sasaki, is another recent proposal for integrating aquaculture ecologies and urbanism. SUAD is a living laboratory for innovative, urban food production practices. Aquaculture that is woven into various spaces and systems of the district enables daily public engagement with fish. Biodiverse, glassed-in office courtyards feature interior aquaponic ponds that are fed by stormwater and greywater harvested from rooftops and plumbing fixtures. And an open-air aquaculture park that mixes aquaponics, floating greenhouses, and algae farms, functions as a district-scale water-filtration system. At SUAD, fish make possible the goal of outputting cleansed water into the Huangpu River.³

Jennifer Wolch, a leader in the theorization of animal agency in processes of urbanization, calls for a “zoöpolis,” a new “political ecology of people and animals in the city.”⁴ She casts animals as influential actors that affect the form, ecologies, and economies of cities; they are “critical to the making of place and landscape.”⁵ As evidence, she cites the outsize roles of salmon in the social and material construction of Seattle, United States. In Seattle, salmon drive economies, they galvanize citizen activism, their migrations informed the recent redesign of the waterfront, and they are afforded special protections—the entire metropolitan area is deemed a critical salmon habitat.⁶

Theories and recognition of animals’ diverse roles in urban environments are augmented by empirical research into reciprocal relations between animal genetics, behavior, and urbanism. Animals that inhabit cities not only experience rapid change in their genetic makeups, but catfish, birds and other animals also exhibit remarkable behavioral adaptations to feed and survive in cities.⁷ Conversely, studies also explore how animal bodies and behaviors affect changes to cities. Research into fish sentience and the social worlds they construct, for instance, informs ongoing discourse on animal rights and welfare,⁸ which shapes policy on issues such as the creation of urban marine habitat. Moreover, animal behaviors with remediative and infrastructural applications, such as the ability of oysters to filter urban contaminants, are increasingly harnessed. Contemporary designers operate in the context of our growing knowledge of complex interdependencies and reciprocity between cities and the species that inhabit them.

In addition to theories and emerging research on multispecies urbanism, historical precedents of integrated urban aquaculture can also inform contemporary approaches. Wastewater-fed aquaculture systems are prevalent in Asia and across subtropical zones. At the East Kolkata Wetlands in India, the various species of fish that forage in low-density habitat basins are integral to the functioning of constructed wetlands that treat municipal wastewater, provide food and commerce for underserved populations, and enable a range of ecosystem services for the city (see Case Study 09).

Urban aquaria have long served as sites for impactful public interface with fish. While they are problematic in their displacement of fish, aquaria also fuel the imagination and curiosity, inspiring good stewardship of fish habitats. The atmospheric Aquarium du Trocadéro, a nineteenth-century grotto aquarium and garden in the heart of Paris, served for decades as a landscape for Parisians to marvel at displays of fish, bred to restock rivers blighted by French industrialization. The aquarium cooperated with hundreds of French angling and aquaculture societies and offered public courses to aspiring aquaculturists on the emerging art of fish farming (see Case Study 07).

Aquaculture also drives processes of informal urbanism. The lakeside village of Ganvié, Benin, is populated by approximately 20,000 Tofino people as well as thousands of Blackchin Tilapia (Sarotherodon melanotheron). The village is a dynamic field of constructed fish habitat, small islands, agriculture plots, and elevated houses. The hundreds of tree branches planted in the shallow water attract tilapia, eventually accumulate silt, and then are colonized by vegetation. Through this gradual process, fish habitat transitions into islands for crop farming. At Ganvié, the culture of fish simultaneously feeds and forms an evolving village (see Case Study 08).

The essays to follow describe exemplary contemporary landscape works at the nexus of aquaculture and urbanism. The essays situate these works within contemporary landscape theory, and are arranged relative to the themes of resiliency, polyculture, and adaptive reuse.

Resilient Aquaculture Coastlines examines designs for resilient urban waterfronts in North America that integrate fish and human communities. The reefs, shellmounds, and seawalls described in this section demonstrate that urban flood-resiliency strategies can help restore populations of salmon, oysters, and other species critical to their ecosystems.

Catalytic Polycultures explores how constructed aquaculture ecologies can have a transformative effect on urban sites and systems. Among the projects discussed is a public aquaponic ecology in China, a country with a deep history of polyculture. This section also features a trout hatchery in the United States reimagined as a commercial aquaponic system and habitat for self-sustaining populations of spawning trout.

Post-Aquaculture Adaptations examines the adaptive reuse of former fish farms as public landscapes that are informed and enriched by legacies of aquaculture. Projects in China and Europe illustrate the adaptation of ponds, dikes, and hydrologic flows of derelict farms as key components of urban development strategies.

02 Sasaki, Sunqiao Urban Agricultural District, 2016. Aerial oblique of proposed innovation district in Shanghai, China.

03 Sunqiao Urban Agricultural District. Detail of perspective rendering at outdoor aquaponic park.

04 Sunqiao Urban Agricultural District. Detail of park diagram illustrating aquaponics linked to district water cleansing.

05 Tom Leader/TLS, Making Ground/Farming Water, 2010. Plan depicting proposed aquaculture and agriculture plots that infill between new urban mounds at Corte Madre in San Francisco Bay.

Resilient Aquaculture Coastlines

Monofunctional flood-protection infrastructure, such as the seawalls that are typical of urban coastlines, are prone to failure and deleterious to the marine ecologies that existed before the infrastructure was built.⁹ Reconceptualizing and remaking this infrastructure into aquatic habitats, farms, and migration corridors has become part of the design vocabulary of contemporary landscape architects, who propose adaptive and safe-to-fail strategies for resilient urban coastlines. Resiliency, the notion that infrastructure, landscapes, and ecosystems can withstand and recover from a range of disturbances such as flooding, has emerged as a guiding principle for urban waterfront design. Ecologist Nina-Marie Lister suggests, “If resilience is to be a useful conce...