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Student: Emily Bigelow
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Dan Faoro, Masataka Yoshikawa, Kurt Neiswender
Biodiverse ecosystems play a critical role in maintaining the health of the world. They help to combat climate change, prevent natural disasters, and mitigate the spread of diseases among other benefits. Mangrove ecosystems are biodiverse habitats that provide more important benefits including carbon sequestration, water filtration, and coastal erosion mitigation.
However, these habitats are frequently threatened by human development and construction practices that prioritize speed and profit over sustainability. Current conservation strategies, which involve regional-scale coexistence, struggle to address this issue because the demand for more human settlements remains higher than the demand for wildlife preservation. As more ecosystems are compromised by urban landscapes, the regional balance between the two shifts in favor of humans at the expense of the environment.
These problems are worsened by the imposition of building strategies that are foreign to a climate region. This practice not only reduces occupant comfort and increases energy demands, but also disrupts natural processes like the flow of water and predation patterns. Vernacular architecture, on the other hand, has an intimate relationship with the surrounding environment and has been adapted to provide comfort within the given conditions. These practices can provide insider knowledge of the local climate and ecosystem to produce new developments that aid in restorative projects rather than harming them.
This thesis seeks to find a symbiotic development strategy, wherein architectural interventions benefit biodiverse ecosystems along with human constituents. It explores innovative and indigenous strategies for urban integration with mangrove ecosystems which reduce habitat destruction and promote restoration. This project recommends a transformative strategy for urban development that makes use of indigenous building techniques and ecological principles to guarantee a symbiotic coexistence of mangrove ecosystems and human infrastructure.
Use Your Cell Phone as a Document Camera in Zoom
From Computer
Log in and start your Zoom session with participants
From Phone
To use your cell phone as a makeshift document camera
