Water Territory

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year

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Water Territory

design thesis

2023-2024

John Palmesino (tutor)

Ann-Sofi Rönnskog (tutor)

Empires transformed rivers into an instrumental apparatus to maintain their autocratic control. However, the processes of modernisation have shifted the relationship between rivers and states. In the Anthropocene, the concept of the river transcends local and global perspectives, taking on a planetary magnitude. The non-geometric nature of contemporary rivers renders engineering control through current mono-technological paradigms and singular knowledge structures ineffective. Embracing the historicity and recursion of the water cycle is crucial for moving beyond instrumentalism. This transformation requires achieving ontological pluralism through techno-diversity, articulated via cosmotechnics. A new architectural paradigm mediates fluvial variability and territoriality, shifting from enframing to attunement, catalysing new assemblies of governmentalities and cosmological imaginaries.

A grid-based survey and cartography where the accuracy of the water system outlines approaches modern geodetic standards. Yu Ji Tu, 12th Century.

Where rivers are drawn disproportionately wide, the delta reads as islands – an inversion of figure and ground. Zhejiang Province, Provincial Atlas of the Great Qing Dynasty, c. 1760.

Ancient empires transformed rivers into an instrumental apparatus for maintaining autocratic control, progressively reshaping them as products of deliberate planning through surveying, mapping, and fortifying, reflecting a persistent desire for static order. Throughout history, the relationship between human chronicle and natural flux has thus become so deeply intertwined that one can no longer be disentangled from the other. According to Dilip da Cunha, a river is a cultural and technological construct rather than a natural given: by reducing hydrological complexity to a line, such abstractions impose order on an otherwise diffuse condition of wetness so that water can be stabilised, governed, and appropriated, enabling empires and colonial powers to classify, parcel, and legitimise territorial claims; in other words, what we conventionally call a river is already a design construct. In China, it is impossible to escape hydro-politics, as river management has been a key element in deploying state power for millennia. This pattern continues in its modern state. Yet China’s modernisation has unfolded without a corresponding transformation in technological thinking: technology continues to be treated as universal and neutral rather than as a mode of reasoning and acting. This unresolved instrumentalism was first articulated through the late imperial ti–yong (体用, substance–function) separation and subsequently reinforced, producing a dualism between technology and culture, society and nature. It continues to shape China’s approaches to scientific inquiry and environmental stewardship, becoming legible in the institutional forms through which hydrological knowledge is produced, standardised, and mobilised for governance.

Plan of Improvement of the Woosung River Lower Part, Shanghai, China, 1900. Proposed by Dutch engineer Johannis de Rijke.

Plan of Hai Ho from Tianjin City to the Sea, 1927. Proposed by the Hai Ho Conservancy Commission.

One of the earliest modern articulations of a Three Gorges dam proposal, in Sun Yat-sen’s The International Development of China (1920s).

Sun Yat-sen’s The International Development of China, 1920s.

Black Rocks Rapid, Upper Yangtze River. Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol.

Trackers hauling a junk over the Wild Rapid, Upper Yangtze River, Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol.

John L. Savage's Proposal for the Yangtze River Gorge Dam, 1945, American Heritage Centre, University of Wyoming.

China’s contemporary hydro-governance configuration comprises both the residues of historical statecraft and the consolidations of modern science and engineering. From early mythologies that link political legitimacy to taming floods, through the consolidation of intensive agriculture across the Yellow River basin, to the twentieth century’s surge of dam construction, water management has remained a recurrent medium through which authority is asserted and stabilised. Hydraulic intervention, in this sense, operates as a demonstration of state capacity: it translates fluvial volatility into governable continuity and encloses wetness as territory. Such hydro-governance carries consequences that extend beyond domestic welfare, shaping regional stability, security, mobility, and economic prosperity. In June 1938, the Nationalist government ordered the breach of the Yellow River embankment at Huayuankou, Henan, to slow the advancing Japanese army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The resulting flood became one of the most environmentally destructive events in world history, inflicting immense human and environmental costs while also reshaping regional demographics, wartime logistics, and state authority. The militarisation of the Yellow River extended through the Chinese Civil War, configuring the political and spatial order of East Asia in the late twentieth century.

Watersheds and Dam Constructions Across China.

After 1949, the Communists demonstrated a willingness equal to that of their Nationalist counterparts to view rivers as both potentially destructive forces requiring continued state intervention and opportunities for development, pursuing dams and basin-scale projects to moderate flood risk, stabilise irrigation, secure logistics, and support industrial growth. Over the subsequent decades, more than 87,000 dams have been constructed, alongside repeated resettlement and new ecological strains. These projects and their social and ecological consequences, in turn, prompted further rounds of technical innovation, institutional consolidation, and policy recalibration. Over the past few decades, China’s water conservancy governance has shifted from discrete works toward basin-scale coordination and networked management. Under the banner of Ecological Civilisation, restoration, resilience, and ecological governance have entered policy agendas, yet their execution remains essentially engineering-led, folding ecological processes into controllable technical regimes. Such an engineering orientation is consolidated through an object–procedure chain that extends far beyond individual water-management projects. Rivers are translated into administratively bounded units and technical targets through monitoring networks, survey routines, modelling protocols, and standardised design parameters, so that intervention can be planned, executed, and audited as repeatable work.

Multi-temporal analysis of Normalised Difference Water Index in Pearl River Delta Landsat 5,7,8, 1990-2023.

Multi-temporal analysis of Normalised Difference Water Index in Yangtze River Delta Landsat 5,7,8, 1990-2023.

It is embedded in responsibility chains such as the River-Chief system (河长制, hezhang zhi), where watershed governance is rendered as a vertical sequence of named officials, discrete territorial scopes, and inspection cycles. It is priced through market interfaces, where water-rights trading pilots and virtual-water metrics bind hydrology to quota, valuation, and commodity circulation. It is stabilised through mobilisation, where flood-detention basins, relocations, and compensation rules institutionalise sacrifice zones as part of flood security, making maintenance and social organisation integral to the governance of variability. It is built into urbanisation, where the Sponge City programme turns stormwater retention and runoff control into construction criteria for expanding metropolitan regions. It is inscribed into territorial spatial planning, where the Ecological Conservation Redline and ecological corridors convert the environment into enforceable spatial categories and permitted–forbidden zones. It is redistributed through inter-basin transfer, where the South–North Water Transfer treats water as a transferable supply reorganised as conveyance, allocation, and delivery. Architecture and territorial planning are often premised on stable ground; yet under the existing hydrological governance framework, engineered stability increasingly depends on the suppression of fluvial variability. This suppression of variability is sustained by the way modern hydrological knowledge is institutionalised, through epistemic procedures that stabilise water as an inert object in advance of intervention. Here, the river becomes legible as a bounded entity that can be measured, depicted, and optimised, a legibility secured through cartographic delineation and geometrical abstraction. This mode of stabilisation is distinct from how rivers were historically apprehended and governed in China. While pre-modern China possessed sophisticated hydraulic practices, these practices remained predominantly procedural rather than axiomatic. Traditional Chinese cartography, or yutu (舆图), did not derive from a uniform geometric projection; instead, it foregrounded topological relations and administrative legibility, construing the river less as a fixed geographic object than as a jurisdictional armature linking centres of authority and regimes of circulation and upkeep. This convention aligns with shi (势), or propensity, wherein governing the river relies on timely intervention rather than construing it as an inert object to be mastered through abstract rule. A decisive rupture followed the introduction of Euclidean geometry and its mode of idealisation: by translating flux into fixed coordinates and stable forms, it allows the river to be reframed as a measurable extension and acted upon as a manipulable entity within linear chronos.

Shoreline variations of Poyang Lake, multi-temporal analysis of Normalised Difference of Water Index, Southeast China, Sentinel-2, 2017-2024.

Reservoirs formed by dam constructions, multi-temporal analysis of Normalised Difference of Water Index, Southeast China, Sentinel-2, 2017-2024.

Urban transformations along the Yangtze River Delta and Hangzhou Bay, multi-temporal analysis of Normalised Difference of Water Index, Southeast China, Sentinel-2, 2017-2024.

In the upheavals of the Anthropocene, the geometric premise of modern hydraulics grows increasingly untenable. Rivers no longer present themselves as bounded objects amenable to exhaustive measurement and stable depiction; they are entangled with extraction, transportation, urbanisation, industrialisation, and scientific observation, where local interventions propagate cross-basin consequences. Rivers bifurcate, migrate, and reassert themselves, marking a non-geometrical condition in which river and anthropogenic environments mutually shape one another. This transformation exposes the limits of an inherited hydraulic paradigm that frames the river primarily through engineering abstraction, and it unsettles the regional, static templates through which control has been conceived. Technology is not merely a means of acting on objects; it is a mediating capacity that shapes how we perceive, how we measure, how we control, and what we allow to recede from view. In this sense, it is embedded in cognitive practice, scientific inquiry, and governmental regimes. To reorient how we think with rivers, therefore, requires interrogating the technology that conditions what can be known, acted, and maintained in relation to them. For Heidegger, modern technology appears as Gestell (enframing): a mode of revealing that orders nature as Bestand (standing-reserve), rendering the river legible and governable as a calculable resource – channelled, regulated, and set upon to yield energy and capacity. Such enframing privileges fixation and optimisation, narrowing the possibilities for reflection, adaptation, and variation, and closing technological mediation into a self-reinforcing loop of regulation. As this enframed, mono-rational technical paradigm proves inadequate to the complexities within which rivers unfold, an urgent task emerges: to recover techno-diversity and to reframe technics that remain open to contingency, feedback, and co-formation with the systems in which they operate. This reorientation can be articulated through cosmotechnics, a term Yuk Hui proposes to name the unification of cosmic and moral orders through technical means.

Cloudy Mountains, Fang Congyi, ca. 1360–70.

As two constitutive poles of cosmotechnics, cosmos and technics are mutually formative. A cosmos sets the normative horizon within which technics makes sense, and technics, in turn, provides the material means through which a cosmos can be apprehended, enacted, and maintained as a coherent order. Contemporary scientific discourses are constructed through instruments embodied as technological objects, where technology and science – or, more precisely, the representations of the cosmos – emerge as dynamics that constantly give feedback and modify one another, seeking to render the world transparent and calculable. In contrast to the Western tragic thought, where conflicting forces are mutually exclusive, Chinese thought, exemplified by the logic of Shanshui (山水, mountain and water), proceeds through oppositional continuity. Here, Shan (山, mountain) and Shui (水, water), Xu (虚, the unformed) and Shi (实, the formed), and yin (阴) and yang (阳) each name a generative relation rather than a pair of opposites to be settled. Mountain condenses qi into tendency and form, while water circulates qi as movement and flow; their difference sustains mutual emergence and co-dependence. This logic reveals a cyclic, recursive movement in which solidified territory and unsettled water arise from the same generative logic of condensation and circulation. This recursivity dissolves the static figure-ground distinction, rendering territory and water as mutually constitutive forces. This epistemological shift has profound implications for how we engage with rivers technically. While modern hydrological engineering and reservoir regulation tend toward closed regimes of optimisation aimed at minimising error, a relational attunement paradigm remains open to contingency. It acknowledges that the world cannot be exhaustively represented or totally enframed. Therefore, a river management strategy informed by this epistemology of the unknown does not seek to fix the river into a static condition of safety; instead, it embraces a possibility of mediation that is recursive yet open.

Vue de la Machine de Marly, Pierre-Denis Martin, 1723.

Chateau de Versailles, Pierre Patel, 1668.

A Painting of Nature, Forty Scenes of the Yuanmingyuan, 1744.

Eternal Spring Immortals Hall, Forty Scenes of the Yuanmingyuan, 1744.

If rivers now exceed the reach of static depiction and single-purpose management, then the challenge shifts from optimising hydraulic objects to composing a collective relation to fluvial dynamics through territoriality. Territoriality, for John Tresch, is neither a cartographically and juridically fixed space nor a calculus of production, consumption, and exchange. Instead, it is a relational mode of inhabiting and conceptualising space, in which subsistence practices, shared imaginaries, and cosmological orders jointly mediate a collective’s relation to space. If territoriality emerges from the interplay between material conditions and how groups frame and make sense of their worlds, then technologies for governing rivers cannot be understood solely as hydraulic instruments or engineering solutions; instead, such technologies must be seen as architectural mediations that configure relations between materials, imaginaries, and orders. Gardens materialise distinct modes of territoriality, embodied in specific cosmological imaginaries and material configurations. They operate as architectural devices that encode possibilities for organising the relations between water and the built environment. The absolutist geometry of Versailles, with its axial pathways, gridded parterres and hydraulic engineering, constituted a cosmogram of mechanical philosophy and monarchical sovereignty. This spatial grammar is derived from Descartes’s mechanical worldview of res extensa, which underpins the intellectual framework of modernity. Versailles’s canal-making and agricultural management project a form of territoriality grounded in domination, calculability and a disciplined environment. The Yuanming Yuan (圆明园), built as the summer palace of the Qing dynasty, articulates a different cosmotechnical composition. The garden fuses Taoist and Confucian principles, aligning mountains, water, and constructed vistas with flows of qi, yin–yang relations, and moral governance. Rather than subordinating landscape to a single geometric plan, it assembles scenes, images, and architectural fragments into a continuously unfolding milieu in which no clear distinction can be drawn between technological intervention and the so-called natural environment. It operates less as an apparatus of control than as a spatial practice of mediation, attunement, and composition. In the Chinese garden, especially within the Jiangnan tradition, architecture is not reducible to inhabitation, nor does it simply sit incidentally upon an objectified landscape. It acts as a mediator, shaping relations among art, technique, and milieu through constructional logics, technical craft, and choreographed movement. Environmental processes are neither excluded nor fully contained – seasonal change, upkeep, moisture, shade, and growth continuously recompose what the garden is. Read through territoriality, such gardens articulate an imagination for water management today. They invite a mode of governance that reorients rivers as entangled with Earth System dynamics, with the biosphere’s metabolic cycles and the technosphere’s deployment and regulation. In this frame, architectural practice becomes an organisational means for integrating hydrological knowledge with cultural and aesthetic values, so that scientific inquiry gains a culturally inflected sensibility rather than closing into a singular engineering paradigm. Rethinking our relations with rivers through territoriality, therefore, demands not a more advanced apparatus of enframing, but a transformation in the cosmotechnical imagination through which rivers are conceived, sensed, and acted upon – a shift from the modern technics that Heidegger calls Gestell, with its drive toward control, to poiesis, a mode of attunement and co-formation with the world. Such a transformation requires recognising that epistemes, technics, and governance are responsive adaptations interconnected through ongoing coupling with fluvial dynamics, rather than seeking static order or the elimination of contradiction. Openness to uncertainty, in this sense, allows knowledge and action to remain generative as recursive processes through which both rivers and the epistemic frameworks that address them learn to learn. Extended Reading

Da Cunha, Dilip. The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

Dreyer, Jacob. “The State of Chinese Science.” e-flux Journal, Issue 150, 2024.

Elise Misao Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari & Jingru (Cyan) Cheng. “Prologue to the Sky River.” The Avery Review, no. 53, 2021.

Hui, Yuk. Art and Cosmotechnics. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. MIT Press, 2016.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Harper Perennial, 1982.

Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Harper’s Magazine, April 2004, pp.15-20.

Tong, Jun. Glimpse of Gardens in Eastern China. China Architecture Publishing & Media Co. Ltd, 1997.

Mostern, Ruth. The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History. Yale University Press, 2021.

Mullaney, Thomas. The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age.MIT Press, 2024.

Muscolino, Micah S. The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1950. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Pickering, Andrew. “Cybernetics in the Anthropocene.” e-flux Architecture, Intensification September 2025.

Seavitt, Catherine. “Yangtze River Delta Project.” Scenario 03: Rethinking Infrastructure, Spring 2013.

Tan, Ying Jia. “Dreamscapes of Accelerated Development: Uses and Abuses of Artist Impressions in John L. Savage’s Yangtze Gorges Proposal, 1944–1946.” Technology’s Stories 8, no. 1, May 20, 2020.

Tresch, John. “Cosmic Terrains (of the Sun King, Son of Heaven, and Sovereign of the Seas).” e-flux Journal, Issue 114, 2020.