Wet Land

Using Essex county as a case study, Wet Land calls for the strategic inundation of tile-drained agricultural lands to create a new agroecological economy as a solution to the environmental degradation that has resulted from the agricultural land-drainage practices — a key tool of the European colonization of Upper Canada. By combining the ecological services of pre-settlement wetlands and contemporary agricultural best management practices, a new agroecological landscape emerges, mutually beneficial to farmers, society and the environment. This thesis uses parametric modelling to understand the spatial effects of the proposed landscape interventions, to spatialize the effects of policy recommendations and to model the potential results of landscape and policy recommendations in difference scenarios.