Brett Milligan, assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of California, Davis, will deliver a Public Lecture Series talk titled Landscape Migration: Pulses, Shortfalls and Trajectories. In addition to teaching design studios and courses on regenerative technologies, Milligan is also a faculty member of UC Davis’ trans-departmental graduate geography program, in which he teaches on the topics of infrastructural studies and industrial ecology.
Milligan is the author of Free Association Design and director of Metamorphic Landscapes. His research focuses on the design of interfaces between land and water, articulating frameworks and methods to meld ecological and infrastructural performance with aesthetics and expanded forms of social and political engagement. He is a founding member of the Dredge Research Collaborative, which curates and designs DredgeFest, a roving event series consisting of symposiums, exhibitions, design workshops, and public tours examining the human manipulation of coastal and sedimentary processes. The first four editions of DredgeFest consist of a comparative study of the four coasts of the continental United States: Atlantic, Gulf, Great Lakes, and the Pacific. Other current design projects include Feral Recreation, an investigation of the human use and occupation of restored and naturalized lands in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta; and Wicked Ecologies, a comparative study of the Everglades and the California Delta from the vantage point of constructed earthworks and wicked problems, a project funded in part by a grant from the Graham Foundation.
Once a dynamic inland sea of tidal wetlands, the California Delta was reclaimed by dredging and the construction of a network of levees (orange). Due to this infrastructure, these landscapes have since subsided up to 25 feet below sea level (darkest green). Data generated by 2008 Lidar from the CA Dept. of Water Resources. Map by Brett Milligan.
