Uncommon Knowledge: Practices and Protocols for Environmental Information

Abstract

The databases that landscapes architects rely on to design future-oriented infrastructure—the SHP files and CSVs that describe a site’s climate, plants, and soils—often involve inadvertently appeal to extractive forms of knowledge production and storage. What if we were to design information infrastructures, both physical and digital, that are premised on collective ownership as opposed to existing systems that privatize, accumulate, and collect? This thesis, Uncommon Knowledge, responds to the contemporary environmental information economy at the site of Google’s first hyperscale data center in water stressed The Dalles, Oregon. On the banks of the polluted Columbia River straddling Washington and Oregon, the thesis projects futures where watershed scale data commons produce knowledge materially, through the infrastructure of plants, and immaterially, through networks and servers. By deepening the connection between people, their environments, and information, the landscape stokes political agency and action in at-risk watersheds through uncommon models of knowledge production.