Lake effects: Refiguring Lake Michigan's public coast

Abstract

As climate change accelerates the speed and magnitude of cyclical water level dynamics across the Great Lakes, the widespread adoption of shoreline hardening increases erosion, starves sediment, and limits access. Enhancing the disrupted sediment flows in the littoral drift is essential to both promoting coastal resilience and upholding public rights to the shore granted by the Public Trust Doctrine. Doing so requires state-level action to reimagine two public landscapes of Lake Michigan’s Eastern shore–municipal harbours and state park sand dunes–as interconnected sites of sediment sinks and stores. Through the concept of a “thickened shore,” the thesis situates the movement of sediment, people, and plants as co-creators of didactic landscapes that celebrate the shifting shorelines of the public trust. It situates landscape architecture as a leader in imagining Great Lakes coastal resilience as a materially and legally connected regional endeavor of tending to the rights and rituals of a floating coast.