a story of two creeks
map + listening tube
A look into how our built environment and city policies control the flow of water, people, and power.
year
2024role
designer, fabricator, researcher, writer
materials
found pvc, 3D print, cement;
newsprint
A speculative installation +
a newsprint style map
Through photos, diagrams, and writing, the map compares how infrastructures and policy in the form of dams, redlining, and highways affected and continue to affect Minnehaha Creek and Bassett Creek.
As rivers and creeks flow between the neighborhoods, cities, and counties of Minnesota, it's easy to consider them as passive players: natural features that just happen to flow by. But humans have long sought out rivers to settle near for food, water, and transportation. They are the original highways, traversed by both Dakota canoes and colonizer steamboats; they were used as exploration and trading routes and power for mills. And so the flow of water has never been neutral-- it has always been a means for survival and, especially through colonization, power. We look to Minneapolis’s two major creeks for examples of how the control of the flow of water directly relates to the control of flow of people and power: Minnehaha Creek and Bassett Creek. One flows through the metro’s wealthiest suburbs, while the other is tunneled 20 feet under the warehouses of the North Loop in Minneapolis.
Bassett Creek’s location near downtown and just upstream of St. Anthony falls, the site of some of the biggest Mills in the midwest at the time, doomed it, it seems, early on. By 1876, there was talk of sinking the ‘mammoth sewer’ of a creek underground, while Minnehaha Creek was still two miles outside of Minneapolis city limits. It would be another six years before the creation of Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners and Minnehaha Creek would be chosen, for its beauty and affordability, to be preserved as a park in the 1880s.
Perhaps not a grand plan to destroy one creek and save another, it still created a value difference. And this difference has been recreated through time. This valuing one area and dejecting another in the late 1800’s would later be codified thorugh redlining in the 1930’s and 40’s, when people where racially dispersed along those same lines. Come the 60’s, and those areas deemed ‘blighted’ are destroyed to make way for the highway system, systematically displacing and separating the same marginalized people concentrated there only a couple of decades before. And the salt from our highways leaks back into our waterways, and the emissions from our cars harms most the people along the highways, and the local property taxes fund the watershed management commissions, so who lives where and how big the houses are informs how well our creeks are restored.