This studio offers you the opportunity to apply your knowledge and skills in a multidisciplinary team that will explore the dam as a modern contested technical, environmental and social global project with major local impact. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the dam was the vehicle par excellence of 20th century utopian development. Its appeal lay in the promise of free and clean energy and the malleability of ecologies and societies. The belief in modernity through this kind of top-down engineering has always been met with objections, but in recent decades the dam has been the subject of fierce protest movements worldwide like never before, for exactly the same reasons: the political process by which they were implemented, the ecological impact, the population displacement, and the urbanisation and industrialisation it promoted. Dam construction is now included in the list of criteria to measure the Great Acceleration, the post-war expansive growth that ushered in the Anthropocene.
In this studio, the issue of dams provides an entry point to learn more about the issues of top-down modernisation, ecological and social engineering. After introductory lectures, you will work in groups to understand the dam as a technological project with major ecological and social implications for local communities. You will learn about the promises, successes in clean energy, water management and development of disadvantaged regions, as well as technological failures and the sometimes disastrous impact on indigenous communities. This studio offers the opportunity to invest and enrich your disciplinary knowledge and skills in an interdisciplinary project. As a group, we learn in contact with activists how scientific knowledge can be used in a multi-stakeholder social environment to address one of the most pressing issues of our time.