NLA Model Talk: Lost Rivers of London

This tour will traverse London’s lost rivers – the streams, culverts and tributaries that once gave life to the city. It will document the instrumentalization of water – from a life force to a utility – and explore what has been gained, and what has been lost. The tour will be and flow between the technical – Bazalgette’s sanitation reforms – to the fanciful – Dreams of life on Mars and vast canal infrastructure. The tour will situate this history within today’s sewage crisis, and explore ecological solutions to our failing water systems.

With the aide of the model, the tour will think at the infrastructural scale – moving beyond the perspective of the individual and thinking-through a systems lens. The tour will in turn question what is gained and what is lost from this type of thinking, and ask how we might “reimagine” these lost rivers.

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