The Gulf of Maine is an international watershed in the North Atlantic stretching north from Provincetown at the tip of Massachusetts Bay in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to Cape Sable on the Bay of Fundy in the province of Nova Scotia in Canada. For over 13,000 years, the Gulf has been developed around access to the coast for fishing, trading, and recreation. Today, these coastal development patterns put the cultural landscapes, economies, communities, and aging infrastructure systems along the Gulf at risk.
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Climate Futures on the Gulf of Maine uses place-based scenario planning to illustrate the risks, vulnerabilities, and plausible futures for ten infrastructure systems along the rim of the Gulf. Place-based scenario planning is a method of long-term strategic planning that creates representations of multiple, plausible futures that are used to inform decision-making in the present. While complementary to probabilistic models used to forecast future vulnerabilities, scenario-based planning shifts emphasis from statistical probability to ways of thinking about the future. The goal of place-based scenario planning is not to predict the most likely outcome, but to reveal biases and blind spots in complex and non-linear situations.
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Climate Futures uses the medium of landscape representation to surface the cultural value systems embedded in existing infrastructural systems, and position landscape as a driver when evaluating design from individual infrastructures to the Gulf of Maine watershed.
Critical SYSTEMS
Critical infrastructures are systems and assets whose operations are extremely important to the function of society. Many of these systems can be described as points, like treatment plants, airports, and train stations, that are connected by distribution networks, like sewer pipes, water mains, roads, and train tracks. Together, these systems deliver utilities and services across the Gulf of Maine that support everyday life.
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These systems are often interdependent on each other in ways that are difficult to identify or understand until they fail. Failure is increasingly likely due to deferred maintenance, disinvestment, and the large scale and complex ownership structures of these systems.
Critical Systems maps and describes ten existing infrastructure systems in the Gulf of Maine Watershed. The maps reveal how many systems have been constructed along arbitrary municipal lines, ignoring ecological and watershed boundaries that put these systems at increased environmental risk.