Dredging Artifice is an AA Landscape Urbanism Design thesis by MSc MSc Students Shiqi Deng and Menglei Zhong with Input from MArchh Kai Fan.
Global Shipping traffic has increased steadily in the last decades causing great transformations in coastal areas. Among the most affected are estuarine territories such as the Ems river estuary in the Waden Sea. Here, maintenance work of shipping canal needs constant dredging of sand to keep navigation channels unobstructed. These dredging works cause side-effects such as the increase of tidal range and frequent flooding’s in local coastal cities while the relocation of existing ports and specialised global trade produced shrinkage of nearby cities.

Our project ‘Dredging Artifice’ looks at ways in which dredged sand and its relocation along the estuarine territory can be repurposed to accommodate and design the relocation of port activities in line with existing wet and march lands. Through the manipulation of tidal energy, a geomorphological re-arrangement of dredged material produces a designed archipelago, on an existing intertidal zone, which over time can produced a territory that can benefit from its exposure to tidal ranges and the constant dynamism, physical and social of Estuarine Landscapes brought by global trade and side effects.

Explore the full Design Thesis HERE