ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION / ENGAGING + INFORMING /
ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION / ENGAGING + INFORMING /
The National Park Service uses the Uni-grid system for their brochures. This is an imagined version of the brochure for El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar Natural Bioreserve in Mexico. It is an important natural area of the Mexican nation; it’s depicted on the 200 peso Mexicano.
El Pinacate Y Gran Desierto de Altar
African Burial Ground Cosmogram
CREATED IN COLLABORATION WITH GEORGE MCCRAKEN, JAIMIE UTHUPH, AND JUSTO JONES.
The Flatbush African Burial Ground is located on the corner of Church Ave and Bedford Ave. It is a sacred place as enslaved West African and Lenape ancestors were buried here, despite that it has been desecrated throughout history. It is now being protected by community organizations; you can see on the map above that community members drew the Kongo Cosmogram on the land in celebration of the people buried here.
Looking to future designs of FABG, we wanted to understand the neighborhood’s cosmovision and feelings towards the space a little bit more. We set up a pop up community engagement right outside the space.
We had two exercises: first we simply asked people what they wanted to see in the space and we asked them to share a little bit about their cosmovision through a quick card game.
Activity 1: What would you like to see in the Flatbush African Burial Grounds?
Activity 2: Cosmovision Game
Using the community engagement feedback of both activities, we designed the Flatbush Cosmogram, both as a cosmovision and as a way to organize the space of the burial ground.
US-Mexico Border Watershed Governance
A spatial education project mapping the complex governance of shared watersheds along the US-Mexico border, investigating how water law, land use, and community needs intersect across national boundaries.
The IBWC is a joint Mexico-US organization that has been dedicated to, “regulating water storage, hydropower, sanitation and flooding precautions,” in the boundary water ways since the Treaty of 1944. The organization has ratified 179 amendments, proving to be quite cooperative in its short history (“History,” 2023).
The river management areas are broken down into three areas; the Colorado River, and two sections of the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande, divided by Ciudad Juarez, CH/El Paso, TX. Each country manages the counties along the US-Mexico border you see highlighted below, as well as projects along the river that affect the flow of the water.
A large part of the treaties and conventions between the United States and Mexico are water sharing clauses.
