Fluid Environments: The Space We Live In

fluid environWe are living in an age of a dynamic sea level, heightened water surges, increased storm severity, and a plethora of cultural demands and other environmental hazards that directly affect the communities we live in. Despite all the data, academic research and scientific proof, communities at large have trouble seeing this as their problem. Our project Fluid Environments: The Space we Live In, hypothesizes that this disconnect is augmented by a typical community’s struggle with visualizing their changing environment. This visualization gap between the facts and their visual and physical context to a person’s community is limiting the development of our urban environments as a livable community for generations to come. How do we begin to educate the community on the global and regional issues of wet and fluid environments to comprehend what is at stake? How can we help visualize the dynamic contexts that foster the development of climate and cultural policy changes to better our communities? The Littoral Urbanism Lab (LU-Lab) at the University of Miami School of Architecture believes that this visualization gap can be bridged by helping communities gain visual access to their regional data and to interact with this information within the specific context of one’s own community through a dynamic augmented reality environment. The project Fluid Environments: The Space we Live In proposes to provide the tools needed to understand the visual effects of climate change in context to one’s own community.