roomthily

This is the Mississippi as a generative infrastructure, instigating patterns of settlement that continue to govern the urbanisms of middle America even as the Mississippi is greatly diminished in relative importance as infrastructural backbone. Thus — quite ironically — it is the efficacy of the Mississippi in generating urbanisms, an expression of the quantity and intensity of agency the river is capable of exercising to the end of making landscapes, that led to its subjugation via channelization and regularization, as the river made the riverboat system possible, the riverboat system begat settlement, settlement requires protection, protection requires flood control, and flood control reduces the capacity of the river to make landscapes.