THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY
This work represents the final semester work of students and faculty in the MSAUD Urban Design studio at Columbia University
Introduction
The Great Rift Valley marks a global transect along geological fault lines. It’s an active space of movement and exchange spanning watery crevices and fertile landscapes from the Jordan River Valley in the Middle East to the Zambezi Delta; in these extensive shallows, fresh river water meets the Indian Ocean in Mozambique. The tectonic plates underlying the Rift are pulling away from each other, and expanding socio-political fractures on the surface follow suit. The 2020 spring semester Urban Design Studio explored how three cities along the Rift—Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and Beira, Mozambique—might forge systems and spaces to span this divide amid rapid urbanization and while grappling with the unique impacts of the climate crisis. Student design projects imagine creative alternatives to address the interrelated risks faced by vulnerable populations. These include extreme heat in Tel Aviv, flash flooding due to river floodplain development in Addis Ababa, and coastal inundation and disaster recovery in Beira, which was struck by Cyclone Idai in 2019. The studio’s visionary design strategies propose new forms of urban living that embrace the complexity of water, which is critical to maintaining life along the Rift; the strategies foster social interactions through local stewardship and empowerment models. Marked with fossil evidence from the beginning of human civilization, the Great Rift Valley encourages bold thinking about Earth’s next 100 years of habitability. The Rift suggests new approaches to social and ecological life that bridge global and local economies and furthers site-specific proposals that advance resilient urban design in each context.
Three Design Studios along the Great Rift Valley
The Great Rift Valley is a north-south zone that runs from Syria to Mozambique, stretching 3,000 miles across the equator and aligning Tel Aviv-Yafo, Addis Ababa, and Beira. Each city is marked with fossil evidence of the beginning of human civilization, and the Rift’s wealth of biodiversity, geological events, habitats, cultures, and evidence of early human existence are the focus of research across a range of fields.
Map of the Rift Valley from John Walter Gregory, The Great Rift Valley (1896)
The Great Rift Valley is then both a place of tectonic forces and a metaphor of diverging differences.The Rift creates a unique locus for design. It’s an opportunity for urban designers to inhabit ‘rifts’ as sites of invention, and find creative ways to engage the different sides and forge pathways and connections between them.
Rifts are not only loci of design. They are also a distinctive challenge for urban designers because they occur at multiple scales simultaneously. Tectonic plates can be pulling apart continentally, while at the same time rifting a road, neighborhood, or field. The same forces are in play in these cities between immigrants and residents, speculative development and affordable housing, urban sprawl, and ecological sustainability. These issues present rifts that are global, regional, and local.
The studio was grounded in on-site research and informed by local scholarship through a series of lectures and workshops with site partners in each locale. During the course of the semester, students shifted from an observational stance to one that is broadly propositional, thinking creatively about how to act as urban designers to shape more climate resilience and just landscapes and decent, inclusive societies through our joint work.
