Doctoral Research Towards a Vital Milieu: Unflattening the Upper Rhine Plain, Institute for Landscape and Urban Studies, ETH Zürich, 2020-25.
The dissertation explores the disturbed landscapes of the Upper Rhine Plain as vital milieus. Communities have inhabited the amphibious landscape of the Upper Rhine for centuries, adapting to the river’s shifting rhythms. The Rhine straightening, initiated in 1817, profoundly altered this relationship. With the aim to control the river, it first abstracted the meander on engineering drawings before transforming it into a channelised waterway. The project caused profound environmental changes and opened up opportunities for further exploitation of the area. More than 200 years later, as climate and ecological crises draw renewed attention to the river’s dynamic presence, there is an urgency to revisit the Upper Rhine’s disturbed landscapes—including former Rhine meanders, flood protection polders, dams and flooded gravel pits—moving beyond linear narratives of engineering triumph or environmental loss. Introducing the concept of a vital milieu, this research draws attention to their inherent vitality. It follows three animals that are historically connected to the Upper Rhine—floodwater mosquitoes, sand martins, and the Atlantic salmon—to trace the complex interactions that sustain the regulated river, the floodplain and the lower terrace. Through ethnographic fieldwork—multispecies walks with interdisciplinary experts from biology, ecology and geography—archival research, and drawing vital milieus as research methods, it unveils maintenance practices, frictions, and rhythms that structure these lively landscapes. This work also informs alternative representations, counter-cartographies, which challenge anthropocentric and static depictions and reframe disturbed landscapes as co-constituted spaces shaped by interdependent, more-than-human relations. Offering methods to research, represent and engage with dynamic environments, the thesis contributes to landscape and urban studies, and reveals design and management practices taking shape amidst the uncertainty of ongoing climate and ecological crises: Tending to more-than-human temporalities and rhythms, they emerge as ways of gardening on a planetary scale.
Publications https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johanna-Just/research
