Rome in the Tiber or Decolonizing Rome

There are two Romes: Rome on the Tiber and Rome in the Tiber. In the first Rome, the Tiber is a flow of water between two drawn lines on the earth surface from the Apennine mountains to the Tyrrhenian Sea. In the second, the Tiber is an all-consuming wetness that hydrologists structure in the hydrologic cycle, scientists describe as the critical zone, and ancients called Ocean or Oceanus. In the first Rome, we are geographic outsiders; in the second we are hydrologic insiders. If we know the first Rome for its pioneering past and its past-filled present, we need to know the second Rome urgently for a warming future that threatens the earth surface and line separating land from water with erasure and chaos. 

Projects take several forms, such as re-situating a ‘landmark’ like the Trevi fountain, the Jewish Ghetto; programing a piazza or walk; re-engaging a place like the Forum, Pantheon or Botanical Garden sectionally on the terms of gradients and nested time; re-contextualizing a summer event or the Jubilee Year; transforming the banks of the River Tiber, the place of an aqueduct or a Roma settlement. Students may consider their projects addressing particular policies or disciplinary realms such as education, tourism, environment, climate, history, housing, ecology.