Salt Flats, Finger Islands, and Ponds: Reading the Landscape through Infrastructure in Tampa, Florida

Abstract

We are moving through strange times with the environment. In the greater Tampa Bay area, people commute to the Everglades to hunt pythons, iguanas fall from the sky, and planners build desalination plants to turn saltwater into freshwater. This thesis is an inquiry into the beliefs and ideas that have led to these environmental happenings. It looks at racial capitalism, the teleology of progress, the frontier, and ideas about nature; all of which people have used to create a material infrastructure of residential development in the landscape. Through a historical and cultural analysis, this thesis looks at how tourists, homeowners, critters, planners, environmentalists, engineers, activists, and regular people operate within the bounds of these ideas. Some of their actions and imaginations are limited by what they know and believe, some people work with the natural world to operate and survive in the 21st century, and others take actions to formulate new ways of life. The infrastructures of our times are a product of history and dominant ways of knowing, this thesis seeks to trouble western knowledge that has foreclosed other ways of knowing the natural world.