Retrofitting the Tennessee Valley Authority

Abstract

As the flagship of the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was a triumph of regional and environmental design that has since fallen on hard times. When writer James Agee toured the region in 1935, he described the massive dam construction underway as a great skeleton across the valley, to be fleshed with social programs; economic incentives; navigation; flood control; power; and economic development. There were planned towns, parkways, jobs, and cheap energy - a regional utopia. Eighty years later, what remains of that skeleton is a static system of dams and their reservoirs, and an aging power grid more reliant on heavily polluting fossil fuels than hydroelectric power. The program is heavily in debt, regularly challenged to privatize and decentralize. Meanwhile, the TVA's region has reoriented itself along new programmatic and spatial lines, increasingly relegating the TVA to irrelevant anachronism. Today's TVA is an important American landscape facing obsolescence, largely due to organizational ossification and a failure to adapt to changing attitudes towards environmental management. Using the Tennessee River as a conceptual and physical bounding device, this thesis revisits the original goals of the TVA and critically examines their contemporary incarnation. The thesis then maps the TVA's remant components in order to explore how a relatively rigid and anachronistic regional plan may be retrofitted within a wholly different economic and political climate in order to rescue it from gradual decline. Ultimately, the thesis argues that rather than reinstituting the original New Deal toolkit, a contemporary retrofit could instead take the form of a flexible series of minimal components around three lenses of intervention: the public; ecology; and energy. These can then be layered onto the existing network to reframe its symbolism for the 21st century. In this way, the project identifies points of entry for grafting contemporary uses and meanings onto the TVA's remnant spine.