Last night and this morning were shaky, but I rebounded. It was the first time in weeks I got off track. I worked in the Everglades studio for several hours, rapidly completing the employment data mapping but running into hurdles with the soils. I came home and skated, ate dinner, took care of some administrative things, and worked on assignments for simulating sustainable futures.
I'm trying to set up a collaborative project for thesis that extends beyond the planning department. It is my belief that big problems that planners have traditionally tried to tackle on their own will require interdisciplinary work in the future. In my case, I'm looking at south and central Florida's hydrological challenges--providing drinking water, flood control, and habitat conservation. The current system is not working well, and it's about to get worse with climate change. I want to assemble a team that would consist, at a minimum, of an ecologist specializing in wetland habitat, engineer specializing in water infrastructure, an economist specializing in infrastructure financing, an architect, a climate scientist, and possibly a hydrologist. It might be impossible to coordinate all the moving pieces, but that's one of the key jobs of a planner, right?