Mapping the WEAP (Water, Earth, Air, People): An Archival mapping-based Methodology for understanding Human Impacts on Places over Time.

As architects and urbanists of now, confronted with the existential threat of the climate emergency, we need to look more deeply at how humankind’s urban narratives, constructs and material layers have an impact on environmental phenomena over time. Using a comprehensive and carefully researched archive and mapping exercise which we call the WEAP (water, earth, air and people) we can deepen our understanding of the environmental effect our places for people have had across different time periods on the water, earth and air that underpin our human constructs and built environment.
Students at the Edinburgh School of Architecture & Landscape Architecture, working in the two-year Masters programme were invited as part of their research-led studio brief to draw the different layers of the WEAP at two different scales; (regional and city) across three different time periods, namely
• Agrarian (10,000-600 years ago)
• Industrial (500 – 50 years ago)
• Digital (50 years ago - present)

Mappings were drawn using CAD with each layer drawn as a DWG file and Xref-ed into a standard template.
The ideological premise of the studio is to research & investigate ‘edge effects’ (changes in species, population or community structures that occur at the boundary of two or more habitats) and the ‘in-between’ they generate, referred to in ecology as the ‘eco-tone’. These existing edge effects have been found to operate within physical, socio-political, and environmental realms. The WEAP research data set dives into deep time and the evolution of place, engaging with the geomorphology, ecology, hydrology, climate and forms of human settlement over time.
Our city of investigation is commonly known as both Derry and Londonderry, the second largest city in Northern Ireland. The intention is that the WEAP methodology could be applied to any place of investigation as a pre-cursor to the generation of urban design narratives.