• 2011

Emerging Terrain

Omaha, Nebraska
$50,000

Emerging Terrain is an educational, not-for-profit research and design collaborative. The organization focuses on how cultural, economic, and social factors affect contemporary land use.

The Arts Endowment will help support design analyses, community interviews, and planning for an exhibition about land use in Sarpy County, Nebraska. Emerging Terrain will work with a number of partners and landscape photographer Alex MacLean to research, visually document, and identify changes over time in the regional land grid on a parcel-by-parcel basis. Maps, aerial photography, infographics, and other design drawings will be generated to illustrate Sarpy County's evolution from agricultural to suburban and urban uses. The partners will engage a diverse cross-section of Sarpy County residents in a series of community charrettes and recorded interviews to further document the relationship between citizens and their local landscape. All material will be compiled for use in a future exhibition to be held in a vacant "big box store" located in a suburban corridor targeted for redevelopment. The project is expected to engage 40,000 of Sarpy County's 160,000 residents, and will specifically target original settlement families and new suburban residents.

Montages of proposed exterior space in what is now a vacant surburban strip mall. Photo courtesy of Emerging Terrain, Nick Rebeck, and Jessica Pfeffer

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