This is an image of a sand filling operation. It shows tendrils of pipes, approximately 1.6 feet in diameter, trailing across a section of the Ganges Brahmaputra Meghna delta basin just outside Dhaka, Bangladesh. The pipes supply a liquefied slurry of sand dredged from adjacent river bottoms and moved by barge to pumping stations strategically placed along rivers and canals. This is all part of a coordinated effort to adjust what had, until recently, been a process constrained to geologic space-time. But no more. Geology has fallen under the scope of design, offering a temporary stopgap against a landscape that is continuously sinking due to perpetual subsidence. The delta is sinking; it has always been sinking—and flooding, and recharging, and sinking, and flooding, and recharging, and sinking. Like other landscapes, it is continuously changing. Unlike many other landscapes, the processes that it undergoes present significant challenges to the built environment. So get back to designing.

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