Planet Swamp is a research and design project that treats wetness as a defining condition of contemporary life. Rather than seeing swamps, floodplains, canals, and stormwater systems as marginal or failed landscapes, the project approaches them as critical sites where climate change, colonial history, and urban governance intersect.

Building on earlier work focused on Sydney, Planet Swamp shifts scale to examine how drainage, drying, and hydraulic control have shaped cities and regions across the world. Modern planning and engineering have long sought to stabilise water through pipes, channels, and standards. These infrastructures do more than manage flows. They embed historical decisions, political priorities, and forms of ecological erasure that continue to shape who bears risk and who is protected.

Planet Swamp brings together historical research, comparative case studies, and embodied field methods such as walking, listening, and diagramming to study wet environments as living archives. Design is used not to deliver solutions, but as a way of thinking through uncertainty, conflict, and adaptation. Indigenous and place-based knowledges are central, offering alternative ways of relating to water that resist purely technical control.

At a time of accelerating climate instability, Planet Swamp argues that the future of cities will be decided in wet places. Understanding how we govern wetness is essential to imagining more just, attentive, and resilient ways of living on a changing planet.