Emma Mendel's work sits between community outreach, infrastructural systems, and urban ecological networks. These relationships have continually influenced her professional, educational, and academic experiences and have helped her develop multiple approaches to landscape architecture and engage with an array of design thinking tools. 

Specifically, Mendel is excited to continue developing a body of research on the convergence of local knowledge and technical prowess in the pursuit of ecologically sensitive infrastructures. Water has long played a critical role in the forms and locations of human settlement, which are often predicated on hydrological planning and engineering. Though technical approaches to planning water-adjacent settlements have provided a clear advantage in the control of hydrological systems, they abstract environmental complexity, and reduce our ability to understand our contradictory relationship to water—simultaneously, a resource and a risk. 

During her current fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, she has been exploring these topics through the concept of ephemeral material infrastructures. This work uses Johnstown, Pennsylvania as a case study of extreme flooding events and explores how cultural responses—such as oral stories, folklore, urban legends, and cautionary tales—emerge just as reliably as technical solutions in the aftermath of a disaster. It proposes that a serious study of intergenerational narratives, and informal knowledge before, during, and after a disaster can be combined with infrastructural interventions to create robust mitigation strategies. The research catalogs this set of approaches alongside more standardized engineering and policy responses. As a type of environmental management—where people are prioritized before, during, and after a disaster—it asks how speculation, fiction, and myth suggest a new type of techne. This work is informed by my prior research on First Nations and Native American issues. For her MLA thesis project, Fluid Reciprocity, I studied access to safe drinking water, food sovereignty and cultural landscapes. While at Harvard GSD, her research engaged with Native American anthropological work and methods of representation that complemented and expanded on issues pertaining to food sovereignty and ecological restoration efforts within the discipline of landscape architecture.