THE RETURN OF THE CITY’S WATER SPINE

Premier University, Chittagong.

Project idea

Chittagong, the name of beautiful city in Bangladesh. But due to global warming and inappropriate planning strategies blessing turn into curse. The rising sea level along with mismanagement of the city creates the water logging in the city. Realizing the demolishing of the quality of life along with blessing, our team(Brittanto) take it as an academic project where the main idea was to revive the city with blessing but the return of its core, tradition along with culture which depend on water. The main aim of the project was to remove the threat of waterlogging from the city and turning the cause into blessing that can help people instead curse them. So that our main idea of the project was returning the city water spine into life in terms of protecting the city with more quality of living.

Project description

Global warming along with embankment in both sides of the canal destroying the characteristics and tradition on chaktai canal which start from bohaddar hat and end in karnafully river. That canal allowed people once to reach bohaddar hat by boat on both transportation and goods supply service. But with time that tradition getting lost with lack of reservation and maintenance and awareness. That canal turn into a curse as the high tide flooded low altitude land (under alt. 15' sea level). As Chattogram having a lot of hill and valley the canal washed rainwater which cost around 200 crore taka. For better understanding field survey of that area done. From there we sort out the strength, weakness, opportunity as well as threat. With respect to the chattogram metropolitan master plan 1995, some design decisions and policies come out along with some zoning. Among the decision we try to turn the curse into a blessing, making individual draining and storm lines which will be collect by water treatment plants at the end of the canal saving the natural resource. As well as considering the canal as the front of the building making a 20ft wide space which design in considering a walkway with a sitting facility and a bicycle road, that road can also be use in need of fire defense and the dredging team. Proposing some pedestrian bridges to connect both sides. The tradition of boat is more necessary to reduce the pressure from the road. So that we make some important points as boat stations and canal port, design the station and port with respect to the tide system. Applying moose system in karnafully the tide will range from 0'-12' from sea level. We can dream to re-imagine the chattogram city with the image of the city.

Technical information

As being a tropical city we calculate the amount of rainwater is value around 200 crore BDT (23,554,360 USD). We make a proper solution to that along with a freshwater reservoir that allocates in master plan which reserve water for the city for 3 months which is essential in HOT season as freshwater is not available at that time. We also make the canal live providing a moose system that will control the tide limited to 11.5 ft which previously happen at the rate of height 19 ft and caused the flash flood and caused losses in the commercial site valued over 1.5 M USD. Our first and foremost goal was to set a sustainable solution by providing great quality and easy livelihood in a habitat like 50 lac people.