Inhabiting Wetness: Resilience through Negotiations

Project idea

Inhabiting Wetness is an initiation of designing by negotiating wetness to make the urban socio-ecological landscapes resilient to flooding and sea-level rise. It explores the role of design to structure a transformation by leveraging social infrastructure for ecological restoration.

Project description

This war against the sea and monsoon seen in the States policies and proposals creates a landscape of separation between land-water, wet-dry and fair weather-monsoon which makes the city’s natural first line of defense, the socio-ecological landscapes, threatened. When the binary solutions of such landscapes are to retreat and fortify, the dissertation intends to re-visualize, recover and revive the threatened socio-ecological landscapes along the Irla Nullah of the Bharat Nagar precinct along the Juhu-Versova coastal stretch with the aim to integrate them with threatening infrastructural systems to create a new resilient networks of water holdings. Each projects at the High, Middle and Lower grounds are, while negotiating varied conditions and relationships, a start for design to play out on the ground. Here rather than resisting them, the projects given in to the system of the infrastructure to construct a transition that begins to appreciate the multiplicities of the raindrop while integrating two clashing systems of draining and overflowing.

Technical information

A wetness literacy was curated that moved away from a land-centric to ground-wetness centric approach to help negotiate relationships at various scales as seen in the diagrams between the wetness, ground and built. This led to the emergence of 4 conditions of relationships: Water v/s Ground driven by draining of water, Water as Ground driven by rise and fall, Ground as Water by saturation and desaturation and the Water is Ground by ebbs and tides. The revisualization along with the wetness literacy helped curate a masterplan where a triad of demonstration grounds along the topographic zone were identified as punctures within the rigid landscapes with potentials to start a chain of interventions that negotiate wetness. It is an initiation of shift from flow thinking to hold thinking. They employ an ideology of integration of land-use with ecological landscapes to create socio-ecological landscapes rooted in the everyday practices of the city.

Documentation

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