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Watering the Urban Desert Past, Present and Future of Water-Urbanism in Ahmedabad, India
Watering the Urban Desert Past, Present and Future of Water-Urbanism in Ahmedabad, India
Tanvi Jain Queens’ College, University of Cambridge
Pilot Thesis, an essay submitted in partial fulfilment M.Phil. in Architecture and Urban Design
Research Supervisor: Dr. Minna Sunikka-Blank Design Supervisors:Ingrid SchrĂśder, Julika Gittner, Aram Moordian & James Pockson Word Count: 5000
Figure 1. A flooded neighbourhood of Ahmedbad, 2017
Figure 2. A dried up lake, Ahmedabad droughts, 2019
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Background The city of Ahmedabad elicits impressions of ‘the shock city’, having become the testbed of experimental projects, policies and mega ¬infrastructures being implemented across the country at an increasingly fast pace (Spodek, 2011). The Sabarmati river front project that reclaims an eleven kilometer stretch within the city is one such outcome of the gigantic infrastructures being built. Motivated more by commercial finance-generation and political image making than river restoration (Dutta, 2018), the project was faced by disjunct responses.
Ahmedabad has been undergoing a water crisis. It was inundated by a brief period of intense rain in 2017, but hit by severe drought soon after, when its ground water reserves almost dried up in the summer of 2019. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events, destruction of the natural floodplains and over extraction of ground-water have not only exacerbated the water stress of the region (Dutta, 2018), but also increased inequalities around water access (Gandy, 2006). The case of Ahmedabad exemplifies larger issues of water management in the country. As cities are increasingly losing their capacity to replenish the ground, many regions are being desiccated and flooded in a short span of time, with either too little or far too much water (Denton and Sengupta, 2019). This situation is common to many other rapidly growing urbanities worldwide, especially the megacities of the global south.
Figure 3,4. Location of Gujarat & Ahmedabad
Contents
Background
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Introduction
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Overview
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Literature Review
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Water: A Cultural View Pre-colonial Water Traditions Emergence of Colonial Technologies
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Water: A Service Infrastructure Present Water Supply Paradigm Inequalities in Access
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Revival of Traditional Practices A Way Forward Water Collection in Dense Neighbourhoods Water Replenishment through Open spaces
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Summary
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Fieldwork Towards Off-grid and Self-reliance
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Bibliography and Image References
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Figure 5. Cross-section of an Iranian Qanat
Figure 6. Yadz, Iran with wind-catchers of badgirs, built for community water collection
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Introduction
The mainstream perception of urban infrastructure as merely utilitarian has denied it of a larger role in the process of designing our built environment. The sociotechnical integration (or the lack of it ) with aspects of water and urban design has been noted by various urban scholars (Margolis, 2015). In a similar vein, Matthew Gandy, speaking of modern cities, says that the hydrological structure has never closely corresponded with a rationalized conception of urban space. In this pilot thesis, I argue that infrastructures like water supply and storage are not simply functional constructs, but active agents in the de¬sign of the built urban environment and can be instrumental in creating ecological and social resilience. They lie at the intersection of geography, ecology, architecture and place, as is manifest in various historic water infrastructures of ancient civilizations like the Qantas of Iran, the Amunas and Puoiquis of Peru, or the Stepwells of the region in question, semi-arid India (“ICOMOS - Cultural Heritages of Water,” n.d.). The current paradigm of ‘Water Supply’ that informs planning, construction and management of centralized infrastructures in Ahmedabad, involves extraction of large quantities of water and extensive piped networks. These energy intensive systems have proven to be unsuitable in terms of maintenance and expansion with sustainability issues arising due to rapidly increasing demands (Wong and Brown 2009) (Morrison, 2010) (Matzger and Moench, 1994). Moreover, they have also contributed to a greater disparity in water access within cities (Anand, 2017).
My research aims to understand the unsustainability and inequality attached with the current water-infrastructural paradigm in Ahmedabad. It questions the construction ideals of extended infrastructural networks, large dams and river-front projects that are inspired by unlimited water supply, and argues for a communitybased water infrastructure. Simultaneously, the associated design project seeks to find an alternative architectural identity through a deeper understanding of traditional water structures. It is argued that the socio-technical integration of these structures in the current paradigm of water infrastructure can become foundational to restoring community agency and moving towards a sustainable future.
Figure 7. Women fetching water in a stepped Kund, and stepwell
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Literature review The social dimension of water has been studied as an aspect of social practice, art, or even architecture (Hegewald 2002; Jain-Neubauer 1981; Mankodi 1991), (Livingston, 2002) (Mehta-Bhatt, 2014) (Strang, 2008). Many academics have also explored water through a technocratic lens of political decision making (Bakker, 2012) (Holt, 2018) (Elhance, 1999). The thesis argues for a crucial understanding of bridging the social and technical paradigms of water, to propose an alternate infrastructural vocabulary. This is pivotal to achieving sustainability and equality, for urban areas of semi-arid India.
Although there is a clear acknowledgement of the sustainable water ecology of stepwells (or traditional harvesting) by various scholars, there has been very little research that juxtaposes spatial and technical paradigms of harvesting with ideals of sustainable urban design practice. This could steer the move towards socially equitable and water sensitive cities in semi-arid regions and help design a framework for urban communities to co-evolve with their fragile environments. Based on a literature review, analysis of policies and precedents, I address the following research questions: ‘What are the lessons offered by traditional water infrastructure in the making of the contemporary city of Ahmedabad?’ ‘What is an alternate mode of urban design that can help move towards more sustainable and resilient habitats?’
Figure 8. Seasonal streams around medieval Ahmedabad
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Overview
The entanglement of the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ indicates the geological agency of humans. Kathleen Morrison, speaking of medieval water tanks in Karnataka, noted that the local materialized history of a region might inform some aspects of water and water use in the future (Morrison, 2013). Therefore, the historical and current regimes of different water management paradigms (Brown et al., 2016) impacted by geographies and the socio-political dynamics, are studied to move towards water resilience.
The thesis looks at the different regimes chronologically, starting with pre-colonial water structures and water traditions of the region. The typologies of traditional water structures, stepwells, stepped kunds and tanks that evolved over centuries in North Gujarat were at the forefront of a cultural attitude towards water. The symbolic role and the desert culture’s collective reverence towards water are expressed by these structures doubling up as meeting, resting and celebratory spaces. Consequently, it is understood that water shaped the aesthetics of public space in the city fabric and beyond. Arguably, these structures can be seen as conforming to the concept of ‘urban hybridity’ developed by Bruno Latour and Erik Swyngedouw that recognizes water networks as active agents in the production of space and culture.
It then moves on to discuss the political forces that shaped the current paradigm of water supply, by examining the radical shift when integrated systems of modern cities came about and completely refashioned the relationship between nature and society. These elaborate networks built for supply and storm water drainage gave rise to Gandy’s ‘metropolitan nature’ and replaced the ‘last vestiges of any cyclical interaction with organicist nature’ (Gandy, 2002). Then, the failures of current infrastructure of water supply are investigated, along with their effects on vulnerable communities.
In the last segment, conjointly with the design project, a series of ideals that can inform a spatial and organizational framework for water resilient cities are proposed. In this approach, landscape is not conceived as an external template (Strang, 2008), but as an integral dimension of the urban processes to move ‘beyond the sterile opposition between the naturalistic view of nature as a neutral backdrop and the view that every landscape is a particular cognitive or symbolic ordering of space’ (Ingold, n.d.). Instead, landscape is seen as an enduring record of the lives, and a testimony to the works of past generations who have ‘dwelt’ (Heidegger, n.d.) within it’ to overcome the historical amnesia about past environments (Morrison, 2013). The definition of resilience is derived from volumes of literature produced on ‘Water Sensitive cities’ by the Cooperative Research Centre in Australia. This framework is adopted to discuss the current state of water infrastructure and the potential future directions. Here, infrastructure is proposed to be a catalyst that can expedite the transition to a water resilient city and move towards an architecture that supports an off-grid water infrastructure. In the fieldwork period, which is to follow, these ideas will be scrutinized through interviews and site observations.
Water: A Cultural View
Figure 9: Relation between settlement, lake and ground water:
Settlement
Stepwell
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Lake
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Confined Shallow Aquif
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Pre-colonial Water Traditions All historic settlements that emerged in semi-arid or arid regions developed unique techniques and traditions in tune with their geographical needs and embodied their cultural idiosyncrasies. In the region of north Gujarat, one finds a consistent relationship between the depressions of land where water was collected and the higher ground that was inhabited by people. Drinking water was provided by a well or a stepwell (well with a flight of steps leading to the water) that accessed the aquifer. Rainwater harvesting evolved as a cultural practice and each house had a domestic water tank. With streets snaking along the water flow to drain into surrounding agricultural areas, the cityscape could be read as a funnel to channelize water back to the ground and store some in the process. This relationship between the stepwell, lake and the settlement has dictated the organization and character of the built form. An intimate working knowledge of terrain, holistic understanding of groundwater table, and percolation rates were put into practice (Sinha, 2019), enabling the historic settlements to flourish in the semi-arid climate. The social dimension of stepwells is revealed in the folk songs translated by MehtaBhatt that describe the women’s playful journeys to fetch water as they enjoyed the uninhibited company of one another (Mehta-Bhatt, 2014). These structures were intertwined with the ritualistic routines of women (who were burdened with the task of fetching water) and were one of the few socially legitimate spaces for them to move freely outside the domestic realm. They also became resting spaces for nomadic tribes and travellers who descended in the cool depths of the earth to refuel and refresh. Their social embeddedness within settlements not only depended on the patrons, but also on the community of well-diggers and the variety of users who nurtured them. These structures belonged to an infrastructural system that unified the dwelling and the regional scales and represented a complex intersection of urbanism and community governance (Bharne and Bogosian, n.d.). It can be concluded that the culture of water extended beyond its physical structure and encompassed the many processes and rituals of the people who built, used and appropriated them (Livingston, 2002).
Figure 10. Dams: Modern temples of India, Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurating the Bhakra Nangal dam
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Emergence of Colonial Technologies Sunita Narain in her book, ‘The Dying Wisdom’, details the politics of the decline of traditional systems, largely brought about by colonial attitudes toward water management, some of which are discussed here. It was in the British administration, that the state become a major ‘provider’ of water replacing communities and households as the primary units of provision and sustenance (Narain and Agrawal, 1999). Additionally, there was an increasing emphasis on the use of surface and groundwater moving away from the earlier reliance on rainwater and floodwater, even though the later was available in greater abundance.
The centralization of water systems also altered the relationship of settlement with water, as it no longer depended on the reticulated terrain and collection from lakes. The extension of pipes beneath city streets and a parallel transformation with taps in the private sphere led to the ‘hydrological extension of the city’. Water came into the houses through piped sources and functioned invisibly in the background of everyday life (Gandy, 2004). The disparate operational networks of provision and maintenance of water supply and storm water drainage severed the cyclical and holistic water ecologies of semi-arid cities. The system of stepwells with spatial qualities was supplanted by an engineered network of hidden pipes and washbasins; technologies that embodied assumptions about water’s ubiquity and abundance (Brown et al., 2016). Water that was once an active element of social space receded to the backdrop and the rainwater catchment deteriorated. During the colonial era, stepwells, wells and water tanks of the old city of Ahmedabad were sealed and the British declared their ownership of over natural resources. Sunita Narain notes that ‘the traditional system in which people contributed voluntary labor had died with the death of local ownership of the resource’. The introduction of tube wells in rural India enabled propertied farmers to no longer depend on community structures. It is not just the infrastructural dimension of water-use, but its holistic ur¬ban paradigm that was gradually eroded (Bharne and Bogosian, n.d.); an erosion that is as much cultural as political.
Figure 11. Sardar Sarovar Dam, Gujarat
Figure 12. Sabarmati Riverfront, Ahmedabad, 2015
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There was also a gradual shift in emphasis from small dams and river channels to large dams, electric tube wells and canals commanding extensive areas. Proliferation of these technologies was linked with nationalism and leaders of modern India invested almost exclusively in mega-irrigation projects and mega-bureaucracies to manage its water systems (Narain and Agrawal, 1999) valorising centralisation, planning and modern technology. Today, India is ‘one of the most active dambuilding countries’ (Ward, 2003), while the era of large dams in the West is largely over (Purseglove, 2019). This ‘peculiar mixing of ideologies’ of centrally managed canals and water supply versus the distribution of millions of tube wells anticipated, in technological and spatial terms, came to define the ‘politics of post-colonial water infrastructure’ (Acchiavati, 2017). However, while accessing the revival of traditional structures, it important to note that they were also intrinsically politicized and enmeshed in social inequalities. Morrison warns that the radical shift after the advent of colonial technologies does not indicate a complete opposition between the (evil) modern dams and the (good) traditional structures. She recognizes that traditional structures also showcased a complex interplay of power relations involving unequal benefits and risks. Morisoon critiques the ‘new traditionalism’ discourse (Sinha, 1997) that relegates these structures to an imagined golden era with an equitable and sustainable management by communities. She points to the dangers of the discourse that posits an impossible return to an imaginary past. Instead, she argues for a ‘third way’ in which both the historical complexity and the contemporary material demand is acknowledged. It is important to determine the correlation between scale and density of population of these territories while discussing the revival of traditional techniques. Therefore, although there is no simple solution to the water problems, an informed perspective on the historical experiences of the region should inform future waterscapes rather than ‘either a romantic and unrealistic view of tradition or a blind faith in modern science and technology’ (Morrison, 2010).
Water: A Service Infrastructure
Figure 13. Ahmedabad water supply
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Present water supply paradigm
Ahmedabad is now a sprawling metropolis with a population of 5.5 million (2011). With seasonal stream flows, the city’s needs are met by the conjunctive utilization of extracted groundwater resources with the aid of tube wells technologies and the transportation of surface water in a canal from a dam 534 kilometers away. As discussed previously, large scale dams became the ‘modern temples of India’ (Morrison, 2010) but were ecological, social and economic disasters that caused forceful displacement of the poor (Narain and Agrawal, 1999). The Narmada Dam together with its sister dam Sardar Sarovar has inundated 700 km of river valley and according to the three state governments involved, displaced at least 2 million people (Purseglove, 2019).
These two water infrastructures: the ‘inconspicuous and clandestine’ tube well, and the ‘expansive and monumental’ dam-canal that embody the technological and political extremes of British imperialism (Acchiavati, 2017), are the two primary sources of water for the city today. The current paradigm of water supply is underlined by ‘limitless fresh water’ being a public right and its supply being incumbent upon the government (Wong and Brown, 2009). This informs the planning, construction and management of centralized schemes depending on the extraction of large quantities of groundwater or the transport of surface water. The hydro-social contract is underlined by the logical expansion of government services for a tax, with the implicit promise of providing cheap and unlimited water to support urban expansion for a rapidly growing population. It is now well accepted that this approach is unsuited to address the current and future sustainability issues (Wong and Brown 2009) (Butler and Maksimovic, 1999).
“Even if there is water in the city, for some marked by religion, age, gender or class differences, to get it takes significantly more work.� Nikhil Anand
Figure 14. Muslim women filling their pots from a tanker, 2019
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Inequalities in Central Supply With centralization of supply, water became an ‘object of the government’ and new forms of municipal governance emerged to manage this complex and invisible network. Consequently, water became a tool for political manipulation and held ‘power over citizens’ to mediate the socio-political dimensions of urban life. This power play resulted in further fragmentation and social exclusion within urban societies. Anand, speaking of municipal supply in Mumbai, notes that the public water network has long distributed difference and inequality in the city (Anand, 2017). In his paper, ‘Municipal Disconnect’, he points to Muslim settlers being often rendered as undeserving of hydraulic citizenship, by being steadily disconnected from formally accessing municipal systems. This is perpetrated by the inaction of technocrats towards maintenance, repair and replacement. Additionally, with the worsening of the water crisis the burden on women gets magnified as they are indisputably responsible for the procurement of water, making them much more vulnerable to climate change (UNDP 2009) (Matzger and Moench, 1994). The women of poorer households walk large distances to collect and carry water pointing to how gender and class are interpellated in the everyday labour of water management. It is in the marginalized Muslim neighbourhoods that vulnerability of poor women can be directly observed. It is at such intersections of overlapping areas that gender, class and religious discriminations get compounded and make the Muslim woman significantly more vulnerable.
Inequalities in Ground water access
Pump technologies were the most ‘ubiquitous and clandestine’ response to India’s increasing demands for a growing population. Tube wells, especially in areas with minimal access to clean surface water provided a “technological fix” and reoriented people’s thinking about the subsurface, and in turn, reshaped settlement patterns. Today, India has become the single largest user of groundwater, consuming more than a quarter of the global total, with an estimated usage of around 230 cubic kilometers per year (Deep Well and Prudence: Towards Pragmatic Action for Addressing Groundwater Overexploitation in India, 2010). Residents adopted this technology to supply what the government was unable (or unwilling) to provide. The tube well became a device of insulation from the caprices of both the monsoon and government bureaucracy. For decades, enabled by the linkage of groundwater ownership to land rights, owners drilled as many wells as they saw fit. This pattern was accelerated by the minimal government regulation which was a result of a combination of technical, social, behavioural and organizational limitations (Acchiavati, 2017) (Matzger and Moench, 1994). A tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968) of this openly exploitable resource has occurred. Due to the mining of groundwater, a practice whereby water is extracted faster than an aquifer can recharge, the shallow aquifer has depleted in Gujarat (United Nations Development Program, 1976; Bandara, 1977). As a result, tube wells are now drilled to even greater depths causing a groundwater “anarchy”(Shah, 2009). With mounting pressures on regional resources, the inequalities and the interregional imbalances continue to grow starker and more tragic (Acchiavati, 2017).
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To combat these inequalities in access and supply, we need to transition from a water supply city to a water sensitive one; one with adaptive, multi-functional infrastructure that reinforces water sensitive behaviours (Brown et al., 2016). This is a critical challenge to urban communities that face the impact of climate change and population growth, all the while the city oscillates between long period of droughts and floods (Denton and Sengupta, 2019). As noted in volumes of literature on Water Sensitive Cities, a major socio-technical overhaul in management practices is required with an engaged community that constantly innovates and protects equity around access (Wong and Brown, 2009). This framework shapes the next section of the essay, that explores how the physical realm can support the transition to more water resilient systems and ensure that water is given due prominence within the urban design process.
Revival of Traditional Practices
Figure 15. Intersection of water infrastructure and urban design to create space for people and water in the community realm
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A Way Forward
Concerns over dwindling ground reserves have led to a re-emergence of indigenous knowledge to deal with water stress, and create a design framework for resilience (Khandekar et al., 2015). A rediscovery of traditional approaches places an emphasis on smaller scale technological responses instead of gigantic infrastructure, and embodies rich spatial qualities with a sophisticated form of management. Community wells lie at an intersection of the contemporary public space and water infrastructure. However, their present-day conditions display a huge disparity: some have been socially integrated as religious spaces while others, though physically intact, are squalid. There are a few that are still functional and continue to supply water to peripheral areas of the city for three-four months post monsoon, embodying the resilience of this system. With the high density of the built environment and its rapid transformation, the watershed of the region might have altered beyond the possibility of a reversal. But a few stepwells within the city offer opportunities to become starting points towards a resilient transformation. Drawing from their functioning, a focus on the role of communities (Agrawal and Narain, 1997) (Brown et al., 2016) has led to an adoption of a trans-disciplinary approach to water infrastructure and urban design, of which some examples are studied in this section. An access to a diversity of water sources at various scales underpins the design principles for resilience by optimizing the use of water resources within a city (Wong and Brown, 2009). The proposals discussed below entail collection of water at different from rooftops, street run-off and the open spaces of a city, while creating opportunities for civic engagement and participatory governance.
Figure 16. Inserts in the dense fabric
Figure 17. Water collection through roofs
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Water Collection in Dense Neighbourhoods
Today rainwater harvesting has quickly emerged as a point of intersection between social, ecological, and architectural discourses (Gandy, 2004) concerned with both water management and urban design reform. In Ahmedabad, and in Gujarat at large, sparse efforts to enable rainwater-harvesting have not gained widespread acceptance due to the continued focus on externally supplied water (World Bank and Ministry of Water Resources – Government of India, 1998). However, its successful implementation in other parts of the country has yielded results. After the drought of 2019, neighbourhoods of Chennai (in Tamil Nadu) that harvested rainwater and desilted wells have seen a 2.5m rise in the water table. The perfunctory initiatives of Ahmedabad need to be integrated with a holistic urban design attitude which remain the grounds for further research. Collecting water where it falls is a dying wisdom and will be a crucial step in meeting the freshwater needs adequately, equitably and sustainably (Agarwal and Narain, 1997).
The first approach is embedded in existing dense neighbourhoods for creating a space that can be regularly used by residents. Derived from the harmonious opinions of many, including Sunita Narain, Lyla Mehta among others, the proposal entails collecting rainwater through rooftops. Also proposed is community collection by the revival of old tanks and stepwells, serving the contemporary cause of harvesting and empowering reuse. The potential of traditional methods of harvesting in the old city of Ahmedabad is enormous. The existing system of approximately 10,000 tanks, that was sealed during the colonial period, can represent a substantial additional source of water. Each tank in the vernacular house has a storage capacity that ranges from 25,000 to 50,000 litres. Policies such as reducing property taxes for houses with restored tanks can be positive steps to incentivise implementation. Abandoned stepwells within city limits are proposed to be reactivated as parallel infrastructure for water harvesting and distribution, lending a form of shared collective identity within the urban fabric. This will save significant expenditure on what would otherwise be a communal infrastructure installation from scratch. They could be owned and managed by public or private institutions and maintained through regulated community participation. This can become the basis to build new infrastructure in other communities that localize water collection. They can manifest as channels, seasonal pavilions and fountains within neighbourhoods taking inspiration from CUAC Arquitectura’s project, ‘Funete de la Magdalena’ which uses a public fountain to investigate how public space can be combined with water infrastructure. These interventions exemplify the contribution of architecture to the identity of a place.
Figure 18. Site 1: Rainwater harvesting in a dense neighbourhood, Panchkuva stepwell revival
Figure 19. Plan/Section ‘Funete de la Magdalena’ fountain in Rome
Figure 20. Revival of the well in Bangalore, Million Well Project
Figure 21. Water channel in Tomba Brion, Venice
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Water Replenishment through Open Spaces
Through this intervention, I argue for a reintegration of water infrastructural elements with landscape to recharge the aquifers while also creating public spaces throughout the city. In and around Bangalore (in Karnataka), 900 families of the traditional well digger communities known for digging wells for 2000 years but had moved to different profession in the last 50 years; the manuwadars and bhovies have been remobilised with initiatives of planners, activists and farmers. They have successfully cleaned up, desilted and revived existing wells and dug over hundred thousand recharge wells in and around Bangalore in the last decade. Through scientific collaboration, they are now actively mapping the aquifer while closely examining its response to recharge. They are on a mission to dig a million recharge wells to delay ‘day zero’ for the city (Kumar-Rao, 2019). These collaborative processes exemplify not only a vertical dispersal of power from the state to the grassroots but also a horizontal development of networks within cities. Such instances of deployment of local knowledge enable to create livelihood opportunities and bring some of the poorest communities to the fore, not as objects of strategic intervention but as legitimate social and political entities in their own right (Gandy, 2004). This example underlines a design rubric for new interventions in the open spaces of Ahmedabad, especially along the low-lying green belt. They can become places for collection, filtration and stormwater treatment at a community and regional scale. This would render the open spaces as ‘ecological functioning’ with the capacity to define a socio-technical infrastructural vocabulary. This intervention is inspired from Carlo Scarpa’s use of water channels in the Tomba Brion, that make the invisible water in today’s cities aesthetically visible. These ‘locally managed’ entities can lead to generating an cyclic ecology of water, that collects, stores, treats, circulates and recycles water. They could become public spaces where one can experience these processes first-hand. Such landscapes could also be created by the appropriation of abandoned infrastructure like the underutilise industrial sites/textile mills for designing water-related services like cafés, laundromat. The layout and funding of the new infrastructure could be done through public organizations with an incremental framework that can build up with communal collaboration. This involvement would create a sense of communal ownership, as well as local governance, and synthesizes the use of public open space and water infrastructure. The initiatives in Bangalore and Chennai, both community and government-driven, demonstrate that reviving rainwater harvesting systems and reconnecting with the aquifer can replenish water tables. However, it is important to note that success of these cases is underpinned by active community engagement and participation to accommodate local opportunities and constraints.
Figure 22. Open Spaces in Ahmedabad: Sites for replenishment
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Summary
The first section of the essay illustrated the past and current paradigms of water infrastructure and management. The juxtaposition of ideals of ‘Urban design for a water sensitive city’ with spatial and technical paradigms of North Gujarat’s traditional infrastructure helped to create a design-framework for socially equitable and sustainable cities. The empirical research is used to reflect on the key questions from theoretical texts, ‘What are the lessons offered by traditional water infrastructure in the making of the contemporary city of Ahmedabad?’ ‘What is an alternate mode of urban design that can help move towards more sustainable and resilient habitats?’ The section, ‘Water: a cultural view’, has largely dealt with the schism between precolonial or ‘traditional’ water structures and colonial technologies that shaped postcolonial endeavours of water management leading to the current paradigm of water infrastructure in modern India. In semi-arid regions, while unsustainable water supply infrastructures continue to expand, the inefficiency and inequities around access of water continue to grow. Despite the castigation of grey infrastructure worldwide owing to their large-scale environmental transformations and social dislocations, they still dominate the current urban design paradigm in India.
Describing water management as technical infrastructure, ‘Water: a Service infrastructure’ discusses the labyrinthine interplay of socio-technical, cultural and political sequences, that perpetuate unsustainability and inequality around water access today. The following section discusses issues of resilience in the development of future water infrastructure. I argue for a community-governed system for water collection, care and replenishment; through a synthesis of landscape and public place. I then postulated key principles underpinning design for resilience based on optimizing the use of water resources. Thus, this paper, conjointly with the design project, defines a series of ideals that can inform a spatial and organizational framework, a new kind of architecture, for water resilient cities. In the fieldwork period, these ideas will be scrutinized through interviews and site observations.
Figure 23. Informal settlement without access to clean water
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Fieldwork: Towards Off-grid and Self-reliance
Vulnerabilities of communities, in times of extreme weather events or pandemics are exacerbated without access to clean water, highlighting the urgent need of an off-grid solution. In case of the ongoing pandemic, the instruction of washing hands thoroughly and frequently for 20 seconds to prevent contagion, puts people in informal settlements at a much higher risk (Mishra, 2020). With a drastic drop in the frequency of private tankers to provide water in areas without municipal supply, people are forced to stand in queues to secure their water needs. This unprecedented experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the need to create self-reliant communities. One such informal settlement located by a stream of the Sabarmati River will be explored by site survey and interviews during the fieldwork period of the research. In the next stage of the research, I will explore the spatial working of ‘communitybased systems’ by studying the implementation of the Million-well project in Bangalore. The project exemplifies the maintenance of water as a community resource and has revived, in part, the dying community spirit. It showcases the vital role that individual households, the community and well-diggers play to protect water sources while creating spaces for both water and people; providing a glimpse of a hopeful solution.
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Image References
Figure 1. A dried up lake, Ahmedabad droughts, 2019: https://www.dawn.com/ news/1257828
Figure 2. A flooded neighbourhood of Ahmedabad, 2017: https://www. financialexpress.com/india-news/gujarat-flood-rains-batter-ahmedabadgandhinagar-over-54000-relocated/783307/ Figure 3,4. Location of Gujarat & Ahmedabad: (Map) Stepwells of Ahmedabad Figure 5. Cross-section of an Iranian Qanat: (Drawing) Produced by author
Figure 6. Yadz, Iran with windcatchers of badgirs, built for community water collection: https://unsplash.com/s/photos/yazd%2C-iran Figure 7. Women fetching water in a stepped Kund, Rajasthan, India: British Library Archives Figure 8. Seasonal streams around medieval Ahmedbad: (Map) Produced by author
Figure 9: Relation between settlement, lake and ground water: (Drawing) Produced by author Figure 10. Dams: Modern temples of India, Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurating the Bhakra Nangal dam: http://historicalplacespunjab.blogspot.com/2015/01/history-ofbhakra-dam.html
Figure 11. Sardar Sarovar Dam, Gujarat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardar_ Sarovar_Dam Figure 12. Sabarmati Riverfront, Ahmedabad: Photograph by author
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Figure 13. Ahmedabad water supply: (Map) Produced by author
Figure 14. Muslim women filling their pots from a tanker: https://www.dnaindia. com/ahmedabad/report-ahmedabad-municipal-corporation-data-says-there-is-arise-in-unfit-water-2747022 Figure 15. Intersection of water infrastructure and urban design to create space for people and water in the community realm: (Diagram) Produced by author Figure 16. Inserts in the dense fabric: (Drawing) Produced by author
Figure 17. Water collection through roofs: (Collage) Produced by author
Figure 18. Site 1: Rainwater harvesting in a dense neighbourhood, Panchkuva stepwell revival: (Drawing) Produced by author
Figure 19. Plan/Section ‘Funete de la Magdalena’ fountain in Rome: https://www. archdaily.mx/mx/02-222713/raudal-fuente-de-la-magdalena-cuac-arquitectura/ 50e65f94b3fc4b138700007d-raudal-fuente-de-la-magdalena-cuac-arquitecturasituacion?next_project=no Figure 20. Revival of the well in Bangalore, Million Well Project: http://www. asianetbangalore.com/well-cleaning-services.php Figure 21. Water channel in Tomba Brion, Venice: Photograph by author
Figure 22. Open Spaces in Ahmedabad: Sites for replenishment: (Map) Produced by author
Figure 23. Informal settlement without access to clean water: (Map) Produced by author
