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