Revival of Traditional Practices A Way Forward Water Collection in Dense Neighbourhoods Water Replenishment through Open spaces

Revival of Traditional Practices

Figure 15. Intersection of water infrastructure and urban design to create space for people and water in the community realm

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

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

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