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.