Climate Change in Practice: Towards a Positive and Transformative Process

climate change in practice |

Integrated Design INDÉ, Bengaluru | integrateddesign.org

TOWARDS A POSITIVE AND TRANSFORMATIVE PROCESS

The article profiles some of the design and planning projects of a research based planning and design practice where various creative processes of engaging with natural and cultural resources are guided by the phenomenon of Climate Change.

Climate Change as a critical issue that requires our immediate and concreted response is well recognized across the globe. However, in the everyday landscape architectural practice as well as academics, neither the urgency nor the criticality of the issue is articulated strongly enough. Often, professional engagement with the issue is limited to fairly superficial aspects, rendering the responses more reactionary than proactive. Framing the Climate Change conversations in the design profession is typically limited to mitigation and adaptation strategies, which leaves large gaps in the actualization of active interventions at both small and large scales. Practitioners in India, as across the global south, also have to contend with moral, economic, and environmental imperatives imposed by universal frameworks that have little contextual or geographic relevance.

While adaptation and mitigation strategies provide an opportunity to inform and influence our larger environment – both natural and manmade, they often tend to be reactionary in the sense of being non-contextual, formulaic, or merely following a set menu, derived largely from architectural parameters. While each of the adjectives is debatable, and rightly so, the design profession cannot deny that Climate Change remains an issue to be ‘paid service to’ rather a toolkit or a process of design thinking. And it is this very valuable opportunity that should be leveraged by the landscape professional to redefine and reinvent the profession [as well as academia] to respond positively and proactively to the challenges presented by the Climate crisis. In a manner akin to the profession’s turnaround due to social, political, and economic exigencies of the past, anthropogenic Climate Change and the ensuing crisis demand an equally strong and sustained response to address the causes as well as its impacts.

Given that landscape architecture, like Climate Change, is shaped by both natural and man-made processes, opens up immense possibilities to address the challenges of the crisis including its impacts, intersections, and imbalances. If one were to position Climate Change as the primary paradigm for design thinking for the discipline of landscape architecture, two significant aspects take center stage. The first is to position Climate Change not as a threat but as a positive challenge to develop a language of thinking that can positively impact the habitat of the present, for a just and resilient future. Such a ‘positive’ approach helps identify opportunities to understand both causes and impacts towards evolving design innovations – not to be read as mere technological advancements – but an approach where Climate Change is foregrounded as the determinant factor to govern planning, programming, and articulation of tangible design output. This leads to the second aspect, of transformative change, and embedded quality of design to specifically address issues of risks and vulnerabilities and to build resilience in a context-specific manner. Such transformation is crucial in our transition from an industrial order of conceptualizing habitats [and landscapes] towards a more natural order, based on the principles of natural capacity. The idea of natural capacity is vital in leveraging the inherent quality of any system [built and unbuilt] that needs to be recognized and reinforced to meet contemporary development challenges and a resilient and sustainable future. Building on these two concepts, the following projects are used as cases to demonstrate how foregrounding Climate Change can guide the design process as a systematic thinking tool across scales and geographies.

Surat Safe Habitat [2012]*

Awarded to Integrated Design, the Surat Safe Habitat Design Competition, organized by ACCCRN [Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network] along with Surat Municipal Corporation and Gujarat State Disaster Management Authority [GSDMA], for the development of the township of Icchapor near Surat, presented an ideal case for exploring a strategy that is foregrounded and rooted in the issue of Climate change. One of the earliest initiatives in the country to position Climate Change as the primary narrative, the premise of the investigation and design proposal was centered on resilience to Climate Change and risk mitigation mechanisms through the performance of productive landscape and green infrastructure as an integral component of urban planning.

* The winning entry was featured in Landscape Urbanism LA Journal Issue -31, 2011

Surat Safe Habitat

[1] Diagram illustrating land value projections based on TP Scheme. Higher towards the Railway and Road [with regards to access] and lower towards the khadi [canal]

[2] Analysis of actual land value based on the risk and vulnerability assessment including natural as well as manmade

The site chosen was an extremely vulnerable low-lying area, replete with natural and industrial risks, vulnerable to flooding, and aggravated by a network of petroleum, gas, and high-tension power lines. Adding to the risks was the presence of petrochemical industrial complexes in its immediate vicinity. Concerns of periodic flooding and backflow from the River Tapi and a network of creeks that defined the land water dynamics of the site were seen as an opportunity to guide the development framework, rather than a problem to be solved. The approach undertaken was based on the opportunities and limitations of the existing microplanning tool –elaborated in the formal Town Planning Scheme – to reinvent a strategy to reconcile inherent conflicts between urban development and natural ecology. Intervention strategies were developed simultaneously to address smaller and larger territories, with the concept of ecological infrastructure introduced as a dynamic design tool to perform non-defensible mechanisms.

As a low-lying area, assessment of regional flooding patterns and flood mitigation measures were identified as the primary drivers of land reallocation mechanisms. The allocation of appropriate land use, compatible with a resilient system to ensure social and physical cohesion, while being economically productive, became the core vision for the development of the Icchapor site. By correlating urban development imperatives with the performance of a productive landscape framed by a well-articulated ecological infrastructure system, the proposal reduces the reliance on engineered systems and allows the natural and passive management of flood waters. The flood plains integrated within the urban planning framework actively accommodates storage and conveyance of flood waters during periods when the flow exceeds channel boundaries and hence respond positively to flood frequency and intensity.

The proposal defines planning and design principles to strengthen resilience capacity while mitigating Climate Change events to adequately respond to societal and urban imperatives. By articulating inter-related strategies of urban development and land economics, it not only reworks the land distribution by equating non-built components and the built fabric but also derives malleable urban relations that negotiate natural risks, social, urban, and governance parameters for highly vulnerable urban areas.

IIT Kanpur [2019]

An opportunity to prepare the Strategic Master Plan for the Indian Institute of Technology campus at Kanpur for the year 2035, allowed for interweaving projected environmental challenges with spatial and physical requirements for the institute’s expansion. While the brief of the project laid a strong emphasis on infrastructural requirements – additional housing and services with a focus on sustainable planning, the project team [INDÉ, SHIFT, EDS, Sterling Consultants] enlarged the scope in positioning the project in its regional setting as well as integrating future scenarios from the Climate Change perspective.

The framework examined not only the dynamic urban pressures of land use, transport and density, but equally importantly, it also engaged with the IPCC projections for the region. The studies revealed projections with significant temperature rise, extreme rainfall events, risks of flooding, aquifer salinity, groundwater depletion, etc., in the region. The project brief demanded substantial additional developments to ensure the guided growth of the campus for the coming decades. On taking cognizance of the physical infrastructure and the expected quality of life, the open space structure within the campus held the key to driving strategic thinking. Though the availability of land was not a concern to accommodate development needs, it was critical to organize and manage all available resources to ensure a resilient campus, capable of responding to increased demands, while adapting to future environmental challenges.

IIT Kanpur

THIS PAGE | [3] Conceiving the GI corridor by networking existing open spaces, water sources as well as movement patterns of the campus. Creating decentralized clusters for the campus to manage physical growth as well as to minimize and manage risks

OPPOSITE PAGE | [4] Developing varied typologies of GI sections across the campus, integrating access corridors and resource flows

14.50m or 9.50m Plaza 3.00m Woodland buffer

7.00m Vegetated swale

3.00m Woodland buffer

15.00m Woodland buffer

9.00m RoW 12.00m RoW 23.00m Parking or Plaza

7.00m Carriageway [4]

2.50m Buggy Cycle

2.50m Avenue Planting

7.00m Vegetated swale

15.00m or 9.50m Plaza 3.00m Woodland buffer

6.00m Orchard Planting

3.00m Cycle lane

6.00m Orchard Planting

7.00m Vegetated swale

14.50m or 9.50m Plaza 4.5m Buggy & Emergency Carriageway

7.00m to 15.00m Scrubland Landscape climate change in practice |

3.00m Woodland buffer

3.00m Cycle lane

3.00m Buffer Planting

The open space structure of the campus was carefully studied, both for its inherent natural capacity and its productive value – in terms of water and carbon sequestration capabilities as well as vegetation qualities. This large and expansive but fragmented open space network was integrated across the campus to perform as a cohesive green infrastructure; one that would act as a dedicated corridor for resource flows and movement, while guiding the structure of the entire campus. Termed as pristine land [a nomenclature borrowed from the existing campus master plan], all the unbuilt spaces were reimagined not as undeveloped lands but articulated specifically to define the character of the campus as well as a performative and systematic green infrastructure for the campus.

A design thinking directed by projected climate vulnerabilities resulted in programming all unbuilt lands in terms of land use potential, density distribution, service integration, waste management, and traffic management while proactively responding to the legacy of understated classical architecture and space-making conceived nearly 70 years ago by Achyut Kanvinde.

The successful outcome addressed multiple scales of operations and decisionmaking including land use, densities, built form, climate responsiveness, safety, disaster management, visual quality, and phasing. All the strategies were intricately tied in to respond to the larger themes of decentralization, land capacity, and long-term sustainability, structured to create an active and vibrant campus life for the institute.

Risk Assessment and Mitigation, Bengaluru

The last case is not so much a design initiative, but one that was commissioned as a course correction of a conventional landscape design of a technology campus in Bengaluru. The term conventional here refers to not the quality of spatial design but a process that did not acknowledge larger and more serious issues of risks, vulnerabilities, and resilience due to patterns of urbanization in the region as well as projections based on Climate Change. Concerned about increasing urban flood risks, the clients approached INDÉ + McDBERL to help draft a Vulnerability Assessment and Risk Potential report for their campus.

Bengaluru

THIS PAGE | [5] Surface modeling of the catchment zone across different scenarios to measure the risk associated with the site

OPPOSITE PAGE | [6] Ground truthing the neighborhood condition that reveals changes in drainage pattern from sheet runoff to multi-source flows, creating higher flood risks [5]

865m 870m 875m 880m 860m 865m 870m 875m 880m

68,675 1,44,789 2,3,2592 3,26,760

20,710 166 893 2,606 5,350 9,149

• Scenarios considering water collection at different elevations are modelled above

• The surrounding region of the site is modelled considering the water levels at different elevations considering the topography of the region

• Model showing water level at 860m indicates the water accumulation at the downstream of the Varthur Tank

• We can observe 2 scenarios under which there is possibility of water collection at upstream of the Varthur Tank, one scenario is when the water level rises beyond 860 level and the other would be due to the blockage in the valley connecting the Varthur Tank

Given the location of the campus, an initial study of the project proposal revealed a clear lack of understanding of the neighborhood setting and regional level risks involved, mainly from the perspective of urban floods. The highly engineered proposal was premised on generic assumptions of precipitation and stormwater management, rendering the campus not only vulnerable to flooding in the short term but at severe risk in the long term. With an intent to address both adaptation and mitigation of extreme weather events, extensive studies were undertaken at several levels – at the site level to identify potential zones to sequester water, the neighborhood level to understand its relationship with the natural systems and infrastructure of the city and at the regional level to project a 20-year sequential scenario for various rainfall intensities to comprehend and manage the long term performance of the landscape as infrastructure.

Studies of hydrology, geology, soil profiles, and topography together helped in the development of comprehensive open space policies and guidelines for the campus to mitigate flood risks. The process also defined specific short and long-term design resolutions both at the neighborhood and site levels to both mitigate and adapt to potential risks.

YEAR 2005 YEAR 2016

climate

The comprehensive set of recommendations was not meant merely to correct deficiencies in the proposed landscape design but structured to integrate effective water management across scales while accounting for open space planning and quality of space-making within the campus; a quality that ought to be determined at the outset of the design process rather than retrofitted as a problem-solving exercise. A clear understanding and appreciation of environmental concerns, especially those driven by Climate Change, is vital in developing a robust process that balances the needs of landscape planning and design with those of risks and vulnerabilities for more sustainable and resilient development.

The three cases discussed above are not to be seen exclusively as integrating the challenges of working with issues of Climate Change – an issue that is equally dynamic, uncertain, and pressing at the same time. The cases are discussed to offer insights on how the design profession – especially that of landscape architecture - can find an opportunity to redefine its practice, reimagine its potential and reposition the scales of its engagement to arrive at a more contextual, contemporary, and relevant language of practice. At the risk of repetition, it is critical to approach the challenges of Climate Change not merely to solve individual or disparate problems. It is a lived reality that demands immediate and drastic action, not through token acknowledgment but through a rigorous process of critical thinking that can reimagine design processes based on a holistic understanding of context and environment. It is through such critical and sustained processes that posit human needs based on environmental paradigms that our profession can bring about a positive and transformative change to the planet we inhabit.

All drawings courtesy Integrated Design INDÉ

by Rohan Chakravarty