Produced for the Urban Design Research Institute
Script: Vineet Diwadkar, Vyjayanthi Rao, Farzan Dalal
Illustrations: Vineet Diwadkar, Farzan Dalal
Post-production: Roaming Design
Voice Artist: Shraddha Sakhalkar
Music: Stuart Moore
Acknowledgments: Anuj Bhagwati, Pankaj Joshi, Rahul Mehrotra, Shirish Patel
Tanks & Berms: Estuary as Resiliency Engine
The dynamics of informal settlements the world over generate social and ecological networks that can be progressively transformed both to make these settlements more resilient and to create more sustainable urban change for the cities of which they are a part. Communities in these settlements are not only formed by histories of sharing cultural practices, linguistic, regional and ethnic origins but also by sharing environmental risks and claims-making vehicles. We wish to enhance resilience by improving socially generated infrastructure and empowering communities to share in mitigating the effects of climate change. Our project focuses on one informal urban ecosystem, a home grown system of tanks and berms cultivated by the Koli fishing community occupying the northwestern edge of Dharavi - an informal industrial settlement in Mumbai who use the tanks for fishing and the berms for community gardening. We propose to redesign and retrofit this system, multiplying its functions and effects. Our project empowers the Koli elders who are the stewards of these tanks and berms to upgrade this infrastructure by retrofitting the tanks to address water contamination issues; slow storm surges; capture and control release of tidal and sea level rise flooding; capture waste for recycling and energy generation through wave action within the tanks. Thus converted, the system of tanks and berms could serve the city as a whole to become resilient to the effects of climate change.