Tanks & Berms: Estuary as Resilience Engine
This project adapts a home-grown system of tanks and berms developed by coastal slum residents to address water contamination and flooding.
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Spatial Ethnography Lab
We are an independent, interdisciplinary not-for-profit research and design group with expertise in anthropology, landscape architecture, urban planning and data visualization. Our method combines ethnography and visualization to identify local solutions to combat vulnerability and inequality.
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This project adapts a home-grown system of tanks and berms developed by coastal slum residents to address water contamination and flooding.
@Chioma Ume
Dharavi Koliwada is a part of the dynamic, industrial settlement of Dharavi. Incrementally developed since the early 20th century, Dharavi encompasses several industrial clusters dealing with plastic, metal and glass recycling, textile and leather manufacture, food production and pottery along with several other specialized industries such as surgical suture manufacture and crafts associated with seasonal religious festivals. Since 2004, the settlement has been designated as a special planning zone under the supervision of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), a state government body charged with drawing plans for the redevelopment of the neighborhood as a whole. Surveying associated with the DRP establishes land ownership and property rights as well as appropriate compensation criteria for slum dwellers who must be moved so that the entire 550 acre locality can be redeveloped as a whole.
Dharavi Koliwada is not officially a part of the DRP though it is adjacent to the DRP planning area. Its residents are protected from displacement both as a protected tribal community and as residents of an urban village having special development rules. The DRP plans will inevitably affect both the Koliwada as well as the portions of the wetlands that are occupied by the tanks as they introduce massive amounts of new construction activity and new patterns of settlement within the territory of Dharavi. However the DRP is solely focused on the development of land for residential and commercial purposes - its plans do not extent to adjacent wetlands. Those wetlands come under various competing city and state bureaucracies.
The tanks and berms that form the focus of this project are protected within a legal exception. Their control rests with the Koli community whose stewardship is protected under a grandfathered legal clause that safeguards their cultivation rights over the tanks. These rights do not preclude, inter alia, the alteration of flows within and around the tanks as needed to support fish farming. This project exploits the loophole that provides control over the tanks to the Koli community, both to alter the dynamics of flows within the tanks and also to expand the tanks’ functions. Feedback from the community suggests that tank-based water treatment and the dredging of nightsoil deposits will directly benefit fish farming and that those activities will come directly within the purview of the tanks’ present functions. Dredging activities will deepen holding capacity within the legal boundaries of the tanks without directly altering the flow of water in the municipally controlled channels outside. Thus these activities will have the dual function of supporting Koli livelihoods whilst cleaning and altering the ecology of the tanks and the mangrove forests within which they are situated.
Our research over the last decade has indicated that cities like Mumbai have specific cultures of change - change is stealthy and exploits loopholes rather than taking place through planned policy pathways. Policies often follow in the wake of stealthy prototypes that demonstrate the capacity for positive transformation. Our project reflects this culture of change both in its form and its practice. The project depends on the civic activism of the Kolis themselves and is modeled along the lines of other civic initiatives such as the NGO SAVE (Save Andheri-Versova Enviroment Forum), which is dedicated to rebuilding the mangrove forests through replanting campaigns and by monitoring enchroachment along the Andheri-Versova waterfront in North-West Mumbai. Their tactics populate the wetlands with public activities that then prevent builders and developers from cutting the mangrove trees, filling the water with debris, and creating additional land for construction. The tanks and berms project also follows this model for altering flows - it is legally safeguarded through the rights of the Koli community over the parts of the wetlands occupied by the tanks as well as providing a stage for the community to demonstrate the city-wide benefits of activities associated with their livelihoods.
Spatial Ethnography Lab & Terreform commented on Tanks & Berms: Estuary as Resilience Engine