TA: KRUTI MAKWANAResilience Thrift: Repairing for Climate Change
Vanzaravas is a loose collection of low-slung, mud-mortared brick houses capped with corrugated sheets, occupying land adjacent Narol Lake in southern Ahmedabad. Densely populated and poorly ventilated, its residents are vulnerable to increasing incidents of extreme heat, flooding, and disease.
Settlements like this comprise 30% of the Indian urban population, and much of the Global South. However, redevelopment has proven to be costly and inefficient, plagued by corruption, and mediocre outcomes.
Can a strategy of repair better address the challenges these places face?
At what scale should it operate? What is the potential of individual house retrofits relative to collective, decentralized, or municipal systems, to solve the challenges that cloudbursts, 50 degreedays and rising vector diseases pose?
This pair of studios partner with SAATH Charitable Trust to design strategies for Vanzaravas that alleviate the stresses of climate change. Urban designers explore collective projects for public space, and examine potential alignments with existing private and municipal programs, while architects design, detail, test, and prototype the climatic performance of retrofit roof and wall strategies for individual units and clusters.
Together, students bring their proposals to the community for feedback and implementation, as part of a movement toward cheap, scalable, collaborative, resilience.
Studio Unit
Retrofits were designed to improve climatic conditions in an existing Anganwadi in Vanjaravas as well as address programmatic and qualitative challenges
Students began by participating in an international competition organised by NGO ROOH, winning both first and third prizes. They then developed systems of assembly for competition proposals by analysing case studies
Residents of Vanjaravas are willing and able to make improvements to their buildings but lack of secure tenure makes permanent upgrades difficult. Retrofits have been designed to be able to be assembled and disassembled and so to be relocated as needed
Various tests like smoke tests and heat tests were done using large scale models. Testing was used as a means of iteratively refining proposals and not simply as a proof of concept at the end of design
Students documented the anganwadi. They used sensors to measure heat and humidity to understand existing environmental conditions. At the end of semester they presented their proposals to the Vanjarvas community. There is interest in developing and prototyping selected projects
