TA: Mani ChauhanResilience 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 degree days and rising vector diseases pose?
This pair of studios partner with SAATH Charitable Trust to develop 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.
Together, students bring their proposals to the community for feedback and implementation, as part of a movement toward cheap, scalable, collaborative, resilience.
