HYDRO-COMMUNES
“The project challenges the current attitudes on urban afforestation, exploring a paradigm shift in the understanding and operation of trees and advocates that the velocity of a city should align on the life cycle of trees.”
Ananya Nevatia, 2020.
SYNOPSIS
Water is a huge crisis in India, whether it’s the melting of the Himalayan glaciers or the devastating impact of many consecutive years of drought. A core reason for water related issues is the management of the resource across regional, geographical and political boundaries. At the heart of water management, is a spatial crisis.
The project is a proposal for the creation of hydro-communes throughout rural India in response to the crisis in water management.
In India rivers are considered sacred and manifestations of divine gods. But there is a duality between a culture that sees water as sacred and treats it’s provision as a duty for the preservation of life and another that sees water as a commodity, and it’s ownership and trade as fundamental corporate rights.
While water management saw a shift from communal management to centralised state management the condition of supply did not match the demand. The privatization and commodification of water only worsened the water crisis in India.
The project critiques the centralised management of large-scale infrastructure projects and proposes a shift in water management, its supply and distribution– by advocating the hydro-commune as a common realm for the local people. It attempts to shift the control of the resource back to the people who are local to the resource, who need and depend on it the most.
Because it is a common it requires a new local establishment to exist to maintain and monitor it. It will be run by a group of women of the community breaking the barriers in water gendered spaces and envisions a cultural shift in gendered roles in rural Indian communities.
Conflicts today can be best understood, not as battles taking place in the landscape, but rather as a process allowing for the creation of new grounds. The hydro-commune embodies a shift in the imagination of water infrastructure in India and strives to alter the socio-political organization of citizens while promoting community resilience.
ANANYA NEVATIA
Ananya Nevatia is an architect from Bangalore, India. She completed her M.Arch from the AA in London. Apart from design she finds home in the natural world outside the built environment. Some of her many passions include gardening, hiking, travel and art.