Editor's note: Beginning 15 October 2017, we're running a new series called 'By Design' that looks at Indian cities from the perspective of urban design. How can design make the quality of life in India cities better? How can the architecture of our infrastructure prevent life-threatening situations like flooding, or rush-hour stampedes? What solutions can simple design changes offer to monumental urban problems? We'll be discussing all this and more, in 'By Design'.
The metropolis is a graceless goliath with rancid morning breath. It is also a terrible beauty, notorious for its mood swings — calm at dawn, simmering by mid-morning, stormy at dusk. Perhaps poetry captures with a lucidity and diction that escapes statistics, the havoc wrecked by urbanisation upon lives trapped in glass-and-chrome or navigating through treacherous streets or suspended across filthy skies. So, before one computes and tallies to arrive at a delineation of loss in numbers, one ought to dwell on these lines by Nissim Ezekiel, from the poem ‘A Morning Walk’, from the collection titled The Unfinished Man, published in 1960:
Barbaric city sick with slums,
Deprived of seasons, blessed with rains.
Its hawkers, beggars, iron-lunged,
Processions led by frantic drums…
This is Ezekiel’s Bombay; this is our Mumbai, where only the rains are incompatible with the poet’s epithet. The rains are no longer a blessing upon the city; they, as the statistics verify, unleash the misfortunes of disease and death upon those who dwell under tempestuous skies. On 29 August this year, the day of the deluge, Mumbai reportedly received around 298 mm of rainfall between 8.30 am and 5.30 pm, the heaviest since a cloudburst in 2005, when around 944 mm of rain lacerated the city in 24 hours.
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Sponge Cities: Resilient to the Rains
While concretised cityscapes are vulnerable to nature’s fury, a porous landscape allows rainwater to be absorbed and reused. A ‘sponge’ city, as the nomenclature suggests, is a reimagined metropolis that captures stormwater and uses it as a resource to augment the city’s water supply. China, for instance, grapples with rapid urbanisation and inefficient management of its water resources — urban predicaments similar to those that grip Indian cities. In 2012, a flood in Beijing destroyed the city’s transportation system, and in 2016, floods damaged the drains of Wuhan, Nanjing and Tianjin.
In 2015, China picked 16 urban districts as pilot sponge cities, to demonstrate the efficacy of measures like rooftops covered by plants, wetlands for rainwater storage and permeable pavements that store excess water. The city of Lingang in Shanghai’s Pudong district exemplifies this sponge city; its government has invested $ 119 million in innovations that other Chinese cities could emulate. Shanghai too, has announced the development of 400,000 square metres of rooftop gardens, in a bid to increase urban greenery.
In Singapore, rooftop reservoirs are used as a method of capturing rainwater. The country’s Marina Barrage, a dam built in 2008, provides water as well as resilience to floods, acting as a tidal barrier and protecting low-lying areas such as Chinatown, Jalan Besar and Geylang.
There are a variety of ways in which a city can become a ‘sponge’. De-clogging and protecting its natural water ways should be foremost. “Let’s respect our natural water systems,” says Professor Sridharan. A drainage master plan for Delhi, prepared by the city’s Indian Institute of Technology, and submitted to the government in December 2016, recommends the removal of sewage and solid waste from the capital’s storm-water drains.
“Construct wetlands; identify areas that can act as a water sink,” suggests Professor Bhaduri. Suggestions abound. But for development to be ecologically sensitive and follow the contours of a city, the collaborative effort of policy makes, city builders, environmentalists and local communities is imperative, so that lashing of rain bring about not destruction, but what Daruwalla calls a ‘cleansed feeling’:
the kind you experience
walking in a temple (Ruminations: 1)