The project is based in Hyderabad, a southeastern city in India with a six-hundred-year-old storm water management system – an asset under threat from rapid urbanization. Discontinuity in this network affects the most vulnerable in Hyderabad, with low lying areas populated with dense informal settlements that experience frequent flash flooding. The project retraces the city’s development and ecological history, and studies precedents from landscape research and practice to devise a strategy to re-connect its fractured water network. The research methodology for studying Hyderabad’s post-colonial history is designed to overcome a period where records were either poorly kept or systematically destroyed to control territory. The project uses that as an opportunity to use alternative methods of research like memory mapping, combining it with onsite surveys and oral history interviews to get a grounded and material understanding of urbanization’s effect on water. These learnings will then be synthesized with existing data to identify vulnerable locations in the network and test an acupuncture strategy to restore it.
Researcher: Ambwani Supriya and Saeb Ali Khan