Streets to Silos - Harvesting water over our heads

The project proposes a system of rainwater harvesting techniques on an urban scale intervention that can promote water conservation and harvesting. Studies suggest that rainwater collection techniques have been successful in ways that can conserve water, increase groundwater aquifer levels, promote sanitation and have direct impacts on climate change effects. About the studio project, Vanjaravas has a dense settlement that holds almost a thousand houses, and the need to collect and conserve rainwater being a lost oppurtunity could potentially be a way forward to mitigate flooding scenarios, waterlogging conditions and heat stress. Calculations based on implemented projects suggest and relative mapping on ground that even in one block of the settlement of 75 houses, annually, the block could potentially collect thirty lakh litres of water only from rainwater run-off. This would also mean that these could save higher quantities of water during summers that can have at least twenty-five litres of water for each household for five dry summer months if conserved properly. The project aims at a design that can channel through all the houses in each street through an elevated gutter and store it in a common facility at potential locations. These channels also act as physical infrastructures that aim at providing threshold spaces that the residents can use as an extension of their homes as refuge spaces. The catchment areas are the ones that would also promote an associated function, be it a public toilet, a child-friendly learning space, a community kitchen, a play area, a healthcare facility, etc.