Slum Lab

hydro-society:

Within the condensed urban environment of Paraisopolis there are many problems seeking solutions.  Urban essentials taken for granted within the Sao Paolo city center, such as fresh water, are a daily dilemma within the favela.  A city water distribution system within Paraisopolis is ideal, yet very difficult to achieve without efficient resources, transportation, and maintenance. 

The solution is to provide water recycling and distribution systems situated locally.  Within this system, members of the surrounding community will have roles allowing for local clean water and a successful gathering space.  These communal spaces include communal gardens, public fresh water supply area, water heating, rainwater gathering/cleaning, public restroom, public kitchen, and urban access paths. 

In order to achieve these spaces, pipes will be implemented to circulate the water between the different spatial uses as well as retain the earth to generate platforms for each use.  Rainwater is collected at the top and bottom of the site.  Turbines will also be placed throughout the water pipes to generate electrical lighting so that the community can access every platform day and night.  The integration of power generation and water cleansing can inspire other creative results within Paraisopolis and perhaps other slum communities searching for adaptable solutions.

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Comment:

Hello,

The first image that comes to mind with your project, is from JG Ballard’s “Drowned World” which is really worth reading.

Constant’s New Babylon as well. (another picture)

Also, Armilla from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”:

Thin Cities 3

Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, shouwers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo’s white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs. You would think that the plumbers had finished their job and gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems, indestructable, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of termites.
Abandoned before or after it was inhabited, Armilla cannot be called deserted. At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature, luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at a mirror. In the sun, the threads of water fanning from the showers glisten, the jets of the taps, the spurts, the splases, the sponges’ suds.
I have come to this explaination: the streams of water channeled in the pipes of Armilla have remained in th posession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed to traveling along underground veins, they found it easy to enter the new aquatic realm, to burst from multiple fountains, to find new mirrors, new games, new ways of enjoying the water. Their invasion may have driven out the human beings, or Armilla may have been built by humans as a votive offering to win the favor of the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the waters. In any case, now they seem content, these maidens: in the morning you hear them singing.

Also, worth reading is this article about growing hydroponic plants in an electrically charged, semi-liquid matrix in order to “stimulate” the production of new forms and compounds.

I hope this is helpful at this point of your project.

best,
Miranda