Habitable water infrastructures

Overview

This project explores buildings, public/civic spaces, and landscapes as water infrastructure. Water is integral to human survival; hence understanding buildings and urban spaces as habitable water infrastructure has the potential to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis and navigate too much water (floods) and too little water (drought) while offering different modes of occupation.

With increasing rainfall intensities, floods, rising sea levels, and drought, the pervasive dichotomy between habitable spaces and water infrastructures can no longer hold. The two can't be treated as two separate things. In many cases, water-related infrastructures are attached to buildings, other urban spaces, and infrastructures in the form of water pipes, water tanks and filtration systems, all aimed at conveyance, retention and discharging.

We will investigate notions of water infrastructure relative to habitable spaces and use these notions to analyse how to design spaces in low-lying coastal cities from the perspective of water infrastructure. In turn, we will explore how this approach can influence site selection, programming, form, materiality, spatial layout, modes of occupation, experience, construction techniques, technology and water use.

Research activities

You will review:

• literature and relevant local and international precedent projects
• the effects of the recent floods in Brisbane on the built form.
• Investigate existing practices, techniques and technologies at the intersection of water infrastructure and human habitation.

Outcomes

• diagramming and mapping of the selected cases
• developing habitable infrastructure typologies
• journal paper publication from the research, and the student is welcomed to continue working o the project as a second supervisor.

Skills and experience

You should be a student from architecture or landscape architecture disciplines with the following skills:

• mapping
• diagramming
• literature review.

Expected learnings:

• how to analyse projects and extract ideas from the projects
• gaining a deeper insight into the role of architecture in flood and drought mitigation and adaptation
• the opportunity to work together with researches in City 4.0 in the School of Architecture and Built Environment.

Keywords

• water infrastructure
• floods
• drought
• buildings
• urban space

Contact

Contact the supervisor for more information.