Integrating top-down and bottom-up approaches to map climate change impacts

Utopia and INDé (Integrated Design) | 17 June 2024

(8 min read)

The global south city, experiencing unprecedented urbanisation, attendant environmental degradation and extreme levels of inequality, evidences the failure of the dominant urban planning approaches that aim to steer its growth. By virtue of being siloed and top-down, urban plans are far removed from the ‘every-day’ city and are thus argued to be ineffective and inappropriate.

In this context, changing climates and their manifestation in extreme events is a crisis multiplier, more so for the urban poor and the marginalised. Even as the efforts around climate action plans are gaining traction, the approach remains the same – top-down and fragmented, the failure to capture the socio-ecological experiences intersecting haphazard urbanisation and changing climates and using these to inform urban development plan and policy remains.?

In response to this challenge, Utopia and INDé (Integrated Design) with generous support from the Royal Academy of Engineering aims to leveraging technology to comprehend and ‘visibilise’ the invisible everyday city and its socio-cultural-ecological-economic linkages.?

Across Kathmandu and Bangalore, existing secondary data (city scale) was scanned and new data (neighbourhood scale) was generated through a bottom-up approach to visualise and mainstream the stories of the ‘everyday city’. The objective is to capture these in a digital tool that is accessible and developed in collaboration with urban stakeholders that ultimately informs new and existing urban plans.

Alternatives must be explored

In developing a feasible alternative to current approaches, two pilot cities - Kathmandu, Nepal and Bengaluru, India were selected. A deep-dive city comprehension captured the historical evolution of both cities, urbanisation trajectories, attendant fragmentation of socio-ecological practices and biodiversity loss. The team mapped extreme climate events like flooding and heat island using? NDVI and LST data. The research revealed a wealth of data, although the understanding remained limited and siloed.?

A narrative of both cities with maps was developed but it lacked nuance and a human understanding of this change. It only gave an understanding of ‘what was’ and ‘what is’ of the? growth trajectory. The data sets utilized are built on top-down approaches that cannot convey lived experiences of the different stakeholders of the city, especially the marginalised.

For instance, in Bangalore the city-level maps premised on secondary research highlighted areas in the city that experienced flooding, however, only through primary field visits the researchers understood the specific spots where flooding occurred at a settlement level and the nature of those spots, whether they were important gathering spaces, verandahs of houses, or streets. Further, primary site visits allow the researchers to explore the numerous impacts and coping mechanisms of the communities living there. These insights are valuable in designing appropriate adaptation solutions against extreme climate events.?

Questions that remained unanswered include what is the impact of living through biodiversity loss? What does it feel like when the rivers and lakes start disappearing? What does it mean to look at natural green spaces slowly deteriorate? The project aims to surface answers to these? questions, amongst others.

The first iteration

Within each city, test sites? - Bansighat, a riverside community in central Kathmandu and Janatha Colony and Sarojamma Badvamane in Bengaluru - were identified that had undergone obvious ecological transitions that were neither visible nor captured at the city scale. Utilizing a simple questionnaire built on Kobo, the teams interacted with people in these settlements eliciting their lived experiences.?

The process involved two or three team members venturing into the area, sitting under a tree or in a public space, interviewing a resident/community member, one asking questions and the other recording the interactions on their phone/ tablet. These interactions were complemented by geo-tagged photos and videos gathered during conversations and transect walks. The experiences from first-hand data collection of the teams across Kathmandu and Bangalore similar - the deployment of the kobo tool as a means to collect and collate the complexity of the everyday city was daunting across both the cities.?

The urban participants are storytellers - they jump from experience to experience and are not mechanical in their answers. They weave in personal stories, feelings, share emotions, and are not interested in seemingly mundane questions about the weather, precipitation, or loss of tree cover. They are there to make sure someone is recording their story of being in that piece of land, in the hope that they and their lived experiences will be visibilised and by extension will be heard.?

Nevertheless, sample data captured during these excursions served as the basis for building the first iterations of a digital tool.?

Ideating on a digital tool

The teams explored current options that offer similar data collection and visualization features, although not necessarily on climate change impact, during the exploration phase. Several user-research interviews were conducted with urban planners from Australia, conservation leaders from South-East Asia, and city planners within the case study cities. Some key learnings are: (a) the importance of building tools with specific user-groups in mind rather than a general application (b) prioritizing the long-term usability and adoption of the tool (c) offering a unique value proposition to current options in the market.

INDé conducted a stakeholder workshop in Bengaluru to better understand gaps in government planning, methods of community engagement, problems with visibilisation, exploring alternative ways of map making and reading.?

Some of the pivotal questions that emerged from the stakeholder workshop were a) do communities really want? to be visibilised? And more importantly who has the agency to decide what gets visibilised??

What can we learn from the initial case studies?

Bansighat is a riverside settlement in central Kathmandu with over 600 households. The community first started settling in the area over four decades ago. Utopia explored the area and conducted interviews with local residents on the changes in biodiversity, ecology they have witnessed or experienced. Although expressive, the community are unable to provide detailed descriptions and accurate histories of urban climate changes. However, there are rich descriptions of place and feelings as the community has experienced change over the years.?

Integrated Design engaged with two informal settlements located on the eastern periphery of Bangalore.- Janata colony and Sarojamma Badvane. While the former is located besides a lake, the latter is along a storm water drain. Janata Colony is a small notified slum settlement of 84 families concentrated in an area of about 5000 square metres. Sarojamma Badvane is a non-notified slum with around 200 houses. Both settlements experience intense flooding during the rainy season due to shoddy urbanisation and harsh climatic conditions.?

Relying on various census data (1971-2023) allowed an understanding of the locational context of both settlements, including the transitions in the planning and administrative jurisdictions. Primary engagement at the settlement scale provided insights to the origin and evolution of the settlements and socio-ecological linkages, including livelihoods. The data obtained was spatialised and triangulated with the satellite maps across different years as well as other spatial data including that of the Master Plan for the city. Geographically referenced audiovisuals and field notes were used to capture the rich experiential data.?

In Janata colony, the livelihood dependencies with the lake ecology such as agriculture, cattle rearing, fodder and water for cattle, fishing and bathing have dwindled. The residents reported that the lake’s water is highly contaminated and unfit for potable and non-potable uses.?

While the local municipality took initiative to improve the lake by fencing and raising embankments for making a walking track, this new construction is the cause of flooding in the Janata colony which post the lake restoration project sits at a level lower than the lake.?

In response to this challenge, the residents have devised temporary solutions like raising thresholds to impede flood water. However, due to lack of tenure security the residents are apprehensive of? permanent solutions.?

The Sarojamma Badvane settlement experiences flooding during the monsoon due to the overflow of the storm water drain. The residents reported that their houses remain flooded for 4-6 days. Coupled with this challenge, the houses of the settlement are temporary shelters and lack access to basic water and sanitation facilities.

The residents fill potable water from a nearby apartment, wash clothes with water from the drain which is highly contaminated. They resort to open defecation due to lack of sanitation infrastructure. The land on which this settlement is situated is privately owned and the owner has not permitted the residents to build any permanent shelters.?

The teams utilize the knowledge from the initial study to start building a wireframe for an interactive digital tool - one that can serve a dual purpose of data collection and data visualization. A tool where the stories and experiences of the people take center stage as opposed to conventional mapping tools that fail to capture the lived experiences. ?

The wire frame will now inform the building of a paper prototype that the teams can test with? decision makers and other stakeholders to comprehend usability, acceptability, relevance and appropriateness of the proposed digital tool.

Post this a higher-fidelity prototype will be tested with an identified user-groups of the digital tool for whom mapping climate change experiences from the bottom-up will be crucial in informing new and existing urban plans.

Utopia and INDé (Integrated Design) are proud recipients of the Frontiers Symposium award 2023 by the Royal Academy of Engineering