Oaxaca Newton Links Workshop: Landscape Urbanism and Natural Design Solutions
- Nov 15, 2017
- 3 min read
How can we quantify the impacts of metropolitan design on regional water security?
Instead of directly addressing the question, the workshop participants did some further questioning and raised important issues to be considered prior, around or after the evaluation of those impacts that are summarized below.
Participants were asked to work on water related conflicts from multiple perspectives. Departing from examples in Oaxaca (agriculture, waste pollution, administrative boundaries and urban growth), they devised manifold strategies linking social, productive, legal, professional, political, institutional, sanitary, educational, ecologic, environmental or infrastructural aspects of water management, involving various agencies and stakeholders. Afterwards, they reflected on how this multi-dimensional approach demands novel transdisciplinary methods and forms of documentation to bring together a wide range of specialized knowledge and to critically rethink fragmented and conventional water practices.
1. Critical and necessary clarifications:
Before answering the main question, it seems crucial to DEFINE WATER SECURITY in the particular context. Rather than QUANTIFY, a more appropriate term would be evaluating or assessing.
Another aspect that needs to be clarified are the types of impacts such as: social, political, environmental, legal, economic, water quality and consumption, supply patterns, etc. However, when trying to establish a hierarchy among them raises an even more important question: FOR WHO? Depending on the perspective of the various agencies involved, priorities are ordered differently.
Before quantifying the impacts, a clear BASELINE needs to be defined which requires a reliable and well-managed DATABASE.
An additional determinant to answer to this question will depend on the particular projects’ resource allocation and available media.
2. Scale
A key question when considering the impacts of metropolitan design is SCALE. Impacts need to be identified in neighbouring regions and a definition of both groundwater and surface catchment areas is required.
In common with the rest of the panel interrogation and related to multi-scalarity, impacts can be assessed in CASE-STUDIES, prototypes or existing initiatives to then scale-up and analyse the extent of the impact of metropolitan design in its various aspects (social, economic, etc).
3. Time
Time determines the assessment not only in the short, medium and long term but also from the historic, current and future perspective.
4. Participatory assessment
Another important aspect to evaluate the impacts is to consider SOCIAL PARTICIPATION. It can be done through individual actions and volunteer monitoring with LOW-TECH SENSORS and SMART APPS. These can be achieved through incentives and in collaboration with the local census (INEGI). In turn, social participation could generate a LOCAL NETWORK OF KNOWLEDGE AND WATER EXCHANGE. This could be a useful tool to index informal developments and in CATASTROPHIC events, similar to navigation apps such as waze that collect users data to gather traffic jams and events information.
5. International policies vs local guidelines
International water security policies should be used as a starting point and framework. However, it should not be taken as a generic ‘checkbox’ list; specific guidelines need to be adjusted for each particular context. Precedent experiences can also contribute to the evaluation of impacts in metropolitan design.
6. Design- Assessment feedback loop
Another question triggered from the debate is: how do you make sure the impacts are INCORPORATED and not left as a checklist procedure carried out after metropolitan design is finished? A more interactive feedback workflow is proposed so that several iterations of re-design/ re-assessment cycles can take place.
7. Paradigm change
Finally, when quantifying impacts on water security, it is important to break with conventional assumptions such as economic growth. Very often metropolitan design projects are evaluated on the hypothesis of economic growth based on UNLIMITED AVAILABILITY OF RESOURCES and this is not clearly the case in regional water security in semi-arid regions.
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