Monsoonal Landscapes

Abstract

Emergence of humans as the dominant species of the planet have come along with extreme manipulation of the earth’s systems to sustain this dominance. The Anthropocene has lasted a little over 200 years has perhaps seen the most shift from completely natural systems to requiring an additional man-made system to aid exponential growth of our species. Among earth’s systems, climate is one of the most complex factors determining energy balance of living organisms and determines energy gains and losses from organisms.
India encompasses a wide range of complex territories with rich biodiversity living alongside some of the world’s highest population densities. Historically the Indians have lived and adapted to these resource abundant terrains through traditional ecological practices that aligned with the ecological systems and governed the socio-cultural practices. The current globalised world has been built upon with technological, infrastructural, sociological political and capitalistic growth has wretched devastating effects on the environment that supports us. India being a colonised country and exploited for its resources for centuries still holds traces of it in the infrastructural and production systems, in this case in the Periyar-Vaigai river basins. The region characterised by complex terrain, excessive manipulation of landforms and alteration of its resource cycles especially in water cycles by storing water in multiple dams experiences excess water flows during monsoons, causing flooding on its western slopes and proves to be the only hope for drought prone region on its eastern side.

Governing such complexities lies with arbitrary administrative borders dividing the control between different states and various different departments controls the flow and management of resource which often falls short of preventing catastrophes or just management of resources.
Extreme weather events in the recent past has exasperated the effects in these fragile habitats, thus the project aims to firstly mitigate the risks associated with failing monsoon, further restore the balance of the ecological system in the region. By building back resilience through co-habitation of social-ecological systems, aligned to nature using human knowledge the design aims to place value on nature rather than exploit it. The project envisions the transition from a local adaptation towards building up the system on the regional scale. It deals with primary production, anthropogenic control with respect to grey infrastructure, values and the role of ecosystems in maintain this balance. By synchronising these various systems the projects attempts at bringing back a dynamic equilibrium to this region, through methods like literature reviews, synthetic cartography and research by design.