Shelter + Water, Kowloon Walled City (Cynthia)

Cynthia Eng - Nov. 1

Shelter + Water - Kowloon Walled City

Girard, Greg and Ian Lambot. City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City. 5^th ed. Watermark Publications (UK) Limited, 2001.

- Water was the most indispensible survival need for people in this self-contained city

- As they did back in the old ancestral village, 77 wells sunk all around the City, with depths of some 300 feet

- “Electric pumps shot water up to great tanks on the roof-tops, from where it descending via an ad hoc forest of narrow pipes to the homes of subscribers” (10)

- City was very dark and damp

- “It was impossible to stand upright because the roof of the alley was lined with a confusion of plastic pipes carrying water, many of them dripping” (12)

- “Government’s longstanding refusal to connect buildings, flats, and factories into the external mains system

- Possible reasons: technical difficulties, disruption, reluctance to further encourage permanent settlement in City

- “Residents and businesses have had to resort to paying private suppliers, to pump water from wells sunk beneath the City, or local Triad groups from water tapped illegally from nearby mains supplies” (36)

- “Running mains water was supplied to various recognized charities inside the Walled City” (36)

- Authorities allowed installation of a few public freshwater stand-pipes, just eight stand-pipes in place by 1987, to supply up to 35,000 residents and hundreds of factories, only one of these stand-pipes was located within the City

- First stand-pipe installed in 1963

- “Residents were paying $12-15 a month for labourers to carry six kerosene cans of water each day from the stand-pipes to their flats”

- “Business of carrying water for entire households became increasingly difficult the more the City grew skywards, during the boom days of the late 1960s and early ‘70s”

- This expanding demand “drove entrepreneurs underground to tap new sources.

- “The new well diggers were mainly property owners who were able to drill on their own land (37)

- 1987, 67 working wells owned by some 40 suppliers

- 300 ‘scientific wells’ said to have been sunk beneath area though many had dried from overuse

- “Recent drillings had to reach as far as 100 metres since shallow sources had been depleted

- Private drilling firms contracted to carry out work

- Water first pumped up to rudimentary storage tanks on City roofscape

- From there, pipes ran downward again branching into blocks and flats

- Installation of a well-water link could cost as much a several thousand dollars, depending on height above and distance from well

- By late 1980s, monthly charges between $50-$70 per household

- Water problems: because of pressure and pumping difficulties, pumps only turned on at set times, usually noon and midnight, to replenish tanks

- Meant residents still had to store water in baths and buckets

- Well-water mostly undrinkable because impregnated with usual seepage of urban and industrial pollutants, water not even fit to boil

- 1970s, underground sources, especially from shallower wells, contaminated by sewage seepage

- Well-water best used for washing and floor-cleaning

- Drinking and cooking water still had to be carried from stand-pipes, a small workforce engaged in this activity till the end

- Illegal tappings of mains water from outside City, monopolized in the beginning by the Triads

- Triad organizations also responsible for much of the construction in the City, they ensured newer buildings had some rudimentary provision for water supply and waste

- “In time Triads sold off most of their ‘business interest in the City but illegal tapping of mains water remained an important source of drinking water until the end” (38)

Shelter + Water, Bogota (Janice)

Posted  by Janice Woo
Oct. 31st, 2010

Hey guys,

Here are some excerpts from the resources I’ve found.

BOGOTA WATER FUND

Borrowing strategies from the realm of high finance, the Conservancy has created a conservation trust fund to protect rivers and watersheds in Colombia — and help provide clean drinking water to Bogotá, the country's capital.

The fund will attract voluntary contributions from Bogotá's water treatment facilities to subsidize conservation projects — from strengthening protected areas to creating incentives for ecologically sustainable cattle ranching — that will keep sedimentation and runoff out of the region's rivers.

Without such projects, the facilities have to spend millions to remove those pollutants in order to provide clean drinking water for Bogotá's 8 million residents.

The fund — based on a pilot program in Ecuador — is projected to raise $60 million for conservation projects over the next 10 years. And the Conservancy plans to implement six more such funds in South American countries in the next two years.

“The best part of this initiative is that it is voluntary and will not raise water costs for residents,” explains Samuel Moreno Rojas, mayor of Bogotá. “It will help the city save on treatment costs.”

The Conservancy led the development of the first such water fund in Quito, Ecuador, in 2000. From a modest $10,000 start-up investment, that fund has already reached $6 million in capital and will disperse $900,000 this year for conservation in watersheds that supply drinking water for Quito’s 2 million residents.

Conservancy donors in the United States provided the seed money that enabled in-country staff to launch both of these funds.

“The Nature Conservancy in Maine believed in us, and that ultimately made this project possible,” says Aurelio Ramos, director of the Conservancy's NTA program and architect of the Bogotá Water Fund.

In 2007, donors in Maine contributed $50,000 in seed money to the NTA Program, enabling Ramos to put a grand vision into action.

http://www.nature.org/wherewework/southamerica/colombia/work/art24802.html

WATER IN BOGOTA

In Colombia, nearly 91% of the domestic and commercial wastewater is discharged directly, without previous treatment, into the receiving watercourses (Camacho et al., 2006). For these reasons, integrated urban drainage modelling is needed to understand the effects of pressures exerted within a catchment, to establish reference conditions, to design monitoring programmes, to perform operational planning as an instrument for cost-effective implementation of measures, and to assess impacts to produce management plans (Solvi, 2006).

www.hydrology.org.uk/Publications/exeter/59.pdf

SLUM SHELTER IN BOGOTA

As in most cities around the world that host slums areas, the slums of Bogotá are largely the result of rapid population increase without the housing and services provision that such growth demands. During the past few decades, Bogotá has seen sustained, rapid demographic growth through waves of rural-to-urban migration in the wake of general impoverishment and violence. The Bogotá urban perimeter expanded rapidly through illegal subdivisions, occupation and the development of marginal areas by immigrants. Bogotá’s inner-city slums, on the other hand, are mostly the result of urban transformation processes, whereby certain downtown areas underwent progressive social and physical deterioration and, increasingly, accommodated lower hierarchy social strata and economic activities.

The slums of Bogotá can be classified as the outcome of:

·       Unplanned and informal urbanization through subdivisions in peripheral and marginal areas, largely characterized by an initial lack of physical and social infrastructure, but which are often – within a few years – improved by the city administration or through self-help (or combinations thereof);

·       Squatter settlements with generally more dire physical and social circumstances (although this category historically has had a relatively low importance);

·       Inner-city urban deterioration zones that came about through the progressive move of 19th-century industrial, military and other functions adjacent to the traditional urban centre to more appropriate locations, and the social, economic and physical deterioration that followed in the wake of this urban abandonment.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/Global_Report/cities/bogota.htm

EFFECT OF WATER ON HOUSING IN BOGOTA

In the rapidly expanding city many new housing developments lie close to farmlands. An- other example of groundwater-engineering geology problems is a development in NW Bogotá. It has an area of 211,400 mP, with three-story homes, built in 1994. During the past eight years the constructors have been monitoring the subsidence of part of this development which lies close to another flower plantation, […]

The houses were built on gently sloping ground of the Sabana Fm 20 to 105 m thick (clay, silt, peat, sand and gravel); beneath and outcropping to the west is the Guaduas Fm, 450 m thick (claystones, sandstones, coal beds) […]

Four factors acting simultaneously cause differential settlements beneath the houses: very compressible beds with a high pore ratio; fluctuation of the water table responding to the rainfall cycles and causing contractions, fissuration and subsidence of the surface soils; the drop of the potentiometric level of the aquifers with the increase of the effective stress, accelerating the consolidation; and abundance of organic clays and peat in the western part of the lot. Micropiles have been constructed up to the thick gravels beneath the houses to solve the problem.

www.rmz-mg.com/letniki/rmz50/rmz50_0193-0196.pdf

 

Shelter + Water, Shanghai (Hannah)

Here is what I have come up with so far. I have had most luck finding examples of how urban settlement and houses have influenced water quality in Shanghai, but I am going to keep looking. There are so many aspects of how water and shelter are related in this city, but I figured that water quality and pollution is a good place to start.

Background information on Shanghai, water quality information

When investigating water quality in Shanghai, is it important to consider a variety of contributing factors to the situation. There is evidence that suggests a strong association between land use, population density, and water quality (Yin 2005). The municipality in Shanghai occupies an area of about 6400 km² and it is located on the Yangtze River Delta. This region is a major industrial center in China, producing approximately 4.9% of the nation’s industrial output and 4.2% of gross national product (Bureau 2002). This figure is much higher that to be expected, as the city accounts for 1.2% of the total population of China. Because of the prominence of industry in Shanghai, was quality has often been compromised. Between the mid 1880s and 1949 a few wastewater treatment plants a relatively small area of the city, leaving a large portion of the municipality lacking sewage collection and water delivery systems.

Urban setting and buildings influence on water quality

To understand the relationship between spatial patterns of urbanization and water quality in the city of Shanghai, a study was conducted my Zin-Yong Yin using water quality data of 1995 (Yin 2005). This study was conducted in anticipation that it would help future planning of the city in ways to alleviate water quality problems. In this study, Yin concluded that the intensity of urbanization (represented by the proportion of built up surface in an area) can be related to water quality parameters. As populations increase in the city, and built up surface increases, more runoff occurs, carrying pollutants into the river. Increases in population density also increases the demand for water, and the demand for water treatment. When cities are unable to keep up with these demands in a sustainable manner, water becomes polluted. Point sources in the central city of Shanghai are largely responsible for the pollution of the water in this region.

Sources:

Yin, Zin-Yong et al. (2005). An Analysis of the Relationship Between Spatial Patterns of Water Quality and Urban Development in Shanghai, China. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 29, 197-221

Shanghai Statistical Bureau (2002). The 2001 Year Book, online edition. Available: http://www.statssh.-

gov.cn/shtj/tjnj/2001/tjnj2001.htm.