Floating Community Manila

Abstract

Urban populations in coastal contexts suffer increasingly from both environmental and spatial risks. Major flooding events, storms, fires, landslides and earthquakes coupled with the unorganized urban fabric located at the locations most at-risk to these hazards render millions of people extremely vulnerable. The externalities in terms of economic opportunity, environmental safety and infrastructural stability are particularly evident in major urban agglomerations where the urban poor suffer from lack of housing, sanitation, clean water, and legal status.
Specifically in Manila, a third of the city’s inhabitants are considered urban poor and live either in slums or in informal housing conditions. The city is an exemplary case of a developing metropolis with multiple water features and geographical conditions which faces the mentioned urban failures and risks in parallel with natural hazards on a yearly basis.
New typologies and solutions need to be sought to understand how to deal with issues of urban land, infrastructure, housing and sanitation, and improved
resilience. As land and flooding are the two core elements which effect all other conditions faced by the urban poor, the design asks how can new land that does not flood be designed as a floating module for a self-sufficient community in the flood-risk context of Manila, Philippines, in order to provide the urban poor population with the means to improve their lives through a more resilient
spatial environment.
The design needs to include strategies both constructional and typological, as well as infrastructure of waste and water management and energy production, so that it will offer an economically and feasibly comparable and sufficiently developed alternative to current practices.