Water, the third thing
The cultural value of water as a driver for increasing urban resilience in informal settlements in Brazil
This blog summarises a group exploration of urban resilience as part of the BLOXHUB Summer School on Urban Resilience 2020. Blog authored by Carolina Carvalho, Johanna Granados, Napi Wouapi, Eleanor Treadwell.
Context
In 2020, the Covid-19 virus global pandemic posed great challenges for the future(s) we dream of. As numbers rise and information is shared widely, the main recommendation issued by governments and organizations is to promote hygiene measures and maintain physical distance to avoid contagion. However, hygiene is not always possible when water is not available, and physical distance also poses a challenge when there is not enough room for a family living in a reduced space. Our exploration aimed to understand the possibilities to leverage systemic change through highlighting the cultural value of water, engaging local communities, and using these to promote a long term development vision.
Diagnosing the problem
Water can be used as a powerful tool to shape and transform society (Gandy 2004). Throughout the world, water has played a central role in culture development, however, as a transboundary, finite resource many, often conflicting, stakeholders are involved in the governance of water access. Those with the lowest position in society have the least leverage to gain access to formal water infrastructure. Value is made up of several dimensions. Intangible values such as spiritual and cultural are very difficult to quantify. We aimed to explore how we might change the cultural perception of water to stimulate long-term, collective action that increases access to water, promotes sustainable use and reinvigorates tradition and culture.
Highlighting the cultural value of water can be a powerful leverage point to increase the urban resilience of communities living in informal settlements in Brazil. By taking ownership of water resources and considering water as a finite resource, we propose ways to engage local communities to be integrated in the water governance system by revaluing rainwater and creating rain gardens in public spaces. Increasing people’s awareness and understanding of the natural environment has co-benefits for urban water management and can help people feel more connected to their local landscape (McGinlay et al. 2017), in the case of informal settlements, foster a greater sense of place and belonging.
In the Covid-19 pandemic, hygiene measures have been widely acknowledged as one of the main tools to prevent the virus spread. However, in some urban areas, water access is still limited. Access to water infrastructure that provides a safe and stable supply at an affordable rate to the poorest in society is a complex challenge linked to health, governance structures, pricing, urban growth policies, urban planning and social justice and inclusion.
Informal settlements, which are densely populated, located in marginal areas of the city usually lack basic sanitation infrastructure are the scenario of this project. In Brazil, 80% of the population live in cities, with an estimated 20% in slums. This accounts for 13.6 million people. In Complexo do Alemão, a slum in Rio de Janeiro, residents reported being without water access for 12 days straight. Slum leaders say that communities are being ignored by the government in their strategy to combat the Covid-19.
We started mapping how raising awareness of water as a cultural asset can help increase urban resilience:
In our system diagnosis, the interrelations among governance systems, Covid-19 rates, and water access and availability were identified, all of which negatively intersect with climate change. The cultural value of water, community engagement and participation also are interlinked in our analysis and were identified as leverage points for a systemic change.
We envisioned an urban environment where the water governance system responds to the finite nature of water by enhancing its cultural value leveraging community engagement.
How we might intervene
In order to leverage water cultural value, our stakeholders analysis lead us to identify urban planners as the key actors. However, a deeper understanding of the systemic nature of our problem led us to identify the importance of community ownership and engagement. It is against this backdrop that we identified NGOs grounded in the local context as a key driver for co-creation in an informal community.
Considering that where the social contract is weak, interventions must be tailored to the political context, we took into account of the fact that meaningful consultation and social accountability mechanisms lead to a better understanding of the local context — and also increase transparency and effectiveness. Besides, it has been established that building social cohesion and social capital helps build urban resilience.
As such, balancing the interests of different groups through a community-led process is a key tool for strengthening social cohesion. Adding to this, projects that are multi-sectoral and integrated are more likely to address multiple risks than single-sector interventions. Slum upgrading projects — and by extension development projects more generally — can build urban resilience if they prove effective to secure trust between communities on one hand, and between the project and communities on the other hand. In the absence of trust and buy-in from the local community, and without community engagement and community-led processes, urban resilience building interventions will hardly mitigate risks.
Therefore, NGOs can play a brokering role as they are rooted in the local context and serve to facilitate community engagement. When all is said and done, the main activities that could be responsible for co-creation of knowledge, new values and strategies to improve the cultural value of water and assure an equal access to reduce risks in informal settlements include:
Through the interdependency analysis, the resilience that this intervention intends to address is access to water, social inclusion and climate change, through: governance, culture and infrastructure. Thus, the enabling systems that can support this system intervention and provide cobenefits include those linked to the improvement of livelihoods in informal settlements such as health, education, food security and employment. For example, a well functioning and attended education system, provides an access point for disseminating information. Whereas the relationship and trust that is built with the local through this intervention will enable healthcare workers to access potentially inaccessible communities. To support the sustainability of the interventions, potential allies and resistors should be acknowledged. Resisting forces are foreseen to be linked to the water supply and access.
Firstly, small-scale service providers may operate in the area and their business will be impacted by the reduced resale of water, these stakeholders should be included. Secondly in the long-term, if water can be used as an enabler to work towards the community’s formalisation then there may be resistance to pay water-service-providers for services in the future. Sanitation is a method to limit Covid-19 transmission, therefore the health sector, at multiple governance levels, is expected to be a key ally in this intervention.
Our exploration also sought to consider outcomes at multiple temporal scales. Short-term outcomes can be quantified by the number of households that have access to rainwater technology, health indicators to monitor the intervention through variations of waterborne diseases and the number of workshops and outreach programmes organised. In the long-term, these interventions could help transform mental models through leveraging cultural value of water and strengthen the resilience of informal communities.
References
Gandy, M., 2004. Rethinking urban metabolism: water, space and the modern city, City, 8:3, 363- 379, DOI: 10.1080/1360481042000313509 McGinlay, J., Parsons, D.J., Morris, J., Graves, A., Hubatova, M., Bradbury, R.B., Bullock,
J.M., 2017. Leisure activities and social factors influence the generation of cultural ecosystem service benefits. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2018.03.019 2212–0416/ 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. T
