Waterscape is a research project of MAALab which investigates resilience of Istanbul city and try to give a solution with considering citizen interaction with hard and soft infrastructures.
Only 50 years ago, researchers who have been concerned about the future of the world's population, created utopias and came up with suggestions for the future of humanity. The same concerns remain. Today, the world population, which is close to 7 billion, is expected to reach 10 billion in 30 years. We have to reduce the density, land consumption, and climate change in our obese metropolitan cities and give back to the citizens the open public spaces and nature that they need.
To be able to talk about building a resilient city, at first the resilience and sustainability of humanity must be considered via social resilience. In this context, social technological change knocking on the door. It is absolute to be collective, not individual. While digital mobility acts globally, physical mobility reminds us of the importance of being local and our neighborhood. So, human behaviors have to change and the way we communicate and design will change with all the development in data science and AI technologies. We need flexible distributed network system designs that can create micro-communities and micro-economies instead of macro solutions.
The focus on this ongoing research project has been focusing on the Metropolitan Cities which have direct access to the water. Istanbul, Bosphorus is the first location for this distributed network of floating underwater topographical structures.
Waterscape combines different communities with a common goal and creates an interface for the bottom-up enlightenment of participatory democracy. It improves the local collective awareness and encourages the public to be part of the zero-carbon energy economy by generating social resilience via ecological resilience.
On one side they provide underwater habitats for the biological diversity of the marine ecology. On the other side, technological developments play an important role in the Waterscape to generate a new type of circular recycling of energy via soft infrastructures.
They don't consume they only generate and exchange energy. To be part of this system it will no longer be asked; What any action will bring back commercially, but what will this action take from nature in real life will become the most important thing.
They are connected to the citizens with an application that integrates simple walking habits to the daily life of the public to save the earth. To be able to connect to the Waterscape the citizens are asked to collect points by walking to their future which ultimately aims to create zero-carbon mobility for the entire city. If they reduce enough C02 footprint, then they are awarded to connect to the system.
Even though Waterscapes are assigned to accomplish various goals to create a resilient city, they all are self-sufficient and have a system and ideology to enrich the biodiversity of fauna and flora of the marine environment as common features. There are 3 types of Waterscape Units:
Symbio-pod Symbio-pods occasionally occurs at the coast to create awareness on ecological resilience. They come together to diversify the fauna and flora of the sea.
Plastic Hoover They collect sea plastics at sea by robotic arms. Collected plastics arrive at the coast to get ready to 3D print urban furnitures for the neighborhood.
Aquaponic Garden Self-sufficient “Aquaponic Garden” creates food for the citizen who collects the sufficient points. The citizens collect their grown food when it comes to the coast.
