PREPHub Nepal – Neighborhood scale infrastructure for disaster resilience

PrepHub Nepal is a community-led project for neighborhood scaled disaster resilience. It aims to revitalize paatis — small, public, open-air pavilions — found throughout the Kathmandu Valley to help embed preparedness towards future earthquakes, while simultaneously tackling the developmental issues of the community such as water scarcity, internet access, and reliable power.

  • Miho Mazereeuw Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism
    Director, MIT Urban Risk Lab

    Project Site
    Thecho, Nepal

    Project Team
    MIT Urban Risk Lab
    Hugh Magee
    Aditya Barve
    Pamella Goncalves
    Johanna Greenspan-Johnston
    Noor Titan Putri Hartono

    Lumanti Support Group for Shelter
    Lumanti Joshi
    Yatra Sharma
    Kusum Bista
    Shristina Shrestha
    Lum'sujan Shakya

    Environment and Public Health Organization
    Prabina Shrestha

    Community User Committee Representative
    Maheshwori Maharjan

    Historic Preservation Advisor
    Rohit Ranjitkar
    Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust (KVPT)

    Supporting Organizations
    TATA Center for Technology and Design
    Lafarge Holcim Foundation
    MIT IDEAS Global Challenge Awards
    MIT SUTD Partnership

Introduction

One of the key lessons of the devastating earthquakes that struck Nepal in 2015, killing thousands of people and leaving hundreds of thousands without shelter, was that open spaces were crucial to community resilience. Allan and Martin Bryant, “The Critical Role of Open Space in Earthquake Recovery: A Case Study,” in Proceedings of the 2010 NZSEE Conference (Wellington, NZ: New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering, 2010), 1–10, http://db.nzsee.org.nz/2010/Paper34.pdf Public squares in Kathmandu became primary gathering sites for the local population. Away from collapsing buildings and falling debris, these spaces became safe havens for accessing water, information, and other resources distributed after the earthquake. Pre-disaster, these spaces also provided essential urban infrastructures, including communal taps and natural springs for gathering water.

In the Kathmandu Valley, piped water connections are not available to each household, so traditional open spaces remain the default place where water is delivered via public wells, tanks, and ancient stone spouts. Small, traditional, public, open-air pavilions called paatis act as a social gathering place where many people access safe drinking water. These spaces—often hundreds of years old—provide shelter from the rain and sun and a place to meet, eat, and participate in community activities. As communities worked to rebuild their homes after the earthquake, many paatis remained in various states of degradation, presenting both a risk of being forgotten and an opportunity for reactivation.

This project leveraged a socially engaged model of fieldwork Socially-engaged design aims to use design as a mechanism for consensus-building between various actors. Fundamental to this process is relinquishing the role of designer as “expert” and adopting the role of facilitator by undertaking detailed local surveys, interviews, and long-term fieldwork; creating partnerships with many stakeholder groups; designing with the community members; and ultimately building the project with the help of residents. This approach of prioritizing process and relationships over the authorship of a design outcome leads to very different types of projects than would be designed without these constraints—types that are more closely integrated into the cultures and spaces of collaborating communities. as a part of designing for disaster-prepared public spaces. PrepHub Nepal is a culturally embedded design intervention that supports the role of the paati as a public space anchor while repurposing it as a resilience node, thereby creating disaster-resilient urban lifelines in a community by restoring heritage structures. By pre-defining spaces to meet for mutual aid and assistance, these local resilience anchors help protect the most vulnerable community members. This project focuses on improving fundamental needs (information, water, safe space) of the communities after an earthquake while supporting their day-to-day basic requirements.

PREPHub Nepal – Construction process of new paati, Hugh Magee

Context

In Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, paatis are ubiquitous markers of public space. They are found throughout the valley’s towns and cities and take on an important socio-cultural role in Nepalese society. Originally developed as spaces for travelers to rest—the word paati means ‘resting place’ in the local Newari language—they originated in a time when traders, traveling through the area on the Silk Road between India and China, brought great wealth to the Valley. Even today, paatis—historically managed by cooperative societies known as guthis—are the smallest and most widespread form of public building in the spectrum of traditional Nepali public-use architecture. Hundreds of them, often built a century ago with exquisite craftsmanship, are scattered throughout the Kathmandu valley. Despite the obvious value that paatis hold as both a space for shelter and as a form of built heritage, they are in decline. Rapid urbanization in Kathmandu valley threatens open and social spaces as well as public infrastructure. Moreover, in the 2015 Gorka earthquake, many of these communally-owned structures were damaged; only some have been rebuilt. As paatis were usually built alongside a traditional drinking water tank, they are also the place where most of the community accesses daily drinking water. A key aim of this project is to integrate disaster preparedness into civic space and urban infrastructure, while simultaneously addressing the everyday developmental concerns of the community.

Approach

The project demonstrates a community-led, action research approach to design with multiple aims: adapting culturally-significant spaces for disaster preparedness with the intention to enhance their everyday public service function, providing infrastructure (like clean drinking water, backup electric supply, and a cache of emergency rescue and relief equipment) to help improve the resilience of the community, and providing access to critical services for everyday life. These interventions aim to bridge the gap between grassroots-level preparations and response to disasters and conventional top-down Disaster Risk Reduction activities.

We began our work in Nepal by creating local partnerships to help investigate the role of open spaces and lifeline infrastructures, both post-disaster and during normal times. In 2015, Nepal was a nascent democracy undergoing constitutional reforms. An initial context analysis and stakeholder mapping in Kathmandu in the aftermath of the earthquake included close interactions with various organizations operating in the Kathmandu Valley—governmental and nongovernmental, local and international—and provided a deeper understanding about various organizations and their roles. We particularly focused on learning from communities firsthand about their immediate concerns and systemic problems hindering recovery. The field research process helped us establish partnerships with local organizations on the ground, most importantly the Kathmandu-based Lumanti Support Group for Shelter, an organization that focuses on housing, water and sanitation, microfinancing, and advocacy in marginalized communities. With the support of Lumanti, we established a women-led committee within the local Thecho Women’s Cooperative, which became the main arbiter for local needs, expectations, and aspirations: the expected users who would function akin to a traditional design “client.” Close collaboration with the cooperative also helped solidify collective ownership and a future role of the community to maintain the project, which we had set as a key metric of success.

Design Outcomes + Transformations

We piloted this project in the village of Thecho in partnership with Lumanti Support Group for Shelter and with support from the Nepali nongovernmental organization Environment and Public Health Organization (ENPHO). With Lumanti’s local team, we closely consulted with the community to understand their needs and experiences related to water quality and water scarcity and their aspirations and willingness to pay for new services, and to identify viable water treatment systems. The construction phase focused on the adaptive rejuvenation of a paati and its adjacent open space to tackle the severe water scarcity persistent throughout the valley. The Thecho pilot embeds low-energy water filtration, recharge, and storage within the existing public space, managed by a local women’s cooperative. With the community and local partners, we are redesigning the traditional paati to act as a storage for post-disaster supplies and to provide power after an earthquake.

The traditional design of the paati reflects its social and cultural role; thus, wherever possible, original wood and stone members were reclaimed and reused. The Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust taught us the process for properly documenting, dismantling, and storing the original structures. A team of masons from Thecho reconstructed the stone and masonry. Two unsalvageable columns were replaced with timber columns carved by a local artisan. With the help of local masons and oversight from the women-led committee, the sewage line was moved to the other side of the street, and a twenty-thousand-liter storage tank was constructed below the dabali, a traditional performance platform adjacent to the paati. The new dabali became a stage for performing festive rituals, concerts, and weddings. The completed paati was handed to the local women’s cooperative in late 2018, but we continue to support the project, working with them on a maintenance plan for the filtration system, which needs attention for the water to be potable. We continue to search for additional funding for the paati to become a charging station for mobile phones and to provide connectivity through a Wi-Fi hotspot.

 

Meeting with community leaders in paati

Aditya Barve

Women collecting water at a local tap for daily use. Even municipal tap water is contaminated, and women use ad-hoc cloth filters to remove some of the larger pollutants.

Miho Mazereeuw

Water testing at a municipal water tap. The municipal tap demonstrated high concentrations of coliform bacteria and nitrates.

Miho Mazereeuw

Design of a revived paati embedded with water systems and supply cache for search and rescue tools

Larisa Ovalles

Sections through the reconstructed paati, dibali, and water tank

Aditya Barve

Rebuilt paati under construction

Yatra Sharma

Rebuilt paati in use by local community

Deepak Bajracharya

Children playing on rebuilt paati

Deepak Bajracharya

Conclusion + Lessons

While the pilot project addresses the damaged physical structure of the paati as well as its contaminated and sporadic water infrastructure, its larger aim is to engage with social and political structures of caring for the public realm. Traditionally, paatis were managed by a guthi—typically a patriarchal organization based on kinship and consisting of community elders. Historically, guthis were supported by trusts funded by land grants, donations, or community contributions. For instance, revenue generated from the tilling of land was used for various community projects. With the decline in farming income and changes in the legal frameworks, the guthi system went into decline, and over time so did many paatis it maintained. While there is still a guthi in Kutujhol neighborhood of Thecho, the local women’s cooperative took charge of the upgraded paati, including managing its water infrastructure and disaster-rescue cache—a key metric of empowerment the group has been able to achieve.

Since the handover of the pilot, Lumanti has taken this concept further and has been developing two more paatis in the surrounding area. Paatis are a ubiquitous typology found throughout the Kathmandu Valley. In Thecho alone, a settlement of fewer than 8000 people, over twenty-two paatis exist in public spaces, pointing to a strong potential to scale up this concept and make an even greater impact through a distributed network of community-managed preparedness nodes. We envision this system of disaster-resilience paatis, managed by empowered women’s cooperatives, could also more broadly address the valley’s problematic water infrastructures. In addition to serving as key anchors of local resilience, these transformed paatis could be pivotal in helping foster open space networks in the face of creeping and often unregulated urban growth in the valley.

  • Miho Mazereeuw Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism
    Director, MIT Urban Risk Lab

    Project Site
    Thecho, Nepal

    Project Team
    MIT Urban Risk Lab
    Hugh Magee
    Aditya Barve
    Pamella Goncalves
    Johanna Greenspan-Johnston
    Noor Titan Putri Hartono

    Lumanti Support Group for Shelter
    Lumanti Joshi
    Yatra Sharma
    Kusum Bista
    Shristina Shrestha
    Lum'sujan Shakya

    Environment and Public Health Organization
    Prabina Shrestha

    Community User Committee Representative
    Maheshwori Maharjan

    Historic Preservation Advisor
    Rohit Ranjitkar
    Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust (KVPT)

    Supporting Organizations
    TATA Center for Technology and Design
    Lafarge Holcim Foundation
    MIT IDEAS Global Challenge Awards
    MIT SUTD Partnership