Anchor: Resilient Barangay Units

Tapping onto the Barangay as  an anchor to build ground-up community resilience, the architecture  of the floating Barangay Unit is designed for programmatic flexibility. It serves  as a self-sustaining refuge during floods, in addition to the daily multiple  functions of an integrated community centre. The building  construction technology responds to perennial pollution along  Manila’s major rivers by upcycling otherwise non-biodegradable styrofoam  waste into a buoyant material for the base, and plastic waste into modular facade panels.

Adapt: Urban Design Catalogue

Urban Design plays a role  creating urban granular resilience. An urban design catalogue of  adaptive – rather than defensive – strategies against flooding, proposes:  elevating living spaces while retaining a sense of urban street  life; transforming dilapidated and submerged houses into vibrant  and productive public spaces; softening and naturalising water-edge   conditions. This catalogue aims to create a framework for an empowering urbanity  and participatory design, where the local residents’ identities and  ecological landscapes are ingrained into a part of urban design.

Activate :  Stitching the River Tapestry

A series of manoeuvres to re-purpose floodwalls from a defensive infrastructure into a structural foundation for an elevated river-spine that stitches together a tapestry of productive water-centred communities and economies, decentralised systems, and closed loops. The vision of the future for Pulo R iver draws upon a notion of a past as a bucolic floodplain landscape-territory. Drawing from Pulo’s idyllic past as a floodplain landscape-territory, the vision is to transform Pulo from a peri-urban fringe into a resilient tapestry of water-centered economies, through re-establishing a connection with the river as a source of livelihood, social activity, and ecological life. Resilience is about adapting to disaster risks and building social capital. The scheme adopts a three-pronged strategy to ‘Anchor’ the Barangay Unit, ‘Adapt’ to flooding and ‘Activate’ the river spine.