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Adaptive Ecologies / Climate Extremes
The Kundapura Estuary (Udupi, Karnataka) is a threshold, a confluence of multiple ecotones (Neimanis 2012), continually shifting and shaping the environment. These ecotones are and lie in between the diverse mangroves, barrier islands and sand bars (bengre), river islands (kudru), multitude waterways that are home to amphibious/aquatic creatures and their breeding and nesting grounds, human settlements, ancient cultivation practices, and material movements. The livelihoods of human communities include fishing, cultivating paddy, coconut, areca nut, bamboo, tile-making, pottery, basket weaving, as well as trade in markets along the coast and across the seas, that supplement the local economies.
In this region, there have been multiple development projects to support intense economic growth, including a new water supply system, coastal highway projects, and a surge of residential projects that require flattening of the undulating coastal terrain or reshaping and demarcating land from water in these aqueous grounds. However, in recent years, particularly since 2018, the unprecedented changes in the landscape during the monsoon season have demonstrated a lack of understanding of how to work with unpredictable weather patterns, resulting in water scarcity, floods and landslides between the Western Ghats mountains and the Arabian Sea. Besides climate change, we believe that there is a gap in the way development and infrastructures are conceptualized, designed and built. These gaps (in understanding weather and excluding it) emerge from a reductive recording of data (drawn from disciplinary frames) that do not include the complexities on the ground, rain and material conditions, excluding change.
In a collaborative and participative manner working with communities on the ground, this work is oriented to record new narratives of a complex watery terrain, in order to frame environmental initiatives and development projects with greater sensitivity to the ecologies that support life.
It is also being run as a transdisciplinary studio for environmental sensitivity and design activism at Odde Research Centre, SMI-MAHE.