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A paper presented as part of the AILA 2009 conference |
Interrogating Practice
Case Study of the EcoWadi Park, Doha, Qatar
Deborah Kuh, Syrinx Environmental PL, Perth, WA
Every place, whether it is in the macro world of country, or the micro world of site, has its own unique identity. Like a thumbprint, it traces a specific topography; is supported by a particular make-up of water and geology; is embedded with its own biodiversity; and most critically, is intrinsically connected to larger ecological systems: built, natural, social, or economical.
Then people come; like urban designers, architects, and landscape architects. We come and we start to manipulate these places and shift these connections. Fundamentally, we do this to inhabit and try and create our own sense of place, and hence our own unique identity. Context and connectivity becomes subjective as we prioritise ourselves: it’s all about us and how we want to use and develop the place, what we think would look good, and the ease by which we can design and implement.
Now, imagine a landscape where our manipulation of place is not exclusive of its context, where as landscape architects we work with the topography, water and geology. We don’t fill in wetlands and re-divert water systems. We don’t de-prioritise nature, deplete the groundwater and import foreign soil. Imagine acknowledging vegetation as communities, and understanding that its biodiversity is, literally, rooted in its environment. Hence, we nurture and expand the endemic vegetation, not eradicate and replace with exotic species. Imagine a landscape by which its design is borne from an inspirational understanding of context and relativity, an intellectual application of co-existence, and a pragmatic consideration towards practice and implementation.
With the world at your disposal, list for me ten landscape projects that successfully achieve this.
So let me take you to a place. Let’s arrive free from our baggage of what we are used to doing: our known species lists, our engineering conventions, our typical details, our incessant dependency on lawn, and our own micro values of standards and conventions.
The EcoWadi Park is a significant public open space planned for the new city of Lusail, north of Doha, Qatar. It was originally designated as an open stormwater conveyance drain, with its banks housing other utility infrastructure. The transformation of this project evolved from the client’s aspiration to restore some of the country’s natural and cultural heritage, whilst providing a key community and infrastructure amenity. The objective is to create a valuable ecological habitat and urban parkland, whilst balancing the needs of urban infrastructure, private investors and leaseholders interested in urban development. The synergy between environmental, engineering and landscape design is critical in resolving a sustainable interaction between stormwater function, extreme climatic conditions, habitat creation and wildlife protection, and active and passive recreational spaces.
Given the priority of the various technical and scientific elements, the landscape design of the Park is underpinned and driven by its science. This in turn has facilitated a cross-spectrum of disciplines, functions and uses; from water, soil, biodiversity of flora and fauna; to urban systems pertaining to connectivity, land-use, interpretation, education and recreation.
Gone are the days when we design landscapes with compensating basins, spoon drains and infrastructure fenced off like a dirty word. There is nothing stopping a landscape from integrating the very elements it requires to be sustainable.
Given this, the design of the EcoWadi Park has been built up from an extensive and detailed set of environmental investigations including groundwater, stormwater and treated sewage effluent [TSE]; to soil, geology, biodiversity, and macro and micro-climate. The design recognises the fundamental element of site and context: of being specific to it, and being grounded by it. This is not about treating the ground as a blank canvas and importing what is necessary to make a parkland. Rather, the design is borne from the endemic values landscape, utilising given resources and minimising additional demands.
The EcoWadi Park reflects the temporal nature of environment whereby spaces can expand and contract with water volumes, climate, changing population and resources. This is a significant factor to consider as the success of ecosystems; natural, built and cultural, is based on its ability to exist in a state of flux. Hence, the design response must move away from conventional outputs of making the landscape static, and instead grow and change over time, mediating between past, present and future. This allows the landscape to not only locate or serve as a backdrop for stories, but also be itself a growing, changing plane that engenders its own stories.
The outcomes of the environmental investigations set the parameters of the design; what we could or could not do. It also revealed numerous opportunities to be inspired by the new, and to pursue a more tactical and sustainable response to given conditions. Here, the landscape design incorporated and made positive issues pertaining to saline ground water, flash flooding, eroded limestone, lost biodiversity, and harsh climatic conditions with extreme ranges in temperature
The saline sands and groundwater across the site reinforce the historical trace of a wadi | sabkha system, and this became the primary design driver of the Park. Whether it is stormwater or TSE, the relationship of water to this place is all about its journey from point of origin to the sea. The intellectual application of co-existence allows stream systems to function as aeration races; wetlands as stormwater attenuation and treatment; shallow groundwater revealing itself as sinkholes; and the creation of an inter-tidal zone as a mangrove habitat.
From this, the Park almost starts to design itself: an eco-system has been created, and with it comes a natural response to its biodiversity, habitat and microclimate. The expense of mining and importing ‘sweet soils’: a type of topsoil, is minimised, and the richness of the natural ecology can be returned. Rather than a by-product or a secondary gesture, the redesign of the wadi | sabkha system becomes the feature of the site. Local ecology is utilised as part of the recreational response : foreign turf species in the Middle East are simply unsustainable.
The EcoWadi Park makes a clear statement about the importance of a multi-disciplinary design team, and the omnipresence of science in landscape architecture. From the inspiration of context, which is underpinned by science, our manipulations of place can better serve our design response such that recreation and urban development can co-exist with each other. Instead of seemingly disparate elements to join up, each land-use is a thread that weaves and inter-connects in both plan and section; possessing a spatial, performative, and functional discourse that cannot exist in isolation. In this landscape, connectivity is a given, not an issue.
If the profession is to aspire to equal standing with architects, then certain principles of architectural practice applies. Architects are required to understand and work intimately with a range of disciplines including mechanical, structural, hydraulic, materials, lighting, electrical, and acoustic engineers. They are required to understand the range of elements that contribute to architecture. Landscape architects should be no different. We should understand and work intimately with ecologists, botanists, geoscientists, geotechnical engineers, chemists, biologists, horticulturalists, hydrologists, and civil, structural, materials, and where applicable, marine engineers.
How often do we work with ALL these people? Furthermore, we are in a unique position of being able to work WITH a place, not against it. Our priority should be working with the fundamental values of the place, not how we decide to colonise it.
Maybe it takes the extremities of a place to highlight the current disjunctures in our practice. That in order to shift our perspective, we must place ourselves in unknown conditions, and to work with the unknown so that what we do know is never accepted as a methodology we either arrogantly, ignorantly, ill-consider, or simplistically believe we can apply to all landscapes.
