Water sensitive ‘Santa Luzia’

a leapfrogging approach for informal settlements inside in the Federal District of Brazil with the use of ecological infrastructure patterns.

Abstract

Santa Luzia is a growing informal settlement, started in the 1990s in the vicinity of the former dumping ground of Cidade Estrutural in the Federal District of Bazil, arising from the struggle for housing of low-income families, evicted from their place of origin. Currently, it suffers without basic sanitation, with precarious infrastructure and denial of its rights to provision for the self-built spaces. Endowed with its identities and socio-spatial relations, it is understood that further evictions could be avoided, provided the appropriate infrastructure is offered. Without sufficient urban drainage, problems such as flooding and runoffs make self-built spaces even more vulnerable and potentially more damaging to the adjacent Integral Protection Conservation Unit. An area devoid of water infrastructure, like Santa Luzia, according to Brodnick et al (2018), has a greater potential to become water-sensitive more quickly and directly, in a phenomenon called “leapfrogging”, compared to a city with its traditional gray infrastructure already consolidated, without this process going through all the development stages presented by Brown et al (2009). In the desire to propose an ecological drainage infrastructure with Nature-Based Solutions - NbS - and water reuse that, in addition to reducing the problems suffered by the occupation, would make it environmentally sustainable and sensitive to water, this work, result of a student’s research nominated for a research award in 2019 by the Univesity of Brasilia, linked to the “Santa Luzia Resiste” Extension Project, sought to analyze, in person and through georeferenced maps, the Santa Luzia occupation and to propose design patterns (ALEXANDER et al., 1977 and ANDRADE, 2014) based on Melbourne Water water-sensitive infrastructure guidelines (2017) and on the work developed by Monash University, promoting and implementing water sensitive in infrastructure in informal settlements.