Exhibition of Flood Resilient Housing

In Summer 2022, Pakistan experienced unprecedented flooding in all provinces, with Punjab being one of the worst affected. This called for a nation-wide effort to mitigate the situation as well as plan for the future. The Department of Architecture at COMSATS University Lahore, took the opportunity to focus the 4th year studio course on the issue to understand the situation in a real context and use it to propose flood resilient strategies and interventions, with a special focus on housing and community development.

Establishing a working relationship with the public sector was an important priority and so DG Khan’s local government was approached as a collaborator. The phase based approach was adopted to conduct the project; Phase One being the non-site-specific research where students studied the strategic interventions to mitigate and adapt to flood situations. Considering the close proximity of southern Punjab, in Phase 2, students looked into the areas that were more affected and selected the suitable site for design intervention. Mangrotha Gharbi was selected as the case study. In the phase 3, a site visit was arranged to Mangrotha Gharbi where the vulnerable community to work with was identified. Spending time on ground allowed the students to conduct surveys and analyse the area and work closely with the community. The design was finalised in integration with strategies proposed at macro and micro scales, with the final output resulting in multi-level proposals from the macro to micro.

The department of Architecture is pleased to exhibit the design ideas on 2nd February 2023 in the Department of Architecture CUI Lahore. The exhibition will be open to the public for two days.