urban planning studio.2022

Urban Planning Option Studio: Latin America in TransitionSpring 2022

Harvard Graduate School of Design
Instructor: Felipe Vera & Soledad Patiño

🚽🚰 Waste Water Parks


Lampa, Chile Site Research 
Collaboration with: Syeda Aimen Fatima & Arnav Murulidhar

Located just 30 kilometers from the nation’s capital, Lampa is a rapidly developing municipality, quickly transforming from a rural town to a middle-class suburb.  It is home to peri-urban manufacturing, industrial agriculture, and numerous informal settlements.

These informal settlements are precariously wedged between the riverbank and the formal city and are plagued by overcrowding, a lack of access to jobs and water, made worse by the region’s ongoing and decade-long drought.

Fleeing the high cost of living in Santiago, these migrants, primarily international, are repeating a pattern seen elsewhere in the metropolitan region’s periphery. Therefore, many solutions proposed for this site, whether they be economic, housing, or water-related could be used as a framework for solutions elsewhere.


Individual Project

Amidst a drought crisis in Chile, intensified by climate change and big agriculture companies being prioritized in the water distribution system, how can wastewater be treated on a neighborhood scale in order to alleviate the ongoing water shortage. Taking Lampa as a case study, this project proposes block or neighborhood scale water treatment systems that feed platforms that will carry the treated water and create communal spaces that will use this treated water. These platforms can be arranged and adapted into empty lots within neighborhoods to create spaces that help mitigate the effects of drought in three main ways. These spaces will decrease the heat by feeding water and fertilizer into plants, they will also provide food security by using the water to feed community gardens, & alleviate water shortages with water parks that also have access to non-potable water.