Rural-urban Moatize: water harvesting design strategies to enable community-driven development

Abstract

This paper presents design research on Moatize rural-urban area, located in the Zambezi river basin, Mozambique. The design research intended to find measures of conserving available resources, supporting reforestation and taking advantage of the riverscape to enlarge the landscape capacity. Starting with a vision of creating resilience through landscape design, the project worked within dualities of extremes: wet versus dry; rural versus urban; endogenous versus exogenous processes. This area is in a fast transformation process, mostly driven by foreign companies that negatively impact the environment and socio-economical dynamics. From an interdisciplinary analysis, problems related to water were identified as key issues to reduce community vulnerability and therefore, community’s reliance on outside interference. The design research proposes a water capture and distribution system, with small scale elements and a scattered management. As a result, the system can be better integrated with the landscape occupation, facilitating efficient community maintenance. The design process was a result of learning from local knowledge and applying it to infrastructural solutions, a soft-engineering project that can be built integrated to natural cycles. Since the project follows the principles of community driven development, it is not a final result, but the starting point of a discussion.