Indicating that the flood disasters of 2018 and 2019 have more to do with planning, acclaimed architect and urban planner Christopher Charles Benninger has advised the Kerala government to closely study the State’s old, natural drainage patterns and identify the bottlenecks that spawn floods.
“The whole flooding problem simply has to do with drainage patterns. Old natural systems which did not flood — which over centuries developed into good systems of drainage — are getting blocked. So, this is a man-made situation, it’s not something that nature is doing to us,” Mr. Benninger, a Harvard and MIT alumnus from Ohio who first visited India in 1968 as a Fulbright scholar and settled in the country in 1971, said.
Based in Pune and running the architecture and design firm CCBA, he was in the city for the national awards event organised by the Indian Institute of Architects.
An architect and planner whose extensive and celebrated body of work spans countries including India, Bhutan, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, Mr. Benninger said the floods should be an eye-opener.
The questions thrown up by the flood disasters of 2018 and 2019 have, in reality, more to do with planning than architecture. The government should not hesitate to employ advanced technology, satellite imagery included, to document the natural drainage networks, he said.
Prefabricated houses
He does not take kindly to the post-flood calls for prefabricated houses in the State.
“Prefabricated buildings have nothing do with flooding. Number one. Number two, we are a labour-rich country and prefabrication is a labour-saving device actually. In, say, Europe and America, prefabrication is a way of saving labour costs. But in India we have unemployed people,” he said.
