DAISA: An Intersectional Design Toolkit to Re-conceptualize Rivers as Green Integrative Spines

Abstract

Rivers support diverse and dynamic ecosystems worldwide, offering significant societal and economic benefits. However, infrastructure development threatens the ecosystem processes, biodiversity, and services these rivers provide. A new approach that helps maintain the water flow on our planet and restores what was harmed is needed. Urban planners and designers can play a major role in this shift since most harmful human interventions are in our cities. This dissertation follows a practice-based design science research methodology to design a toolkit to be used by urban designers for river interventions, proposing and testing an “Intersectional” design approach as a tool to allow for hearing the hidden voices about how the river is being conceived and bring these voices on board. Beginning with defining the related contexts and affected groups, besides studying similar precedents, the toolkit progresses via a series of analytical tools that illustrate an emergent framework for the ‘the Barada River design exploration exercise’: the re-conceptualization of the Barada River in Damascus as a green integrative spine, an ‘urban living room’ that re-connects the city with its surrounding natural environment, and a catalyst for ecological urban regeneration. Each tool is developed to serve a certain purpose and to allow progression to the subsequent step using the next tool. Then, it integrates all the tools to offer the DAISA toolkit as an answer to the research question. The presented work on the Barada River case can be considered an example of how the toolkit can be used. However, the DAISA toolkit is designed to be flexible and easily modified to tackle other similar case studies.