‘Spongy Mountain Terraces’ is one of the five concepts of “Cascading Semarang”, a comprehensive urban design strategy developed for the third largest city of Indonesia as part of the Water as Leverage program.
The Spongy Mountain Terraces propose an urbanization model to create uphill interventions aiming at reducing the flood risk of downstream areas as well as reducing the landslide risk in endangered zones. The terraces stabilize the water supply throughout the year and increase the resilience of recent and new developments. On an urban scale they will increase sponginess of natural areas and release new land for further development. They will enhance natural spongy capacity of uphill zones and stimulate new urban typologies, which could facilitate new ways of living with water.
This program aims at the upstream areas, where the future urban expansion is expected. Natural preservation, agricultural zones, new residential development, and water-management infrastructure are the main realm of interventions. Different strategies are implemented based on the landslide risk conditions.
Read more about Cascading Semarang and the other concepts here.
Location: Semarang , Indonesia
Program: Resilient Urbanization Model
Year: 2019
Commissioner: Water as Leverage, RVO
Partners: MLA+, Deltares, Witteveen+Bos, UNDIP, UNISSULA, Liveable Cities platform
Design Directors: Eric Frijters, Olv Klijn
Project Leader: Rens Wijnakker
Team: Luca De Stefano, Isabella Suppa, Marianne Lafontaine-Chicha, Nafeesa Hamza, Reinout Haisma
In agricultural zones, a new water infrastructure is proposed to increase retention capacity and ensure a consistent water provision all around the year.
The water retention of natural zones in enhanced by creating more room for natural water courses, reservoirs and reducing water contamination.
In residential areas, where water runoff is normally high, a series of water strategies aims to increase spongy capacity and collect water for reuse. Additionally, in specific areas anti-landslide measures are implemented.
The spongy capacity of the river is increased by enlarging the riverbed and preserving the biodiversity around it.
Water as driver for urban transformation: The stepped water strategy responds to each zoning condition with a tailored strategy, but all solutions come together in a comprehensive and coherent system. This system generates a series of additional values for the sustainable development of Semarang.
