Researchers unveil new
method to save Ciliwung
Instead of using heavy technology and engineering, a research center has suggested a more ecological approach to rehabilitating the heavily polluted Ciliwung River, which flows through West Java and Jakarta.
During a recent symposium entitled “Future City Jakarta: Swiss and Indonesian Research and Technology in Practice”, at the University of Indonesia in Depok, West Java, the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) — a collaboration between ETH Zurich and Singapore’s National Research Foundation — presented the Ciliwung Rehabilitation Project, which pointed to a paradigm change in river rehabilitation as an alternative solution.
“We believe in an ecological and softer solution [..] It’s not high tech, it’s green-tech solution. There’s a relationship with the river that we should bring back. In the old days the temple, the front of the river, was the noble, important side of the village until the Dutch came and made it the back side,” FCL principal investigator Christophe Girot, who leads a team researchers on a flood control project in the coastal metropolis of Jakarta, said on the sidelines of the symposium.
The team exhibited 3-D modelling of the Ciliwung River’s topography generated by photogrammetry, in which the Ciliwung River is studied in its entirety to generate solutions based on the spatial scale of the river’s catchment, corridor and individual urban sites to capture the dynamics of the river and its surroundings.
- Research team from Switzerland, RI, S’pore say ‘green-tech’ is key to rehabilitating polluted river
- Team uses 3-D model to test flood scenarios and better understand Ciliwung
- Local residents are key to efforts to clean up river, says local group
According to the team, comprising at least 50 researchers from Indonesia, Singapore and Switzerland, the interactive visualization system enables the visualization of the extent of flooding and can contribute to urban planning decisions.
“The idea is to get rid of slums and build new high-density, low-rise housing along the river that can actually withstand floods,” Girot said.
“The river is sometimes flat and sometimes high. Where the river is flat you should not have a city, you should have a park.”
Meanwhile, Een Irawan Putra, the coordinator for the Ciliwung River Care Community, emphasized the importance of involving local communities as the key to rehabilitating the Ciliwung.
“No matter what we do to improve the river, it will be nothing without the involvement of local residents. However, our government is too lazy to think about ways of boosting people’s awareness and participation. It takes continuous effort to build that awareness,” Een said during the symposium.
“I once approached government representatives to talk about this issue but they shrugged off such ideas, saying that it was too complicated and instead suggested infrastructure project-based solutions. It won’t work with only infrastructure projects,” he said.
Swiss Ambassador to Indonesia Yvonne Baumann acknowledged that building awareness would contribute significantly to restoring a degraded environment, as proven in her home country, which faced such challenges a few decades back.
“The awareness built up over several decades. I think it started in the 1960s and 1970s. I remember being a child and [at the time] the river was polluted. We are all now very aware of [creating] sustainable environments and it does not just come like that. We had to go a long way to reach this stage,” she said.
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar