Anäis Chanon created a film called ‘Living with the Sea’
The winners of the LI’s flooding film competition were announced at Ecobuild this week. First prize went to Anäis Chanon, a landscape architect from Glasgow, for her film ‘Living with the sea’.
It shows a project that she developed in 2014, during her final year as a student of landscape architecture in Versailles, France. It consisted of a counter-proposal to the local council’s costly and unsustainable plan to considerably raise the height of dykes around the island of Noirmoutier.
Coastal spaces all around the world are rapidly metamorphosing due to rising sea levels.
‘Upon meeting the people of Noirmoutier and hearing of their fear concerning the possible loss of their island,’ Anäis said, ‘I realised that flood management was both an economic and an ecological issue. But, perhaps most importantly, it was also a powerful social question.’
By using fiction as a way of communication, this short film narrates an ideal vision of Noirmoutier in 2080. It aims to promote flexible and creative solutions to flooding and invites people to engage with collective problem solving.
Watch the film here.
Second place went to ‘Celebrating Water in the City: An integrated strategy for flood alleviation along the Porter Brook’ by Sarah Barker and Lizzie Griffin.
The film examines the Porter Brook River which begins its journey in the grassy moors of the Peak District national park. It winds down into Sheffield’s city centre where it becomes culverted and hidden away.
The project aims to use an ecologically sensitive design approach to re-connect the river to both people and nature while mitigating flood risk in this zone of Sheffield. A series of intervention sites along the Porter Brook have been identified. These are currently a mixture of unused, derelict sites or hardscaped car parks. The routes ends in Sheaf Square, adjacent to the train station, creating a stunning first and last impression for those entering and leaving the city.
Watch the film here.
Room60’s ‘instructional ideas film’
There were also two runners-up. One is ‘How to prevent flooding – an instructional ideas film’ by Room60. Intentionally short, it is intended to be shortened further into six-second segments that can be shared on Vine and Twitter. The aim is to put together a simple ten-point plan of what can be done by those at all levels of society and professional status to prevent flooding across the board.
Watch the film here.
Image from ‘Flooding: a bigger picture’
The other runner-up is ‘Flooding: a bigger picture’ by Ms Deepthi C B & Ms Hina Bajaj. It looks at the the lack of integration and harmony between networks – both natural and man-made – that has aggravated flooding problems and explains how problems start at the origin of the river system, and build up as it reaches its destination, the sea. The film explains how landscape urbanism concepts, used at every stage of the water system, can help mitigate the consequences of urban flooding in an economical and sustainable way.
Watch the film here.
The other shortlisted films were ‘Water boulevards’ by Baharash Architecture, ‘i-ngress – working together to alleviate flooding’ by Atkins. ‘Underground taming of floods for irrigation’ by International Water Management Institute, and, ‘Transition to a riparian landscape: designing a flood resilient coastal settlement in Par Docks, Cornwall’ by Edward Barsley from the University of Cambridge.
