4/4/2013 Sarah Hoyle-Katz
Written by Sarah Hoyle-Katz
By Sarah Hoyle-Katz, graduate student in SRIS
As we stepped out into the warm night of January 4, surrounded by the irregular melody of car horns and hundreds of people calling out to friends, flowers adorning the many plants and vehicles around us, it became clear that we were no longer in Urbana-Champaign.
Our group—two CEE professors and thirteen students—had just arrived in Chennai, India, as part of the first Global Leaders trip in the department’s Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems (SRIS) program. We students – a mixture of graduate and undergraduate students from SRIS, Construction Management, and Environmental Engineering – had come to Chennai to begin work on urban sustainability projects and perhaps gain some global perspective and real-world experience on the side.
Our first visits were to cultural sites. DakshinaChitra, a cultural center for South Indian traditional arts, was a festival of colors, sights and sounds. We
watched a glassblower sculpt a miniature elephant, experienced the humming drums and stepwork of a thunder dance, and had a lunch of diversely and deliciously spiced dishes. Our next stop was Mahabalipuram, a UNESCO World Heritage site not far from Chennai. We walked through temples hundreds of years old, carved out of solid rock into an intricate mosaic of human and animal forms. As we walked through the Shore temple, gazing into stone faces worn smooth and expressionless by centuries of salt air off the Bay of Bengal, it struck me how long people had lived in this place, working to maintain order in the face of inevitable and often chaotic nature. Nowadays, I reflected, the challenges might not be all that different.
Our professional site visits began with a tour of rainwater harvesting sites given by the director of the Chennai Rain Center. Chennai, we learned, has the dual problems of potable water shortages and seasonal monsoons: enough water to flood the streets at some times, at other times so little that the groundwater table drops. By collecting, filtering and infiltrating rainwater on-site, problems of water shortages and flooding can be avoided. The idea is catching on – we even saw a rainwater infiltration well on the grounds of the San Thome Basilica.
The next day we sat in the offices of the Chennai Metro Rail, drinking sweet coffee with milk, a South Indian specialty. Putting in an urban rail network where one did not exist before is no small feat in any area, but Chennai poses some unique challenges. The area has been densely built up for more than a thousand years, resulting in narrow right-of-ways and little available space for the infrastructure needed to support a city-wide rail system. The scale of the challenge became apparent as we stood on top of one of the constructed rail lines, looking out across a patchwork of buildings of all heights and styles, interwoven with bands of river, road and greenspace.
We visited more projects involving water on the following days. The wastewater treatment plant we visited was the largest I had ever seen and still expanding. As we walked by the pools affiliated with different parts of the treatment process, we learned that the plant meets most of its own energy needs throughout the year through gas production, made possible by the constant subtropical warmth. Finding a cost-effective solution to the infrastructure corrosion caused by hydrogen sulfide gas was high on the plant’s list of priorities.
The patchwork of the Pallikaranai marshland reflected its historical classification as a “wasteland”; the marsh, an important migratory bird nesting site, was bisected by a major roadway and massive open dump, and surrounded by encroaching IT buildings. In part due to a grassroots campaign, the marshland is now protected from further encroachment, and restoration work has begun.
Our final visit was to the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM) Intelligent Transportation Systems laboratory. On many computer monitors before us were live videos of vehicles zipping or crawling across many Chennai roads, each vehicle enclosed in a virtual box as the lab’s programs remotely sensed and tracked them. We learned about the challenges and promises of remote sensing in Chennai, and how information on traffic conditions would help improve the at times remarkable congestion of the streets.
Then it was time to work: we sat in the offices of our faculty hosts at IITM, reading relevant papers and books, typing project outlines and discussing how concepts of sustainability and resilience could be integrated into the projects. After another day of work, we completed our project definitions and presented them to our fellow students, our professors and the IITM faculty as monkeys climbed outside the windows. After nine days, our stay in Chennai was over, but our work was just begun – we would spend the following semester fleshing out our ideas and completing the projects.
However, the trip was not all work. Every day was an experience of something new; we ate at all sorts of different restaurants, sampling everything from spiced curries to cool yogurt lassis to Indian pizza (expect peas, not pepperoni). Since we were on campus during Saraang, the university’s annual cultural festival, we attended a traditional music concert and the annual dance competition. Watching the teams dance both more traditional forms and hip-hop to “Gangnam Style” underscored for me what a globally connected and yet locally diverse world we live in.
What I left India with – aside from a project, photos, memories and a sari– was a renewed sense of scale. I saw the length of time over which we have grappled with how to make the world comfortable, beautiful and habitable stretching all the way from Mahabalipuram to the tapestried landscape of modern Chennai as viewed from the top of a rail line. Visiting Chennai gave me perspective not simply on the number and diversity of the people on our planet, but also how many of our concerns – safe water to drink, traffic jams on our way to work, pollution in our natural landscapes – are shared. As populations grow and various networks shorten the distances between us, I think this is an important thing to remember.
About the Author: Sarah Hoyle-Katz is a first year graduate student in the interdisciplinary Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems program in Civil Engineering.