ETERNAL LANDS

Before 2000 years ago there were lands submerged in water which is located in southrern Iraq, these lands were inhabited by people forming small colonies, having their own habits, traditions and ways of living that is different from others, these colonies continued to grow and expand, preserving their traditions and way of life until their population reached 818,966 in 1977 while the population of Iraq were 12,462,059

Despite the fact that Iraqi people are young people, the number of population of the marshlands suffered from a decrease due to the continuous migration as a result of the events of neglect and drought even after its inclusion by UNESCO on the world heritage list in 2016 , so according to that their number reached 386,199 while the population of Iraq is 40 million people now

There are many problems which can be located in main four categories ( social problem – environmental problem – economic problem – organizational problem ) the most of them affect  is the last one because it is related to village expansion and reed islands expansion in randomly way, so solving these two issues through organizational planning will reduce other problems but before start planning its essential to understand how marshes are formed which is leading us to make the right decisions .

According to that the project splits into two sections, the first is village planning and the second is development of reed islands and house designing

Village planning philosophy was depending on comb system planning and it is projected perpendicular to water movement direction instead of being parallel to it by tooking a geometrical form that locals used in their designs a lot and manipulated with it to achieve the comb system also making these roads parallel to the marshes water channels and moving with it when they need to expansion

Housing philosophy was through raising these houses on pillars with two meters height ( to allow boats to move freely under them ) to ensure that these houses wouldn’t affected by sanition totally in the future

After these decisions it was clear that we are dealing with two height levels so the philosophy for master plan was based on two pillars, the first is to exploit these levels to make separation without isolation between locals and visitors and the second is to make an isolation between locals life and animals

while the expansion of village was solved, there were another problem need to consider which is the expansion of family house itself but there is no real houses at all so the main challenge was to find a design of house that :

– Familiar to locals, so they could built it by themselves

– should emphasize on their habits not changing them

–  providing future expansion to them

– including traditional MADIF within it as a preservation building

– Achieving the separation between animal and resident by getting benefit from two levels that was achieved previously in master plan