KM3: Water Infrastructure as a public service

Since a multidisciplinary approach, combining knowledge from hydraulic engineering, landscape, urban planning and architecture. Km3 is a system, to mitigate urban storm floods. It tries to change the concept and role of water infrastructures in contemporary societies, vulnerable and not at all resilient contexts, acting on water basins to generate sustainable solutions.

With extreme rains of up to 200 mm in a short period, 60% of the city is flooded in less than 1 hour.

In this context, km3 focuses on making the problem visible, maintaining water as a transforming element within the city, returning its identity with the succession of different territorial scales about the community, and dissolving the limits between infrastructure/society/territory.

The project provides an answer to extreme water situations in cities around the world subject to storm floods, innovating a new typology of multi-scale water infrastructure, combining existing urban infrastructures and relating them to water, in favour of society’s pleasure. Each element of km3 is designed to be located in large urban voids, train tracks, railway beaches, and military areas. Replicable in a global context, subjected to water stress.

From the study of water basins, the intensity, duration of design rains, and a recurrence time of 25 years, urban parts (SML) are designed, which capture, store, conduct and retain the runoff water, through a natural sanitation process.