Postnatural drainage infrastructure: reframing drainage devices as relational interfaces for the recognition of the territorial agency of water
(2025) Urbanism and urbanization — Location: IUAV Venice (29.October.2025)
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- Over the past few decades, the Sicilian coast has undergone extensive urbanization processes, often through informal or unauthorized construction. In this context, water has been systematically marginalized, seen as a threat when present or irrelevant when absent. As a result, drainage infrastructure is often rigid, undersized, or compromised. Combined with the effects of climate change, which make the presence of water increasingly unpredictable and intermittent, this condition has significantly raised a conflictual condition in which water, through events such as floodings and landslides, reclaims its spaces. The aim of the paper is a re-reading of drainage infrastructure as Postnatural entities, resulting from the mutual action of water and humans: while traditional urbanism, in recognizing the urgencies related to climate change, considers the presence of water within the human process of production of the city, the paper claims the necessity to recognize the agency of water as both foundational and fundamental in the construction of the territory, therefore in its restitution of a recognized space of action. The re-reading is done on three typologies of seasonal waterways, through spatial analyses that propose a shift of drainage devices: these, from elements that expose water-human conflict, become relational interfaces of water-human negotiation. It finally proposes an exercise on a specific watershed where a relational approach on the interfaces facilitates the reinterpretation of drainage infrastructure as Postnatural.
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Ventimiglia, R. (2025). Postnatural drainage infrastructure: reframing drainage devices as relational interfaces for the recognition of the territorial agency of water. Urbanism and urbanization, IUAV Venice. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/273799