Stories from Akalapuzha: Reading Rivers as Systems and Places

Naeema Ali is an interdisciplinary designer at Witteveen+Bos, working from their Dubai office. An emerging professional in the built environment sector, Naeema collaborates with diverse teams to develop landscape design strategies, nature-based solutions and climate-resilient infrastructure. In her role as a project coordinator, she oversees international and urban development projects. Her work portfolio spans the United Arab Emirates, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India, and Azerbaijan, where she applies systems thinking, nature-based engineering methods, and community engagement to her projects. Focusing on cities and climate change, she has further explored these issues through publications, activism, research, and academia. She works closely with global think tanks and research groups like the LoTEK, which designs climate-proof futures by applying indigenous knowledge. During her graduation year, she developed an integrated water management approach to landscape architectural design, using the case of the below-sea-level Kayalnilams in Kerala, India. This project “Land can sometimes be Water” conducted in the Circular Water Stories lab (2020), was exhibited in the London Design Biennale, 2021, inside the India Pavilion under the clean water category. Naeema holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, India and a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from Delft University of Technology (TUD), the Netherlands.

Inge Bobbink has been an Associate Professor in the Section of Landscape Architecture since 2007 in the Department of Urbanism at Delft University of Technology (TUD) in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment in the Netherlands. She holds a post-master’s degree from the Berlage Institute and a PhD from TUD. In cooperation with others, she developed and coordinated, from the start of 2010, the educational program for the master track of Landscape Architecture. She teaches and supervises master and PhD students, lectures internationally, coordinates the graduate studio and other courses, serves on the education management team, and participates in diverse advisory boards. She is the founder of the Circular Water Stories lab. Her research focuses on identifying landscape-architectural and sustainability values in (traditional) water systems worldwide. The goal is to learn from the past and transform that knowledge for today’s design challenges. Good mapping and drawings are crucial in this regard and require close attention. Therefore, developing an illustrative method and researching how to draw time as a design tool are ongoing topics in her research. In collaboration with colleagues, alumni, and students, various books and articles bear witness to this agenda.

Monica Veras Morais is a Brazilian researcher based in the Netherlands graduated at Delft University of Technology (TUD) in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment in the Netherlands in Landscape Architecture in the Circular Water Stories lab (2020). Her work today explores shared landscapes through the evolving interplay of design, governance, and social-ecological systems. She approaches landscape architecture as a situated, time-based, and relational discipline, exploring how humans and non-humans jointly shape landscapes and contribute to their reimagining. Her research spans a range of contexts, from residential gardens and urban interstices to peri-urban territories. Her doctoral research at TUD examined the long-term transformation of shared residential gardens, leading to the development of design principles that support evolving social and ecological needs. More recently, she explored networks of urban leftover spaces as sites of multiple forms of inhabitation through the project Everyone’s Land: Reimagining Urban Interstices for the More-than-Human. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at TUD on the project FAIR: Fostering Water Circularity in Peri-urban Landscapes, in cooperation with Inge Bobbink, collogues from Vienna, Austria and Florence, Italy co-designing circular water strategies for European peri-urban regions and explores how water, as a shared landscape resource, drives spatial transformation.

Amina Chouairi is an Italian Moroccan landscape architect based between the Netherlands and Italy.  She graduated at Delft University of Technology (TUD) in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment in the Netherlands in Landscape Architecture (2020) and was part of the Circular Water Stories lab. She is a lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Wageningen University & Research and holds a PhD in Urbanism from Università Iuav di Venezia. Her practice centres on transitional wet territories, interrogating their contested epistemological, ontological and ethical matters from a landscape architecture perspective. Her doctoral thesis discusses the agency of the barene (brackish marshes) in the Venice Lagoon landscape and their urgent call for restoration. It acknowledges their role in unveiling and rethinking Venice as a city in a landscape, a fluid “Venice-in-a-Lagoon”. Chouairi actively raises public awareness by showcasing overlooked areas of the Venice Lagoon through curated talks, symposia, and landscape explorations, among other formats. Among others, she has given guest lectures at the AA London, TUD, TU Munich, Ghent University, Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Virginia, and the National Institute of Technology Calicut. She was a finalist for the Canadian Centre for Architecture-Mellon Research Program, In the Hurricane, On the Land. Her research has been exhibited at the 10th International Architecture Biënnale Rotterdam, It’s About Time and the 19th International Architecture Exhibition Biennale Architettura Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.

Anjana Bhagyanathan is a landscape architect, researcher and educator, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture and Planning at the National Institute of Technology Calicut. Her work explores the intersections of nature, culture and spatial design, with emphasis on sacred groves, traditional landscapes, riparian systems, urban ecology and climate resilience. She engages with landscape urbanism practice, integrating ecological processes into urban design and planning frameworks. She leads interdisciplinary research on local ecological knowledge, environmental attitudes, deep ecology and sacred geography, translating traditional ecological knowledge into planning and nature-based solutions. Her publications examine the spatial logic and ecological significance of sacred landscapes, including their role in headwater and riparian conservation along the Malabar Coast. Through teaching, research and collaborative projects, she seeks to develop culturally grounded approaches to landscape restoration, water security, biodiversity conservation and resilient human settlements in India. She collaborated on the workshop Circular Water Stories, which is documented in the essay Stories from Akalapusha.