WATER CONSUMPTION BALANCE AT DWELLING AND DISTRICT SCALE: AN INNOVATIVE PROSPECTIVE FOR CARTEGENA DE INDIAS – EL POZÓN

The consequences of climate change are affecting informal neighbourhoods, exacerbating, even more, the instability and insecurity of these settlements. For instance, the settlement of El Pozón, located in the Colombian city of Cartagena de Indias, in addition to its social and economic problems, is characterized by a contradictory environmental situation: on the one hand, it suffers the problem of floods due to its proximity to the La Virgen swamp and to seasonal heavy rainfall. On the other hand, the supply of drinking and domestic water is problematic - especially in the dry season- and reaches unsustainable costs for a population who lives in marginal conditions (Guarín Cobos, 2003). The project of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá and the Politecnico di Torino, presented at the Solar Decathlon Latin America & Caribbean 2019 was aimed at improving the quality of life of the El Pozón inhabitants, offering a new model of an economic and sustainable house, self-sufficient from an energy point of view and achievable largely in self-construction with local materials and dry technologies. The prototype, that was built and tested for the duration of the contest, proposed an integrated water use strategy at the building scale, which combines different low-tech systems. This article presents a possible methodology to realize a low-tech water technology: a blue-green roof module to incorporate into the design of the Solar Decathlon prototype. The main purpose is to stimulate the inhabitants to address problems such as lack of sanitation, water quality and environmental improvement, through a scalable, sustainable and cost-effective solution, using mainly waste materials.