River basin flood adaptation for coastal urban slums. Mithi river basin, Dharavi slum

Abstract

Urban slums in developing countries host a substantial proportion of the urban population. Slums are located on land usually unsuitable for formal development, along the river basins or coastal mangroves that makes them at a greater risk of flooding. River basins face a continuous conflict between mushrooming slums and environmental needs being most vulnerable to changing water levels, plays a significant landscape infrastructure in building flood resilience and provides for spatial interplay between floods and measures of adaptation. The paper investigates how this physical space can be turned into an adaptive interplay to address floods in coastal slums. The methodology involves observation and interpretation from reality. Dharavi slum is assessed to develop a landscape typological framework of flood adaptation set in the parameters based on the functions in different zones that demonstrates the role of river basins towards the integrated approach for flood adaptation in urban slums.