A Flood-Resilient Neighborhood in Lisbon That Stores Water Beneath Its Streets

What if a neighborhood didn't just survive flooding but was designed to absorb it? Rather than treating stormwater as a problem to be engineered away, this proposal for Lisbon reimagines an entire residential district as a sponge: water is captured, stored underground, and reintroduced into the landscape as a visible amenity. The logic is deceptively simple, yet the architectural consequences ripple through every decision, from building section to street geometry to the placement of a fire pit in a courtyard.

Designed by Ravisha Vanjari, Nidhi Joshi, Padmawati Thakre, this People's Choice entry in the Ohana competition on uni.xyz proposes a flood-resilient neighborhood that draws on Lisbon's Mediterranean materiality (white stucco, terracotta, azulejo tile) while embedding a new hydrological infrastructure below grade. The result is a district where water is neither hidden nor feared; it sits at the center of communal life.

Water as Civic Space, Not Civil Engineering

The most striking move here is the treatment of water at ground level. A broad water feature stretches between curved residential wings, populated by organic planted islands that serve as both bioretention zones and landscape ornament. Viewed from across the pool, the low-slung buildings and distant tree canopy recall the scale of a Mediterranean fishing village more than a drainage basin. A covered walkway wraps around a secondary pool where white sculptural forms break the surface, and pedestrians move through a soft mist. These are not decorative ponds; they are the visible face of an integrated stormwater management system, designed to fluctuate with rainfall and slowly release stored water back into the ground.

What Happens Below the Street

The section drawing is the project's most revealing document. Building volumes sit above grade on a landscape that appears relaxed and permeable, but beneath the surface, large underground water chambers collect and hold stormwater runoff. Tree silhouettes along the section edge suggest deep root zones that interact with these chambers, turning the planted areas above into active participants in the hydrological cycle. The relationship between the inhabited surface and the engineered subsurface is clearly legible: every courtyard, lane, and garden bed is positioned to feed water downward during heavy rain events and draw it upward during dry spells.

This below-grade infrastructure allows the designers to keep the neighborhood's streets and public spaces at a comfortable, walkable scale without resorting to the massive concrete culverts or raised embankments that typically accompany flood-mitigation strategies. The architecture does the work quietly.

Curved Lanes and Terracotta Shadows

At the scale of the pedestrian, the neighborhood reads as distinctly Lisboan. A curving lane flanked by white stucco facades narrows and widens as it winds through the district, with terracotta roof canopies projecting overhead to cast deep afternoon shadows on the paving below. The geometry is not arbitrary: the curves slow foot traffic, create pockets of shade, and introduce the kind of spatial compression and release that makes walking through old Alfama or Mouraria such a pleasure. Permeable surfaces at the lane level also serve the hydrological strategy, allowing rainwater to percolate rather than sheet off into drains.

A Courtyard That Gathers More Than People

The courtyard view reveals a more intimate scale of intervention. A blue tile feature wall, an unmistakable nod to Lisbon's azulejo tradition, anchors one edge of the space. An outdoor staircase climbs to an upper terrace, and a fire pit draws silhouetted figures together under a clear blue sky. The courtyard functions as a social nucleus, but its depressed profile and surrounding surface grading suggest it also serves as a temporary retention zone during extreme rainfall, holding water briefly before it drains into the underground chambers below. Dual purpose, singular space.

Why This Project Matters

Flood resilience in architecture too often defaults to either hard engineering (seawalls, levees, pumps) or performative greenwashing (a rain garden next to a parking garage). What makes this Lisbon proposal compelling is its refusal to separate the hydrological strategy from the spatial experience. The underground chambers are not an add-on; they are the foundation on which courtyards, lanes, and water gardens are composed. The result is a neighborhood where resilience is invisible to the casual visitor but legible in every section cut.

For Vanjari, Joshi, and Thakre, the project also demonstrates a mature understanding of context. The material palette, the street geometry, and the courtyard typology all belong to Lisbon. Flooding is a universal urban threat, but the response here is site-specific, rooted in the particular light, culture, and topography of the city. That specificity is what elevates the work from a generic sustainability diagram to a place you could actually imagine living in.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Ravisha Vanjari, Nidhi Joshi, Padmawati Thakre

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: CIAZEDE RIAZ by Ravisha Vanjari, Nidhi Joshi, and Padmawati Thakre. People's Choice, Ohana competition (uni.xyz).