A window into our history: Water towers and our connection to the city

This thesis explores how people engage and attribute meaning to a specific type of building, water towers. I choose these buildings because they have been present in the past and in our times. Thus, I investigate how people relate to this place and the different components that are part of that engagement, including the characteristics attributed to them. As it will be shown this attachment is diverse among the participants despite being the same building function-wise. To elaborate on these, I focused on different concepts such as sense of place, place identity and place attachment.With this framework, I explored different ways people generate a bond with a location and how their experience it, and what type of relation it generates with the building. There are different types of attachment that people have that will be shown. I will present four different ways that people relate to these places. I explored four ways on how the people engage with water towers, the first one is the engagement through the conservation of the building, where people recognize an historical value, secondly, the creation of engagement through the enhance of the water tower, another engagement that is created socially and people shares a common knowledge of the buildings, and lastly, an individual attachment, where users attached emotionally and trough their memories and experiences with the water towers. Since it is an exploratory study, there might be other cases that can exist but have not been explored here. The water towers presented here were built in different periods; therefore, in a way, water towers are connecting the past to the present, and why not think about the future of buildings that are not currently being used and can be redesigned to have a different purpose from what they were designed for.