Climate change and urban deltas: Design research for adaptive strategies across scales

Urbanized deltas—which host more than half of the world’s population and produce the lion’s share of global economic value—are amongst the earth’s most inherently vulnerable territories with regards to climate change and man has yet to figure out how to appropriately respond to the predicted consequences of increased vulnerability, which includes storm surges, sea level rise, both increased flooding and drought, and extreme rainfall. The hazard-prone areas threaten water and food security, human settlement and transport. Clearly the stakes, in terms of human and financial capital, are extremely high and need urgent attention. Design attention and creative thinking is thus part of the necessary ‘game-changers’ that must figure into a paradigm shift for such deltaic landscapes.

The lecture will focus on design responses—from the OSA research group and post-graduate programs—to climate change, including water and forest urbanisms and the development of new morphologies and typologies to create new relationships between nature and culture, water/ agriculture /forests and cities, the unbuilt and the built and public and private realms. It will present a set of complementary case studies in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mozambique, Ecuador and Belgium.

Speaker Bio
Kelly Shannon is a professor of urbanism and program director of the Master of Human Settlement and Master of Urbanism and Strategic Planning programs at the University of Leuven (Belgium). Her research is at the intersection of interpretative mapping, projective cartography, urbanism and landscape with a particular focus in Vietnam.