Designing the Adaptive Landscape

Designing the Adaptive Landscape: Leapfrogging Stacked Vulnerabilities

Roggema, Rob (Western Sydney University; Cittaideale)
Tillie, Nico (TU Delft Landscape Architecture)
Hollanders, M.J. (Student TU Delft)

2021

In the Anthropocene, climate impacts are expected to fundamentally change the way we live in, and plan and design for, our cities and landscapes. Long-term change and uncertainty require a long view, while current planning approaches and policy making are mostly short-term oriented and are therefore not well suited to respond adequately. The path-dependency it implies causes an irresolvable dilemma between short-term effect and long-term necessities. The objective of the research is to investigate an alternative planning and design approach which is able to overcome the current constraints and take a holistic long-term perspective. Therefore, the methods used in the study underpin a creative process of future visioning through backcasting and finding a dynamic equilibrium in the past as a primer for long-term climate adaptation. This way, the individual vulnerabilities of current sectoral policies can be leapfrogged and integrated into one intervention. This design-led method is applied to the northern landscape of the Groningen region in the Netherlands. This intervention is positioned as a re-dynamization of the landscape by re-establishing the exchange between the land and the sea. The findings in the study show that a long-term perspective on the future of the regional landscape increases climate adaptation and enriches the opportunities for viable agriculture, increased biodiversity, and a raised land that is not only protected against possible storm surges, but benefits from the sediments the sea brings. The economic analysis shows that a new perspective for farming within saline conditions is profitable on a fraction of the land, the biodiversity can be enriched by more than 75%, and the ground level of the landscape can be raised by one meter or more in the next 50–100 years. Moreover, the study shows how a long-term perspective can be implemented in logic stages that comply with the natural step-changes occurring in climate change.

Climate adaptation
Ecology
Food
Groningen
Holistic future
Long-term planning
Sea level rise

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:c402c3d1-0d02-489a-b232-0dcae087fd89

https://doi.org/10.3390/land10020158

2073-445X

Land, 10 (2)

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2021 Rob Roggema, Nico Tillie, M.J. Hollanders