Amphibious Bangkok: Creating a resilient landscape framework for amphibious urbanisation and fostering human and water coexistence

Bangkok is located on the low-lying deltaic soil near the mouth of Chao<br/>Phraya River. Like many coastal and delta cities, it has faced many floods<br/>and environmental challenges due to human’s extensive alteration of the<br/>landscape and consumption of natural resources. With climate change,<br/>these cities are threatened by more...

A Floating Circular Future: Utilizing the changing landscape as a driving force to a circular economy

While attempting to find an answer to the question of how we could become sustainable and circular by 2050, we discovered that it was quite difficult to even imagine what South Holland, the Netherlands or the world, for that matter, would look like. The questions that arose quite quickly were, among others: how many people will live here then?...

Drowning Deltas: A strategical spatial approach to soil subsidence in delta regions

Delta cities all around the world are under pressure from different forms of climate change effects. Soil subsidence as a result of peat oxidation, and anthropogenic loading of the soil. The soil in many of the heavily urbanised deltas around the world is subsiding faster than the see level is rising as a result of climate change. Few people are...

Flood Risks in Sinking Delta Cities: Time for a Reevaluation?

Sea level rise (SLR) and subsidence are expected to increase the risk of flooding and reliance on flood defenses for cities built on deltas. Here, we combine reliability analysis with hydrodynamic modeling to quantify the effect of projected relative SLR on dike failures and flood hazards for Shanghai, one of the most exposed delta cities. We...

Breathe: Redefining a zone of informal settlements for Ho Chi Minh City

The project has been created from a strong fascination of the author who came from the developing country in South East Asia. A rapid change of a city from urbanization and over-growing population have somehow eradicated the traditional way of living. One of the best examples is in Ho Chi Minh City, in the South of Vietnam. The city is located...

Collaborative spatial planning in the face of flood risk in delta cities: A policy framing perspective

Integration of flood risk in spatial planning is increasingly seen as a way to enhance cities’ resilience to the growing flood hazards, albeit its operationalisation remains challenging. This study aims to explain the reasons for this difficulty through the case study of Guangzhou, a Chinese delta city that is highly vulnerable to coastal,...

Flood safety in delta cities: Development of a comprehensive risk-based model to support decision making on measures against pluvial, riverine and coastal flooding in urban area, with the application to Hoboken, New Jersey

Flood safety in low-lying delta regions has been a challenge of all ages. Societies worldwide have been trying to protect themselves against flood hazards for centuries. Floods in vulnerable urban regions are often caused by heavy rainfall, high river flow, extreme sea levels, or combinations of those three. Currently, there is a lack of tools...

Flood adaptive cities: Towards climate change adaption and urban development in the Mekong Delta

For three hundred years, Mekong delta has become a water society where inhabitants in this region developed adaptive strategies, often called “shaking hand with floods”. Historically, people first settled on the lightly higher terraces and later on the levees along the river. With the digging of canals, people started to settle along the canal...

Towards an open delta: Research and design for sustainable urban landscapes in an open Dutch Southwest Delta

The invention of technology for land reclamation in the 10th century started a unique transformation in the delta. Sand plates were dike-ed and pumped and became polders. Examples of early harbor cities created on the dike-ring are Ooltgensplaat and Oude Tonge. These cities were founded at the main creek of a sand plate. The polders created a...

Comparative assessment of the vulnerability and resilience of 10 delta cities

In this collaborative project of the Delta Alliance a framework for delta assessment is proposed, building on the work done for the Aquaterra 2009 conference in Amsterdam and elaborating recent recommendations of the World Estuary Alliance conference (hosted by WWF in Shanghai, June 2010) regarding the development of a worldwide assessment of...