A possible consequence of the contemporary re-evaluation of Dutch flood and water management strategies could be a return to more naturalistic estuarine conditions within the Southwest Delta. This has the potential to re-animate natural systems and habitats as well as bolster cultural connections to, and across, this landscape. But how could this re-naturalisation benefit the urban landscapes and economies that negotiate the transition between one of Europe’s densest urban, industrial and logistics corridors (from Brussels and Antwerp to Rotterdam) and the equally congested territory of the southern portion of the North Sea? Could a new spatial typology of augmented ecologies prompt a re-orientation of both naturalistic and urban ecosystems within the delta towards greater social, economic and ecological efficacy and resilience?

Japan and the Netherlands have very different physical, historical and cultural contexts but they share a vulnerability to extreme flood related events and have, in both their (relatively) recent pasts, had to recover from such events: be they the floods of 1953 in the Netherlands or the tsunami that hit Japan’s east coast in 2011. This paper describes the process and results of two workshops investigating flood reconstruction responses undertaken by students representing five disciplines at TU Delft in the Netherlands. A particular workshop method was employed to promote an interdisciplinary design process and then design responses investigated for the (very real) Japanese case were transferred to a hypothetical disaster scenario for Vlissingen, in the south of the Netherlands. The conclusions reached focused as much on the efficacy of the workshop method as the particular design proposals for both cases as well as on what was learnt via the comparison between Japanese and Dutch, contexts and reconstruction philosophies.