The capitalistic and economy driven approach towards urbanization in India has led to a great disparity between different socio-cultural groups as well as a huge pressure on the ecological systems. Further, with the changing climate these groups are increasingly vulnerable to hazards. This can be observed even in the Ganges River Basin where unplanned urbanization has caused a fragmented river system that puts several local settlements at increasing risk.
The approach to planning water centric projects has not been a holistic approach in the past, and with uncertainties of changing times the planning approach needs to be more adaptive. The aim of the project is to relook at the current development trend within the existing system and derive a possible adaptive spatial planning model for design, that would include local communities and governing bodies into the planning process. The focus lies in emphasising the importance of a holistic approach to planning for the Ganges River Basin and bridging the gap between the national mitigation policies and local adaptation to climate change, to alleviate social, economic and ecological vulnerabilities.
Designing for resilience for the Ganges River Basin, is based on the understanding of the relationship between the human systems and the ecological systems. The notions of SES (Adger 2003-2009), and the panarchy of adaptive cycles from Holliing (1986) are used to derive the process of designing infrastructure and interventions within the river basin. The derived framework of Adaptive Spatial Planning enables a flexible approach to planning for uncertainty, integrating local communities in the planning process. Local adaptation of multi-scalar strategies along with local knowledge from the community allow early testing of strategies and informing policies simultaneously, with results and local knowledge, reducing the time-line compared to traditional planning where policies are derived at central level without in-depth understanding of local context. The new adaptive spatial planning allows shift of pathways in times of uncertainty, making the system more flexible and resilient.

The Greater Bay Area, known as the GBA, ultimately incorporates 11 main cities (consisting of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), the Macao Special Administrative Region (Macao SAR) as well as the municipalities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen, and Zhaoqing) into an urbanised population of over 70 million people. It represents a significant opportunity to shape the future of the Pearl River Delta region.

In the last decades, this region has experienced an unprecedented rise of urbanisation and a rapid economic growth positioning itself as the future centre of global economy. However, the uneven development has been the reason behind several environmental and socio-spatial challenges that threaten the future of this mega region. The research intends to comprehend these issues under the fragmentation perspective, by classifying and analysing the challenges within three main themes (Society, Economy and Environment) in three different scales. Furthermore, the research proposes that the integration of bio-physical infrastructures (Green and blue network) respecting the natural ecosystem and the delta conditions throughout the whole process of development and urbanisation, will help redefine the future of globalisation in the GBA. In order to achieve that, an explorative method using the ‘strips game’ was used as a method to produce a vision and urban scenarios on multiple scales providing functional and spatial distributions. This method was conducted in Hong Kong to give access to the feeling and environment in question.