Societal problems related to climate change include increasing climate extremes, flood risk and environmental degradation of cities. It is important to address these problems in order to improve urban resilience, reduce flood damage, and promote quality of life. This thesis addresses these problems by focusing on increasing the ecosystem resilience in the urban environment. It seeks to address current shortcomings in cities’ approaches towards urban development; the potential of nature-based solutions as an alternative to grey solutions; and the integration of climate sensitive urban design in the built environment. The main research question is “How can an ecosystem resilient approach guide the built environment in order to integrate climate sensitivity in human-oriented urban design?” The development of a detailed urban design follows from a literature study on ecological urbanism, climate resilience, and nature based solutions, which is supplemented with an in-depth site analysis that focuses on spatial and technical aspects of the built environment in relation to heavy floods, spatial quality, and urbanized landscapes. The study draws on theories of persuasive visual storytelling and research by design. The interdisciplinary approach taken in this project culminates in an urban design proposal for the Buffalo Bayou Downtown corridor in Houston, Texas. The design proposal introduces new nature-based and water-based features into the urban environment. By reintroducing elements of the lost ecoregions of the East Texan coast (including wetlands and prairies) the design proposal not only contributes to improvements in quality of life, but also to greater urban resilience to pluvial floods.

Houston, TX is known for being flood prone. Recent disasters such as Hurricane Harvey (2017) severly damaged this city. Houston’s flooding problem is caused by urban sprawl, the flatness of the city and the lack of policy. The urban sprawl increases the amount of concrete and limits the city’s natural drainage, the flatness of the city means the water has nowhere to go, and the lack of policy causes a lack of stricter building regulations and zoning laws in regards to allowing developers to pave over crucial acres of land that could otherwise absorb rainwater.
Recently the green light is given for the reroute project of the I–45 highway. The
part of the I–45 between the districts of Midtown and Downtown will disappear. A new plan for this inbetween area is needed. In this report we will use an integrated approach to work from the biggest scale level of down towards the smallest scale level, combining the disciplines of urbanism, water mangement and infrastructure for the Midtown neighborhood of Houston.
The research question for this project is: “How can we make Midtown a flood and climate resilient, vibrant part of Houston?” Which will lead to our wider I–45 area vision.
We suggest to replace the I–45 with a lower level beach. The beach will function as a recreational public space and as a detention area for water in case of heavy rainfall. Around the beach there are mid rise buildings, and the beach will be connected to ditches that will be placed all over Midtown. Different measures of the 3 disciplines will be applied on 4 scales through passports containing guidelines based on the American grid system to realize a flood and climate resilient, vibrant Midtown. These sets of passports have great potential because they are also applicable in other neighborhood with the American grid system.