‘From Lost Streams to Living Landscapes’ investigates landscape-based infrastructural futures for flood adaptation by diving into American flood management and critiquing the dependence on centralized infrastructural systems that create complex patterns of vulnerability within the Metropolitan Area of Boston.

This thesis approaches landscape as a form of infrastructural ecology, an active system that organizes flows of water, energy, and life. The objective of this thesis is to explore how such a perspective can balance environmental pressures with everyday urban life by integrating ecological processes into the logic of urban systems. This approach aims to strengthen the embedding of the city within its landscape and to explore how hydrology, flood risk, and landscape can generate new urban futures.

The main question: How can landscape, understood as infrastructure, guide future scenarios of flood adaptation that strengthen the spatial and ecological relationship between water and urban life in Metropolitan Boston? is answered through critical cartography, ethnographic fieldwork, scenario building, and research-by-design through the following research questions:

- What is the current condition of Boston’s water and landscape infrastructures?
- What are the (spatial) implications of extreme water scenarios, caused by climate change, in Metropolitan Boston?
- How do socio-economic vulnerabilities intersect within Boston’s flood-prone areas?
- What future scenarios can be developed to explore how landscape-based infrastructures could mediate between flood dynamics and urban development?
- How can these scenarios be spatially translated into design strategies that reconnect urban form with its underlying land- and waterscapes?

Through a systematic sectional exploration, the integration of the urban and environmental system is translated into design strategies by combining historical hydrology, soil conditions, water flow patterns, and urban form into a coherent spatial logic. The result is a set of landscape-based strategies that reconnect the city to its underlying land and waterscapes, not by replicating historical conditions, but by using them to guide new forms of flood-resilient urbanism.

By acknowledging the correlation between the urban and environmental (sub)systems, in combination with a flood accommodating approach, landscape-based infrastructures can transform (storm)water from a hazard into a driver that enables the co-evolution of landscape, ecology, and urban life.

Currently, the Southwestern Delta is ill. The inability to produce its essential ecosystem services hinders the Delta from being healthy. Systems that make the Delta economy prosper are the main reasons for this obstruction. If current hazards like salinisation, soil depletion, and nitrogen pollution continue; the livelihood of the peri-urban Delta communities will be under threat. In contrast, the direct relation to the Delta makes them a potential stepping stone for change.

The main question: ‘How can local peri-urban communities be the base of the just transition towards a healthy Delta, which restores the production of ecosystem services and improves the climate resilience of the Delta?’ forms the foundation of this research. This research aims to explore the potential of communities as the missing link in the just transition towards a healthy Delta.

By creating a vision and designing its strategy, the Delta area will be able to produce its ecosystem services from 2050 on. The combination of environmental assessments, mapping and spatial analysis, stakeholder engagement, a SWOT matrix, the development of action perspectives through scenario planning, and a policy review provides the base for a vision towards a healthy Delta. This vision is translated into a strategy where a design catalogue, community engagement approach, and a knowledge network bring everything together in the spatialisation of three zoom-in areas: Schouwen-Duivenland, Oesterdijk, and Haringvliet.

Through education and recognition, the awareness of the Delta communities will rise which will motivate them to be part of the urgent transition towards a healthy Delta. Field labs and knowledge centres stimulate cooperation and sharing of knowledge. The ecosystem can be restored through the collaboration of the communities with other stakeholders. The combination of ecosystem-based adaptation, knowledge networks, and the borderless approach creates a regenerative and resilient Delta that serves as an example to other estuaries in the world.