‘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.

The Dutch history of deforestation and reforestation, especially in the recent two hundred years, challenges us to rethink about the relationship between humans and forests. From a feared wilderness, to a productive asset, from a romantic retreat to a managed public green space, as an important cultural landscape, the forest reflects evolving human relationships with nature. In today’s Netherlands, where afforestation and sustainability are actively promoted, a culturally informed vision of future forests and cities can foster a new model of co-development that enhances the forest’s positive impact on well-being and cultural identity.

In this graduation project, the study area is the Utrechtse Heuvelrug region: its forests, nearby cities, towns and villages, and the transitional areas. The challenges it faces go beyond internal issues like forest fragmentation and a weak forest culture identity. They also include external pressures such as recreation, housing, agriculture, and extreme climate. Therefore, forest urbanism serves as an integrated approach that links forest expansion with urban development. By redesigning the transitional landscapes, this project aims to integrate complex functions, spatial experiences, and cultural identities in the new forests.

The result is a new forest metropolis in the Utrechtse Heuvelrug region. Eight types of forests are embedded within the transitional landscape under specific spatial principles. The outcome ranges from territorial-scale planning to local-scale urban-forest interface design. This project shifts perspectives between “seeing the forest from the city” and “seeing the city from the forest,” challenging conventional boundaries between the city and nature, the functional roles of forests, and the potential contributions of landscape architecture to future urban development.