In Bangladesh, rapid urbanization, rural-to-urban migration, and climate change converge to intensify the vulnerability of slum residents, particularly in regions like Sylhet. Slums are characterized by overcrowding, substandard housing, and limited access to essential services, leaving residents highly exposed to disease, poverty, and natural disasters. Climate change compounds these challenges through rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, and increasingly frequent floods and cyclones that destroy precarious housing and disrupt livelihoods. Despite the urgency, many government-led relocation and upgrading initiatives have been ineffective, often failing to account for local needs and causing further social and economic disruption.

This research explores the urgent need for affordable, climate-resilient housing solutions tailored to Sylhet’s slum residents, with a focus on in-situ development that avoids forced relocation. It examines how housing can be designed to be both culturally appropriate and adaptable to the residents’ livelihoods, using locally available materials and construction techniques that enhance flood resilience. The study seeks to define affordability in this context, identify design features that improve climate resilience, and propose implementation strategies that maintain community stability during construction. By centering the specific needs and aspirations of slum residents, this research aims to inform practical, sustainable, and inclusive housing models that strengthen community resilience to climate change while addressing urban poverty in Bangladesh.

Housing for climate-displaced communities has long been limited to temporary solutions, often overlooking the long-term needs and realities of those affected. This thesis challenges that norm by proposing a new standard for permanent housing in the face of recurring displacement. Set in the flood-prone village of Shonatola, Bangladesh, the project engages directly with the lived experiences of vulnerable communities to offer a flexible, incremental housing model.
Designed to evolve with its residents, the proposal uses a hybrid structure that is centered around adaptability. Each home integrates pucca (permanent) and kutcha (temporary) components, allowing families to expand and modify their living spaces over time, based on need and resources.
More than just shelter, this project reimagines housing as a framework for long-term resilience—deeply rooted in local knowledge, environmentally responsive, and socially inclusive. It offers a path forward for rebuilding not just homes, but a community in the face of climate uncertainty.

Transitional territories such as lagoons are among the most impacted and delicate environments, threatened by the combined effects of climate change and human action. This Master thesis in Landscape Architecture examines the Venetian Lagoon in North of Italy as one of the most endangered and critical cases, as the last extreme flooding event of November 2019 demonstrates. The thesis aims to address the Venetian Lagoon hydromorphological sufferance, the state of neglection of its secondary islands, and the over-engineered flood defence design as crucial issues. From the research conducted, emerges clearly the need for redefining the role of the entire Venetian Lagoon in the next future, shifting its role from passive, being exploited and consequently damaged, to active, able to sustain resiliently the rest of the territory. In order to do so, the main strategy to be pursued is to reinforce the “barene” landscape, the brackish marshlands, fundamental for the hydromorphological and ecological survival of the lagoon. These brackish marshlands are able to limit tidal and wind impact, favour water exchange and act as an expansion vessel, but, from 20th century onwards, 70% of their surface have been lost due to anthropic actions. Therefore, the goal of the thesis is to employ the agency of “barene” to mitigate the impact of anthropic and natural threats, acting as a nature-based flood defence (function), to recover hydromorphological sufferance (flow), and to support the cultural, ecological and productive heritage (form), making the Venetian Lagoon function as a sustaining landscape infrastructure. The “barene” act as pivotal means to achieve a comprehensive vision for the Venetian Lagoon where functions, flows, and forms are implemented and designed as part of a unique co-operating system. The central area of the Venetian Lagoon is chosen as project site, being the most damaged hydromorphologically. Having researched on how natural forces (tides, winds, etc.) influence this portion of lagoon, different combinations of under-water and above-water concave structures are designed in harmony with these forces, to capture suspended sediments and promote accretion. In the most compromised cases, the structures are partially supported by initial dredges. The islands of the central lagoon become the perceptive points from which experience the transformation and the growth of this new landscape. In the end, the intertwined system of “barene” and islands, once grown sufficiently and matured, will produce a beneficial effect over the hydromorphological, ecological and biodiversity, and cultural surrounding environment. Through the process of research by landscape design, the project seeks to mitigate the threats of climate change and relative sea level rise in the Venetian Lagoon; provide a nature-based flood defence; create brackish marshland’s habitat for ecosystem restoration; invest on alternative forms of slow-tourism and foster different duration of stay in Venetian lagoon; enrich local community livelihood and economical vibrancy. Moreover, the project wants to consolidate and enhance the cultural image of the Venetian Lagoon, consisting of the diffuse sense of horizontality, reflection and visibility conveyed by the diffuse and unceasing water surface.

The ‘resource curse’, a term coined by Richard Auty in 1993, refers to the paradox that the abundance of natural resources tends to have adverse effects in a country’s economic, social and political well-being (Ross, 2015). This correlation has also led many to refer to this phenomenon as the ‘paradox of plenty’. When a country depends exclusively on the extraction of non-renewable resources it faces a wide range of risks that can be extremely difficult to manage, since they are created by powerful external factors. And Venezuela, a nation that has mainly depended on oil and mineral extraction since the 1920s, has not been the exception. The astronomical rise in the prices of various metals over the past two decades has put great pressures on resource-rich countries all over the world, especially in the global south. In recent years, and pushed by the drop of oil prices, the Venezuelan government decided to shift its attention from the oil fields of the country to the tropical forests of the Venezuelan Guayana, where large deposits of iron, bauxite, gold, diamonds, coltan, and many other rare minerals can be found.

But the ongoing economic crisis and the subsequent lack of opportunities throughout the country, have also promoted the escalation of illegal small-scale gold mining operations in this part of the Amazonia. Thousands of people, especially in neglected and peripheral areas, have found a way to survive the crisis by working in the gold mines. However, this dependency on resource extraction is having far-reaching consequences that will be felt by many generations to come, from an environmental, social and economic point of view. And from a larger perspective, the idea of maintaining a model based on the exploitation of non-renewable resources hinders the possibility of a sustainable future for the region. But is there a way out of the resource curse? What kind of
regional and local development should be promoted to overcome this dependency, and for whom? These are difficult questions that nevertheless must be addressed, especially in the Amazonian context. Therefore, this work seeks to explore the spatial dimension of this problem in the Venezuelan Guayana, to understand if the restructuring of the territory can create the conditions for the generation of alternative economies from the bottom-up and reduce the current dependence of the region on resource extraction.

The research focuses on developing a system based resilience strategy to manage hydraulic challenges related to pluvial and storm surge flooding in the light of climate change. The project embarks an ecological approach by conditioning landscape into a hybrid infrastructure of green and blue networks which operate across spatial and temporal dimensions. The specificity of this research project lies in the context being in a delta condition. Managing urban storm water which needs to be conveyed, stored and discharged but also the saline sea water which inundates the downstream (temporarily during storm surges or permanently in the process of sea level rise), lies at the core of this research. The highlight of the research is in how the system can accommodate the bidirectional flow of fresh and saline water; and simultaneously improves the built environment for the region.