From Lost Streams to Living Landscapes
Investigating landscape-based infrastructural futures for flood adaptation in Boston
G.J.I. ten Bosch (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
Luca Iuorio – Mentor (TU Delft - Environmental Technology and Design)
D. Cannatella – Mentor (TU Delft - Urban Data Science)
E. Mann – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Building Knowledge)
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Abstract
‘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.