Resilient Urban Landscapes

Abstract

Urban flooding is a problem faced by many mayor cities around the world nowadays. That is the case of several areas of the Greater Miami Area. Rapid urbanization and the depletion of natural buffer zones that used to storage rain water, added to climate change effects, specifically the increase of heavy rainfalls and sea level rise have only aggravated the situation during the past two decades. This thesis focuses in the necessity to provide new types of resilient and sustainable landscapes for the cities of Hialeah and Miami Springs in order to deal with this issue. There have been and still on the going, numerous urban regeneration projects throughout the Miami Dade County. However, most of these plans don’t contemplate the use of landscape as a mean to deal with water management problems like floods. The goal of this graduation project is to improve the current and future social and ecologic needs of both cities through new types of urban landscapes that will also contribute to water management solutions for the area. The purpose of the research is to gather information to understand the problem and the site in order to establish a comprehensive set of design principles and strategies to guide the design. The key concept of the theoretical framework is the implementation of landscape as water infrastructure through the transformation of existing underused public space and urban infrastructures, as well as future areas for redevelopment within the sites. The expected result is to achieve responsive socio environmental local solutions to create an evolutionary landscape in the cities of Hialeah and Miami Springs.