Six strategies for creating flood resilient environments

By Tom Ravenscroft

Rising sea levels are impacting the design and shape of our cities. Edward Barsley outlines six key strategies for creating environments that are adapted to flooding.

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Alleviate – Yanweizhou Park by Turenscape 

An alleviation strategy will increase the capacity of a water system, or provide supplementary areas that can be flooded, to reduce peak flood levels and limit the extent to which vulnerable locations are exposed to flood risk.

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Attenuate – Saint Kjeld's Kvarter by Tredje Natur

Attenuation uses natural or artificial structures and spaces to reduce the velocity and/or turbidity of water. This increases the time it takes for a given volume of water to move along the pathway and provides increased opportunity for infiltration.

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Restrict – BIG U by BIG

Projects that focus on restriction reduce a community's exposure to flood risk by preventing water entry through the use of soft and hard flood risk management measures.

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Realign – New York Rising Community Reconstruction

Realigning means reducing exposure to flood risk by repositioning critical infrastructure, properties or changing the land use classification.

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Create – CPH Harbor Blue Plan by Tredje Natur

This involves constructing or generating new landforms and structures in or near water bodies onto which development and, or alternative land uses can be assigned.

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Embrace – Resilient Boston Harbor by SCAPE

Projects that embrace flooding accept that water will be a feature within the scheme and use it as a design driver to organise and adapt the built / natural environment in a contextually appropriate manner.

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