Vernacular flood resilience: Constructive and spatial responses to hydro-climatic hazards in seven water-based settlements

This study sets out to examine how vernacular water-based settlements develop constructive and spatial responses to flood-related hazards, and what recurring combinations of responses can be identified across distinct hydro-climatic contexts through an analytical protocol grounded in the IPCC AR6 risk triangle. The article brings architectural evidence into flood risk management debates on construction adaptation, nature-based responses, and the governance of exposed territories. The working hypothesis is that vernacular water-based settlements do not respond to flooding through a single model.

Across the seven cases analyzed, six recurring patterns were identified: streetless spatial organization, unfixed cadastral organization and territorial mobility, hyperstatic and repairable stilt structures, kit-house logic, material cascade and resource renewal, and voluntary fallow or end-of-life abandonment of occupied substrates. Taken together, these patterns suggest that flood resilience in vernacular water-based settlements is not primarily based on resistance to water but on the capacity to live with hydrological variability through long-term coexistence with water, seasonal flexibility, reparability, cyclical material renewal, and collective maintenance.