A resilient design approach to climate adaptation of coastal landscape : exploring design principles in facing flood risk and rising sea levels

Sammanfattning: In the footsteps of human society global warming have caused the world’s oceans to expand due to increased average temperature and further created sea level rise and flooding. Today the most frequent natural disasters are water related which comes with great challenges in designing and planning for coastal protection. This master thesis is an independent work within landscape architecture with the focus on designing in relation to sea level rise and flooding. Through the understanding of climate change adaptation and resilience concepts, this thesis aims to identify design principles to resist extreme weather events and flood risk. The principles derived from resilience theory will further be applied on a case study in order to test and explore what kind of tactics that foregrounds in addressing flood risk and sea level rise. While discussing the most fundamental design processes about coastal landscape and its water related problems, the design principles will work as an inspirational guide for architects, designers, planners and other people interested in the subject. The design principles are based on and inspired by human relationship with water, projects from all over the world and well-known principles as methods in dealing with flood risk and rising sea levels. The principle integrate aims to see the coastal landscape as an opportunity, instead of a constraint, and further on adapt into living with water. Protect aims to managing water and to sheltering certain interests and further shut the water out in order not to interrupt the life within the protected area. Finally, separate aims to distance the water by temporary or permanent relocation but could however also mean to create restrictions where or where not to exploit. The design proposal, Archi-Pelago, are applied on Falsterbo peninsula in Sweden. It aims to test the principles and together with a series of tactics answer how the principles will practically be achieved. Archi-Pelago aims to enlighten a landscape architect’s perspective on flooding and sea level rise in relation to resilience. The outcome of the project creates several opportunities to not only protecting us from the water but to see new ways to actually live with water or to use the water as a possibility.