FACING CLIMATE CHANGE

Ecological and Spatial Quality in Flood-Risk Strategies

by Camilla Di Nicola

The role of the designer in flood risk management strategy development is currently often restricted to the important but limited task of optimally embedding technical interventions (Nillesen, 2014). These interventions that take place only at an advanced stage of the project cannot be satisfactory nor complete. The landscape architect or the urban planner should have a decisive role in water management policy in order to promote both safety and spatial quality of cities at risks. Landscape architects study the intrinsic qualities of the site, being able to design a project more integrated with the context and safer in the long term. The generates a place that respects the imposed safety standards and the same time it creates a dynamic and interactive environment.

It is, then, fundamental to develop an integrated approach in which ecological and spatial quality can be both included in the strategy development of regional flood-risk management, also becoming a decisive aspect in the initial phases of the project.

Camilla Di Nicola is a master student of Landscape Architecture at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), in the Netherlands. During her bachelor she participated in the Erasmus program in Oporto, Portugal and then she graduated in 2018 at Roma Tre University. In the Netherlands she worked at “Defacto Architecture & Urbanism” office, in Rotterdam, where she studied and worked on many water-related projects inside and outside the Netherlands, there her interest in water, climate change and urbanisation has grown considerably.