Current approaches to spatial planning for resilience involves adding a ‘protective’ layer based on a ‘return period’ to shield the landscape from threat and/or rehabilitation to ‘bounce back’ to the pre-existing condition. Escalating manifestations of climate risk often surpass the level of protection offered by this type of approach leading to massive economic losses and reconstruction. The shortsight in spatial decision making for climate resilience can be attributed to conflicting timelines of climate change research (100 years) ,urban planning practice (20 years) and political term (5 years) which makes long term consensus challenging. This paper looks at how we can sync the urban planning timeline with return periods of climate hazard to utilise land management as a tool to not just mitigate but better transition to adapt to intensifying risks. The principal objective is mainstreaming the role of spatial planning for risk reduction. The method adopted is learning from urban crisis recovery patterns in space offered by critical infrastructure networks - transport, water, energy lines. Utilising a spatial disaster event chain (informed by literature on causal chain effect, complexity theory and cascading effects), risks are projected in space. The test case is the East Bay of San Francisco which is at risk of a sea level rise by 2100 and is a hotbed of seismic activity. Risks from flooding and earthquake are projected iteratively in space to simulate obstruction in evacuation movement on road networks using ArcGIS Network Analyst. This informs the critical web of the region that forms the backbone to reconfigure land-use and densities. Understanding recovery patterns due to incremental risk on infrastructure helps derive the gradient of spatial vulnerability. A hierarchy of risk informs the adaptivity framework for resilient land parcels that absorbs intensive growth and vulnerable parcels that must transition to other functions. This defines a revised cohesive spatial morphology for the region. In this paper, we develop a spatial planning approach to embrace uncertainties ‘proactively’ such that we allocate investment that are not solely focused on ‘reactively’ decoding the blind side of climate change. It provides the potential to bounce forward in space to better cope with a disaster which is essential for a robust environment that can contribute to resilient regional economic growth in the long run. While the method utilises urban design as a qualitative tool , it draws from quantitative conclusions from transport, seismic and flood risk simulations. In doing so it highlights vital gaps between the two approaches and invites further interdisciplinary practitioners to refine the methodology for a more realistic implementation of long range urban planning for climate risk. It develops a ‘spatio-temporal’ scale in syncing decision making across different hierarchies of space, governance and risk. Thus, it wants to contribute towards a composite framework for better urban planning practices and a faster, more integrated decision making for implementation under deep uncertainty. @en

Urban designers ‘design across scales’, moving between streetscapes, neighborhoods and entire cities or regions. In this paper we study the urban design process from a conjunction between perspective of Synergetic Inter-Representation Network (SIRN) and Construal Level Theory (CLT). The first refers to a sequential process of interaction between internal representations constructed in the mind~brain and external representations (e.g. the design media) constructed in the world; the second refers to the process of abstraction in terms of psychological distance. Our SIRN-CLT view on scale in urban design sheds new light on the relations between the scale of the design object, the design medium and the design process. We show that urban design deals with hybrid large-scale and complex design objects. An example from the domain of urban design is given to illustrate is view.@en

The Department of Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment at the Delft University of Technology has a long tradition in educating generations of internationally oriented designers, planners and researchers in urbanism. Here the domain of urbanism is defined as an interdisciplinary approach that engages in real-world sociocultural, ecological and technological issues affecting urban landscapes, from the perspective of spatial planning and design. Specifically, it combines the disciplines of spatial planning, urban design and landscape architecture, having their own theories, methods and techniques, but also sharing common grounds and being complementary. Urbanism education focuses on specific context-related design tasks, in which knowledge from different disciplines is synthesised into coherent multiscale proposals. This paper aims to elaborate on the foundations of the Delft approach to urbanism education that focuses on the urban landscape as a scale continuum, uses design research and research through design as important teaching and research strategies, and regards mapping and drawing as important tools for thinking. The typical Dutch geographic context and spatial planning traditions are the foundation for this approach. The paper addresses the backgrounds and describes the principles of the present education strategies, learning tactics and examination, and identifies their challenges.@en

Self-organization implies that order and regularity can come into being (emerge) spontaneously as a purely bottom-up process. Design implies the exact opposite: that order and organization come into being by virtue of a designer in a top-down manner. In this paper we treat these apparent contraries as a complementary pair, and use the notion of SIRN to show how they may coexist.@en