In the past decade, many discussions on the need to reduce our carbon footprint have led the EU to open a public discourse on the applicability of high speed railroad travels within the continent. But spatial plans regarding the implementation of said infrastructure are lacking and the topic of emerging railroad technologies has not surfaced in our media yet. The opportunities behind creating a sustainable European network are endless, but where is the research? This thesis aims at opening the discourse on alternative railroad infrastructure technology in the fields of social and spatial acceptance based on the frameworks of flowscapes (operative infrastructure as landscape and landscape as infrastructure) and the three dimensions of perception, function, and symbolism in order to assess the spatial and social opportunities of designing with innovative railroad technologies. This visionary research sees the cultural landscape of the Netherlands as initiator of this development, in which the new infrastructure aims at connecting the landscape, focusing on the character and values of the province of Overijssel, based on an analysis of technology through art. As a result of the research, the technology proves its position as a guiding Line in the Landscape, providing readability in the three dimensions in terms of narrative, landmark and connection.

Coastal areas and riverine cities accommodate the great majority of the world’s population, but they are extremely vulnerable to flooding risks. In the cities next to the Medway River estuary, the capacity to adapt to flood risks had been weakened by urban development and intense industrial usage. This degrading led to the loss of flood buffers and the recreational value of the coastal landscape. Moreover, climate change threatens large areas of nationally important habitats in the estuary. Coastal habitats are likely to be submerged by the rising sea. The rise in sea level can also accelerate the natural erosion of coastal cliffs. To address these problems, a more resilient landscape approach is needed to increase the coastal resilience. Therefore, this design-related research regarded resilience as the theoretical backbone, embraced landscape-based design approaches, including layer approach, scenario study, and mapping as research strategies. The project developed and applied design strategies in three lower-scale sites. First, the site on the Isle of Sheppey focused on coastline protection. A nature-based offshore island structure is proposed to diminish the surf, create space for tidal habitats, and provide recreational use. Next, on the Rainham coastline, to respond to intertidal habitat loss, managed realignment and growing marshes are the key strategies to restore the dynamics of the ecosystem. Last, the study proposed a transformation scheme for the Medway city estate site to relocate flood defence, provide space for tidal rivers, and accommodate mixed-use development. Each proposal could grow with time, increase ecological benefits, and create multifunctional programs. In the end, the study framed a vision on regional development, aiming to increase the socio-ecological resilience of the Medway river landscape.

The extreme character of human activities and hard infrastructures in combination with the continuous variation of the climate has triggered an unprecedented fast rate of alterations in the environment. Hereafter the anthropogenically magnified climate change is increasing stress on ecosystems; especially interfaces such as coastal areas are in significant risk. Considering that the North Sea is one of the most urbanized seascapes, we can draw upon its susceptibility to three hazards: inundation, sea temperature rise, and growing harbors. Although an ambiguity will prevail concerning the magnitude and rate of transformations, certainly inundation will cover and drown habitats, as well as move large amounts of formations and sediments; that sea temperature rise will attract invasive species and decrease water quality due to habitat depletion; in addition to the demand on expanding ports which implies more pollution by ship traffic, industrial areas, and spills, hence the accumulation of externalities in the sea bottom. One of the most sensible as well as affected territories concerning these hazards is the Wadden Sea Re¬gion, which consists of a large intertidal zone surrounded by high productivity areas and rich marine ecosystems shared by three countries. Recalibrating this region could mean enhancing the exhausted North Sea ecology to embrace climatic risk, store externalities, and set an example for the manage¬ment of other conservation areas at risk. Our spatial measures have developed from the exploitation of ecology (1900s) to its conservation (1960s) , currently (2000s) we are looking towards shepherding nature by integrating them into our constructed systems. However this spatial management perspective overlooks the innate benefits resulting from the synergy by co-habitation of human life, non-human life and the environment. The proposed project recommends to look into a partnership with nature to join the intrinsic dynamics this planet offers, instead of trying to dominate them. This suggested co- habitation could be a chance to synchronize with the changing processes of our environment, which might lead us towards adapting progressively to them. The project claims to regenerate the multi- equilibria state of marine ecosystems and develop an evolutionary adaptation through an ecosystem suc¬cession approach(Davoudi et al., 2013; Hale et al., 2009). This entails the grad¬ual transformation of constantly obsolete infrastructures towards hybrid evolving systems consisting of Infrastructural Ecologies (Brown, 2019).The idea is to use a mixture of soft and hard infrastructures that reintegrate the bio dynamics of ecology, so that it can be colonized by socio- ecological elements. Hence the interplay of the anthropic designs and environmental processes would support the creation of habitats that allow a shared expansion space for dissimilar activities to meet (ecotone enhancement). To propose such infrastructures it was necessary to understand the dynamics of the different marine ecosystems in terms of time cycles, longevity and inter dependencies. The consideration of this temporal dimension of socio- ecological elements in the design, allows the proposed changes to eventually be coupled to the pace of environmental processes. Hereafter ecosystems could be able to embrace climatic risk, since they no longer present a hazard, but a trigger of transformation.