The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) Metropolitan Region faces significant challenges, including drought, severe precipitation, floods, subsidence, societal disparities, air pollution, and an aging population. Fragmented spatial and institutional frameworks hinder effective responses, perpetuating vulnerabilities. This study focuses on enhancing water resilience with an emphasis on environmental justice in vulnerable areas between major cities. The proposed low-density development approach aims to balance economic productivity with ecological sensitivity, creating a decentralized, self-reliant, and resilient region.
The strategy integrates ecosystem-based adaptation, integrated water resources management, and water-sensitive village reorganization. A shift from a profit-centric model to one prioritizing water risk reduction in vulnerable areas is crucial for achieving environmental justice. The research employs pattern languages and the dynamic adaptive pathway method to organize potential measures, integrating future objectives, intervention patterns, and scenarios to feasibly implement actions by 2060.
Ultimately, the research envisions self-resilient units contributing crucial ecosystem services to urban centers and receiving support through knowledge exchange and economic assistance. This transformation will turn these units from sacrificial entities into integral components of sustainable development in the BTH region. Validated by both quantitative and qualitative assessments, this shift is anticipated to strengthen the water resilience of individual units and enhance the overall resilience of the metropolitan area.

This research explores the roles local public authorities can deploy in innovation district planning and development and the spatial conditions and interventions they should enhance to stimulate innovation through the built environment. Because cities are promoting and investing in new locations to agglomerate knowledge-intensive activities on a specific location, to raise the innovation profile of the area and accelerate urban economic renewal. Academics and practitioners question to what extent urban planners can appoint areas where innovation-rich activities might cluster and what strategies and organization these projects need to become more than a rebranding effort. This trend also becomes apparent in Dutch urban practice. Which drives this research to explore how innovation districts came into being, to what extent innovation is actually stimulated in these districts (focusing on the physicality of this phenomenon and the role of the built environment), and how they could be organized to enable and stimulate innovation and the processes leading to it.