The Pearl River Delta (PRD) is a river dominated floodplain in southeast China. Long known as one of the country’s richest agricultural regions, in recent years it has also become known as one of the world’s most densely urbanized areas. Decreasing space for water through dyke-ring construction, channelization and urbanization has led to increased flood risk from the river, rain, and the sea. To protect residents from flood risk, a more adaptive urbanization strategy is required, one that takes account of ecological agriculture (e.g. the traditional dyke-pond system) as well as historical water-management methods, which uses a multi-scalar approach. The objective of this thesis is to identify landscape architecture principles for multiscale water sensitive design based on traditional agri-aquacultural practice in this region. In Shunde district, a flood prone lowland located between the West and North rivers in the PRD, there is a century-old tradition in working with water via integrated agri-aquaculture systems. By learning from traditional agri-aquacultural practices, new design principles can be developed to mitigate flood risk while allowing for increased but sustainable urbanization, not just for the Shunde district, but also for the Pearl River Delta, so that they can be more resilient to flood risk in the future. Finally, an article called "Learning from Agri-Aquaculture for Multiscale Water-Sensitive Design in the Pearl River Delta" is also written by the author and Steffen Nijhuis and Gregory Bracken about principles and application through study.

Due to the major flooding disasters particularly in the Southwest region, the Delta works were needed in order to protect the people and the land. During the Delta works a lot of water infrastructures were built in the area as technical solutions, such as the Haringvlietdam. The Delta Works brought safety and made the area more accessible. However, nowadays we realized some negative effects as well, since ecosystems were damaged and lost.

Additionally, the climate is changing and in the future the sea level will rise. Due to storms and heavy rainfall rivers will have higher peak discharges. These changes will have considerable consequences for the Southwest Region and therefore innovative long term solutions need to be designed so that the area stays protected.

In this specific framework, it could be argued that the protection of coastal landscapes from flooding disasters is traditionally approached by engineering perspective that often resulted in negative impacts on local ecology and ecosystems. As well as massive mono-functional infrastructures that act only as intermediate space without culture and program value.

Taking this in to account, it could be indicated that there is a strong need to incorporate landscape architecture and ecological services in coastal protection. For this reason, the design assignment of this graduation project is the partial opening and slow transformation of the Haringvlietdam to an operative landscape infrastructure along with the creation of a group of islands for protection.
It is important to slowly transform this area in such a way that people will be part of the development and can profit from it. The design should be considered as an open ended slow process towards an adaptive coastal self-sufficient region.

This slow process, would give people the time to realize what would change and understand the future possibilities of this area and could develop a self-sufficient region which is producing energy from alternative resources (water, wind, sun), producing aqua agriculture that is consumed domestically or is exported to other countries, attracting tourism to the extended coastline (islands) and providing a unique experience both for the residence of the region and for the visitors.