Resilient Infrastructure and Environment

Abstract

New forms of mobility offer opportunities to make urban areas along highways more resilient by using those specific areas for the ecological and functional improvement of the city. This requires spatial interventions that approach the highway, the buffer zone and the specific urban area along the highway as a whole rather than as separate zones that just happen to be juxtaposed. Anticipating new forms of mobility, how can we design the correlation between these spaces and how can these spaces foster resilient urban systems?
To examine the correlation between highway and city, combinations of five highway prototypes and three urban types that represent the majority of urban territories along highways in the Netherlands are studied. The approach is executed in two phases: the polluted buffer zones will be cleaned in the first phase and the potential of the urban area will be activated in the second phase. This involves opportunities for waste- water treatment, energy production and newly built programme.
How can the different combinations create spatial opportunities to enhance the resilience of a specific area? In this context, climate change, the energy transition and quality urbanization are of key importance. The need to mitigate and adapt changes in the hydrological cycle, to reduce energy dependency and find more renewable energy sources is increasing, but at the same time there is less space available to achieve these things. For each urban type, current qualities and opportunities to create a balanced relation between human and natural systems can be defined in relation to the present situation.
The scale at which resilience influences the new urban systems shows the overwhelming potential of the space around the highway once new technological innovations in the field of mobility and environment are combined. New correlations between human and natural systems transform the as yet orphaned fragments of land into pioneer zones that enhance the resilience of the city by its improved ecology and additional housing programme.