Resilient projects: from theory to practice
Resilience is a term increasingly used in the field of urban planning and land use. Faced with climatic and environmental challenges, it is crucial to develop projects capable of adapting and thriving despite disruptions. The resilient approach not only minimizes negative impacts but also rethinks systems to offer robust and sustainable solutions. In this article, we explore how resilience principles can be put into practice, across different scales of design.
What is resilience?
The capacity to prepare and plan, absorb, recover, and adapt more successfully to adverse events.
This definition highlights the importance of anticipation and the ability to bounce back after a disruption. Our experts integrate this concept into all projects: beyond mere repair, aiming to create robust and adaptable systems.
Three action steps for resilience
To develop resilient projects, we follow three complementary steps:
- Minimize impact: This involves reducing identified risks and improving a specific situation through evaluation, prevention, absorption, and mitigation.
- Go further: We strengthen the robustness of systems by anticipating other aspects and providing multiple responses that generate co-benefits.
- Rethink the system: This step involves increasing people’s capacity for action, providing technical and methodological tools, and offering innovative and diverse solutions.
Towards a systemic approach
Putting resilience into practice requires a systemic approach that integrates different scales of planning and land use:
Territorial planning
At the macro scale, territorial planning requires understanding the different systems that compose the territory. Proper articulation between these systems allows for coherent strategies to create resilient and sustainable environments. Thought out globally, they are implemented locally to ensure real performance. This is the aim of projects like Communal Development Schemes, the Open Space strategy for Brussels, the Canopy Plan for the City of Verviers, Urban Support for municipalities affected by the 2021 floods with SPW…
Neighborhood Masterplan
At the meso scale, the Masterplan, like that of Coronmeuse for Neolegia, illustrates how reading the territory at a large scale induces the guidelines for neighborhood planning. They allow for the integration of the neighborhood into the ecological corridors of the valley, the strengthening of centralities in connection with the existing urban fabric, the proper hierarchy of mobility networks towards harmonious articulation of different types of uses within the neighborhood. This exercise of scale interlocking allows for the new neighborhood to be extended coherently with its context.
Local planning
At the micro scale, local planning translates the intentions of the masterplan and the sought-after atmospheres while preserving the objectives of resilience and performance of open spaces. The creation of meeting places at the heart of the neighborhood, the realization of planted, permeable, and livable roads (as with the innovative roads of Verviers), the diversification of ecosystems, and the articulation of nature with human uses as within Astrid Park in Liège… All these achievements also aim at maintaining existing buildings, reusing materials on-site, integrated rainwater management, maximizing ecosystem services…so many interconnected aspects that enhance the resilience of the project as a whole.
At Sweco, we firmly believe that resilience is key to developing sustainable cities and territories. By working at different scales of land use, we integrate these resilience principles into our projects from strategy to execution. We thus contribute to creating environments capable of adapting and thriving in the face of climatic and environmental challenges.
