Abstract
We face an unprecedented water crisis. A widespread imbalance in the global system causes progressively extreme situations, on one hand increased unmanageable water volumes through flooding, rising sea levels and storm events and, on the other hand, a lack of water during prolonged periods of drought and wildfires. This imbalance threatens the urban environment, rendering already vulnerable populations under further duress. Because all systems are connected, all aspects of urban life become more and more fragile. Communities are trapped within cycles of short-term disaster management, rather than building long-term adaptation strategies. Therefore, instead of regarding resilience as the capacity to recover quickly, we focus on using its potential to accelerate change. “Beauty and wonder” might seem superficial, but their potency lies in their provocative quality. When we think of resilience, we think of pragmatism, and restraint. However, we believe that “beauty and wonder” are crucial ingredients of every successful urban adaptation strategy. They spark and prolong the will to change. MVRDV is an architecture and urbanism practice that lives this ethos, driven by the ambition to enable communities and cities to transition towards a better future. The “wow factor” in our projects communicates this power, it challenges people look at the future through a different, positive, lens. We can inspire and help communities, investors and developers harness this to create solutions that facilitate long-term commitment, preparedness and flexibility, attracting innumerable benefits. The backbone of MVRDV’s resilience strategy is the connection and transformation of vulnerabilities into drivers for optimistic, robust and daring designs, challenging stakeholders to co-create an adaptive urban future that works in concert with nature with these six principles: 1-Enabling urban life that works in symbiosis with vulnerabilities & natural systems 2-Concisely analyzing & interpreting complex systems 3-Stimulating social & fun engagement processes 4-Adding daring emptiness 5-Making adaptation desirable 6-Seeking win-wins on all levels & scales. MVRDV uses design projects to advance this multifaceted methodology in practice, approaching real-life challenges by collaborating with multiple stakeholders, and continually evolving digital and analogue design tools. We bring them together to discern true needs, and ultimately manifest collective desires in built solutions, combining pragmatism with provocation. This leads to projects that explore e.g. new forms of governance, innovative building systems, urban greening and living with water. Exemplary urban and architectural resilience projects demonstrate the outcomes, including: Resilient by Design, Too Little+Too Much, Eindhoven Supervision, Tainan Spring, Silodam, Wego, Future Towers, Oosterwold, Bastide Niel, Overschild, Barapullah Drain and Future Mobility studies. We can derive several lessons from these projects. They include the need for: - Inclusion of climate, disaster management and social adaptation strategies from the start; - Intense collaboration between scales, socio-economic backgrounds, and expertise; - Independent resilience facilitators; - System monitoring through historic and real time data to support decision making; - Digital tools to enrich co-creation processes, while human interaction remains vital; - Clear principles and intriguing proposals that ease consensus and mobilization on all scales; - Advancements in flexibility of building structures; - Incentives for and impact analysis of resilience efforts; - Active evaluation of the 6 principle’s application to drive further enhancement. Fundamental to all of this, is the belief that design encourages people to look at the world in a different way. It challenges them to see value where they did not before. We believe our approach to resilience is broadly applicable to urban development processes. It allows MVRDV to create scalable solutions for resilient environments that foster consensus through surprising and intriguing solutions. In a world faced with mounting challenges, “wonder” brings hope to motivate adaptation, towards a sustainable future.
