Adaptive Urban landscape and solutions for water challenges in Europe - Towards developing the blue-green layer of Swedish cities’ master plans

The project aims to collect and analyse different types of urban landscapes which are capable to adapt to climate change. The project concentrates on urban landscape and the opportunities it offers to cities in overcoming the water challenges. The focus is gaining more knowledge on design based techniques to make the cities more sustainable and resilient towards expected and unexpected climate changes and the consequences.

The goal is collecting and evaluating the practical, design based solutions to deal with water challenges and develop the blue-green infrastructure of the cities.

The target is reviewing and understanding design-based methods of North Sea countries through comparing and completing the strengths of successful samples as well as studying the applicability of those in Swedish cities.

The outcome is expected to be used in the development process of cities which face similar water issues. It is projected to reduce the collaboration gap between water and environmental engineers, urban planners and architects as well as increasing awareness on the important role of spatial and physical planning among the decision-makers.

All the gathered information is supposed to be collected and analysed and will be presented in a report. The report is expected to reveal how water issues are framed and understood in blue-green design of European cities while the problem framing, contexts, scales and levels of issues in different cities are different. It is supposed to show how each of these cases evolved and what their similarities, differences and applicability are. The report wishes to help the cities with their adaptation planning process. The focus will be more on cities development possibilities by considering the future water-related issues and development direction that will assure the resiliency against water challenges. The report will contain the cross disciplinary mutual methods between water and urban planning/design and classify them in order to be used by water and environmental engineers, architects and urban planners. The report can then be used as starting point for adding the adaptive blue-green layer to the cities’ master plans.