Skip to content

Urban design principles for flood resilience: Learning from the ecological wisdom of living with floods in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta

Despite the widespread implementation of flood control infrastructure, modern cities around the world remain vulnerable to flood hazards. Although flood management has in general placed less emphasis on structural measures, urban flood hazard mitigation continues to fixate on the flood control paradigm, the ideology that flooding must be prevented in the first place, as flooding is assumed to be disastrous. To promote urban flood resilience, this paper argues for the alternative flood adaptation paradigm, which concerns preventing damage when flooding occurs and allows flooding to enter the city. The argument is grounded on our fieldworks on the ecological wisdom of living with floods in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta in two hamlets, Vinh An and Ha Bao, where flooding is mostly harmless and brings benefits. To turn this ecological wisdom of the rural hamlets into practical knowledge, we extract lessons for modern cities: Modern cities need ecological knowledge to nurture ecological wisdom; and need to become agile by developing localized flood-response capacity, striving for timely systemwide adjustment, and turning amphibious. To make these lessons of the ecological wisdom actionable, we translate them into three urban design principles: Urban design should (1) anticipate and accommodate flooding, (2) incorporate the ecological process of flooding, and (3) reveal the flood dynamics to the public

Data Resources (1)

Data Resource Preview - Urban design principles for flood resilience: Learning from the ecological wisdom of living with floods in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta

Additional Info

Field Value
Dataset topic category
  • Adaptation
  • Floods
  • Infrastructure
Language
  • English
Dataset reference date July 12, 2016
GeoNames
  • Viet Nam
Process Step Free
Lineage Kuei-Hsien Liao, Tuan Anh Le, Kien Van Nguyen (2016). Urban design principles for flood resilience: Learning from the ecological wisdom of living with floods in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta. Journal og Landscape and Urban Planning. Published by Elsevier B.V., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.01.014
License ODC-PDDL-1.0
Copyright Yes
Version Dateset version 1.0
Province(s)
  • An Giang
Keywords adapatation,Flood,Urban design,Mekong Delta
Date uploaded December 29, 2017, 16:50 (UTC)
Date modified May 21, 2018, 12:20 (UTC)