Resilience in urban development projects in flood-prone areas: a challenge to urban design professionals

International audienceThis article analyses how more resilient cities can be built in flood-prone areas by looking at the various ways urban design professionals get involved in urban development projects. While stressing the aesthetic values added by water environments, urban professionals (i.e. urban designers, landscape designers and architects) also have to deal with a number of risks specific to waterways and flood-prone areas. They also find themselves facing a range of operational difficulties that can be solved either at the immediate building level or at the area level. This study focuses on four French projects developed in three medium-sized cities, Le Havre, Angers and Narbonne, as well as in a small city, Romorantin. Leveraging those examples, it provides an opportunity to better understand how vulnerability and resilience are dealt with by urban design professionals, as well as how the latter attempt to articulate the various and sometimes conflicting aspects of their projects – should they be political, æsthetic, technical or urban. This article will focus more specifically on architectural and urban forms. It will review some of the limits they present in terms of risk management, when reducing vulnerability to flooding becomes the number one priority