Resilient design for the extended Välen-Frölunda Valley

The global concern for sustainability and for issues connected to climate change engages a vast group of professions and fields of science. As cities worldwide are growing due to a great relocation of people, ecology research has partly shifted its focus towards urban conditions and development. Urban areas have simultaneously become vulnerable to the consequences of climate change due to their position in the landscape and to their being economic and social centers. The questions of how to handle natural processes, disturbances and dynamics thus become highly relevant. Within ecology the term resilience is used to describe a system’s ability to withstand disturbance. Urban resilience thus focuses on the processes, adaptability and transformability of the social systems of cities. Within landscape architecture there is no recipe for understanding resilience thinking or for applying it to landscape architectural design on the scale of urban design and urban planning. The purpose of this master project is therefore to explore the theories of resilience and to experiment with on-site design through the concept of resilience. As case study a southwest area of Gothenburg was used and test designs were made as interpretations of eight sites within that area. The suggested alterations take into account different scales and domains, which implies a need for further negotiation. The alterations thus invite to a discussion on the alteration principles and the issues of concern as well as on technical or management solutions. The thesis shows a possible method for reflective practice, using theories from other disciplines as evocative metaphors and building knowledge by combining theory and practice