Delta Interventions: Design and Engineering in Urban Water Landscapes

This book presents a selection of research-by-design projects developed in the Delta Interventions Studio at the Delft University of Technology, including a short overview of all graduation projects from 2009-2015, and reflections by senior scholars. We hope this book will inspire others working on delta issues and designing interventions. The Dutch Delta is known for its extensive flood protection system, which permits residents to live in a safe and attractive environment. The Dutch expertise in ‘designing with water’ has become an important field of study as well as an export product. Due to climate change, the Netherlands will face new water management challenges, requiring additional measures to reduce flood risk. In this light, the 2005 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and the 2007 Dutch Delta program both focused on addressing long-term water-related issues; this put ‘designing with water’ high on the agenda for spatial planners and architects. At the time, in design projects water was often used as a generic term, and (although there were exceptions) many designs were made without a basic knowledge of how water behaves, or the conditions created by the water. As an example, designers would propose and visualize a spatially attractive bypass for a river; however, when civil engineers investigated the proposal, they would inform the designers that water would not naturally flow there, and that the project would not reduce flood risk. The process would leave designers frustrated because engineers had ‘killed their baby’, and leave engineers irritated that designers did not take the basic laws of physics into consideration. It was in this context that the multi-disciplinary Delta Interventions Studio was founded. The studio projects vary in scale from buildings and multifunctional flood defenses, to neighborhoods and urban areas, to complete regions. A number of international cases are also included. The projects vary from detailed designs, to strategic plans and policy proposals. The studio emphasizes the link to practice, and results have often been shared with practitioners and policy makers. This way the research-by-design performed by the students contributes to the debate on flood risk management, as well as proposing concrete solutions