Adapt — climate resilience

This multi-award-winning project reclaims and renews a degraded brownfield to create a thriving urban park full of biodiversity.

Shaped with a combination of post-war Warsaw building rubble and bioreceptive concrete — the park has become a climate-resilient environment for native plant life and animal habitats, water run-off manage-ment, and tree cover offering protection from the increasing urban heat island effect.

Kirkkojärvi Park creates a flood-resilient plane for its dynamic landscape. Built around the Espoonjoki River, the area floods due to the spring’s meltwater, autumn’s heavy rainfall, and because of climate change that makes winter flooding more common now.

The terrain is thoughtfully designed to serve the community’s needs and adapt to the area’s native lake returning to the local landscape when the river floods seasonally.

Carl Nielsens Allé, once a busy parking lot has been transformed into a lush urban oasis that unites nature, city life, and climate adaptation in one of Copenhagen’s cozy bridge districts.

The oasis catchment basin turns rainwater into a valuable resource during cloudbursts, and diverse plantings function as food and habitat for insects that contribute to increasing the area’s biodiversity.

According to the Obel Award jury, this 2023 award-winning visionary project tackles the full task of adaptation and has the capacity to inspire and positively impact vulnerable shorelines worldwide.

This benchmark for adaptation in the built environment operates on several scales — increasing physical, ecological, and social resilience, and activating both human and non-human life in the design process.

This proposal reimagines a unique stretch of Lyon’s riverbank by transforming the site from an urban barrier to a natural attraction.

Climate-adaptive features include reduced asphalt, bike lanes shaded by trees, restored natural habitats, and green infrastructure.

The proposal envisions a more resilient urban environment adapted to withstand the challenges posed by regional flooding and cloudbursts along the River Rhone.

University officials prioritized resilience against natural disasters in the building design for this earthquake-prone region. Resilience is also evident in the permeable and green surfaces that capture rainwater, along with an underground water retention system for adapting to frequent flooding.

The wide use of glass for natural daylight and solar panel arrays further led to this project’s success, as did the sustainable materials, sealants, coatings, and finishes.

This single-space structure is built with a combination of sustainable materials and construction debris from local sites.

The pavilion treads lightly, standing without concrete footings, enabling it to be dismantled to retrieve and reuse all its materials or reassembled elsewhere.

Learn how SRDA employed climate resilient materials and adaptive building methods to create this award-winning project.

Global Center on Adaptation created the Adaptation Knowledge Portal to make information on adaptation accessible and actionable – as a comprehensive online source connecting adaptation science, policy, and practice.

In addition, see GCA State and Trends in Adaptation Reports 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Architizer spoke with LANDPROCESS founder Kotchakorn Voraakhom about the climate-adaptive Thammasat Urban Rooftop Farm, TURF.

The project unites the principles of modern landscape design with traditional agriculture of rice terraces, to transform wasted space into a productive organic rooftop farm – Asia’s largest.

Nature-inclusive and climate-adaptive.

Nearly all materials in The Natural Pavilion are biobased and renewable. In addition to the Dutch wood of the construction and the wooden (CLT) floors and stairs, all inner walls are made of (residual) materials from agri-culture and horticulture such as straw, flax, bell pepper stems and spinach seed. 

The glass was reused from a government building in The Hague.

Land on Water will provide a climate-resilient and adaptable solution for the construction of new floating buildings worldwide.

MAST has envisioned a new system of simple flat-packed modules made from recycled reinforced plastic, that can be easily transported around the globe and assembled into countless configurations, providing a secure floating foundation.

UrbanShift supports local projects in 20+ cities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, enabling city leaders to adopt integrated approaches to sustainable development.

The group is also building a global platform of knowledge and expertise on sustainable, inclusive, low-carbon urban solutions.

Learn more about UrbanShift projects and their impact on transforming cities below.