In growing urban areas, populations are increasingly exposed to the effects of climate change. Rainwater has been identified as a primary risk, although it is also an opportunity to pursue resilient and equitable cities while regenerating the urban ecosystem. Both urban design and landscape ecology have attempted to define effective responses to urban flooding and their synergy supports novel transdisciplinary approaches. The translation of adaptive management theories to the design process suggests working with rainwater rather than defending against it, combining science and practice. This paper retraces the evolution of design for flooding approaches and outlines the basis of an adaptive urban design for rainwater management.

In highly urbanized floodplains, it is becoming widely accepted that a change is needed to move away from flood control towards flood adaptation paradigms. To address riverine and flash flooding in urban areas, urban and landscape designers have developed design solutions that are able to increase urban ecological resilience by allocating space to fluctuating water levels. With the purpose of operationalizing flood resilience, this study explores how constructed ecology principles are applied to the design of multifunctional landscapes to restore floodplain functions in urban areas and prevent downstream flooding. The study adopts a design-by-research approach to examine 30 case studies from the Sponge Cities initiative realized in China in the last twenty years and develops a toolbox of Flood Adaptation Types for stormwater management. The results are aimed at informing operations in the planning and design professions by proposing a schematic design framework for flood adaptation in different geographic conditions, scales, and climates. The study sets up the bases for a systematic assessment of flood adaptation responses also by facilitating communication between disciplines, designers, and non-experts. This will enable evidence-based decisions in landscape architecture and urban design, as well as fulfill pedagogic purposes in higher education and research.

Vertical enclosure is incapable of describing the permeation of landscape space enclosures. Physical and visual enclosures are identified to compensate for enclosure cognition inadequacies. Physical enclosures reflect the restriction of behavior, and visual enclosures embody the viewshed extension range. An identification method is proposed and implemented using point cloud data. Multiple enclosures are mapped, and the distribution of each enclosure is shown. Seven combinations are summarized based on the organization of vertical, physical, and visual enclosures. Four typical physical and visual enclosing modes are defined by the quadrant distribution of quantified enclosure features. From the identification to the distribution extraction and typical type identification, this research transforms descriptive enclosures into identifiable multiple enclosures that can be computed and quantified.

In a perspective of exceptional environmental change, the role of unbuilt and green spaces to improve urban resilience has increasingly attracted the interest of the scientific community. The conceptualisation of cities as urban landscapes has drawn a parallel between their spatial and ecological dimensions. Both urban morphology and urban ecology have examined the structure of cities form. However, we still do not completely understand how anthropogenic processes and ecosystems have been dynamically interacting in the formation of the urban structure. Thus, this article carries out a comprehensive analysis of built and unbuilt spaces in a case study with the objective to reveal the underlying morpho-ecological periods and patterns in the urban ecosystem. Morphological periods (temporal analysis) and ecological patterns (spatial analysis) are examined in combination through the hypothesis of nested scales at different resolutions operated at the macro, meso and micro levels of the urban landscape. By identifying common denominators across urban morphology and landscape ecology, the study is also a contribution to interdisciplinary research. The proposed framework set up the foundation for a more systematic quantitative assessment of the urban ecosystem across different disciplinary traditions while supporting a new urban landscape design culture based on the evidence of ecological constructs. An accurate explanation of how built forms symbiotically interacted with the ecological dimensions of the landscape over time is also crucial to predict the effects of environmental change and promote future sustainable planning agendas.