The need to respond to increasing flood risk, climate change, and rapid urban development has shaped innovative policies and practices of spatial planning in many countries over recent decades. As an instrumental–technical intervention, planning is mainly used to improve the physical environment (through concepts such as regulating waterproof facades of architecture, setting buffering zones, and designing green–blue corridors). However, the implementation of the proposed physical interventions is often challenging and necessitates assistance from practices such as climate assessment, policy disciplines, civil societies, and economic resources. These extensive perspectives have spawned many new research domains in the realm of spatial planning. This paper provides a review of the recent developments in flood resilience, risk management, and climate adaptation; based on this, it positions planning research and practice within these works of literature. Four clusters of thought are identified, mainly in the European and American scholarship of the last two decades. They are environmental concerns, disaster management concerns, socio-economic concerns, and institutional concerns. Current planning research concentrates on disaster management in the underlying belief that planning is functionally efficient. The attention to environmental concerns, socio-economic concerns, and institutional concerns of planning research remains insufficient but has been growing. This, in turn, enlarges the scope of planning research and indicates future directions for study. These new concerns relate to spatial planning’s ability to operate effectively in a multi-sectoral setting, despite limited resources and in the face of uncertain risk.

The paper examines the development of different spatial plans to address flood resilience in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, one of the most vulnerable cities to flooding and climate change. The analysis focuses on the differences in planning procedures and planning mandates (determined by different plans in authority) before and after the launch of the Sponge City Plan which calls for numerous spatial resilience measures to address the increasing flood risk. The analysis reveals that the introduction of the Sponge City Plan has changed the role of planning from onlooker to active participant in the arena of flood governance. In addition, new plans combine long-term strategic visions, soft principles, and strict regulations with an aim to promote concrete planning practice between multiple layers with a clear mandate. Despite these shifts, institutional and territorial challenges remain.

Researchers and policymakers have long called for a collaborative governance process for climate adaptation and flood resilience. However, this is usually challenging when urban planning is supposed to be integrated with water management. Using the Chinese city of Guangzhou as a case study, this study explores the long-term disadvantaged conditions of urban planning in flood governance and how this situation is shaped. The findings show that, in comparison to the increasingly dominant position of water management in flood affairs, the urban planning system has had weak powers, limited legitimate opportunities, and insufficient fiscal incentives from the 2000s to the late 2010s. Those conditions have been shaped by organizational structures, institutional rules, and financial allocation in urban governance, whose changes did not bring benefits to urban planning. The emergence of the Sponge City Program in China in 2017 and its implementation at the municipal level is deemed to be a new start for urban planning, considering the encouragement of nature-based solutions and regulatory tools in land use for flood resilience. Even so, the future of this program is still full of challenges and more efforts are needed.

The research was inspired by the increasing impact of extreme weather events and changing climate patterns on flood-prone regions and cities, and the consequent human and economic costs. Despite global efforts for flood resilience and climate adaptation involving climate analysts, economists, social scientists, politicians, hydrological engineers, spatial planners, and policymakers, it is only partially clear how best to construct resilience measures and implement concrete initiatives. The complexity of institutions is a key factor that is often neglected, and which needs further investigation. The thesis examines the institutional arrangements that determine the role of spatial planning in managing flood risk, through an in-depth case study of Guangzhou, one of the most vulnerable cities in China and globally. The thesis employs theories of historical institutionalism, planning procedure and planning tools, policy framing and collaborative governance, to explore the mechanisms and factors that influence the creative planning and design process. Content analysis, GIS-based mapping, stakeholder analysis and TOWS analysis are used to investigate data from official policy documents, grey literature, geo-information data and interview scripts. The findings indicate that institutional arrangements, such as long-established planning traditions, formal planning procedures and tools, policy framing patterns and contextual organisational factors, determine spatial planning’s role in managing flood risk. They do this through (1) the extent of the changeability of an established planning system towards expanded flood resilience measures; (2) the performance of cross-level communication and boundary-spanning work between planning and water management; (3) the legal framework that planners and hydrological engineers follow; and (4) the capacities of planning and water management institutions to work on flood issues. This research shows how to apply knowledge from policy science, political science, institutional science and administration, to analyse the nature of the planning process in tackling the urgent challenge of flood risk and climate change.

China and Europe have the common problem of mitigating flood risk, a problem partly created from poor management of the urban transition now compounded by the effects of climate change on sea level and extreme weather events. Adaptation to these effects requires extensive cooperation between administrative jurisdictions and policy sectors to strengthen shared land resource management. Governments generally look to urban planning to resolve potential damaging competition between sectoral policies, but it is often not well-equipped for this task. In Europe, there has long been recognition of the need to improve territorial governance, in part through a spatial planning approach that coordinates the place-based impacts of sectoral policies and helps in the cross-fertilisation of policy making across policy silos. How can this experience inform the urban transition in the Pearl River Delta? Experience in Europe points to new institutions that are needed to reduce the costs arising from non-coordination. Spatial planning must engage a wide range of stakeholders to build trust and ownership of a shared strategy. Plans need to be adaptive in the face of great uncertainty. These prerequisites for more effective territorial governance present a huge challenge for both Chinese and European policy makers. Keywords Territorial governance Spatial planning Cross-fertilisation Adaptation

Aiming at the dual challenges of storm surge safety and landscape conservation in coastal parks, existing studies often separate ecological resilience from flood control engineering, lacking an integrated framework to coordinate the two, thus failing to provide effective technical support. This study proposes their coupling mechanism and constructs a four-dimensional framework centered on engineering, ecological, social and governance resilience. Adhering to the “adapting measures to local conditions and time” strategy, it integrates four technical systems to build a safe, adaptive and sustainable natural-artificial collaborative disaster prevention barrier. Taking Nansha Dajiaoshan Coastal Park’s flood control improvement as an empirical case, the model solves traditional pain points such as sea view obstruction and ecological damage, raising the flood control standard from less than 20-year to 200-year return period, and achieving multi-dimensional balance. It fills the research gap, provides a global reference, enriches coastal disaster risk management research, and promotes the integrated development of ecological resilience and engineering technology.