Updated: May 13
In Venice, shopkeepers have slots in their doors to slide a plank of wood when the streets flood. You can still get your groceries most days if you wear your knee high boots. In Cambodia and Myanmar, entire cities are built on stilts and floats, and life continues largely uninterrupted during the rainy season. The residents of Jamaica Bay's shoreline communities in Brooklyn and Queens choose their parking spots according to the lunar cycle so their cars don't get flooded on a full moon high tide. In short, "living with water" is a way of life for many people all around the world. Our physical spaces and our social construct must be designed to hold up under the realities of climate change. Coastal and Island communities are increasingly faced with this reality, and many are working hard to adapt.
The term "living with water" itself gained popularity in the United States after the Dutch Dialogues of 2006. After Hurricane Katrina, a group of consultants from the Netherlands, including hydrologists, civil engineers, landscape architects and urban designers, traveled to Louisiana to share their expertise through a series of workshops. Ideas that emerged included the concept of "wet canals" like Amsterdam's that make water visible and change people's relationship to the water, and multi-functional landscape designs like rain gardens capture water, along with guidelines for stricter zoning requirements
Now, cities all over the country have embraced the philosophy. New York City DEP's Cloudburst Management program targets the most vulnerable places on the city, down to a block by block level, and designs green and gray systems that capture, divert, store and even utilize rain water. In a Queens cloudburst zone, a sunken basketball court provides perimeter spectator seating, but is designed to act as a catch basin during intense rain events.
The architect Kongjian Yu completed hundreds of "Sponge Cities" infrastructure projects throughout China and beyond before he passed in 2025, many of which encompass beautifully landscaped public spaces that allow the waters to ebb and flow without disrupting daily life.
The concept of "living with water" stemmed from thousands of years of human experience not only in the Netherlands, but all over the world. In the Netherlands, there is another philosophy by which they live, and which allows them to "live with water" so effectively. This is the concept of "shortening the coastline." The Dutch are able to live with water because they know they also have systems in place to keep the water out when a major storm surge event occurs, one in which the level of water becomes "unlivable" for vulnerable, population dense areas no matter how many sunken basketball courts they have. Massive barrier systems stand at the ready to protect Dutch population centers if needed. By taking the need to design their cities for massive surge out of the equation, the Dutch have been free to innovate and create systems that allow the Dutch to "live" with rainfall, blue sky flooding and slow sea level rise knowing that the outer layer of protection will allow them to keep on living by keeping the massive surges out. That's what the Layered Defense Strategy is all about!
