Paolo De Martino
TU Delft
What if the edge between land and water—the fragile strip where rivers meet cities and tides meet walls—became our laboratory for the future?
That question animated the symposium “Land–Water Threshold as a Laboratory for Multi-Risk Urban Futures,” held at TU Delft on 18 and 19 September 2025 under the umbrella of the MIRACLE project (Multi-risk Integrated Resilience Approach for Coastal Landscapes and Environments). Convened by Carola Hein (TU Delft), Francesco Musco (IUAV University of Venice), and Paolo De Martino (IUAV, TU Delft), the event brought together researchers, designers, and policymakers to explore how cities can learn to live with risk rather than merely defend against it.
Why Multi-Risk, and Why Now?
The term multi-risk framed the entire discussion—not as an abstract technical category, but as a new way of understanding the entangled crises of our time.
Flooding, heat, drought, social fragility, and governance failures are all interconnected. They cascade, overlap, and reshape how we inhabit cities. Multi-risk is understood here as both a condition and an invitation: a call to move beyond single-hazard thinking and toward systemic, cross-disciplinary responses.
But it is also a cultural question. Risk, as participants argued, is as much about values and choices as it is about data and models. What do we choose to protect? What are we willing to let go of? Who decides, and who benefits? These questions formed the undercurrents running through every talk, model, and map.
From Hamburg to Naples: Stories of transformation
Carola Hein opened the symposium by reminding the audience that landscapes have long memories. Her reflections on port cities traced how flows of goods, people, and power have shaped coastal territories for centuries. “History matters,” she insisted, “because every transition has a before and an after.” The challenge is not simply to build stronger walls or smarter infrastructure, but to ask: which futures do we want, and whose futures are they?
A film on Hamburg, edited by Carola Hein, illustrated this beautifully: a city once devastated by cholera and industrial pollution, now reinventing itself through clean water, renewable energy, and design strategies that reconnect citizens with their river. Hamburg’s story captured what many described as the essence of amphibious resilience—living with water rather than fighting it.
In contrast, Michelangelo Russo turned to the dense, layered, and often chaotic landscapes of Naples. Describing the city as a “laboratory of urban contradictions,” Russo outlined a vision of regenerative urbanism—a planning approach rooted in participation, ecology, and the city’s own cultural sediment. His idea of transitional landscapes—spaces constantly shifting between states, uses, and meanings—offered a poetic yet practical frame for dealing with uncertainty and change.
Designing with Water, Designing with Risk
The symposium’s short pitches expanded this mosaic of ideas. From delta cities in the Netherlands to coastal towns in Turkey, from the lagoons of Venice to the springs of Urla, researchers presented projects that reimagined water as both a threat and a planning agent.
In Southeast Asia, the PolyUrban Waters project proposed participatory governance models for “secondary cities” facing both flooding and drought. In the Campi Flegrei near Naples, digital twins were used to visualize overlapping risks—from volcanic activity to mobility breakdowns—turning complex datasets into democratic tools. Even art entered the conversation: a performance piece from Mumbai revealed how creative practices can expose hidden inequalities in access to water and space.
Across all these examples, one idea resonated strongly: risk can be a catalyst for innovation.
Toward a Manifesto for Amphibious Futures
The symposium concluded with a collective discussion moderated by Marcin Dombrowski and Maurice Harteveld (TU Delft), aimed at drafting a Manifesto for Land–Water Thresholds.
Rather than offering definitive answers, participants articulated shared principles for how we might reimagine cities under conditions of multi-risk. The emerging manifesto called for:
- Nature-based and regenerative approaches, working with ecological processes
- Adaptive design, embracing uncertainty as a creative force.
- Inclusivity and co-design, ensuring that communities, not just experts, shape the agenda.
- Conflict as opportunity, treating disagreement as fertile ground for innovation.
- Public space as the new agora, where participation and adaptation converge.
As one participant remarked, “We can’t design our way out of risk—but we can design our way into new relationships with it.”
Archetypal Mapping Workshop: Exploring Different Conditions
The Archetypal Mapping Workshop invited participants to imagine a city that could belong anywhere—a city of all waters, shaped by coastlines, deltas, rivers, and tides, yet confined to no single geography. This “archetypal city” became a canvas for exploring how risk, adaptation, and imagination intertwine in the making of resilient urban futures.
Rather than starting from a real map, the exercise began from the conditions that define cities today: flooding, erosion, drought, pollution, heat, abandonment, social inequality, and economic vulnerability. Participants layered these risks to construct a shared geography of exposure—one that could resonate with many coastal and inland cities alike.
From this mapping of risks emerged scenarios of transformation. Participants imagined tidal parks and sponge landscapes that absorb rather than resist water; festival grounds that combine culture and ecology; and blue-green corridors that link natural systems and communities. Across all discussions ran a common thread—the idea that cities must learn from water: yielding, adapting, and regenerating through cycles of change.
The workshop also became an experiment in collective learning. Mapping was not only a method of representation but an act of inquiry—a way to understand how environmental, social, and political layers overlap. Participants explored how governance, participation, and cultural imagination are as crucial as technical design in shaping adaptive cities.
In the end, the archetypal map stood not as a depiction of a specific place, but as a mirror of shared conditions—an invitation to rethink the city as a living system of relationships between humans, nature, and time. The workshop revealed that to design for resilience is to design for learning: a continuous process of seeing, imagining, and reconfiguring the spaces we inhabit together.
Acknowledgments
This blog post has been written in the context of discussions in the LDE PortCityFutures research community. It reflects the evolving thoughts of the authors and expresses the discussions between researchers on the socio-economic, spatial, and cultural questions surrounding port city relationships.
This Symposium builds upon and is connected to research activities carried out within the framework of the Extended Partnership RETURN – Multi-Risk Science for Resilient Communities under a Changing Climate, Spoke 5 – Urban and Metropolitan Settlements, promoted and coordinated by the University of Naples Federico II.
We also thank all the participants of the symposium LAND-WATER THRESHOLDS FOR MULTI-RISK URBAN FUTURES. Specifically we thank Carola Hein, Han Meyer, Maurice Harteveld, Elise van Dooren, Marcin Dabrowski from TU Delft, Hadi El Hage, IUAV, and all the speakers of the symposium: Nebojsa Jeremic and Leonardo Zuccaro Marchi, Polimi, Maryam Naghibi TU Delft, Anke Hagemann and Ania Wilk-Pham, Habitat Unit-TU Berlin, Alberto Innocenti SDU Denmark, Aysen Savas METU Faculty of Architecture, Beatrice Moretti, UniGe, Bruna Vendemmia, Libera Amenta, Unina-DiARC, Zuhal Ulusoy, Istanbul Bilgi University, Inge Bobbink, TU Delft, Inah Kim, Heidelberg University, Eun Bin Boo, TU Delft, Alankrita Sarkar, Deltametropolis Association and TU Delft, Mila Avellar Montezuma, UNESCO IHE-Delft and WaterStudio.
This blog was edited by the PortCityFutures editorial team: Yi Kwan Chan. Special thanks go to Carola Hein, Francesco Musco, and Michelangelo Russo, who represent my academic points of reference.