Design Meets Science in a Changing Climate: A Case for Regional Thinking to Address Urban Coastal Resilience

As countries and cities struggle with the complexities of sea-level rise and climate change, and as the built environment professions struggle with field conditions that necessitate transdisciplinary management, the academic institutions have developed pedagogical approaches and are increasingly reengaging the idea that innovation can be facilitated within linear, rule-bound systems. Through a codification of criteria that defy optimization, the default programmatic and form biases of the designer are manipulated by a collective interpretation of sociopolitical relationships, market behaviors, and constitutional and scientific laws. The increased recognition of the limitations of professional acculturation of the objective public obligation is balanced by subjective realities of professional ethics and intra-organizational dynamics, which serve ostensibly the same outcome despite different and often frictional trajectories. One significant dimension of the application of this model is to question the notions of aesthetics in the face of efficiency-seeking production and replication whose applications on a regional scale defy any historical precedent beyond perhaps that of the Great Wall of China.