Adaptation and Resistance: Vietnamese context-specific landscape urbanism responses to climate change

The article begins with a critical stance towards the contemporary development of responsestowards climate change. It makes the hypothesis that a near-generic toolkit is rendering landscapes worldwideas more and more generic. It suggests a reversal of logics and develops design scenarios with geographicas well as socio-cultural specificity from which principles can be distilled and reiterated in similar contexts. Itdenies a universality of space and the growing reliance on performance criteria, but instead underscores thepower of cultural appropriations and geographic specificities. In order to illustrate the hypothesis, the paperturns its focus to a series of recent projects in Vietnam, designed by the authors and others in collaborationwith Vietnamese partners. Ultimately, six principles are developed in response to climate change. All theprinciples are anchored in a careful reading of the site-specific and innate logics of landscapes—inextricablytied to their ecological foundation and social and cultural formation. The proposed strategies work tobridge the divide between the dichotomies of economy and ecology, culture and nature and urbanism andlandscape, while adapting to new challenges brought by climate change and resisting generic responses

Publication year:2020

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