In January 2025, the Palisades and Eaton Fires destroyed approximately 12,000 structures and burned down about 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) of land across Los Angeles, California. A few months earlier, in October 2024, flash floods hit Valencia in south-eastern Spain, causing billions of euros worth of damage. Climate change is not a future threat: it is already underway. As homes and communities face increasing climate-related disasters worldwide, the question for architects, engineers, and urban planners is no longer only: how can we prevent further climate change? But also: how can we be more resilient to it?

What does climate resilience mean? 

Dr Juan Sebastian Canavera Herrera, Sustainability Engineer, and Rob Newman, Architect, state that ‘it is important, first, to outline what resilience means, as well as how the term can be applied to the relationship between climate change and the built environment.’

Resilience is not a new concept, and has, over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, accumulated multiple names: emergency preparedness, disaster risk reduction, then risk reduction. Today, ‘resilience’ is a term applied to a range of global concerns – from climate policy to healthcare planning, cybersecurity, and earthquake and tsunami preparedness. It is therefore important, each time that we call upon ‘resilience’ that we are clear on the following: resilience of what and resilience to what?

One useful definition of resilience that works across industries comes from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction: (UNDRR):

This definition can be used to think specifically about climate resilience, and its application to the built environment. To bring the concerns of climate resilience and architecture to the UNDRR’s definition: the hazards can be understood as climate-related, and the system response can be understood as design.

This allows a new set of questions to emerge for practitioners of the built environment when beginning a project. What is a climate hazard to the design, or to the community or the ecosystem? How severe are the hazards? How should a design respond? And when, and how frequently, will this response be required, and how will this capacity to respond be maintained? Equipped with an understanding of how resilience functions – not as the eradication but as the management of hazards – proposals can then be made for designs that face different climate hazards such as, wildfires and flooding, but also droughts, storms, and agricultural loss.

Resilience case study: New Slussen Masterplan

Flood resilience also extends beyond the home and the community, to the urban and multi-terrain plan. Foster + Partners’ New Slussen Masterplan is an urban planning exercise that combines a robust climate resilience infrastructure with city planning. In 2009, the City of Stockholm commissioned the practice to design and deliver a masterplan for the Slussen area. This was a gigantic undertaking, described by Angus Campbell, Senior Partner and architect, as an ‘iceberg problem’, where ‘a great deal of the design and engineering was hidden from view.’

The initial brief required rerouting an outdated and inefficient twelve-lane traffic interchange from 1935, reinstating the existing and unsuitable Karl Johan lock system to improve flood management for both Stockholm and its hinterland, streamlining maritime traffic, and safeguarding a drinking water basin for two million people. The first phase of the New Slussen Masterplan opened in 2024.

Slussen has long used locks as a way on controlling the flow of water between the lake and the sea – the earliest example being Queen Christina’s Lock in 1642, with subsequent upgrades following over the centuries. The area remained a public thoroughfare at the centre of Stockholm until the 1930s, when the pedestrian connection to the city waterfront was cut by a ‘cloverleaf interchange’ that reflected the growing popularity of the car at the time. Foster + Partners proposed, therefore, to reinstate this pedestrian connection, arguing that Slussen had long been an instinctive centre to the city.

In the place of the 1935 motor interchange, a new ‘Water Plaza’ was introduced. This public space was arranged around the new navigation lock and offers improved north-south pedestrian and cycling connections that link Stockholm’s Old Town with its cultural district, and animate the quayside with new restaurants, cafes and cultural amenities. Not only has the area dramatically increased in attractiveness to residents, businesses and investors, but, as the Vice Mayor commented, Slussen is now a ‘meeting place for everyone in Stockholm.’

Slussen was infrastructure in need of a designer’s eye. Prior to Foster + Partners’ involvement, the City of Stockholm had rejected previous proposals for the waterfront, which had focused mainly on the engineering of the lock systems and not the surrounding realm. It was Fosters + Partners’ wider-ranging architectural and urban planning lens, applied to an engineering problem, that eventually convinced the city. As Angus Campbell puts it: ‘If the money is going to be invested in climate resilience and infrastructure anyway, we might as well push for this climate resilient design to also work for people, and for the wider city.’

Full article: Climate Resilience in Design