We have to change our attitudes towards possession and risk, and stop fighting a losing battle with nature
- Ed Barsley
Flooding from rising sea levels and extreme weather events is a major global issue, and the UK is no exception. According to the Government’s 2012 Climate Change Impact Risk Assessment, flooding is the greatest threat facing the UK today.
The UK’s current strategy for coastal defence is largely reliant on rigid structures such as sea walls. Many of these are reaching the end of their design life, and proving disadvantageous in terms of cost, restrictive access to the sea and limited capacity to adapt to rising sea levels.
As for the longer term, the Future Foresight flood research project commissioned by government and published in 2004, concluded that the government’s 100-year shoreline defence plans were not adaptive enough to cope with changes expected within the next 15 to 30 years.
But how can walls and buildings – which we take for granted as solid, enduring structures – adapt to a landscape that is gradually changing from firm ground to wetlands to sea? Does such an adaption require a sea-change in our own attitudes to permanence in our built environment?
Ed Barsley, who completed a Master’s in Architecture and Urban Design last year in the University of Cambridge's Department of Architecture and has now started a PhD, believes it does, and has come up with an adaptive, flexible approach to coastal flooding as innovative in design and technological terms as it is sensitive in cultural ones.
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Image Credit: Ed Barsley
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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