Swarm Planning for Climate Change: An Alternative Pathway for Resilience

Abstract

Although there are an increasing number of extreme events ( www.emdat.be ), humankind has learnt how to deal with their immediate impacts. This is illustrated by the fact that the number of casualties as a result of extreme weather dropped from 240 million (in 1920) to three million (in the last decade). Nonetheless, there is still a need for communities to improve their capacity to adapt to forthcoming climate events, particularly if adaptation pathways substantially reduce carbon footprints. A growing attention for the adaptation to climate change can be witnessed in current spatial planning practice. However, despite this attention, the question is whether spatial planning frameworks and approaches are sufficiently equipped to include strategies that deal with uncertainty and that are capable of anticipating an unpredictable future. In this chapter swarm planning theory (Roggema and Van den Dobbelsteen 2008; Roggema 2012a) is taken as the starting point to be used in two examples of actual regional design. The theory is applied and tested in practice and the results are presented here. This chapter focuses on the potential benefits that a swarm planning approach can offer. This is particularly relevant to designing for both a post-carbon scenario (the period after dominance of use of fossil energy resources, authors’ definition) and a pre-adaptive scenario (the period before preparations to anticipate climate change impacts are taken, authors’ definition) landscapes.