Urban Design Study of Resilient City in Greater Bay Area

Abstract

With the increasing climate change, the contradiction between the vulnerable natural conditions and rapid urbanization in Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area becomes much more prominent. Urban security is threatened by various severe natural disasters, such as rising sea level, storm surges, and intensified floods, etc. To solve this problem, based on the theory of resilient city, this paper develops three resilient urban design principles: 1) integrated city principle; 2) adaptive technology principle; 3) flexible design principle, and build a research-designfeedback loop pattern. In the research and prediction stage, we quantitatively calculate the influence of natural disasters that may happen in the future in the Greater Bay Area and map the disaster influence in the natural basement layer, urban infrastructure network layer and urban settlement layer by Geographic Information System(GIS) through scenario stimulation. Based on this, the most severely affected areas in the future will be defined as key design areas. In the urban design stage, we focus on one of the key design areas – Pazhou and stimulate multiple scenarios to assess the urban resilient risk. We propose different integrated urban design strategies to balance the urban development and risk, select the adaptive hydraulic engineering technology to realize a more sustainable green infrastructure and build a flexible development framework to face the future uncertainty. In the evaluation and feedback stage, we develop a time series model of heavy rainfall to evaluate urban resilience in different design and quantify the impact of natural disasters through a set of urban resilience indicators in various layers, in order to pick up more resilient design to optimize. The practice experience shows that the resilient city is a long-term process, which requires an interdisciplinary cooperation mode, among research, design and feedback and a great management and control platform and a multi-objective evaluation index system so as to achieve real-time monitoring, regular evaluation, and dynamic control. This study attempts to make up for the lack of resilience city research in planning and design practice, to provide practical experience for the next stage of urban building.