Resilience as a New Concept of Planning Transformation in Delta Areas

Delta areas have made remarkable achievements in urban construction, as a result of rapid development in recent decades. However, the accumulated ecological problems have also become more prominent, exposing challenging obvious spatial vulnerability problem. In the face of the high overlaps of factors such as fragile natural basement and increased spatial-temporal disturbance of natural disasters, there is an urgent need to improve the ability of delta areas to cope with future uncertain disturbances. This paper first analyzes the particularity of natural environment in delta areas from the perspective of landscape, and proposes that resilience planning is the transformation of existing planning in delta areas. It believes that robustness, adaptability and learning/transformation ability are the core capabilities of resilience planning in delta areas, while systematic, integrative, baseline and scenario thinking are four major principles toward resilience. Secondly, it further puts forward constructing the resilience planning framework of “pattern-connectivitystrategic points” of multiscale delta space from the aspects of highlighting the overall land use pattern, constructing flowspace carriers, strengthening research and application of resilience technologies, and stressing effective cross-scale cooperation and management. Finally, it expounds the points that need to be paid special attentions in real practice when taking resilience planning as the new concept of planning transformation in delta areas. That means, a new proposed spatial layout can not only overcome shortages deriving from the overview of history and evaluation of existing site, but also cope with different scenarios with different development and risk degree. When applied this concept to distribute spatial layout of a specific case, it is required to rely on the natural environment, taking dynamic landscape process into consideration. It is also necessary to integrate ecological wisdom and modern technologies, managing guidelines with robust and adaptive functional zones and typical sections.