Climate change and waterscapes of value: co-creating resilience in urban landscapes through diversity and hybrid justifications

Resilience and climate change adaptation (CCA) are closely connected to the concepts of value. From this departure, handling of water (HOW) is a pressing issue which involves values at many levels: it challenges economies, questions governance, planning, settlement patterns, land-use, spatial understandings, infrastructural strategies, sensory sensations, use of materials and daily life practices. Furthermore, water represents uncertainty and does not acknowledge administrative boundaries. Approaching this through the acknowledgement of watersheds reveals how water forces diverse actors to act together which is closely related to actions and spatial practices of value in urban landscapes.Values, however, are plural and relationally dependent. Different actors see them differently from their varying fields of interests, professions and time perspectives. How do we bridge fields of value across disciplines, engagements and traditional boundaries in order to engage with concepts of value as a way to qualify actions in a practice-oriented context? This is the basic point of view of this paper.This paper proposes the approach of Boltanski and Thévenot to engage with this issue. They present a way of identifying and justifying values with their 6 Regimes of Justification (Boltanski, 2006): the inspirational, the domestic, the opinion, the civic, the market and the industrial regimes. These regimes can provide a methodological approach to clarify, decode and encode values, which ALSO can allow for mutual understanding and collaborative creation. The subject matter is approached through best-practices of watershed projects in Seattle explored through research by design methodologies. The over arching aim is to develop methods to discuss, engage and envision resilience and (future) values in urban landscapes in an age of uncertainty