Environmental change: New potentials

In low-lying regions like Denmark a rising sea level combined with change in rain and wind patterns now cause problems in several coastal cities where open urban spaces, infrastructure, and houses are flooded.
The initiatives taken to prevent damages are mainly technical. But the impact of a changing environment is also addressing social and human issues and concerns, and architectural norms and tools. One of the main themes and questions concerns how we relate the built environment and open urban spaces to water.
Water plays an important role in Danish culture, tradition. To many Danes, it is desirable and in great demand to live in a house near the water. If a house near the sea not affordable, the next choice will be a summerhouse or summer vacations near the sea. Many Danish cities and summerhouse areas are situated in low-lying areas, and thus exposed to floods. Dikes are not in general use in the Denmark. Introducing dikes in coastal cities in order to protect them against floods would thus both have a huge spatial impact, but also a huge effect on issues related to identity, understanding and history.
Therefore it is important that we as architects and planners understand and handle these new environmental conditions both in a practical, functional way but also in an aesthetical, spatial way. As professionals we should contribute to the creation of new images, ideas, strategies and solutions able to handle the challenges, to investigate the potentials and interpret these architecturally.
This suggests that that we should work with nature and the natural processes – i.e. to understand the processes, learn from them, and invent solutions that seek the potentials and use them as generators in the problem solving. Two cases, Kerteminde and Reersø will be discussed, and potentials suggested