Adaptation to climate change and water sensitive city development. Enhancing resilience and transforming cities through nature as infrastructure.

The increasing impacts of climate change, urban demographic growth and migrations are pressures that exacerbate the vulnerability of cities. In order to respond and enhance their resilience, cities implement adaptation strategies that involve the transformation of the urban space. This requires an approach to the development and design of the urban territory that takes into account the new conditions, thus questioning the modern and post-modern principles and practices. While engaging in the path towards adaptation goals and successive stages of sustainability in the context of water-related climate impacts, the relationship between cities and ‘nature’ within their own borders is forcedly changed as well as the physical space. Adaptation, due to its systemic nature, is multi-scalar: at the macro level – urban scale, it is implemented through plans and strategies (adaptation process); at the meso/micro level - urban and architectural design scale, these strategies are realized through concrete interventions (adaptation projects). In the case of climatic extremes related to water, more and more often we are witnessing the use of the so-called ‘nature’ as infrastructure resulting from an eco-centric and holistic approach, rather than the use of the traditional techno-centric approach. Through the analysis of the transformation process at the macro level via a multi-level perspective approach and implemented or planned interventions as blue/green and traditional grey infrastructure projects in selected cities, the research aims to investigate the relationship between cities and ‘nature’ and the urban space produced by the projects aimed at adaptation goals. The cities of Miami and Rotterdam subjected to considerable water-related impacts to are taken as a sample to analyse two different urban transformation pathways towards adaptation. Although the sample cases constitute only a partial view on the topic, the analysis is useful for drawing some conclusions and highlighting the factors that support the process of urban adaptation and those that constitute a brake, providing some hints and approaches transferable to other urban areas. The transformative approach, a multidisciplinary and systemic vision of the challenges the city faces, the integration of the development of water management policies in urban planning as well as the consistency in the adaptive orientation at the various levels so that strategic planning finds concrete implementation through tangible interventions, are elements that allow to tackle the impacts and allow to consider that the need for adaptation to climate change may represent an opportunity for cities to enhance resilience and modify urban space with benefits in terms of the liveability of the urban space itself.