Urban climate resilience through hybrid infrastructure

Urban infrastructure will require transformative changes to adapt to changing disturbance patterns. We ask what new opportunities hybrid infrastructure—built environments coupled with landscape-scale biophysical structures and processes—offer for building different layers of resilience critical for dealing with increased variation in the frequency, magnitude and different phases of climate-related disturbances.

With its more diverse components and different internal logics, hybrid infrastructure opens up alternative and additive ways of building resilience for and through critical infrastructure, by providing a wider range of functions and responses. Second, hybrid infrastructure points toward greater opportunities for ongoing (re)design at the landscape level, where structure and function can be constantly renegotiated and recombined.