LECTURE: Frédéric Rossano // Floodscapes

 

Flood disaster in Belgium, mudslides in Northern Germany, heatwaves followed by flash floods around the Mediterranean sea… In the last years, many European cities and rural areas drowned under unusual precipitation, for which neither the minds nor the hydraulic infrastructures were prepared. Since these extraordinary precipitations are predicted to become the “new normality” in the course of the century, many water systems that were designed in the past centuries to tame and control natural processes have now to be reconsidered and adapted, from river channels to gutters. A few pioneer regions have already embarked on vast transition and adaptation projects involving urban infrastructures up to whole rivers and watersheds. These projects are based on increasingly diversified approaches, combining new cultural narratives and spatial strategies with traditional containment techniques. Next to damming and channeling, mitigation and renaturation appear as suitable and often unavoidable measures. However, they bring about new challenges in terms of social and economic acceptability, as well as new contradictions for designers to solve in order to achieve real changes. Through two recently completed projects, Frédéric Rossano analyzes the complementarities and transgressions brought about by contemporary landscape approaches to flood prevention and mitigation.

 

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Frédéric Rossano is a landscape architect, graduate of Versailles School of Landscape Architecture, and holds a doctorate from ETH Zurich where he taught urban and landscape design from 2008 to 2015. Designer and researcher, his fields of exploration and intervention cover landscape and urban planning in relation to water, and draw on his experience as a practitioner in Paris, Rotterdam and Zurich and as a teacher and lecturer in various European institutions. He is currently associate professor at Strasbourg School of Architecture, where he initiated and leads a joined design studio with the National School for Water and Environmental Engineering. In 2021, he published the book Floodscapes. Contemporary Landscape Strategies in Times of Climate Change, which tells the multifaceted story of humankind’s relationship with flooding. His last book, De la Ville-Port à la Métropole Fluviale, results from a three-years research project on the interactions of city, ports and rivers in Strasbourg’ metropolitan area.

 

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