Regenerative Productive landscapes: a proposal to deal with climate change in the deltaic territory of South Holland

The thesis aims to explore how productive landscapes can address the environmental challenges of climate change and, in particular, what role spatial design can play in this process. The case observed by this study is more specifically the Delta area of South Holland, where port, horticultural, and agricultural activities make the province one of the most economically prosperous in the European context. For centuries, the area has been subject to a process of 'anthropisation' of the landscape: a continuous transformation of the land to make it habitable by humans, in a way that was able to accommodate the productive activities necessary for their subsistence, until it evolved today into an entirely productive space. This trend is in stark contrast to the vulnerability of this basin, which has been exposed in particular during catastrophic climatic events and is currently at the center of the debate on the different ways of dealing with climate change. The hypothesis of this work is that the policies for adapting European productive landscapes to the current and future effects of climate change must fit a spatial specificity, both in terms of given conditions and expected outcomes. This is based on at least two main assumptions: first, European productive landscapes have developed through an efficiency-based functionalist approach that has made such space a "production machine". Second, the sustainability paradigm is not based on a form of adaptation that halts the productivity of an area, but on the project of a renewed prosperity. According to such hypothesis, the first part explores the case study on a large scale, using the Inquiry Lines Methodology inherited from the Delft University Department of Urbanism. The reading of the productive landscape highlights a sort of contextual and singular “malleability” of each typology, in which water infrastructure, soil type, climatic risks, and type of production are inevitably interrelated. The second part reflects instead on possible adaptation strategies for these territories and develops specific projects grounded in the current policies and future scenarios that aim at challenging their risks and limits by evolving a peculiar form of adaptation: regenerative design. The main features of such a proposal for the productive landscapes are at least three: (1) given that it is based on the diverse malleability of the territory, regenerative design should operate differently in different contexts; (2) since those landscapes are a physical place that hosts both human and natural agents, it should improve the quality of the habitat in which they are located through urgent ecosystemic interrelation strategies; (3) while moving from a better integration of currently degraded ecosystem services, it reframes an urgent near-in-time adaptation as a model of spatial transformation that can also be implemented incrementally right away.