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Living with Floods: Ecological Wisdom in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta

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Ecological Wisdom

Part of the book series: EcoWISE ((EcoWISE))

Abstract

Despite the widespread implementation of flood control infrastructure, modern cities around the world remain vulnerable to flood hazards. Although flood management has in general placed less emphasis on structural measures, urban flood hazard mitigation continues to fixate on the flood control paradigm, the ideology that flooding must be prevented in the first place, as flooding is assumed to be disastrous. To promote urban flood resilience, this paper argues for the alternative flood adaptation paradigm, which concerns preventing damage when flooding occurs and allows flooding to enter the city. The argument is grounded on our fieldworks on the ecological wisdom of living with floods in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta in two hamlets, Vinh An and Ha Bao, where flooding is mostly harmless and brings benefits. To turn this ecological wisdom of the rural hamlets into practical knowledge, we extract lessons for modern cities: Modern cities need ecological knowledge to nurture ecological wisdom and need to become agile by developing localized flood-response capacity, striving for timely system-wide adjustment, and turning amphibious. To make these lessons of the ecological wisdom actionable, we translate them into three urban design principles: Urban design should (1) anticipate and accommodate flooding, (2) incorporate the ecological process of flooding, and (3) reveal the flood dynamics to the public.

This chapter is a reprint with permission from Elsevier. Landscape and Urban Planning, 2016 Special Issue on Ecological Wisdom.

Liao KH, Le TA, Van Nguyen K (2016) Urban design principles for flood resilience: learning from the ecological wisdom of living with floods in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta. Landscape and Urban Planning, 155:69–78.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Taipei University, New Taipei City, Taiwan

    Kuei-Hsien Liao

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  1. Kuei-Hsien Liao
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Correspondence to Kuei-Hsien Liao .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Landscape Architecture and Planning, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Bo Yang

  2. The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Robert Fredrick Young

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Liao, KH. (2019). Living with Floods: Ecological Wisdom in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta. In: Yang, B., Young, R. (eds) Ecological Wisdom. EcoWISE. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0571-9_11

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