The question of what design contributes once technical and regulatory solutions have been accounted for is both fundamental and difficult to answer. Across the four lectures, we encountered the term “resilience” being interpreted in genuinely different ways: as a critical concept of governance, as a design practice operating across timescales far beyond electoral cycles, as a discipline confronted with its own epistemological blind spots, and as a professional identity seeking greater political relevance. Rather than reducing these perspectives to a single shared conclusion, we decided to preserve the tensions between them. The interviews that follow are the result of this approach.

These four perspectives do not fully converge, and we have deliberately avoided forcing them into a unified narrative. Read together, they reveal a discipline engaged in an ongoing debate about who resilience is ultimately for, whether the concept can be reclaimed from its technocratic interpretations, and what architecture and landscape architecture can realistically contribute when financial resources, institutional capacities, and political commitment are limited. This debate—rather than any single definition of resilience—is what remained with us after the conference. It is also what we hope becomes visible through the conversations that follow.

Dr. Gül Tuçaltan (Urban Morphosis Lab) offers the strongest challenge to established resilience thinking. In her lecture, “Logics of Urban Resilience across Contexts: Why, and How Interventions Work (or Fail),” she questioned the dominant resilience paradigm of prototype–test–fail–learn–redesign, arguing that it often assumes institutional stability and financial capacities that many cities—particularly in the Global South—simply do not possess. In the interview, she expands this critique by framing resilience as a test of whether systems protect their most vulnerable users or merely reproduce their own continuity. Drawing on cases ranging from Turkish municipalities responding to displacement pressures to Ankara’s pandemic-era food delivery networks, she illustrates what governance looks like under conditions of structural constraint rather than in idealized models of experimentation.

1. Urban resilience is widely discussed but interpreted in different ways. How do you define resilience in your work, and how has your perspective evolved through research and/or practice?

I came to resilience through my work on infrastructure governance. So, I would define resilience as the capacity to maintain and mobilize critical infrastructure under pressure, not only when an unexpected event challenges the operations of a system, a flood, a pandemic, a displacement crisis, but also when the challenge is structural, be it chronic disinvestment, institutional neglect, ecological degradation or racism that accumulates below the threshold of political attention.

Thus, my engagement with (infrastructural) resilience operates through a critical lens. I focus on the governance processes through which inclusion and exclusion are produced, asking who is protected by the infrastructure that persists and who is rendered disposable by the infrastructure that does not. This speaks to a part of the definition most often dropped is the last clause, which is ‘’leaving no one behind’’. However, that should not a moral aspiration appended to a technical concept. It is the test that distinguishes resilience from sole system preservation. An infrastructure that survives a crisis by sacrificing its most vulnerable users has not demonstrated resilience. It has demonstrated whose expendability was built into the design.

Aligning with this standpoint, my doctoral research at Utrecht University revealed who gains and who loses when a city reorganizes its waste system. I spent years working on how informal waste collection works together with formal forms of waste recycling, a relationship shaping forms of labor, physical risk, and political visibility and recognition along lines of class, ethnicity, and legal status. The waste workers whose bodies carried the system were the people most thoroughly excluded from the institutions governing it. That taught me something that resilience scholarship often avoids stating directly.

When I later encountered the resilience field professionally, first through applied governance work, then through climate adaptation research, I recognized the similar patterns. The field contains the logics also addressed with the academic literature shaped around it. Engineering resilience, which asks how quickly a city returns to its prior condition after a shock. Socio-ecological resilience, which asks how much disruption a system can absorb while still functioning. Transformative resilience, which asks whether the system that produced the vulnerability deserves to persist at all. And, of course, a critical tradition, also drawing on urban political ecology, focusing on the apolitical and non-transformative nature of the concept.

While I have considerable sympathy for the last position, I believe the concept can still be reclaimed and put to work, provided it is held accountable by a critical lens that never stops asking who benefits and who bears the cost.

What crystallized this for me was a period of applied work across radically different institutional conditions. From 2018 to 2021, I led the knowledge component of a Sida-funded project called RESLOG, implemented by the Swedish Association of Local Governments and Regions, which supported municipalities across Turkey that had absorbed hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians while simultaneously expected to manage regular public services with almost no additional resources. What I observed was not a resilience deficit in the textbook sense. It was the sudden visibility of structural governance weakness that had existed for decades. Rapid mass migration was not the sole fragility. It revealed the structural political, economic and societal limitations as against governing for resilience at the local government level. Any resilience framework that cannot account for that distinction, between a shock that arrives and a condition that was always there, is analytically incomplete.

The concept evolved further when I moved to the Global Center on Adaptation in the Netherlands and developed the Climate Adaptation Changemakers School, a peer-learning program I work for the design of from concept, coordinated, and facilitated. It brought government officials and researchers from Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, The Gambia, into structured exchange with Dutch officials and academics. The international resilience vocabulary available to both was designed in neither of their contexts. That is the observation that now organizes my work. The concept travels, but what it carries and what it drops at each border crossing is where the politics lies.

2. What are the key obstacles when translating resilience concepts into concrete urban projects, policies, or spatial interventions?

I can name multiple obstacles as linked to each other. The first is the assumption that iteration is universally available. The experimentation logic at the heart of mainstream resilience thinking, the cycle of prototype, test, fail, learn, redesign, presupposes conditions that most cities lack stable governance capable of sustaining projects beyond one political cycle, fiscal space to absorb the cost of failure, enforceable legal frameworks, and planning horizons long enough for learning to accumulate. The Netherlands can spend 2.3 billion euros over a program running nearly a decade on giving its rivers their natural course for flood management. While in another context, one election may be enough to change the governing and economic conditions, and the political will that held a program together. Years of accumulated institutional work, relationships, governance operations, all of it quietly archived. Not destroyed, but shelved, which in practice can be considered to be the same thing. Thus, when we export the vocabulary of experimentation without the institutional substrate that makes iteration possible, we produce strategies that read well in donor reports but dissolve on contact with actual governance conditions.

The second obstacle is epistemic, and it operates at the level of what counts as knowledge and to whom it belongs to. Through my current research at the Urban Morphosis Lab, an international collective affiliated with Darmstadt University of Technology that works at the intersection of urban governance, infrastructure studies, and spatial inequality, I keep encountering the same structural pattern in international resilience instruments. Frameworks like Sendai, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the various adaptation plans that descend from them construct the categories of their own application before they arrive in any specific place. They carry knowledge systems rooted in the Global North and position communities as sites of implementation rather than as producers of knowledge about their own conditions. The question is not whether these frameworks intend to be participatory. It is whether the epistemic geometry they bring with them is capable of being successfully utilized outside the contexts they are developed in. During the RESLOG project in Turkey, we tried to address this partly through a 25-book open-source guidebook series that we wrote with local governance practitioners in both English and Turkish rather than delivering pre-packaged toolkits to them. The distance between those two prepositions, with and for, is where most resilience translation breaks down.

The third obstacle is distributional, and it is the one most consistently avoided. Resilience interventions redistribute. Every infrastructure decision in essence is a distributional one concerning who controls the resources, land, labor and capital, who has voice in governance, and who profits. The same dynamic operates in every resilience intervention I have since come across. A framework that presents itself as win-win is either describing a context extraordinarily well equipped in terms of resources or it is hindering who absorbs the loss.

3. Beyond technical solutions and regulations, what unique contribution can architectural and urban design make to strengthening resilient cities?

Critical analysis matters. Identifying structural barriers, naming the governance arrangements that produce vulnerability, understanding whose interests a particular infrastructure configuration serves. This is necessary work. But it is not sufficient. At some point, you are standing in front of a community that floods with every heavy rain, and the structural barriers you have correctly identified are not going to be dismantled by tomorrow. The question becomes what you do with what you have at hand, in the absence of comprehensive data, large budgets, or institutional continuity.

This is where, I think, design comes into play. Tactical and acupunctural urbanism tell you where to intervene right now, with the resources, knowledge, and governance relationships that exist, to produce outcomes that are visible enough to build political support for the next intervention. The design contribution is not choosing between structural critique and immediate action. It is operating in both registers at once: understanding why the system produces vulnerability while simultaneously building, at whatever scale is available, physical evidence that alternatives are possible. Small, fast, reversible interventions that test ideas at low cost and build political support through demonstrated results rather than projected ones. Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba who coined the term urban acupuncture, understood that a city is a living organism and that well-placed, precisely designed small interventions can lead to larger systemic effects. A vacant lot converted into a productive urban garden can simultaneously grow food, absorb rainwater, and create social recreational space.

In addition to these two, I think we need to think with Pierre Bélanger's conception of landscape as infrastructure. Landscape is not the setting for urban life but the infrastructure that sustains it. Biophysical systems performing what can be considered engineering functions may not always match the effectiveness of large-scale interventions like storm surge barriers or dike systems, but they offer a materially grounded alternative to ageing grey infrastructure. And in cities without capital budgets for pipes and pumps, this is not a design preference. It is the only infrastructure available.

I also touched upon this and give the example of community groups in Gorakhpur, eastern India. I have not worked on this case myself, though it would have been great to do so. But there are several visual and written secondary sources. They preserved peri-urban agricultural land as a functioning flood buffer while simultaneously improving farmer livelihoods through crop diversification, at a cost that was, yes capital, but minor as compared to other cases, but rather essentially organizational. The farmland was already there. The knowledge that was already there was acted upon. The design solution was recognizing both as infrastructure and building a governance argument around their protection.

Thus, the intervention can be smaller in budget and large in consequence. That, I believe, is where architectural and urban design thinking is most required, not in producing a plan that resolves everything on paper but never realized, but in identifying the precise, low-cost, multi-functional move that demonstrates, in built form, that another way of inhabiting a city is already underway.

4. Resilience is not only environmental but also social. How can planning and design foster social cohesion, inclusivity, and adaptability in times of uncertainty?

I will keep this one short, as the separation that is also embedded in this question, setting the environmental on one side, and the social on the other, is itself the problem. There is a whole body of literature working on addressing how to break this divide and reconsider our mainstream ways of understanding the “socio-ecological”. Every infrastructure system is social, economic, spatial and yet political in itself. The data center or a pipeline sitting next to an oftentimes colored community facing socioeconomic challenges and impacted by the negative consequences is not an environmental failure. It is a socio-spatial and ecological institutional decision, thus an arrangement materializing. Thus, the very institutions expected to address unjust socio-ecological practices happen to be the ones producing, reproducing, as well as orchestrating and reorchestrating them.

5. Effective resilience strategies require cooperation across disciplines and sectors. Based on your experience, what models of collaboration between academia, practice, governance, and civil society are most promising?

This is what we tend to recommend when working with central and local government actors. Partner with universities, co-produce knowledge, build multi-stakeholder platforms! It is the right recommendation. However, I would like to underline a structural problem. The collaborations that resilience scholarship celebrates, transdisciplinary partnerships between universities, municipalities, civil society, and the private sector, are overwhelmingly documented in contexts where research is funded, where universities have the capacity to engage with local government, and where political conditions allow civic organizations to operate freely. The partnership-building itself requires resources most cities lack time, institutional trust, facilitation capacity, and a governance environment in which cross-sector work is politically tolerable. In many of the contexts where such collaboration is most urgently needed, it is structurally least available. Municipal staff are managing daily crises with skeleton teams. Civil society operates under political suspicion. The excessive institutional labor required to sustain partnerships becomes one more demand on people already stretched beyond capacity.

The most effective collaborations under these circumstances that I have witnessed emerged either because a crisis made visible what was always true, that no single institution holds sufficient knowledge about the problem it is trying to solve, or because they were externally funded. Their sustainability after the emergency or after the end of funding is also a huge question mark. The unresolved challenge is how to embed such governance practice without requiring a disaster or a push from donors.

A known good example of sustained partnership is the Surat Climate Change Trust in India. After the 1994 flood and subsequent plague outbreak, the Surat Municipal Corporation undertook a governance transformation. What emerged was an institutionalized platform bringing together the municipal corporation, industry, academia, and civil society into a permanent structure for climate risk governance. I have not researched Surat firsthand, and the critical literature suggests the success story is more uneven than it appears: the institutional collaboration is real, but it was built partly on slum demolition and driven by business interests, not community empowerment.

This is, to me, pattern-matching with what I have observed throughout my career. The collaborations that prove most institutionally durable tend to be the ones where powerful actors have material reasons to participate where the crisis threatens their economic interests, their political legitimacy, or their international reputation. That is not the same thing as a partnership built around the needs of the most vulnerable.

A smaller observation from the earliest stage of my career sharpened this further. At UNIDO, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, I worked on the Montreal Protocol Program in Turkey, training refrigeration technicians on the phase-out of ozone-depleting substances. It was not theoretically sophisticated. But the knowledge was specific enough to be immediately usable, the training was embedded in professional routines rather than delivered as an external event, and it changed what people did the following week, not just what they knew. How durable that impact proved in practice is always difficult to assess. Capacity building that operates at the scale of the workforce rather than the scale of the workshop, and that targets what practitioners do rather than what they understand in the abstract, has a different kind of traction.

Lastly, I would like to speak to the role of academic researchers who are genuinely engaged in this space, producing high-quality analysis and building intellectual infrastructure around climate adaptation. How much of that work reaches the everyday operational reality of the government officials who are supposed to act on it is, to me, an open and uncomfortable question. The translation gap between what academics produce and what practitioners can use under real governance conditions is wider than most collaboration frameworks acknowledge.

Closing that gap requires something the current models do not yet deliver, which is collaboration mechanisms that local governments can own and sustain without permanent external support, that operate at the level of daily practice rather than planning or policy documents.

6. Have recent global crises significantly influenced your approach to urban planning and development? If so, what lasting lessons should the profession take forward?

The experience that most fundamentally shaped my understanding was not a single crisis but the experience of compound, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing pressures. Again, during the RESLOG Turkey project, we also worked straight through COVID-19. The municipalities I worked with were dealing simultaneously with the governance consequences of hosting refugees, a national political environment that was using emergency governance to centralize power away from local authorities, economic instability, and then a pandemic that demanded rapid improvisation of public services already stretched capacity. What collapsed first under that weight was not physical infrastructure. It was planning logic. The municipalities that managed were not the ones with the most detailed plans. They were the ones with the most adaptive governance relationships and the capacity to improvise responses that no plan had anticipated.

Later I had the chance to do research on Ankara, as part of a project funded by European Endowment for Democracy and it is an example that stuck. When lockdowns left elderly and chronically ill residents unable to access food, the metropolitan municipality launched a solidarity campaign, scaling food assistance from its normal 150,000 families to preparations for 500,000. But the most interesting governance move was not the scale. It was how the delivery happened. The municipality partnered with unemployed transport and courier workers, to distribute food packages across the city. It solved two crises simultaneously. Isolated households received food, and an entire occupational group that had lost its income was put back to work with purpose and pay. The municipality knew who was registered, neighborhood mukhtars knew who actually lived where, and the courier networks knew how to move through the city. Each held a piece of knowledge that the others lacked. Nobody designed this as a resilience intervention; and it was surely adaptive governance by necessity, but this is how collaboration should look like when designing resilience interventions addressing everyday realities.

To paraphrase this into a punchy lesson, although it is very challenging to do, build this kind of cross-institutional reflex into routine governance without requiring a crisis to activate it.

7. What skills and competencies should future architects and urban planners develop to address the challenges of climate change, resource scarcity, and urban transformation?

There is currently an enormous emphasis on technical expertise, quantitative data, and economic analysis in the practice of architects and planners, with digital modelling, climate projections, etc. These are valuable tools. But the risk is that they become substitutes for the more difficult competency, which, to me, is the ability to critically assess the underlying dynamics of a problem before designing an intervention.

The second important consideration is a generalist orientation. The problems architects and planners face do not respect disciplinary boundaries. Drought in a city is simultaneously a hydrological event, an ecological process, a governance matter, a public health concern, and a food security issue. No single discipline holds sufficient knowledge to address it. Future practitioners need the capacity to work across fields, to ask the right questions of specialists, even if they cannot answer those questions themselves. The most effective professionals I have encountered in my career were not the deepest specialists. They were the ones who could sit in a room with engineers, ecologists, community organizers, and government officials, and understand what each was saying well enough to identify where the real tensions and trade-offs lay.

The third is a critical relationship with technology. Technology, in my opinion, will produce, and is already producing, various responses to climate change and other comparable challenges. Sensor networks, AI-driven early warning systems, digital twins, and so on. Some of these are genuinely useful. But technology does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives in a governance context, and the questions of how just, how inclusive, and how equitably distributed its benefits are not technical but political. Future architects and planners, and the ones practicing today, need to grasp this political nature of their work. The orientation and the habit of asking who wins and who loses in any given process is not a supplement to design. It is the foundation without which technical competence produces elegant solutions to the wrong problems.

8. What do you believe will characterize resilient cities in 2050, and what structural or cultural shifts are necessary to achieve that vision?

I would have liked to give a more hopeful answer. But honesty requires me to say what I believe rather than what sounds good in a policy document. The resilient cities of 2050 will, in all likelihood, be the ones that hold the most resources and are most adaptive in their governance style. That is not a vision. It is a projection based on every trend currently in motion. Many of these cities accumulated their wealth through colonial histories and sustain it through neocolonial economic arrangements that extract resources, labour, and ecological capacity from precisely the places that will be least equipped to adapt. The cities that are most resilient in 2050 may well be the ones whose resilience was partly built on the vulnerability of others.

But the problem runs deeper than money. We still evaluate success through growth, through GDP and investment attraction. Replacing valuable forest ecosystems with destructive mining projects counts as development. Cities are not free from this logic. Economic gains and profit maximization still take priority over public safety and long-term habitability. Until that changes, resilience will remain something wealthy cities purchase and everyone else improvises.

What I have seen across my own work, in waste governance, in municipal crisis response, in climate adaptation, is that the institutions we build to manage urban life do not just fail to prevent inequality. They structure it. Disaster response that reaches registered citizens but not displaced populations. Multi-stakeholder partnerships that endure because they serve business interests rather than the communities most exposed to risk. These are not exceptions. They are how the system routinely operates.

What should change? I realize this is not the optimistic closing interviewers typically invite. But the shift that is needed is not technical. It is a shift in what we are willing to confront about who benefits from the current arrangement and whether we have the collective courage to change it. It requires governance systems that stop reproducing inequalities and start redistributing protection, voice, and resources toward the people who have the least of all three. And it requires planners and architects to accept that this is their question too, not just the domain of decision makers, political scientists and economists.

Prof. Dr. Markus Keck (University of Augsburg, Chair of Urban Climate Resilience) approaches the topic from a different angle: through a critical reflection on the academic evolution of the resilience concept itself. Having introduced the term “social resilience” in 2013, he now examines how the concept has increasingly been incorporated into forms of governance that risk transforming self-organization into a moral obligation for communities rather than a responsibility of public institutions. Drawing on Lucius Burckhardt’s proposition that “design is invisible,” he argues that resilient design should do the opposite: make structures of marginalization and exclusion visible rather than conceal them.

1. Urban resilience is widely discussed but interpreted in different ways. How do you define resilience in your work, and how has your perspective evolved through research and/or practice?

From the perspective of those most affected, urban resilience is about how largely marginalized households and groups cope, recover and adapt in the face of crises. This was my initial understanding of “social resilience”, a term I coined (Keck & Sakdapolrak, 2013). However, later in my studies, I learned that, from a critical bird's-eye perspective, urban resilience is also a new form of governmentality which tends to subordinate communities and municipalities to expert-led managerial frameworks, while making self-organization a moral imperative.

If we really want to build resilient cities, we need to stop making resilience policies work to foster an investable environment (governmentality) and start making them work to protect and enhance people’s lives, especially those of vulnerable people (social resilience)!

2. What are the key obstacles when translating resilience concepts into concrete urban projects, policies, or spatial interventions?

In Germany, translating resilience into concrete measures entails several challenges. Firstly, a major challenge stems from the limited financial resources granted to municipalities by states and the federal government. Secondly, a silo mentality still prevails within German bureaucracies, hindering collaboration between departments — particularly with regard to risk management, civil defense and urban planning. Thirdly, Germany still thinks in terms of projects when it comes to urban resilience. Project-based funding favors short-term solutions, a lack of institutionalization and experimental pilots rather than systemic change.

3. Beyond technical solutions and regulations, what unique contribution can architectural and urban design make to strengthening resilient cities?

In my opinion, architects should familiarize themselves with the history of the plot or area on which they are designing. They must also understand the social structure of the immediate environment and of the city or settlement as a whole. Taking the New Urban Agenda (UN-Habitat) vision at face value, architects should embrace the principle of the commons (Allmende) when designing inclusive and convivial neighborhoods for solidary cities.

4. Resilience is not only environmental but also social. How can planning and design foster social cohesion, inclusivity, and adaptability in times of uncertainty?

When thinking of India, I would suggest gaining a proper understanding of the socio-spatial and socio-political realities on the ground before designing anything. Urbanization in India is driven by the informality of the state/municipality. Therefore, any planning project will be part of this system. Architects and designers need to address this to avoid becoming accomplices to a system that works against the vision of just, solidarity-based and convivial cities. Why do riverfront development projects have to resemble bourgeois environmenta-lism, prioritizing the political ecology of the rich over the political ecology of the poor? Why not incorporate 'slums' into a colorful riverfront development project?

5. Have recent global crises significantly influenced your approach to urban planning and development? If so, what lasting lessons should the profession take forward?

Clearly, the recent crises have altered my perspective on urban resilience. Within the G7 process, discussions about climate resilience have been overshadowed by more urgent concerns such as geopolitical risk management, civil defense, and military resilience. In my view, we cannot ignore these new challenges as they will not disappear soon. If you want to plan future-proof cities, you should follow an “all hazards” approach and consider how civil defense and climate resilience can be integrated, rather than viewed as opposing targets.

6. What skills and competencies should future architects and urban planners develop to address the challenges of climate change, resource scarcity, and urban transformation?

The Swiss design theorist Lucius Burckhardt (1925-2003) coined the phrase, “Design is invisible”. With this statement, he sought to shift the focus from the purely aesthetic, visible product to the functional impact of design. According to Burckhardt, design is at its best when it functions so seamlessly that it no longer draws attention to itself. Even though I can understand Burckhardt’s statement and agree with it in parts of my everyday experience, I would nevertheless like to disagree with him in the context of the discussion about the resilient city. In this context, the following should apply instead: “Design is about making things visible”! For marginalization, poverty, exclusion, and violence do not simply disappear by pushing these elements aside. What is needed is a healing, restorative approach that focuses on the very social structures responsible for the processes just mentioned. In my view, that is the true essence of resilience design!

7. What do you believe will characterize resilient cities in 2050, and what structural or cultural shifts are necessary to achieve that vision?

The Swiss design theorist Lucius Burckhardt (1925-2003) coined the phrase, “Design is invisible”. With this statement, he sought to shift the focus from the purely aesthetic, visible product to the functional impact of design. According to Burckhardt, design is at its best when it functions so seamlessly that it no longer draws attention to itself. This phrase clearly resembles Hiedegger's philosophy of the “broken hammer”. Since object-oriented ontology is also built upon Heidergger's philosophy of the “broken hammer”, let me ask you: Would you agree with with Burckhardt or would you rather re-phrase the phrase of him?

Burckhardt’s “invisible design” is essentially the aesthetic application of Heidegger’s ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) state. When a chair is perfectly designed, you don’t “see” a chair; you simply “sit.” The object vanishes into its utility. However, if we look at this through the lens of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)—specifically the work of Graham Harman—Burckhardt’s statement feels like a half-truth. You’re right to spot the “broken hammer” here. In Heidegger’s Being and Time, the hammer only becomes present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit)—meaning we actually notice it as a distinct object with properties—when it breaks. Burckhardt's Goal: Keep the hammer “broken-proof” so it stays invisible; The Design Paradox: If a design is truly invisible, the designer has succeeded in making the user forget the object even exists. The OOO Critique: Why “Invisible” Might Be the Wrong Word

While I agree with Burckhardt’s functionalist sentiment, an OOO perspective suggests a slight rephrase is necessary. In OOO, objects are withdrawn. They aren't just invisible because they work well; they are fundamentally inaccessible in their entirety, regardless of whether they are working or broken. When Burckhardt says design is “invisible,” he is focusing on the human experience of the object. OOO reminds us that the object has a life and a reality that has nothing to do with us.If I were to rephrase Burckhardt to satisfy both design theory and OOO, I would say: “Design is the mediation of withdrawal.”

Why this rephrase? First, it acknowledges the “hidden” nature: Like Burckhardt, it admits that we don't see the “guts” of the design when it's working. Second, it respects the object: “Invisible” implies the object has disappeared. “Withdrawn” (the OOO term) implies the object is still there, powerful and autonomous, but we are only interacting with a specific “sensual” profile of it. Third, the Designer’s Role: The designer isn't just making things disappear; they are deciding which parts of an object’s reality are accessible to the user and which parts remain tucked away in the shadows. The Verdict – I agree with Burckhardt’s intent—to stop designers from making “loud,” useless objects. But I would argue that “invisible” design is actually a bit dangerous. If we make design too invisible, we lose our connection to the material world. We stop understanding how things work, leading to a “black box” society where we are helpless when the “invisible” eventually breaks.

Christoph Elsässer (West 8 urban design & landscape architecture b.v., Rotterdam) represents another perspective—one grounded in decades of built projects and professional practice. His interview focuses on the realities of implementing resilience-oriented urban design: planning not only for the coming decades but for centuries ahead, and navigating the slow processes of negotiation with municipalities, stakeholders, and private developers that often determine whether ambitious concepts can move beyond the drawing board.

1. Urban resilience is widely discussed but interpreted in different ways. How do you define resilience in your work, and how has your perspective evolved through research and/or practice?

Resilience is one of the core pillars of our work. We aren't designing for the coming decades but the coming centuries. Structures we are defining now, also have to serve the needs of future generations. During the years the perception of a long-term robustness of designs has grown.

2. What are the key obstacles when translating resilience concepts into concrete urban projects, policies, or spatial interventions?

It's not the designer only who tries to implement resilience in a plan. The tight collaboration with clients such as city governments and private developers is indispensable necessary. Also, financial feasibilities and political willing are strongly influencing the implementation of spatial interventions.

3. Beyond technical solutions and regulations, what unique contribution can architectural and urban design make to strengthening resilient cities?

We are evolving into a colorful, diverse society and are facing climate change. Our built environment must respond to both: it must be flexible enough to accommodate diversity and future needs, and buildings must be resilient in order to reduce our impact on the climate. Furthermore, architecture and urban planning aim to put people at the center; technology should merely be a means of supporting this goal.

4. Effective resilience strategies require cooperation across disciplines and sectors. Based on your experience, what models of collaboration between academia, practice, governance, and civil society are most promising?

Securing funding for a collaborative project is crucial to the successful implementation of resilience strategies, as the development of neighborhoods takes a considerable amount of time. Consequently, the financial capacity to sustain a planning team is the most important factor for the success of such a collaboration. A development project can easily take up to 20 years from conception to completion. Funding must be secured for the entire duration of this period.

5. What do you believe will characterize resilient cities in 2050, and what structural or cultural shifts are necessary to achieve that vision?

The goals for resilient cities in 2050 are unlikely to differ significantly from the issues we are discussing today. However, as climate change and other global challenges are unpredictable, we must devise robust plans that focus on the landscape and a diverse society. At the same time, these plans must be flexible enough to respond to new influences, so that development does not fail halfway through implementation.

Mechthild von Puttkamer (Terrabiota Landscape Architects and Urban Planners GmbH, Starnberg) brings a perspective shaped by mediation, communication, and public engagement. Reflecting on three decades of practice—from the emergence of global environmental awareness, the ozone crisis, and the first IPCC report in 1990 to current climate challenges—she describes a field in which scientific knowledge often advances faster than the willingness of clients, institutions, and societies to act upon it. For her, communicating resilience requires not only expertise but also persistence, creativity, and the ability to inspire.

1. Urban resilience is widely discussed but interpreted in different ways. How do you define resilience in your work, and how has your perspective evolved through research and/or practice?

In my work, I understand resilience as a holistic approach that considers all actors involved, the different systems at play, and the interdependencies between them. When I started studying, environmental crises such as the ozone hole and forest decline were already major topics. The first IPCC report in 1990 clearly warned about the consequences of continued CO₂ emissions, yet progress has been slower than expected. In recent years, climate change and adaptation have gained more attention, supported by scientific research, social movements such as Fridays for Future, and changing political priorities. Landscape architecture, which became highly mineralized in the 1990s, has also shifted back toward ecological thinking. At the same time, I increasingly notice a gap between the knowledge we bring as professionals and the understanding of clients, decision-makers, and users. Therefore, we need simple, convincing arguments and must communicate these topics with enthusiasm and optimism.

2. What are the main obstacles in translating resilience concepts into concrete urban projects, policies, or spatial interventions?

One major challenge is that ecological issues are often considered only at the end of planning processes. Urban development involves complex spatial, social, and economic requirements that are not always easy to communicate. People naturally tend to focus on the present, while planning requires imagining future conditions. Talking about negative future scenarios often leads to being perceived as pessimistic, and climate-related measures are increasingly politicized. Adaptation and prevention also require investments today, while the costs of disasters are often accepted only after they occur. We need to make the long-term benefits of resilient planning much more visible.

3. Have recent global crises significantly influenced your approach to urban planning and development? If so, what lasting lessons should the profession take from them?

Yes. Looking back at 30 years of professional practice, I see a significant transformation in urban planning, at least in Europe. The more people experience the impacts of climate change directly, the more these issues become priorities. The floods in the Ahr Valley, for example, have increased awareness of natural water flows and flood management in planning. Unfortunately, it often takes a disaster before change happens. As planners, we should use our knowledge proactively and think ahead. We cannot predict everything, but we must remember that what we design today may only be realized ten years later. Therefore, long-term and holistic thinking is essential.

4. Which skills and competencies should future architects and urban planners develop to address climate change, resource scarcity, and urban transformation?

Future planners need the ability to think in complex systems and understand the future as part of today’s decisions. They need enthusiasm for interdisciplinary collaboration: being experts in their own field while also recognizing when other disciplines need to be involved. This requires openness, dialogue, and the courage to work across boundaries. Climate adaptation must go hand in hand with climate mitigation, including reducing CO₂ emissions and conserving resources. Above all, planners need strong communication skills to explain and advocate for solutions. Our ideas are often perceived as restrictions, so we need to demonstrate with inspiring examples that sustainable development can create better places to live.

5. What will characterize resilient cities in 2050, and what structural or cultural changes are needed to achieve this vision?

By 2050, the global population is expected to approach 11 billion people, with an increasing majority living in cities. At the same time, cities will face rising temperatures and more frequent extreme weather events. The pressure on urban systems will be enormous—spatially, environmentally, and socially. Cities that prepare for these challenges can remain attractive and livable. However, resilience cannot only mean adaptation. Climate mitigation must play a much stronger role. Without reducing emissions, cities will no longer have enough capacity to adapt to increasing pressures and competing demands for space. We need political systems at national and global levels that take climate change seriously and recognize our responsibility toward the planet. A sustainable relationship with nature should be seen as a shared value: humans must understand nature as a partner, not as a resource to exploit. We still have a long way to go culturally and structurally.