Wonderful Resilience: Creating hope for an uncertain future

Resilience needs consent to reach scale. Bold, audacious, and daring design can be a powerful tool to motivate stakeholders to engage in building resilience and ensure their commitment and participation in long-term adaptation. When we think of resilience, we think of pragmatism, and restraint. However, we believe that “beauty and wonder” are crucial ingredients of every successful urban adaptation strategy, as they catalyse the will to change. Using six principles, MVRDV endeavours to transform vulnerabilities into drivers for optimistic, robust and daring designs, challenging communities, investors, developers, and stakeholders to co-create an adaptive urban future that works in concert with nature. The Case Study illustrates several lessons from the comparison of two projects. These inform our practice, and commitment to creating scalable solutions for resilient environments that foster consensus through surprising and intriguing solutions using “wonder” to motivate adaptation towards a sustainable future.