Three Forms of Resilience Learned From the Safe-to-Flood Landscape of the Upper Mekong Delta

For more than 2,000 years, the people of the Mekong Delta have lived with flood and developed farming practices and urban forms that minimize risk and maximize water benefits by organizing settlements in patterns that are flood tolerant. This chapter is aimed at exploring the possibility of translating the adaptive capacity expressed by this traditional landscape into an operative and spatial geographical knowledge to increase urban flood resilience. Three urban forms have been identified that have fundamental spatial properties for flood resilience and safe-to-flood urban landscapes, namely, isotropy, patchiness and osmosis. These can inform the design and retrofitting of contemporary urban floodplains.