AEGIS – reactive urban flood protection
Creator:
Jona Rammler
Curator's Note
Updated: October 2022
AEGIS is an innovative solution to a past, current and future problem. It is a technological flood protection that can adapt to different water levels. Even though it is part of the urban infrastructure it only emerges when needed.
Since this project was conceived in 2014 the number of floods grew, as forecasted, but the approaches and efforts to making coastal cities resilient still are either green infrastructures (such as wetlands, bioshields, buffer zones, green roofing, street side swales, etc.) or gray infrastructures (e.g. dams and seawalls) which are not adaptive.
An adaptive infrastructure like AEGIS should be part of a city planners toolkit, like green and gray infrastructures. What if cities had the ability to guide water, that surpasses a seawall, to wetlands while transforming streets into waterways?
We cannot stop climate change from happening, even if we were to be very ambitious about climate protection starting tomorrow.
Abstract
Climate change is unstoppable. Sea levels are rising. And yet, at the same time, coastal city populations are rapidly increasing. Today, the coastal city is the habitat growing most rapidly among all urban populations. These two factors have the biggest impact on what coastal cities will look like in the future. How can these cities become resilient against floods? What might urban living with water look like?
AEGIS is an environment-reactive flood protection system, which is implemented in the city‘s infrastructure. Its goal is to make the city resilient against floods and enable its citizens mobility during high water levels.
The design problem of this master thesis is the changing context: the coastal city. There is a need for an adaptation of the city to the future requirements. High water levels threaten urban inhabitants and their habitat.
Life in the coastal city with floods is becoming the norm. We need to develop design solutions for this.
„Resilience is the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self- organization, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change.“
The growing population of humans is pushing back the natural environment. Future cities need to find a way of how to be better integrated into nature. The term “resilience“ describes the goal to make cities resistant to climate-related threats through specific measures.
The central aim of this project is to protect the city against water damage and enable mobility for the daily life during floods. One criterion is for instance that there is no need for a water protection the system when there is no flood. Therefore, the system is part of the street and draws the picture of a life in a city where floods and high water levels are part of the daily life.
AEGIS is an underground system and is only visible in case of a flood. It consists of two parts: the water barrier module and a transition module for boats.