1. Living With Water

New, inter-disciplinary approaches are now being developed and implemented to help to ‘live with water’ rather than fight it.  These approaches require a reappraisal of current urban planning and design practices.  Urban planners, architects, flood managers and a wide range of other related professionals need to find ways of creatively integrating urban planning and flood risk and water cycle management planning.  These sessions aim to achieve a common understanding among countries and across key organizations,practitioners and communities of the basic principles underlying these new approaches.

2. Flood Resilient Systems and Communities

Any program or project aiming to build flood resilience does best to engage locally and begin with the community as an entry point.  These sessions will cover both the technical and social dimensions of flood resilience through exploring pathways to adapting communities and neighborhoods to withstand increasingly frequent flooding.  They aim to address strategies and responses for coping with both the repetitive seasonal and the infrequent extreme floods that affect the urban environment at the community level.

3. Climate Change Adaptation

Climate Change Adaptation will explore amphibious innovation's potential as an adaptive strategy to alleviate climate change.

4. Indigenous Voices

Indigenous Voices will explore themes of environmental stewardship, social justice, the relationship between land and water and alternatives to profit-first development.

5. Vernacular Amphibious Solutions

There is much that modern society can learn from historical examples of strategies that promote community resilience.  For centuries, rural populations living in regions with intermittent flooding have utilized amphibious solutions to protect their lives and property. These sessions will present case studies of historical uses of amphibious construction by native and non-industrialized populations.  They will also include more recent examples of grassroots applications of amphibious construction that have “flown under the radar” of public scrutiny and regulation.

6. Concepts, Typologies and Designs

These sessions will make connections among spatial and temporal scales and disciplines. How can amphibious concepts and technologies play a role in the design of flood-resilient urban landscapes?  How can public space be conceptualized when a large part is water? What typological transitions are needed to adapt to amphibious living?  These sessions will feature innovative concepts, typologies and designs ranging from individual building scale to the scale of neighborhoods or even cities.

7. Case Studies

These sessions will feature projects that have been successfully realized.  They will highlight the necessary steps for implementation and how the process can be replicated.  The intention is to bridge the gap between researchers, professionals, public agencies, private companies and citizens to promote project development, in the process highlighting the technical and social benefits and constraints of amphibious architecture and design.

8. Technology and Construction

In recent years the technical and engineering aspects of amphibious construction are receiving more and more attention, with many researchers and practitioners now working on the topic. Despite this growing interest, the degree of international collaboration remains poor.  Given the different approaches used in different parts of the world, there is great potential to accelerate the development and optimization of amphibious technology and construction through the sharing of lessons.  These sessions will also pay attention to the technical aspects of site preparation including infrastructure systems such as water storage and drainage, road infrastructure, electricity, drinking water and sanitation at the local level.

9. Opportunities for Business

Opportunities for Business will discuss entrepreneurial, financial and logistical dimensions of amphibious construction.

10. Challenges to Implementation

These sessions will deal with the impediments at the regional and national level that inhibit the realization of amphibious construction.  What stands in the way of implementation?  What are the impacts of regulations, codes, zoning, economic factors and cultural resistance to change? What lessons can we learn from the various experiences of negotiating the policies and practices in different countries?

11. Visions for the Future

Climate change and sea level rise are creating a global crisis.  How do we as a world community respond?  Amphibious architecture has huge potential to broaden the range of solutions for safe, sustainable, resilient inhabitation across the globe.  What are innovative ways in which amphibious construction can protect existing communities?  What are new ways of living with water that amphibious design makes possible?  What are the ethical, regulatory and environmental implications that should be considered?  What visions of the future can we imagine?