This seventh session addressed an ongoing debate in urban planning between prioritizing the quantity of housing versus ensuring the quality of housing. It focused on how urban planning can enhance climate resilience by integrating sustainability and climate-adaptive strategies into housing development.
Key themes from Prachi Rampuria
Prachi Rampuria argues that balancing housing quantity with quality in a time of housing and climate crisis requires an eco-responsive and systems-based approach to settlement design rather than a narrow focus on individual buildings.
She frames the UK’s housing crisis as simultaneously a numbers and a quality problem, insisting that delivering large volumes of homes must go hand-in-hand with creating resilient, inclusive neighborhoods that support recreation, health and well-being while responding to environmental and social emergencies. This leads her to advocate for integrated, multiscale design thinking that connects buildings, plots, streets, and natural infrastructure, drawing conceptually on Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics to keep human needs within ecological limits.
Using her practice’s Heath Park project near Liverpool as a main example, Rampuria explains how an eco-responsive approach starts from the “deep layers” of settlementlandform, water systems, and green infrastructure, before addressing buildings and surface-level development. At Heath Park, a former single-tenant chemical headquarters turned business park is reimagined as a mixed-use, zero‑carbon neighborhood, requiring a shift of investment and planning attention from short-term building products to long-lived natural systems and strategic mobility networks that form a resilient base for housing delivery.
The Heath Park masterplan combines around 600 homes (with a substantial affordable share), significant office and studio space, and more than six hectares of green space, all phased carefully to allow existing businesses to continue operating and existing communities to grow alongside new residents.
Rampuria concludes with three main lessons for reconciling quantity and quality in eco-responsive housing.
1. A development brief is crucial: without explicit quality and sustainability ambitions embedded in the brief, design teams face an uphill struggle to exceed conventional benchmarks, especially where political will is weak or suburban contexts are steeped in car-dependent, “not in my backyard” attitudes.
2. Project management must structured design processes that bring the right expertise in at the right time and deliberately sequence questions and decisions across disciplines and scales.
3. The power of storytelling alongside evidence: while data and metrics are necessary, many stakeholders understand and hold their beliefs through narratives.
Key themes from Abdi Mehvar
Abdi Mehvar’s key message is that climate‑adaptive planning for the Dutch delta must adress with how the financial sector currently understands and manages climate risks in real estate and infrastructure.
He presents findings from the RED&BLUE program, a multi‑year, transdisciplinary initiative with Dutch universities, governments and market actors that aims to co‑develop integrated climate risk management strategies for low‑lying urban areas, including use cases in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
Abdi analysed public reports from Dutch banks, insurers and pension funds to see how they conceptualise climate risks, what hazards and scales they focus on, what they see as barriers and opportunities, and which institutional “logics” guide their decisions.
Abdi shows how Dutch financial institutions typically balance attention between transition risks (linked to decarbonisation) and physical risks (such as floods, droughts and heatwaves), but that some actors lean more strongly to one side. Flooding, drought, heatwaves, storms and other extreme weather emerge as the most frequently discussed hazards, while land subsidence, sea‑level rise, health impacts and biodiversity loss are mentioned but less central, even though they are critical for long‑term resilience in the delta.
He also finds that most measures and analyses are concentrated at the building/ asset scale and the national scale (e.g. retrofitting, flood stress tests, national delta strategies), whereas area and neighbourhood scales – crucial for spatial planning and climate‑adaptive urbanism – remain comparatively underdeveloped.
Across institutions, internal governance and public regulators (government, central bank, water boards) are all seen as responsible for managing climate risk, with property owners also recognized but generally framed as less central actors, raising questions about who should act on which hazard and at which spatial level.
Abdi therefore calls for closer dialogue between planners, designers, policymakers and financial institutions, so that climate‑adaptive planning is aligned with how capital is allocated and risks are perceived, and so that the costs and benefits of resilience measures are shared more fairly across society.
Prachi Rampuria
Prachi co-founded EcoResponsive Environments in 2019, an award-winning practice creating health- and wellbeing-focused places through systems-based design. With over ten years’ UK experience, she has led multidisciplinary teams on masterplans, planning applications, and public realm projects. Trained in India under B.V. Doshi and holding an MA (Distinction) in Urban Design from Oxford Brookes, she received the Urban Design Prize. Her firm’s Heath Park masterplan was recognised by the UK Government and won major national awards. Co-author of EcoResponsive Environments (Routledge), she also teaches at Oxford Brookes and serves on several Design Review Panels.
Abdi Mehvar
Abdi is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (Urban Development Management Group) at TU Delft. Holding MSc and PhD degrees in Coastal Engineering from the Netherlands, he has years of professional experience in leading and carrying out collaborative and cross-disciplinary research projects with a focus on climate risks and resilience in Europe and South-East Asia. Abdi will present his work with the Area Development Knowledge Foundation (SKG) and his involvement in the RED&BLUE project, a five-year transdisciplinary research initiative developing integrated real estate and infrastructure climate risk strategies for the Dutch delta.