Urban Rivers and Resilience Thinking in the Face of Flood Disturbance, The Resilience Planning of the Kan River

Resilience, a new approach to environmental disturbances, has attracted the attention of landscape architects in recent decades. This approach is an appropriate alternative to rigorous engineering approaches and has been extensively used in different landscape projects around the world.The Kan river, the main river of Tehran, is still vulnerable to flood disturbance even though its infrastructures have been improved to control the flood. Rigid and one-dimensional approaches to flood control not only has failed to control flooding but also destroyed the ecological and structural infrastructures of rivers. This paper seeks to investigate how the environmental resilience approach can affect flood management in urban rivers. It mainly focuses on the role of resilience thinking and its potential contribution to the regularization of the Kan river in response to flood disturbance. To this purpose, in this paper, four successful projects in the world were examined to extract the principles and strategies of resilience in the face of the river flooding. Planning and strategies were proposed based on these principles and guidelines for this chaotic river. Time, trial, threshold, learning, and diversity as the principles and cut and fill as well as wetlands as the strategies were extracted from the projects to address the disturbance of the river. As a variety of disciplines play a key role in flood control, the necessity for multidisciplinary integrated approach and planning is much felt. The integration of principles and strategies, planning, and organization of the landscape lead to a comprehensive and multidisciplinary program. In other words, the Kan river planning management requires a multidisciplinary approach which addresses landscape and ecological issues. This comprehensive and multidisciplinary planning based on flood resilience can serve as a model for other urban rivers that are vulnerable to flood disturbance.