Brussels Urban Landscape Biennial 2018 – Rising Waters

Climate change causes an important increase of rainfall rates and more particularly of intense rain events, posing a significant threat to coastal regions and small islands across the surface of our planet. And yet, even in urban areas farther away from these coastal regions, increased precipitations and urban spread also cause a problematic of flood of entire city areas, which occurs more often than before. 

The second edition of the Brussels Urban Landscape Biennial (BULB) reviews the increasingly worrying issue of flooding in urban areas. How to manage the complex evacuation of rainwater in an integrated manner? Can landscape architecture provide an answer to such challenges and how ? What are the limits of the current way of addressing this question? 

Through workshops, learning by doing activities, an exhibition, a day of symposium, curated walks and lectures, the BULB event, which spans two months, tries to sensitize the broad public to the importance of water and its related cycles in the urban landscape. Rather than considering this element as a threat, BULB sees it as a vital and structuring element of this vshaped landscape.