Critical Zones | Transition Seeds 2026 – Fondation Braillard Architectes

The coastline as a space of tension and resilience: rethinking the boundaries between land and sea.

Floods, runoff and rising sea levels are profoundly transforming the ways we inhabit the world. With climate change, water management has become a major issue for spatial planning, revealing the fragility of critical zones where natural dynamics and human activities interact.

The two projects presented at this lecture explore this question in different contexts. The first is located on the Côte Vermeille and proposes an integrated approach to water management, restoring the coastline’s now-broken continuities. The second takes place in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and envisages reversible emergency housing capable of sheltering residents during floods.

Between the Mediterranean and the North Sea, these two research projects address the same question: how can we learn to live with water rather than against it?

Speakers:

Eulalie VIDÉ, architect HMONP, ENSA Versailles

Rotterdam, the port city facing floods
Living with flooding: a new phase of Dutch adaptation

Located at the mouth of the Eurodelta, with almost half of their territory below sea level, the Netherlands are particularly vulnerable to climate change and to increasingly severe river flooding. The many existing defences, dykes, dams and pumping systems, could become inadequate by 2050. How can we continue to inhabit a territory destined to be partially submerged? In Rotterdam, the project seeks a solution for housing climate refugees displaced by floods, while restoring the link between the city and its port, built on raised ground. It thus proposes a new way of inhabiting deltaic territories, by learning to live with water rather than against it.

Joud OLLEIK and Léa LE, state-certified architects (DE), ENSA Paris-Belleville

Critical zone, between vineyards, river and sea
The story of a territory shaped by water on the Côte Vermeille

The project offers a broader reading of the Mediterranean coastline, considering the entire catchment area as an ecological continuum. On the Côte Vermeille, the vineyard slopes, the small coastal rivers and the marine environments form an interdependent system structured by the movement of water. Floods, runoff, urban discharges and agricultural drainage link upstream and downstream, natural environments and human activities. This interdependence makes it necessary to move beyond the opposition between exploited land and protected habitats. The project envisages the coastline as a critical zone where agricultural practices, urban uses, ecological conservation and risk management can coexist, provided that the continuities between water flows, landscape forms and patterns of use are restored. The objective is to establish integrated water management based on existing structures: wastewater treatment plants, agouilles (irrigation channels), agricultural terraces and abandoned vineyards. Treated water is redirected by gravity towards the cultivated terraces, while rainwater is captured as close as possible to where it falls by modest, low-impact structures. The Baillaury valley serves as a demonstration site. There, the project develops a sequence of multifunctional basins capable of slowing floods, filtering water, recharging aquifers and accommodating public and agricultural uses. This system becomes an active layer of the territory. At every scale, water is conceived not as a resource to be controlled, but as a common thread. It makes it possible to reconnect separated environments, to give new value to forgotten spaces and to bring forth new ways of inhabiting the margins. To make water the subject of design is to propose a territory that does not erase risk, but transforms it into a lever for adaptation and collective reinvention.

Respondent:

Sabine Chardonnet, lecturer and researcher, ENSA Paris-Malaquais

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