Assistant professor Fadi Masoud has recently published two pieces of writing on a topic that is central to his research: zoning for climate adaptation and resilience.

The first of the two, which Masoud co-authored with David Vega-Barachowitz, director of urban design at WXY, is a book chapter titled "Flux Zoning: From End-State Planning to Zoning for Uncertainty." It appears in A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation, from Island Press*. The chapter details ways cities and regions might adapt zoning into a tool for long-term coastal and environmental adaptation.

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Masoud's writing also appears in the latest issue of Landscapes | Paysages, the official magazine of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects. In an article he co-wrote with research associate Isaac Seah, he argues that municipal zoning would be better able to respond to changing climate conditions if urban planners were empowered to take into account data on environmental factors that affect urban land, including topology, geology, and water permeability. As a case study, the article presents some of Masoud's efforts, with the Platform for Resilient Urbanism at the Daniels Faculty's Centre for Landscape Research, to use new technologies to model geophysical and environmental risk factors in flood-prone Broward County, Florida.

Masoud and Seah write:

In many places, these normative zoning codes have rendered themselves extraneous in truly dealing with the impacts of climate change. For example, some regions continue to be zoned for typical future residential land use, knowing they are under severe risk of future flooding. We simply ask: why does land use zoning continue to remain static when we know that landscapes are dynamic?

Read the full article in Landscapes | Paysages

*(Use the code ADAPT at checkout for a 20 per cent discount on the book.)

Top image: Generative codes for an expanded littoral gradient. Image from the Centre for Landscape Research.