In this article three different responses are taken as the starting point how different types of disruption could be dealt with. These responses—repair, bounce back and grow stronger—are combined with three disruptions (sea level rise, storm surge and heavy rainfall), and then tested in three case studies. The result of the investigation is that anti-fragility (grow stronger) is a preferential approach to create delta landscapes that become stronger under influence of a disruption. Anti-fragility is for this research subdivided in three main characteristics, abundance of networks, adaptivity and counterintuitivity, which are used to analyse the three case study propositions. The type of response, type of disruption, characteristic of anti-fragility and the qualities of the case study area itself determine the design proposition and the outcome. In all cases this approach has led to a stronger and safer landscape. The concept of anti-fragility impacts on the period before a disruption, during and also after the disruptive impact. This gives it a better point of departure in dealing with uncertain or unprecedented hazards and disruptions.
This article discusses the question: where to with sustainable urbanism? It includes a historic review of the concept of sustainable urbanism and reviews of recent literature in the field of eco-cities. Through these reviews, it deliberately interrogates new pathways for sustainable urbanism. The result of this investigation is the insight that there are six design principles that are required to create a sustainable city: a design in which cycles are closed, redundancy is built in, anti-fragility is created, citizens are seen as (design) experts, the landscape is used as the basis, and innovative, rule-breaking designs are developed. These six design principles are then captured in three comprehensive concepts, which together support the design of a sustainable city: the design approach needs to be a (1) society-based; (2) complexity-led, and (3) landscape-driven design approach.
In media audience research we tend to assume that media are engaged with when they are used, however ‘light’ such engagement might be. Once ‘passive media use’ was banned as a reference to media use, being a media audience member became synonymous with being a meaning producer. In audience research however I find that media are not always the object of meaning making in daily life and that media texts can be hardly meaningful. Thinking about media and engagement, there is a threefold challenge in relation to audience research. The coming into being of platform media and hence of new forms of media production on a micro level that come out of and are woven into practices of media use, suggests that we need to redraft the repertoire of terms used in audience research (and maybe start calling it something else). Material and immaterial media production, the unpaid labour on the part of otherwise audience members should for instance be taken into account. Then, secondly, there is the continuing challenge to further develop heuristically strong ways of linking media use and meaning making, and most of all to do justice, thirdly, to those moments and ways in which audiences truly engage with media texts without identifying them with those texts.
