Building with Nature

This course is on integration of the natural system in engineering thinking and design, called Building with Nature. You will learn to analyse and design with natural processes and the natural system and everything that lives in it. Lectures will focus on providing you with the basic skills to do a system analysis by improving your understanding of the interaction between abiotic and biotic processes and Building with Nature principles.

The central element in this course is a case study of the Oosterschelde. Students work in groups to disentangle abiotic and biotic processes in this area and to describe functioning of the system on different scales. This analysis constitutes the basis to evaluate the problem at hand from the perspective of different stakeholders and to formulate objectives to serve these different stakeholders. Interventions to meet the objectives will be formulated and evaluated using a multicriteria analysis. For a single intervention a more detailed design will be made in an individual assignment. For this design simple wave-vegetation models will be used. The work will be captured in a report.

Guest lectures will inform students on implemented Building with Nature practices and bring students in contact with companies that work with Building with Nature. Problem analysis, objective setting and intervention evaluation will be done in groups. The modelling exercise is an individual assignment. During tutorials the students can work on the assignments. A field visit of a day to the Oosterschelde area is part of the course and during the field visit a stakeholder game will be played. Reports will be delivered and graded individually.