**3. Conclusion**

The new district also stands out for the wide range of architectural solutions it proposes for foundation supports. Old buildings that have been kept have deep hard stone foundations that have already withstood a number of flood episodes, and new collective buildings are raised off the ground and protected from rises in water levels by long "floodable" parking lots that form a water retaining channel. Detached houses are also raised off the ground on piles which enable water to pass through without restriction. In this way, we can imagine the future movement of any water liable to invade the district by observing the meeting points between facades and ground: the protective dike on the boundaries to the north and west, the water retaining channel in the centre and the vertical piles to the south. It is certainly simpler to understand this by walking through the district during flood periods, but which is undoubtedly easier to do outside flood periods. Inhabitants of the town can cross the area by two parallel ways, one alongside the public square to the north, and the other skirting the detached homes to the south. Pedestrians and residents in the district have pathways between homes and the garden. Each of these ways offers a different perspective of the whole project, and they all entwine with the watercourse in different ways depending on the frequency of rainfalls [28]. To the south, the route crosses buildings on piles and runs along islands with large trees heralding the proximity of the river. The results of any rise in water levels are easy to imagine. The situation is

**Figure 5.** Romorantin, a study of hydraulic transparency during a 100-year flood in "Matra" district (the flow of water

through the district marked in red). Source EDL - Eric Daniel Lacombe.

12 Natural Hazards - Risk Assessment and Vulnerability Reduction

Although the Ile de France region has managed to create structures for limiting the most frequent floods and droughts over the last 60 years, it is clear that large structures show their limitations in the face of less frequent events. As such, the 2016 flood was a remarkable indicator of dysfunctions, whereas the climatic event was not very intense in itself. Various options exist for coping with more significant events, and creating an additional storage facility in the area of La Bassée is part of this objective. If the project is realised, storage capacity will be increased, but by themselves, these works will not be capable of protecting downstream areas from flood risks. The French version of the 2007 Flood Directive [13] gives more prominence to local flood risk management strategies and resilience dynamics are intensifying. The Ile de France region has developed a strategy [20] on a scale corresponding to the size of the high-risk area. The strategy has eight targets, one of which (Target 6) deals specifically with "Resilient Neighbourhood Design." Moreover, since December 2014, Paris has been part of the global network of resilient cities4 , an initiative launched by the Rockefeller Foundation and it has also set up a multi-hazard resilience strategy [29].

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The case study presented in this chapter deals with a sector subject to slow floods and proves the existence of a capacity to manage exceptional events at local levels. From a historical point of view, this is all the more interesting because the possibility exists, very credible in view of the great floods of 1846, 1856 and 1866 [23], 1910, and so on that most of the major French rivers may be in spate simultaneously and that many large urban centres can be flooded in a matter of weeks. It shows that it is possible to manage floods effectively by means of urban design, even floods that are very significant at local levels, without losing qualities of architecture and urban planning. By means of its local response, Romorantin has illustrated that the examples usually published on resilient neighbourhoods can also be conceived in economically less privileged areas and within the framework of French regulations. Will architects, town planners, and decision-makers know how to take advantage of current evolutions and will this experience to innovate towards urban forms of resilience be capable of meeting all the very significant challenges seen during the 2016 floods?

## **Author details**

Bruno Barroca1,2\*

\*Address all correspondence to: bruno.barroca@univ-mlv.fr

1 National Center for Scientific Research - Research Centre on Technologies, Territories and Societies (LATTS), Marne-la-Vallée, France

2 Paris-Est University –Urban engineering, Environment and Housing (Lab'Urba), Marne-la-Vallée, France

<sup>4</sup> In this network, urban resilience is defined by "the capacity of persons, communities, institutions, companies and systems to survive, adapt themselves and grow, irrespective of the types of chronic tensions and acute crises they may undergo."
