Planning for Climate Uncertainty: Rethinking Principles and Practices in Resilient Design

As climate-related challenges intensify, urban centers emerge as both highly vulnerable and critical arenas for addressing global environmental uncertainty. Cities are increasingly exposed to extreme events such as heatwaves, flooding and droughts, as well as systemic pressures on energy, water, and food systems. These interconnected risks often exceed the capacity of conventional planning tools and governance models, which remain largely grounded in linear forecasting and assumptions of environmental stability. In this context, climate uncertainty should be understood not merely as a limitation of predictive models, but as a structural and persistent condition that reshapes how cities are planned, governed and designed. This chapter argues for a shift from static and defensive notions of resilience toward adaptive and dynamic approaches that explicitly engage with uncertainty as a design driver. Rather than relying on rigid infrastructures or deterministic urban plans, uncertainty is reframed as a catalyst for innovation, institutional learning and socio-ecological transformation. The chapter outlines a theoretical and methodological framework for designing under climate uncertainty, drawing on climate science, systems theory, resilience research and critical urban studies, while critically addressing the limitations of traditional risk-management paradigms. Building on this framework, the chapter proposes six guiding principles for adaptive urban design: anticipatory governance; modular, reversible and decentralized infrastructures; redundancy and diversity in urban form; temporal and adaptive planning; co-design and local knowledge integration; and ecological connectivity supported by regenerative processes. These principles are operationalized through a stripe-based methodology (climate, water and biodiversity stripes) that translates complex data into accessible visual and decision-support tools. Through selected international examples, the chapter demonstrates how cities can operationalize these principles to enhance physical, institutional and social resilience. Ultimately, designing for climate uncertainty is presented as an ethical and political project that enables cities to adapt continuously, reduce vulnerabilities and cultivate a new urban imagination attuned to the challenges of an increasingly volatile planet.