Purpose Whilst resilience has been a critical academic topic and worldwide issue for many decades, not all territories have been equally investigated. In addition, the role of architecture in contributing to community resilience against climate change has been overlooked. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to shed light on what is the current state of the art of community resilience in rural towns and what type of architectural strategies has been recognised for facilitating resilience. Design/methodology/approach The study has combined literature review and architectural project review. Findings There are four major findings to this research that could impact policy making and decision making if implemented at different institutional levels. First, there is an evident increased academic interest on this topic. Second, there is a need for a greater consultation among the different stakeholders that participate in the planning and implementation of the future-focused adaptation strategies. Third, the potential for the architectural discipline to play an active role in facilitating and ameliorating community resilience has been identified. Fourth, there is a need to integrate placed-based and identity-related factors/components into a community’s framework for resilience amelioration. Research limitations/implications One limitation is the fact that the literature review investigated only English literature. Also, the review relied mostly on online findings and, for the good-practice review, did not take into consideration direct local knowledge, which would have required travelling the globe and all of Australia in order to collect feedback. Thus, some projects and literature might have been missed. Originality/value The value of this research is to compare findings from literature review (scholar activities) and best practices (architectural activities). In combining the two aspects, it merges a gap in research.

This research thesis aims to mobilise Queensland Government funding destined to the construction of public cyclone shelters to address the higher goal of enhancing community resilience of inland Far North Queensland (FNQ) communities threatened by cyclonic events.The thesis comprises a written portion and a design proposal for a cyclone-proof community centre in Atherton, ninety kilometres south-west of Cairns, the main city of FNQ. The applied strategy seeks to surpass the limited and mono-functional government solution with a more versatile proposal. The design proposal aspires to activate community socialisation in three disparate conditions. The cyclone-proof community centre will operate: during the disaster as public cyclone shelter; after the disaster as a dedicated place where the community could find a familiar venue to perform social activities that rebound the severed social networks which are considered fundamental components to achieve community full recovery; and outside the disaster scenario as one of the civic-life pivots.Criteria for success are identified through a comparative study of architectural exemplars for disaster relief. Extrapolating from good-practice precedents for post-disaster facilities and with the additional ambition of enhancing resilience in communities threatened by cyclonic events a hybrid civic incubator has been designed for local needs. Analysis of the deficiencies of the Queensland Government cyclone shelters has been used to further inform the proposal. The observed deficiencies are: limited doubling-up functionality of the cyclone shelter which typically serve as sports hall for local state schools; lack of integration with other community functions in enhancing township civic and social liveliness; and the absence of a clear architectural expression. The centrally-located civic incubator plans to bind together Atherton's social life and to provide a public space in a rural township founded on secular planning principles. A pool-theatre; an outdoor volleyball court; a sports hall that doubles as a community cyclone shelter; rooms for the local nonprofit and socially-oriented associations; and a partially roofed venue for the local market; have been considered strategic functions in stirring Atherton resilience.Starting from structural constraints imposed by community-cyclone-shelter requirements, concrete is the main building material. However, taking an opposite approach to the mediocre anti-architectural solutions pursued by the government, the poetics of the béton-brut together with monumental compositional aspect have been embraced and advanced. These two parallel traditions have been presented to contextualise and support the design solution. Taking into account the main characteristics of Atherton and the natural hazardous condition to which is exposed, the monumentality of the cyclone-proof community centre acquires a symbolic dimension for expressing the resilience of the community and its civic pride.The architectural contribution to disaster situatio...

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In 1965, Singapore declared its independence and initiated a process of modernisation aiming to erase any evidence of its colonial past. Thedevelopmentalist orientation of Singapore, as Rem Koolhaas defined it, together with the formula “displace, destroy, replace,” became the theoretical instruments used to implement the urban vision for the future city. Singapore has thus become the contemporary urban laboratory of the Asia Pacific Region and due to its limited area for construction, turned into an experimental epicentre in the field of dense dwelling. A protagonist of this experimentation has been the Israeli/Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, designer of the Integrated resort casino Marina Bay Sands (2010), an exemplary feature of Singapore’s drive for development. This paper focuses on Safdie’s theoretical work, casting light on the ideological shift from his early modern residential project Habitat‘67, built during the Expo in Montreal (Canada) in 1967, to the contemporary residential complex Sky Habitat, completed in 2015 in Singapore. While Habitat’67 represented the manifesto of Safdie’s social utopia, envisaging itself as a prototypical residential component of the future city, Sky Habitat is a private gated community, which targets an upper-class market. And yet, Safdie’s two projects, distant in time and social ideals, display comparable strategies, as the use of similar architectural solutions and the permanence of urban modern utopian principles. These strategies underpin two other projects designed recently by Safdie in China: the Golden Dream Bay in Qinhuangdao (2016) and Chongqing Chaotianmen (design phase), which propose further elaboration of Sky Habitat’s urban principles. This paper will investigate how utopian urban strategies elaborated during the Modern period and advanced and tested in the 1960s and 1970s, have become material of experimentation for new forms of living in the congested 21st century city, evolving the concept of urban density in “the city that could be”.