A warm welcome to all of you. We invite you to use this online platform to develop knowledge on how we can take the social context into account and move beyond pure engineering to both build with nature and with people. 

Building with Nature is a comprehensive engineering approach that seeks to enhance the use of natural ecological processes to achieve efficient and sustainable hydraulic infrastructural designs. It strives for a flexible integration of land in water and water in land using interactions and materials present in nature. This course extends your understanding of the trade-offs intrinsic to ecosystem-based design to the social context. 

In the first part of the course we will focus on why move beyond engineering when designing Building with Nature engineering infrastructures. We will not cover whether hydraulic infrastructure should be built or not, nor will we deal with assessing the impact of infrastructure on the natural and social environment. Instead, we will focus on how to take the social context into account in hydraulic infrastructure design. The content covered in the course is described in the syllabus.  

The workload for the course includes short video lectures and reading materials. The course is structured into five course topics, with a first exploratory module in which you can acquire necessary background knowledge – topic 0. Thereafter, the material is made available in the seven modules:

1. Welcome
2. Necessary Background Knowledge
3. Why Beyond Engineering?
4. Stakeholder Analysis and Mapping
5. Cooperative Game Theory
6. Social Design Principles
7. Towards Coalition Building

Good luck with completing the course!

Jill Slinger and the Building with Nature course team