| Urban floods cannot be managed in isolation at the city scale and responses to build and increase resilience are complicated by interlinked political, socio-economic and environmental changes. However, there are significant opportunities to make buildings and infrastructure more flood resilient through synergistic interventions. Given the pace of climate and other changes and the need to refurbish the existing building stock, there is tremendous challenge to incorporate flexible, adaptable and more flood resilient measures by synergistic inclusion within refurbishment and renovation programmes. This needs to be recognised and become mainstream, so that inclusion of such measures becomes the norm. Failure to do this in this decade will miss vital and unique opportunities to harness a significant fraction of our Western cities against the increasing treat of flooding . This is illustrated in the paper by recent studies in the Netherlands that have mapped urban flood vulnerabilities and identified where these opportunities can best be targeted at the current building stock through refurbishment, renewal and regeneration. In this paper it will be shown that local-scale pioneering is essential in this process to encourage the cultivation of resilience through synergistic interventions. |