So-called amphibious homes, which can rise up along with floodwater, provide a cost-effective way of protecting the “resilience of existing communities.”

That’s according to the head of the Buoyant Foundation Project, Elizabeth English, who is based in the architecture school at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

She presented her latest field projects as part of the recent UN Disaster Risk Reduction conference in the Americas, which took place in Montreal.

She first began working on the idea of converting or retrofitting existing houses in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated areas of New Orleans and Louisiana, in the United States in 2005.

She told Matthew Wells how the technology works in practice.

Duration: 4’50”