Abstract: The environmental impact of climate change (CC), an increase in stormwater contamination, urban flooding, sea level rise and the urban heat island effect, have become a global issue. Green infrastructure (GI) is increasingly being promoted as a panacea to the environmental deprecation of climate change especially in the urban realm. Cities by their very nature, are very dense and impermeable places with little green space to absorb the expected increase in rainfall, are often located on the littoral and are therefore vulnerable to sea level rise, and the many hard surfaces will acerbate an increase in air temperature. We argue that green infrastructure can be used as a way to build resilience to these effects by changing the current urban form. To achieve this conceptual shift, the city must be seen as being part of a larger landscape. This paper presents a catchment-based methodology to explore how a GI can help ameliorate the environmental effects of climate change. The authors use a speculative case study to demonstrate this method, and show that a reconfigured urban form can prioritise climate change mitigation strategies, without compromising the building programme and real estate return. While the study is located in New Zealand, we believe that the catchment-based approach is applicable to cities in China.