With 670.000 residents, the City of Rotterdam is the second largest city in the Netherlands. Rotterdam as a port city with the largest port of Europe, is facing multiple challenges regarding climate change. Rotterdam is also a delta city; water is coming from all directions, that’s why urban water management, climate adaptation and resilience in general are high on the agenda.
Additonal to climate resilience, the city has a target to build 50.000 new houses, whilst in the middle of a huge energy transition. Because of limited space ànd climate change, specifically sea level rise, Rotterdam took the initiative to stimulate and facilitate floating urban development. Such as the Floating Paviljon and the floating Office. These innovations are important to raise awareness and create new knowledge for scaling. Not only for R’dam, but also for other delta cities in the world. That’s exactly why Rotterdam is participating in the Floating Future program; the develop knowledge about scaling opportunities regarding floating urban development.
Rotterdam is known throughout the world as a city that shows vision, courage, and perseverance; as a strong, assertive, and resilient city. In order to maintain this level of resilience in the future, we will factor in the opportunities and risks of new developments. Resilience is key to remain an attractive ànd adaptive delta city for citizens and businesses to live, work and recreate. Therefore, Rotterdam will do all that is within its power over the next few years to enhance the city’s resilience – to make absolutely sure that we are ready for the 21st century.
In this context Rotterdam Municipality has announced a new initiative which seeks to map out the possibilities for floating development in the city. This contains the development of a so called Water Atlas. An inventory is made of the possibilities and impossibilities of the rivers and lakes. This initiative offers enormous possibility and offers an important next step towards larger-scale sustainable floating developments. This research proposal also strongly corresponds to our current Resilience Strategy and will be addressed in our follow up version of the resilience strategy focusing on 2021-2026. It is also aligned with the ambitions of Rotterdam for floating urban development. We are therefore very interested in knowledge development in the field of governance, technology and ecology for floating developments. The developed new knowledge would enable us to enrich our policies in the field of resilience and urban development, scale-up floating developments which contributes to our journey to become a climate resilient city by 2030.
