Space for Energy in Rotterdam

^{picture: Frank Hanswijk}

The energy transition is one of the key challenges of the coming decades. One important issue is how the transitions will actually take shape. How the advantages and disadvantages will be distributed is not yet clear. The energy transition will involve more than infrastructure and the most important question may well be: What kind of new urbanity will the energy transition allow us to create?

The IABR–Atelier Rotterdam will turn the opportunity created by the energy transition the city and port face into a driver for inclusive urban development and an engine for other important challenges regarding food, the productive city, living, social equality, and others.
This means the Atelier considers energy transition not only a goal, but also as a lever - a means to work on an attractive future and a resilient and inclusive Rotterdam.

Bospolder - Tussendijken

^{picture: Frank Hanswijk}

The Energy Transition as an Urban Project
The energy transition is a technical challenge, of course, but at the same time it is also a spatial challenge that we have to integrate into a social agenda. After all, the reduction in the consumption of energy and the transition to renewable energy impact every aspect of daily life. From the way people travel to more energy-efficient dwellings and energy-producing neighborhoods. But is there a level playing field for everyone involved, can everyone keep up with the changes or even benefit by them? Energy poverty as a consequence of the energy transition is already imminent, especially in the more vulnerable neighborhoods.
Given the right approach, conversely, the energy transition can contribute to a high-quality, attractive future if it is used as a means to work on a resilient and inclusive Rotterdam in which citizens are enabled to be not only energy consumers, but also energy producers. With this approach, the energy transition helps us to realize various Sustainable Development Goals.

Experiment, Test, Develop
The question the IABR–Atelier Rotterdam raises is about what this new urban quality is that the energy transition will allow us to achieve. What ecological and social added value for the city, its neighborhoods, and every individual citizen will the energy transition be able to generate?
Against the background of the challenge of the energy transition the IABR–Atelier Rotterdam tests new methods for inclusive urban development and generates concrete spatial proposals with the intention of eventually realizing them. In the period between 2017 and 2020, research by design is used for different lines of action and at various scale levels.

At the building level, the Atelier has focused on the development of new building typologies for the energy transition, the results of which were presented at IABR–2018. At the district level the Energy District concept is tested, while Test Site M4H+ highlights integral area development.

The platform of IABR–2018 has mainly been used to present and exchange expertise and knowledge and to actively involve partners and actors (from the city and region as well as beyond) in shared knowledge development.

We are now working on further developing the "energy district"–concept, specifically in the Bospolder-Tussendijken district. In 2019 and 2020 the focus is on advancing a Local Energy Action Plan. The results will be presented at IABR–2020, when Bospolder-Tussendijken itself will become a biennale exhibition. After which –and this is what the two clients, the Municipality of Rotterdam and the IABR, have committed to– these results will be implemented.

The IABR–Atelier Rotterdam, established by IABR in 2013, is a collaboration of the two clients, the IABR and the Municipality of Rotterdam (Department of Urban Planning Department and Resilient Rotterdam). At the Test Site M4H+, the Port of Rotterdam Authority has joined this collaboration.

Energy Transition as Leverage for Socially-Inclusive City Making is, after The Urban Metabolism and The Productive City, the third research project of Atelier Rotterdam.

The Energy Transition as Leverage research process was led by Joachim Declerck (AWB), and, from the spring of 2020, by Eva Pfannes (Ooze). Research by design commissions have been given to Civic, Team1010 (1010au, Mariska Vogel and Ronald Van Der Heijden), PosadMaxwan & Generation.Energy, Energiewijk BoTu (Transformers, Beekhuizen Bindt, Eliza Works and Steps2Inspiration), Architecture Workroom Brussels and OOZE Architects and Urbanists.

Dordrecht is not just a city, it’s also an island. And due to its location in a transition area between the sea and major rivers, the Island of Dordrecht is extremely vulnerable to flooding. Wisely, the city of Dordrecht is always looking to improve the measures that protect it from the water. After all, its water safety strategy has to take into account the unlikely possibility of dikes breaking and the city flooding. As it stands, if there’s a flood the people who are not able to leave the city on time are advised to take refuge in their attics.
But the higher-situated district De Staart, which lies outside the dikes, may provide a better and safer alternative – if it is converted into a large-scale temporary shelter.
What is the best way to set up De Staart to function as a safe haven in the event of flooding? And how can the city use the resources this takes as sensibly as possible? Not just for the exception, but also for other problems Dordrecht needs to solve?

De Staart in Dordrecht

In IABR–Atelier Dordrecht, the IABR and the city of Dordrecht examine ways to use water safety as a leverage for a new and widely supported sustainable urban development strategy. They look for possibilities to turn De Staart into a safe haven in case Dordrecht needs one, as well as a location in which both (part of) the city’s housing challenge is met and truly sustainable urban development is realized in the best possible manner.
The Atelier is led by landscape designer Adriaan Geuze (West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture), who curated the second IABR, The Flood, in 2005. Geuze was born in Dordrecht.

^{werkshop IABR–Atelier Dordrecht}

Vulnerable
Because the island of Dordrecht is vulnerable to flooding, the authorities have been working on the development of a so-called ‘multilayer safety strategy’ for many years. This may also involve evacuation in the event of extreme storms, which can only be predicted a short time in advance. In the worst-case scenario, it is estimated that only 20,000 of Dordrecht’s 120,000 inhabitants will be able to flee the island on time. The people left behind in the flooded area are advised to take refuge on the upper floors of buildings, which the safety strategy calls ‘vertical evacuation’. But it is hard for that many people to survive in the city’s attics for any serious amount of time and evacuating them from the tops of buildings is also relatively complicated.

Evacuation to areas outside the dikes
Fortunately, there is a possible alternative – one that involves better conditions that reduce the risk of casualties – and that is to evacuate people to higher ground outside the dikes. De Staart, the district east of Dordrecht’s historical city center, between the Wantij waterwayand the Beneden-MerwedeRiver, meets these conditions. And because the area is easily accessible from the water, it is ideal for the next step of the evacuation: getting people to safety at other locations in the country. However, this alternative has not yet been sufficiently researched. It is as yet unknown how many people De Staart can accommodate. And people are not eager to evacuate to areas outside the dike, either: intuitively, it feels unsafe – running towards the water rather than away from it.

^{Workshop IABR–Atelier Dordrecht}

Connection with other challenges
Due to its location, De Staart is eminently suitable as a large-scale shelter in the event of flooding. But it’s a complicated area. Half of De Staart is currently residential – a socially vulnerable residential area partly located on a former illegal dump – and the other half is an industrial zone, with many chemical companies. There is a waste incineration plant that supplies heat to the heat network, a water company, a major reservoir and a penitentiary. And this in a unique location, between two rivers, near the historical city center and with national park De Biesbosch just around the corner.
Therefore, anyone that considers the future setup of De Staart cannot but wonder about the future prospects of this unique but complex area. And this is best done against the background of the major housing challenge Dordrecht faces – space for at least 6,000 more homes must be found within the existing city – and the need to create new jobs in manufacturing industry as well as room for all of the interventions needed for the energy transition. Only looking at all of this in conjunction will allow us to get to grips with the real challenge.

Water Safety as Leverage
The IABR–Atelier Dordrecht investigates how to set up De Staart as a safe, self-sufficient shelter to use in the event of imminent flooding, in such a way that the approach can serve as leverage for the initiation of truly sustainable urban development that will help to meet the housing challenge the city faces, that will make room for the next economy after the energy transition, that will ensure good accessibility, and that will reconnect the city of Dordrecht with water and nature.

The IABR–Atelier Dordrecht is a collaboration of the IABR and the city of Dordrecht. The lead designer is Adriaan Geuze ((West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture).
Five distinct research by design commissions have been given to VenhoevenCS, Studio Donna van Milligen Bielke, EGM Architects, West 8 and PosadMaxwan

In the summer of 2018, the climate crisis made itself felt in the Netherlands. Not only by an excess of water, but also by freshwater shortages. To many, this came as a surprise. Our entire delta has been designed to discharge water as quickly and efficiently as possible with an eye to water safety.

^{The dry hot summer of 2018}

^{source: NOS}

Drought in the Delta
We live in a delta where climate change now confronts us with new problems. In 2018, it took a great deal of effort to keep the Dutch water machine up and running, but two more dry summers followed. Some areas have not recovered from the drought, and there is likely to be permanent damage, both to urban and to wildlife and agricultural areas.
For hundreds of years, the Dutch have been making ever smarter arrangements to drain water as quickly and efficiently as possible with an eye to water safety and agricultural productivity. But how to store water in order to be able to use it when we need it is an unexpected quandary. That we, like no other people, know how to handle water is no longer self-evident.
Drought in the Delta is a new challenge that in 2018 prompted the IABR to start an investigation into opportunities and frameworks for the large-scale storage of freshwater, both aboveground and underground. The IABR–Atelier Drought in the Delta was set up and since 2019 its lead designer Marco Vermeulen and his SMV-team mapped the situation and explored possibilities for increasing the delta's water buffering capacity and the opportunities that this would create, also for other transition challenges such as the energy transition, food production and urbanization.

ten potential pilot projects

^{© IABR, Studio Marco Vermeulen}

Building blocks for a new freshwater strategy
The final goal of the IABR–Atelier is to propose concrete building blocks for a new freshwater strategy for 2050, and to identify possible pilot projects. The Atelier wants to design a stimulating imagination of the future, but it is at least as important that local or regional governments will be able to use the outcomes of the research to work on their own challenges.

The results of the Atelier are presented in the exhibition DOWN TO EARTH: DROUGHT IN THE DELTA

The IABR–Atelier Drought in the Delta is a study by the IABR that is being conducted by Studio Marco Vermeulen under the direction of Marco Vermeulen.

Drought in the Delta is part of our agenda Water as Leverage, in addition to Energy Transition as Leverage a common thread in the IABR–DOWN TO EARTH program in 2020 and 2021.

IABR initiates and produces the IABR–Ateliers in the Netherlands as a lead partner of the Dutch National Government within the framework of the ARO, the Action Agenda for Spatial Design 2017–2020 of the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations.

The East Flanders Region comprises a network of cities and municipalities around Ghent. Expectations are that by 2050, the population of the area will have grown by 15 to 25 percent – an extra 100,000 to 160,000 people. To accommodate this growth the area needs more dwellings, work spaces and facilities.

^{Image: Architecture Workroom}

The Province of East Flanders wants to use its space in a more intelligent and versatile way to realize a climate-friendly and high-quality living environment by 2050. Both the Province of East Flanders and the IABR subscribe to the need to go beyond the ‘experiment’ and really focus on operationalization and actual change. Therefore, the Atelier will examine and test on site how population growth can create opportunities for the sustainable spatial development of the East Flanders Region. How can the demographic growth of the region be seen as an opportunity, as a lever for development, and used to shape the necessary transitions in the field of open space, accessibility, economy and energy?

East Flemish Core Region

^{picture: IABR–Atelier OVK}

The IABR–Atelier East Flanders Core Region is a collaboration of the IABR and the Province of East Flanders (BE). Its Lead Designer is Joachim Declerck (Architecture Workroom Brussels)