City Investment and Partnership Opportunities: Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Multifunctional Roofscape Rotterdam Centre

Rotterdam was the first municipality in the Netherlands to successfully implement green roofs, currently counting more than 250.000 sq. meters of green roofs, with the goal of increasing this to 1,000,000 sq. meters across the city centre. As part of its climate adaptation strategy, Rotterdam received a C40 Cities Award for its work in this area. Techniques for greening roofs have developed and can now effectively cater to multiuse roofs including urban farming, solar panels, water storage and even sports facilities. These spaces can contribute enormously to the sustainability and viability of the city centre, addressing challenges related to water, greening, renewable energy, air quality, and lack of space. A program for large-scale green roofs retrofit offers a distinct added value to Rotterdammers by encouraging a combination of integrated solutions (such as solar panels above a green roof) for a higher return. In practice, this means more water storage, increased permeability of the urban area, energy generation, greater ecological value, food production, cleaner air, health and social cohesion amongst other benefits. Finally, the program has the potential to be revolutionary for the city centre and can be deployed at short notice without major issues.

Investment/Partnership Opportunity: The program is currently in a preparatory phase. One specific roof is part of EU-Life-funding. The City seeks examples of best practices in other cities and additional funding.

Resilient Districts: Feijenoord City Including New City Bridge

Development on the district scale is forthcoming in Rotterdam: Feijenoord City. This urban (re)development is linked to the building of the so-called 3rd city bridge. Connecting neighbourhoods between the north and south bank, the bridge is poised to become a symbol of resilience in the city. The expected social resilience will contribute to the city’s goal: Rotterdam, a Balanced Society. One of the challenges is to further develop and apply the resilience scan on this project, which is new regarding scale and timing. Important stakeholders are public and private companies and the University for Applied Sciences.

Investment/Partnership Opportunity: The initiative would benefit from a combination of deeper resilience thinking on the project, as well as stakeholder mapping and community centered design. Targeted funding could come from Structural Funds (NSRF 2014–2020, Municipal and Regional Funds, EU funded programmes).

Contact:
Arnoud Molenaar, Chief Resilience Officer | a.molenaar@Rotterdam.nl