After waking up and getting ready for the day, we took a metro headed for Rotterdam. In the city, we were given a tour of some of its sustainable aspects. Some of the sustainable aspects of the city we saw while exploring were public facilities such as basketball courts that could be used as water basins and wormeries, bins that use worms to turn food waste into compost. One really cool sustainable aspect of the city I saw was the choice to repurpose the area under old train tracks into a strip of buildings. This reflects sustainable urban design as you are incorporating preexisting infrastructure to build new buildings, saving new materials for future projects, and preventing the infrastructure’s destruction by heavy machinery (which traditionally utilizes fossil fuels). Something that also relates to sustainability on the tour I saw was a gas station exclusively for electric vehicles. It had me thinking about how, in the Netherlands, more people drive electric vehicles than in the United States; thus, having stations like that are necessary. This had me then considering at what level drivers in the United States would need to adopt electric vehicles to see stations like that in the states, 10%, 20%, 30%, etc.?
Once the tour was completed, we took a bus to Waternoodmuseum, a museum which pays its respects to the 1953 flood in the Netherlands. There we meet our tour guide, a founder and one of the survivors of the flood, who taught us about the flood itself, its aftermath, and the future of flood prevention (ex. The Delta Works). The experience not only reinforced some of the information I learned about the Delta Works the day before but also gave me new insight into the events that led up to and after the 1953 flood. After saying our goodbyes to the guide and a quick hailstorm, we took the bus back to the hotel. Overall, today offered me both insight into applications of sustainability in city life and an improved understanding of a significant event in Dutch history.
