Today we first visited DakAkker, a rooftop garden in downtown Rotterdam. This is one of the largest rooftop gardens in the Netherlands and an exemplary leader in sustainable agriculture innovation. Our tour guide gave us a history of the garden, and we were all able to go up and visit it. Something that stood out to me upon seeing the garden was the wide variety of agriculture, from herbs, to root vegetables, to bees, to chickens. It was eye opening to see urban sustainability up close, like how a space as common as the rooftop of an office building can be transformed into a lush green ecosystem. In addition to being a futuristic farming prototype, DakAkker is also being used as a test site for rainwater storage. The guide showed us a 3d model of the rooftop surface layers and how they are designed to temporarily store water runoff that can then be absorbed by the plants. In addition to our visit to the rooftop garden, we also received a sustainable architecture focused tour of the surrounding area. A common theme was water management and flood control, driven by a combination of Rotterdam’s predisposition to flooding as well as increasing weather severity due to climate change. 

In between site visits, we visited a rock climbing cafe. This was a normal coffee cafe except for the fact that it had a large rockwall in the middle of it. I thought this really reflected the Dutch concept of integrating movement and physical activity into everyday life. I also had a fun time getting to climb!

After, we boarded a bus to visit Watersnoodmuseum, a historical museum in Ouwerk. The museum is dedicated to the catastrophic 1953 North Sea Flood. Something that immediately stood out was the construction of the museum itself, which was composed of 4 massive concrete structures known as caissons, or hollow concrete boxes used to seal dikes. My favorite part of visiting the museum was that we were able to receive a tour from an actual survivor of the 1953 flood. Hearing her personal narrative of the event as a young girl brought another layer of tangible emotion and personal connection to the experience. Something I found fascinating was how the catastrophe was not always a topic of conversation– the Dutch never had a real memorial service for the event till nearly 30 years after it happened. A huge factor in this is that the people of the southwest Netherlands, the area struck by the flood, are very religious and saw the event as a punishment from god. The museum was emotional as it had many accounts of firsthand experiences and artifacts of flood victims. It was also an interesting perspective into a pivotal moment in Dutch flood engineering.