Today began with a nice, laid back tour of various sustainble architecture throughout Dakakker, Rotterdam. Our guide showed us a lot of beatiful buildings across the neighborhood, many of which are pictured below, that were all used for various methods of water management. The buildings with the curved windows are actually the edge of a curved roof – the arches leave space for plants on the green roofs above them to root deeper into the ground. This allows them to hold more storm water to help prevent flooding. Whenever there is eventual runoff from the roofs, though, it flows into ground pipes that bring the water into the large “ZOHO” sign to be stored. We got to see a bit of this in action thanks to the rain while we touring, I took a video but I’m not sure if I can attach them here unfortunately.
Moving past that, we learned about a basketball court built for a school that doubles as a reservoir, a neighborhood rebuilt above and along a river after bombing, and future plans for sustainble builds around that neighborhood. The picture with our group on a yellow bridge bellow shows where a community garden used to be. There are plans to rebuild that garden and turn an abandonded train station on the other side of the bridge behind us into a rooftop park. Its always nice to see the myriad of water management methods throughout the Netherlands, but I love getting to see the other methods of sustainability prioritized here too, specifically social sustainability through reinvesting these rundown places into the communitites here.
After our tour of Dakakker, we got to visit the rooftop garden of our tour guide’s office building. The garden is right outside of a rooftop cafe, and is the home to many different fruits, vegetables, and even some small trees as shown in the picture below. There’s also a small chicken coop visible in the back! (The chicken did come out for a little bit, but mostly hid inside from the rain). The garden is able to hold 60k liters of water before any of it spills onto the street, and provides food for the area. I’m not sure if the rooftop cafe uses the food grown here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it does. Getting to visit this garden was like seeing my dream rooftop garden I didn’t even realize I wanted. If there could be a garden like this on every roof in a city, I think it would be extremely beneficial to it by reducing air pollution, reducing the heat island effect created by citites, and provide more locally grown food. I’ve noticed a lot more green roofs throughout the Netherlands, but before this visit I hadn’t considered that may be partially because they’re easier to manage here as opposed to the US because of the more frequent rain.
Right after leaving the green roof, we hoped on bus to visit the Watersnoodmusuem in Ouwerkerk, memorializing the devasting North Sea Flood of 1953 that we learned a bit about yesterday. Learning about the cause of the flood and how deeply impacted all the victims were made me realize just how important the Deltaworks are for the entire country. With the flood being so close to the end of WW2, the two extremely traumatizing events led to this community being irreversibly changed forever. Over a thousand people died, and their stories will stay with me. Until this museum, the community was too hurt to ever talk about the event again, leading to victims being swallowed by their grief alone. Learning about these types of devasting events always make me more motivated to be a better engineer as I continue through college and to do my part to help preserve history where I can. I hope to one day help people with my skills and work to prevent events like these from ever happening again, just like what the Deltaworks do today.
