Han Meyer

Rotterdam: A City and a Mainport on the Edge of a Delta

Within Europe, Rotterdam is by far the largest port and supplier of fossil energy sources. City and port have a “sandwich” position in the low lands between a sea with a rising level and rivers with increasing peak discharges. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that sustainability forms a matter of life or death for Rotterdam as a Delta City. The question of a sustainable Rotterdam or not is related to the following issues: (1) water management (preventing hazards; the restoration of the estuary; salinization); (2) urban renewal; (3) the spatial and climate footprint of the ever-growing port and (4) energy transition. Currently all these issues are dealt with largely independently of one another. For a genuinely sustainable future, linkages have to be made between strategies, projects and actors.

Delta urbanism: planning and design in urbanized deltas – comparing the Dutch delta with the Mississippi River delta

Planning and design approaches in urbanized deltas are in a process of fundamental reconsideration. For a new approach, it is fruitful to consider the urbanized delta area as a complex, layered system, based upon complex-systems theories and layer-based methods. With this theoretical point of view, we can distinguish several development periods of urbanized deltas like the Mississippi River delta and the Dutch Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta. In the current period, both deltas find themselves in a transition between the regime of the recent past and the new regime. In this transition process, the planning and design of the infrastructural system will be crucial. In order to find the most effective approach to infrastructure as a condition for urban development and water management, it will be important to develop a method of research by design, based upon strong collaboration between different disciplines such as urban design and planning, hydraulic engineering, landscape architecture, and environmental sciences.

A Rationalized Delta

During the twentieth century spatial planning in the Netherlands obtained the status of being a worldwide benchmark. Two phenomena became especially famous: the Randstad Holland, as an example of a poly-nuclear metropolis, and the Delta works, as a masterpiece of hydraulic engineering. Both physical structures are strongly related to each other: the Delta Works (together with the Afsluitdijk and IJsselmeerpolders) contributed strongly to a rational organization of urbanization and industrialization of the western part of the Netherlands. Besides, the strong emphasis on major engineering works at the national scale stimulated a culture of state-organized top-down planning. Both concepts, Randstad and Delta Works, were strongly related to the concept of the Netherlands as a nation-state and to the rise of the Welfare State.

Designing for Different Dynamics: The Search for a New Practice of Planning and Design in the Dutch Delta

The Dutch delta is an example of a complex urban landscape, the result of different processes with different time frames. Such an urban landscape can be regarded as the product of mutual relationships between natural processes and human interventions. Since the 1970s, landscape architects and urban designers have tried to conceptualize these mutual relations between different processes using a ‘layer approach ’—where substrate , infrastructures and land-use patterns are regarded as different urban layers with different speeds of change—based on the theories and methods of Braudel (La Mediterranee: La part du milieu. Colin, Paris, 1966) and McHarg (Design with Nature. Natural History Press, New York, 1969). The Dutch river and delta landscapes are an important laboratory for experimenting with new approaches which try to take into account the different dynamics of the different layers. The development of a ‘framework model,’ applied in the Dutch Room for the River program, a comprehensive spatial planning approach, is an initial attempt to create new relationships between the layers at the regional scale. It creates a balance between a clearly defined and designed framework, composed by natural elements and manmade infrastructures, and the possibility for local adaptations of urban and agricultural land use. However, as a long-term developmental strategy the framework should be adaptable to possible changes. The paper describes the attempt to develop a design approach for an adaptive framework in the Rotterdam region. Adaptive frameworks create the conditions for short-term societal changes as well as for long-term adaptation to possible changes of the natural substratum .