Red&Blue Lab September 2024
Advancing Urban Climate Adaptation: Insights from Practice
Author: Abdi Mehvar
In September 2024, the Red&Blue lab convened another session, this time hosted by Arcadis in Rotterdam. The event provided an excellent opportunity for the exchange of insights, ideas, and expertise between Red&Blue researchers and Arcadis professionals, fostering connections and advancing shared knowledge about urban climate adaptation. This report outlines a short summary of the day’s activities and key discussions.
The day began with showcasing urban climate adaptation projects led by Arcadis, both in Europe and across the globe. Key highlights included a presentation on the ‘Room for the River’ program in the Netherlands, emphasizing the creation of space for water to mitigate flood risks and determining strategic areas for dike reinforcement. As one of the most extensive integrated river and watershed improvement projects, the program exemplifies collaboration among public and private partners, addressing multifaceted challenges such as safety, navigability, water supply, and ecosystem service enhancement through an integrated approach. The Arcadis team also shared insights on their international collaborations, including New York City’s Coastal Resiliency Project and the restoration of the city’s subway system to its pre-Hurricane Sandy condition. Discussions highlighted the crucial role of municipal leadership in ensuring that the technical and regulatory measures designed by private sector partners and consultancies align to provide a uniform level of protection across the city.
These projects offered attendees a closer look at real-world examples of tackling climate challenges through adaptive urban area development. Participants also gained insights into the complexities of decision-making in climate adaptation, particularly when navigating the challenges that arise within urban planning and area development processes. The session underscored the critical role of stakeholder engagement and public-private collaboration, and highlighted the pressing need for more cohesive and integrated strategies to effectively address climate adaptation challenges. Another key theme was the importance of considering different spatial scales—examining how localized interventions such as neighbourhood-level flood protection measures, connect with broader regional strategies to create integrated and impactful adaptation solutions.
Discussions further delved into the concept of spatial quality in sustainable urban development, a key factor exemplified by the ‘Room for the River’ program. Attendees reflected on how thoughtful design, combined with interdisciplinary collaboration, can enhance spatial quality in area development, and generate value for communities. However, the reflections highlighted that this consideration is not often easy to be embedded, for example, in large-scale flood risk management projects where flood protection structures often take precedence as the primary strategy.
The day continued with the second presentation by the Arcadis team, focusing on integrated sustainable urban development, which highlights liveability, affordability, accessibility, and health of cities as the main elements in making cities sustainable for the future. Participants discussed today’s challenges in area development, including scarcity of available lands, building regulations and codes, broad prosperity point of view, social and ecological driven issues, matching opportunities for addressing multifaceted problems, and so on. The discussion outlined several key steps for integrated urban development, which include: (i) understanding the problems and context by involving stakeholders to define scope and objectives; (ii) identifying connections and opportunities by mapping synergies, aligning goals, and prioritizing actions; (iii) designing research and spatial translation; (iv) assessing financial and technical feasibility while evaluating various development scenarios; and (v) formulating a strategy to achieve long-term integrated urban development goals. These steps coupled further with insights from the Motorstraatgebied case study in Rotterdam, a multifunctional urban area housing a hospital, educational institutions, offices, and other facilities.
The discussion was followed by the third presentation from the Arcadis team on a tool designed to create city value by integrating multiple disciplines. Attendees reflected on potential values such as social health and emphasized the importance of having shared interests among stakeholders for the tool to be effectively used in a collective manner. A general consensus emerged among participants regarding the necessity of applying such a tool to real-world cases to provide evidence of its effectiveness in generating value across different scenarios.
