Netherlands: Inside Rotterdam’s quest to green 10 million square feet of rooftops
The Rooftop Days festival is part of a campaign to use more of Rotterdam’s flat roofs to add greenery, harvest solar power, and collect rainwater.
By Elissaveta M. Brandon
Fast Company
May 27, 2022
Excerpt:
There’s a saying in Dutch, “Je kan het dak op,” which, translated literally, means “you can go up on the roof.” But what it really means is “get lost.”
The origins of the saying are difficult to trace, but for Paul van Roosmalen, it probably has to do with the fact that no one thinks of a flat, grey roof as somewhere you want to be. Van Roosmalen works in the Department of Sustainability for the municipality of Rotterdam, where he leads a program called Multifunctional Rooftops. And, in many ways, his job is to change that preconception.
If you think of a traditional Dutch house, you probably picture a gabled roof, but Rotterdam is different. Much of the city center was razed during World War II, leaving behind a flattened landscape rife for reinvention. Today, Rotterdam has over 650,000 inhabitants and more than 150 million square feet of flat roofs. Most of them are unused, but in the past few years, this has been changing.
This weekend, Rotterdam is opening 20 of its rooftops to the public. Think of it like an open house, but for roofs. Known as the Rotterdam Rooftop Days, the festival aims to highlight the untapped potential of rooftops by organizing an extensive program of tours, concerts, exhibitions, and dinners.
