Building Resilience from the Community Up: Lessons from Rotterdam's People-Centered Climate Action Strategies

Undeterred by the heavy rain clouds overhead, a group of neighbors gathered around a street tree in Carnisse, a neighborhood in the south of Rotterdam, with shovels and drills and planks of wood. Their mission: to build a planter around the tree to create a garden, where plants and more greenery could take root and grow.  

“The project for this week is greening,” said Karen Welp, a founder and director of Buurtklimaatje, an organization that works with residents to introduce neighborhood-scale climate resilience measures into communities. In Carnisse, she says, Buurtklimaatje has been working with neighbors for around five years. Their process for engaging with communities is intentionally slow and deliberate: They get to know people individually, and grow to understand the needs and dynamics of the neighborhood.  

Over the course of three coffee meetings several years ago with Jannie, a Carnisse resident, Karen learned of her concerns about public spaces and streets in the neighborhood deteriorating due to lack of maintenance and care. She knew what she wanted to do: She wanted to re-introduce vibrant greenery to her street, and she wanted to connect with her neighbors. Buurtklimaatje worked with Jannie to organize a bulb-planting campaign on the street. Since that day, the organization has worked to improve and re-green 27 spaces across the neighborhood.  

Against the scale of climate change’s threats, efforts like Buurtklimaatje’s work in Carnisse may feel small. But think about what they accomplish: They beautify the neighborhood, and, in the process, they create bonds among the people who live there, which is essential for resilience. Swapping out hardscape for greenery helps urban areas absorb excess water from heavy rainfall and manage flood risk—a constant threat in the Netherlands. As the country also deals with increased heat, the added foliage cools the air temperature too. And community-scale efforts like these serve to bring residents into the fight against climate change. They demonstrate how to organize, they educate about the power of urban nature-based solutions, and they show that neighborhoods can change their own circumstances and become more resilient. 

During a four-day Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Exchange that UrbanShift organized for around 20 representatives from cities across Brazil, Argentina, and Costa Rica, UrbanShift visited Carnisse to see firsthand the importance of linking climate resilience with placemaking—an approach to city planning and design that focuses on deep collaboration with residents to understand their needs and co-create spaces that meet them. It’s indisputable that combatting climate change in cities requires high-level action and coordination. But resilience measures are implemented locally, and for them to take root, residents must be brought in and bought in. As part of the P2P Exchange, UrbanShift brought the participants to Placemaking Week Europe, an immersive conference hosted in Rotterdam from September 24-27, to explore the link between urban climate resilience, placemaking, and creating livable neighborhoods for all.  

During Placemaking Week Europe, UrbanShift hosted an interactive workshop to collect inputs for climate resilience projects in UrbanShift cities in Latin America, with a focus on green corridors in Salta, Argentina, waterfront resilience in Belém, Brazil, and pedestrian access and flood management in Tibás, Costa Rica. “We received so many good ideas!” said Maria José Leveratto of Argentina’s Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development. The whole P2P exchange—which spanned a technical workshop hosted at the Global Center on Adaptation with local resilience experts, the Placemaking Week Europe conference, and a visit to the Green Village at TU Delft—was intended to enrich participants’ understanding of how cities can simultaneously address climate change while becoming more equitable, livable, and beautiful. 

By the end of this insightful week, each delegation had developed a customized action plan to integrate the ideas and strategies discussed into their local resilience projects. “These activities from UrbanShift are very important for us,” said Leonardo Madeira Martins, Environmental Coordinator for the Teresina 2030 Agenda. “Every time I return to Teresina from an UrbanShift activity, I come full of ideas to share and test.” From the last P2P Exchange for Latin American cities, in which UrbanShift brought city representatives to Barranquilla to learn about urban nature-based solutions, “we came back with ideas that we are piloting now, like the first rain garden in the city and our afforestation plan,” Madeira Martins said. “Now, from Rotterdam, we learned a lot from local projects and from the university. We plan to take these learnings and implement them in Teresina to continue improving our urban resilience strategies.” While each delegation’s plan is specific to their local context and needs, several core takeaways united them: 

Climate resilience projects can create more livable neighborhoods 

As cities face multiple challenges, from rising inequity to the threat of climate change, “it’s more important than ever to look for projects that combine functions and balance strategies of resilience and community benefit,” said Anne Loes Nillesen, professor of urban design at TU Delft and founding director of Defacto Urbanism. Rotterdam is proof-positive for how cities can successfully tackle multiple goals through creative use of public space and infrastructure. From installing “facade gardens” along the front of buildings that limit flood risk and beautify streets, to its innovative water square that serves as a public gathering space in drier times and a water catchment facility during floods, Rotterdam is full of multi-functional uses.  

During the UrbanShift P2P Exchange and through the interactive tours hosted during Placemaking Week Europe, participants were able to witness these innovations firsthand, and validate and expand on their own approaches to develop multi-purpose projects. For Costa Rica, said Mariana Rojas Fernández of Organization for Tropical Studies, “witnessing the power of small transformations affirmed that we are going in the right direction with our project.” In the greater San José metropolitan region, Tibás, Costa Rica is undertaking a significant effort in the streets around a medical clinic to improve pedestrian safety, calm traffic, and add more options for walking and active mobility. At the same time, the initiative—part of the UrbanShift-supported project in Costa Rica—will remove some asphalt to add trees and nature-based solutions to reduce flooding and improve water drainage during the region's substantial rainfalls. “Costa Rica is car-based, so the idea of puncturing the asphalt is literally groundbreaking, and hopefully it can become a catalytic example,” Rojas Fernández said. 

Similarly, cities in the Amazonian region, like Belém, also face challenges related to water management. As Davina Oliveira from Belém explained: “Living in urban Amazonia and dealing with a city that still faces serious challenges in managing water, such as river pollution, inadequate and insufficient infrastructure, and misinformation among the population about the importance of natural resources, creates challenges.” A standout moment from the exchange, she added, was a technical look at Rotterdam’s urban drainage solutions, which could help inform Belém’s management approach. While the contexts of these two cities are very different, the potential for shared solutions to a common challenge emerged clearly through the exchange. 

Effective resilience strategies link top-down and bottom-up action 

With one-third of the Netherlands below sea level, resilience is not an abstract concept: it is a part of everyday life. “Resilience is becoming an increasing focus of individual residents and the city as a whole,” said Arnoud Molenaar, Rotterdam’s Chief Resilience Officer, during the technical session of the Peer-to-Peer Exchange. While Rotterdam has an overall resilience strategy and city-managed infrastructure in place to cope with water risk, 60% of the city, Molenaar notes, is not publicly managed. As such, “you need both a top-down and a bottom-up approach to resilience that involves homeowners, real estate developers, community members, and businesses,” he said. 

Green roofs are an excellent example. They can be individually installed and managed, but encourage enough of them, and they become a meaningful part of a city’s strategy to combat the urban heat island effect, absorb rainwater during storms, reduce air pollution, and increase biodiversity. Recognizing this, Molenaar said, Rotterdam developed a subsidy program to encourage individual building owners to convert their rooftops to more adaptive uses with solar panels, gardens, or water storage facilities. Ultimately, the city aims to see 10 million square feet of flat roofs converted, amplifying the city’s resilience and expanding usable space for people and nature.  

Residents are powerful agents of change 

The central idea of placemaking is that residents can and should shape the spaces they want to see and use in their neighborhoods. Hans Karssenberg, founder of the Dutch design firm STIPO and a board member of Placemaking Europe, described his moment of realization around this during a session at the conference. When he first started out as a designer, he said, he saw so many top-down public space redesign projects go in, only for the revamped places to go unused.  

Placemaking, instead, enables communities to self-direct what they want to do, and create spaces that meet people’s immediate needs—for safe gathering, for joy, for community activities—while addressing a city’s overarching goals. Rotterdam has taken a creative approach to putting residents in charge of creative placemaking and greening approaches. From a desire to de-pave the city and create more opportunities for nature-based solutions to flooding, Rotterdam launched a competition with Amsterdam over paving tile removal, or “tile-tipping,” that’s now spread across the Netherlands. Residents are incentivized to remove tiles and add in community gardens or trees, like the people of Carnisse have done, and the element of competition heightens people’s enthusiasm to participate and collectively transform their spaces. “Institutionalizing resilience can be done in different ways, and it can be fun,” Molenaar said.  

It can also be empowering. In Teresina, said Caterina Ferrero of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation of Brazil (MCTI) during the UrbanShift session in Placemaking Week Europe, “the most important lesson we have learned is that communities are the most important part of resilience. We can help people see that nature-based solutions can help with the challenges, but they have to lead.” For example, through the Transformative Urban Coalitions initiative, community members in Residencial Edgar Gayoso, a housing complex of over 450 socioeconomically vulnerable families, joined together through the initiative’s Urban Lab to decide on an approach to adding gardens and green space to their district. The initiative will tackle food insecurity and reduce the impacts of heat and pollution, but first and foremost, it offers community members safe and enjoyable spaces to gather and to care for.  

“Communities are the ones who keep up the project after the government is involved. If people don’t feel like they’re part of what we’re doing, they won’t take part in it, they won’t make it last,” Rojas Fernández from Tibas added. “It takes time and patience, and you need to really get to know people, but you will have a successful story to tell over time.”  

Learning from other cities has also helped to validate and enhance local initiatives. For participants like Miriam Miranda, program manager for Costa Rica’s Global Environment Facility-funded Transition to a Green Urban Economy (TEVU) program, the exchange “reinforced that we are on the right path with the interventions we are implementing in Costa Rica, especially around nature-based solutions and climate resilience at community scale.'  

Looking forward, participants expressed a desire to continue working on disaster risk management solutions, exchanging strategic alliances, and accessing more tools and data. They stressed the importance of systematizing the experiences from the week with real examples to improve communication and build trust in international cooperation. Further technical assistance, especially around nature-based solutions for flood management, and new collaborations will be crucial for the future success of these efforts. 

“Through these activities, we’ve seen that together, we can work more efficiently and effectively,” said David Peixoto of MCTI. “The exchange of knowledge and ideas is what keeps us moving forward."  

UrbanShift Peer-to-Peer Exchanges aim to build capacity of city and national government representatives from UrbanShift cities and beyond by promoting knowledge exchange and connecting people from different cities with common challenges. Twenty-two participants from San José, Costa Rica; Brasília, Belém, Florianópolis, Teresina, Niterói, Porto Alegre, Brazil; and Buenos Aires, Salta, Mar del Plata, Argentina participated in the P2P Exchange in Rotterdam.