Green roofs are a solution: They absorb water and heat while increasing the city's biodiversity. They can't handle the increasingly heavy downpours, and in the summer months form heat islands. Rotterdam's slapdash postwar reconstruction resulted in 200 million square feet of flat rooftops. “Now, finally, projects are actually happening.” “For the first 15 years of running this office, all we did was feasibility studies,” he says. Cees van der Veeken, the founding partner at landscape architecture studio LOLA, gives me a primer on seven soon-to-be-developed parks to increase the city's livability and climate resilience. A few blocks away, I stop at Het Industriegebouw, a postwar industrial complex that's now mostly home to PR agencies and architecture studios. They hold Zoom calls under the old waterslide, while a farm growing mushrooms from coffee grounds just moved out of the former dressing rooms. A glass-domed riverside water park I used to visit is now called BlueCity-a breeding ground for sustainable start-ups where young entrepreneurs brew beer from rainwater and turn fruit peels into vegan leather. No forlorn lot has been spared from the city's unbridled drive for innovation. Launched late last year, it's the largest floating workspace in the world and when sea levels rise, it won't flood but simply rise with them. It's also the mooring spot for a fully self-sufficient office made entirely out of timber. (The port is currently transforming to provide shore power for the cruise ships that now dock here.) Up until the early 2000s, few would think of visiting, let alone settling down here, but today it's one of the city's most expensive residential areas, with high-rises designed by Norman Foster, Álvaro Siza, and Rotterdam's very own Rem Koolhaas. The rise of affordable air travel made these ships obsolete, and after the last one left for New York, in 1971, the area fell into disrepair. Crossing the Maas River, I reach the Wilhelminakade district, where during the 20th century European workers boarded Holland America Line steamboats for greener pastures in the U.S. Ever since World War II, when much of the city was turned to dust, it has been reinventing itself. De Zure Bom restaurant at Weelde, a complex just outside the city center Chris Schalkxīut Rotterdammers have seen change before.
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