This project is the result of the research for the graduation project of Project HUMAM; Hub for Urban Mobility for the Amsterdam Metropolitan area. The project focuses on the future demands of the Amsterdam Municipality in which they expect an increase of 70.000 new households and 50.000 new working areas over the coming 30 - 40 years in Havenstad area. More people are moving from their village to the city or the suburbs, creating a full expanse of the city boundary and less space to accommodate the residents. However, the Municipality acknowledge the fact that this growth also brings difficulty in the accommodation of the expected households. Amsterdam Havenstad has been chosen to be the new urban core for these developments. The area is well-known for its extensive industries and enterprises, making this area rich and profound for the economic heart of the city, which will make its shift towards a mixed-use region for industry and residents. To accommodate these amount of people, the Municipality sees new opportunities in technological innovations and sees the use of a car as a potential problem in terms of land-use and health. Therefore, project HUMAM will analyse and research the Sloterdijk area, to accommodate a transportation hub for the city. This hub enables the district to ban the car and put the focus on Automated Vehicles and shared possibilities. To keep Sloterdijk connected, the hub will perform as the catalyst for the area. This project tries to posit a vision of a future where anyone in the city can go wherever they want, whenever they want to, and accordingly, a place where we share our spaces in total connectivity with our mechanic neighbours. Project HUMAM will be the landmark of innovation and offers solutions to this growing problem.

The report starts in Chapter 1 with an introduction to the Sponge City Programme (SCP) in China and the project area which is the ErQi International Business District in Wuhan. In this chapter, the problem statement, our collaboration with Arcadis and our project goals are also introduced. Chapter 2 delves into our methodology to tackle the brief. Starting from how we shaped our interdisciplinary approach, we explain our approach towards the project and our decision to include resiliency with the Sponge City concept as an objective. We continue by providing background information on ErQi area in Chapter 3 to get an overall understanding of the planned urban design and potential urban flooding. To provide a thorough analysis and recommendations for the selection process of adaptation measures to mitigate excess rainfall as part of the SCP in the context of ErQi area, an assessment of the Wuhan Sponge City criteria, a stakeholder analysis complemented by a spatial assessment was performed and described in Chapter 4. Setting the context allows understanding the complexity of the system and its constraints in the implementation of the SCP. Thus, we decided to first focus on the implementation of low-impact development (LID) measures using a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) presented in Chapter 4 and then developed an integrated and resilient system design later in the report. As the Sponge City is not sufficient to cope with high precipitation events (Arcadis, 2017), the project combines sponge city and resiliency principles in an integrated system approach.
The guiding resilient design principles of the Sponge City are further described and explained in Chapter 5 and applied in the opportunistic design process in Chapter 6, bridging the research with the designs. Here the designs of the MengQiao Bridge and the Water Road are presented along with their proposed effects on the urban flooding. Chapter 7 serves to assess the designs through the criteria of the integrated sponge city to improve flood resilience. The following chapter serves to share our conclusions on the challenges for implementing a functioning of the SCP that includes the concept of resilience. It also touches upon the difficulty of implementing the value-based design in a profit-based context. The final chapter is composed of five parts, all of which is our recommendations. It starts with our recommendations to improve the Sponge City criteria to make them more effective in reaching the goals of the programme. Then we give our recommendations for the selection process of LID followed by what we have learned of this interdisciplinary approach. That includes what we consider to be crucial to achieving a genuinely interdisciplinary process resulting in an integrated design. The final part of the chapter is dedicated to what we believe should be researched further. We believe a more in-depth assessment of the designs with the Sponge City criteria and input of the stakeholders is required for a final design. Further, the working definitions and approach of the Wuhan city government need to be considered, and an approach that assesses the necessary maintenance protocols is necessary.