Supporting green urban initiatives in local biodiversity improvement

Abstract

The green pioneers of Rotterdam are actively making the city a greener living environment. Through the infrastructure provided by the municipality of Rotterdam, citizens can apply to take over a green space from the municipality or to introduce green elements to the predominantly grey streets in which they live. They not only improve the neighbourhood experience, but also have the potential to contribute in addressing local climate challenges such as climate adaptation, climate mitigation and the mitigation of biodiversity decline. However, it depends on the interpretation, the actions the creators take, if this potential is utilised. The goal of this project is to create a toolkit that supports the green pioneers of Rotterdam in their actions to improve their contribution in addressing their local climate challenges.

I research the green pioneers of Rotterdam, to figure out how they approach their projects, why they are involved, and what they do exactly. Moreover, I investigate their current contribution to the local climate challenges and how this can be improved. Therefore, I conduct different explorations, including three case studies in which I meet three initiators who are involved in a green initiative in the city. This resulted in the following main insights. 1) the most promising challenge for green pioneers to improve their contribution in, is the mitigation of biodiversity decline. This challenge is therefore chosen as a focus for this project. 2) Most green pioneers want to contribute to biodiversity where they can, but are not always aware when they are able to do so and how. 3) Green pioneers can improve the contribution to biodiversity with their green initiative, by adopting an ecological gardening behaviours.

By analysing the difference between ecological gardening and current behaviours, I arrived at four options in which the design can help improve the contribution of the green pioneers of Rotterdam:

1) By providing green pioneers and the citizens they influence inspiration on possible actions and their ecological effect
2) By stimulating green pioneers to make decisions with a focus on the effects on animals and plants.
3) By broadening the perspective of green pioneers and the citizens they influence by including unfamiliar/unattractive animal- and plant species.
4) By encouraging an interplay-experience between the actions of green pioneers and the input of natural processes.

These four solution spaces lead to the development of a toolkit concept. The toolkit provides inspiration and support to help the green pioneers of Rotterdam to optimize the ‘natural site’ that they created in the city. The toolkit can be incorporated in any approach, initiative type and group structure.