Rooftop Villages
Rooftop villages (the English translation of ‘dakdorpen’) are a new step in urban development that combines sustainable housing with creating a more ecological intelligent city. While contributing to the solution of several urban challenges exciting new places are created for habitation.
Urban challenges
Modern cities face many challenges. Take for example the large amount of impervious area, causing problems like flooding sewers and cities that tend to be much warmer than their surrounding rural land. Another challenge is an increasing demand for mobility, which in its turn leads to air pollution, or the lack of housing in the city center, while an increasing amount of people have the desire to live in cities. These kinds of problems need to be addressed to make sure our ever growing cities will remain attractive places to live the coming decades.
Green roofs
A solution to tackle the environmental challenges already exist; green roofs. Green roofs clean the air, cool buildings and cities, provide ecological habitats and buffer water. Unfortunately, implementation is not wide spread due to high costs and a lack of a direct financial gains, especially for existing buildings.
Rooftop villages
Rooftop Villages (or Dakdorpen in dutch) will solve this lack in financial revenue. By greening roofs and at the same time reinforcing them, we can make them habitable with compact houses. This way we can change the business case of roof redevelopments, and make green roofs financially attractive. By doing so, the water retainability of the city increases, the city will warm up less, the biodiversity and habitats for species increases, polluted air will be cleaned, and affordable housing will be provided. All the while getting a good return on the investment.
Our mission
We have several milestones to be achieved. The first one will be the realization of a pilot project in Rotterdam as a proof of concept and for attracting the attention needed to scale things up. This scaling up is our second objective, to get a large impact we need to (re)develop hundreds of roofs. And we will do that in a way that combines a healthy profit with sustainable ambitions. These goals are mutually dependent, when nature in the city flourishes, so do we. Are you ready to inhabit the rooftops with us?
Find out more
If you want to get in touch, you can contact us here. If you want to see more images of our work, check out this page. And finally, if you want to follow our progress check out our instagram.
