Climate change has an enormous impact on our society: heat stress, droughts and flooding can cause a lot a problems. These problems are even more severe in the built environment as the urban design influences the urban climate. Less greenery, more paved surfaces, less urban ventilation an more human activity influence the urban climate in a negative way. This results in higher temperatures and more precipitation in cities compared to rural areas. To cope with the urban climate problems climate mitigation is not sufficient. Therefore it is also important to adapt the urban landscape to the changing climate conditions. Climate adaptation strategies for the built environment are still not sufficiently implemented and therefore this research looks at possible bottlenecks for these strategies in the spatial planning process.
In this research three Dutch post-war neighbourhoods are reviewed as they have seen recent redevelopment of (parts of) the public space. Post-war neighbourhoods are relevant as a lot of infrastructure is in need of replacement, which makes this an opportunity to combine this with the implementation climate adaptation. Post-war neighbourhoods are common throughout Dutch cities and also house relatively large amounts of vulnerable groups of people. The amount of public space in these neighbourhoods gives municipalities a lot of influence on urban design and thus on the amount of climate adaptation.
The research reviewed the spatial planning process of the three cases with twenty interviews with practitioners in the redevelopment projects and through the analysis of project documentation. The three cases are Bernadottelaan (Utrecht), IVORIM (Haarlem) and Kruidenbuurt (Tilburg). Main bottlenecks of climate adaptation are the large investment and maintenance costs and the claim on the limited public space. The goal is to come up with recommendations to improve implementation of climate adaptation in the spatial planning process.
The outcome of the research is that there are six different recommendations related to actor involvement, project finance, project scale and design guidelines. Maintenance parties should be actively involved in the design process instead of only giving advice or testing designs. This would enhance the amount of climate adaptation as measures have to be maintainable. Early contractor involvement is necessary to be able to be more cost efficient and come up with practical design solutions. External parties like housing associations and public utilities should be informed in the early stages of project for them to be able to match the planning. This makes bundling of challenges possible and eliminates some spatial restrictions. Project finance has to be integral as climate adaptation is divided over several departments. With integral financing projects can be bundled and therefore overall be more cost efficient. Projects at neighbourhood scale benefit from the ability to solve different problems at larger scale and form the placement of solutions to other challenges so that climate adaptation measures can be done where they are needed the most. Design guidelines need to be implemented to ensure that ambitions and priorities are rationally translated and balanced in the final design.