Invitation for Cities to Nature 3 - Let’s Cool the City

After the success of Cities to Nature 1 (University of Twente) and Cities to Nature 2 (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam)), we are proud to present Cities to nature 3: Let’s cool the city (Delft University of Technology). This year, we focus on business models, the need for data, and citizen science for more green roofs.

🌿 On April 24 2025 we welcome you at The Green Village in Delft. 🌿

📌 You can register here: https://lnkd.in/dJhUvfPN 📌


Why? Dutch cities are increasingly vulnerable to heat stress and energy stress. At the same time, theses cities’ roofs make up huge areas that can be covered with local plants and solar panels, offering advantages such as increased biodiversity, cooling, isolation, and energy generation. To generate solutions we organize a symposium on sustainable green roofs at the Green Village, the place to be for sustainable green innovations in the built environment.

What? In this one-day symposium we alternate plenary presentations with interactive workshops. We present the design of an experimental sustainable green roof that combines local plants (Dakbloemenweide), solar panels (SolarNRG), and circular principles (IKO) at The Green Village. This green roof also functions as a site for data collection in collaboration with Management & Organisation, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, University of Twente, and Delft University of Technology.

For whom? Citizens, policy makers, businesses, entrepreneurs, academics with an interest in green roofs are welcome to come and share their needs and motivations for green roofs.

 

Program

9:30 Coffee and tea

10:00 Welcome

10:10 Plenary session: Green roofs are good for us, people (Rooftop Revolution)

10:30 Plenary session: Green roofs are good for us, nature (Garden Design)

10:45 Interactive session: Brainstorming the benefits of green roofs (Roos Bunskoek)

11:15 Interactive session: Brainstorming the business of green roofs by filling out a business model canvas (Nick Lakenman)

12:00 Lunch

13:00 Experiential session: Walk around The Green Village (SolarNRG, Nophadrain, The Green Village)

14:00 Plenary session: Measuring Green Roofs (Dakbloemenweide, Groofer)

15:00 Experiential session: Citizen science for green roofs (Pulsaqua)

16:00 Drinks and closure

 

📌 You can register here: https://lnkd.in/dJhUvfPN 📌

 

Organisers:

Katinka Quintelier (VU)

Marina Bosman (Dakbloemenweide)

Sean Vrielink (UT)

Karel van den Berghe (TUD)

Elke van der Heijden (HvA)

 

LILa construction January-March 2025

Now that the subsurface work has been completed for the general terrain, the individual experiment sites are being setup. This does require more digging and connecting cables. But first, January started off being too cold for activities, but this luckily didn't last too long. 

In February most activities concerned the construction of the Land2Sea lab.

Land2Sea Lab

The Land2Sea Lab looks into interactions at the land-sea-air interfaces and has three facilities: an open-end wind tunnel in which sand and vegetated soil beds can be placed; an aquatic-vegetation greenhouse with tide simulator; and an outdoor water basin with variable depth and wave paddle. The lab offers controlled environments to study processes that govern dynamics of beach-dune systems, intertidal marshlands and shallow coastal waters.

 

These activities continued into March. There were no significant visible changes to the rest of the terrain.

 

Starting measurements at TU Delft Green Village

Today we started a test at the TU Delft Green Village to measure the performance of a solar panel combined with a green roof with endemic species, vs. solar panels without a green roof. I installed the metergroup's sensors ATMOS 14 and a datalogger to measure air temperature, humidty and air pressure above and below each of the two setups. Here you can see some photos of the installation groups and the sensor setup. Big thanks to the TU Delft Green Village team who helped us out on the spot by creating two pole setups to place sensors just above the solar panels, complete with tiles against blowing over by the wind. I have high confidence these sensors will survive any upcoming storms and wind gusts.

In addition, we have access to data from a weather station on the building, soil moisture and soil temperature sensors from Dakbloemenweide, and infraredsensors for the temperature of the roof itself.  So far, we are getting data to our cloud. Our goal is to measure from April 1st to March 31st next year. We expect that especially in summer the evapotranspiration of the vegetation in the green roof will help reduce the maximum temperatures experienced by the solar panels and that they thereby are closer to their ideal operating temperature of 25 C, and can produce more electricity than the solar panels without a green roof. Especially since this roof is covered by black bitumen, which can quickly heat up dozens of degrees Celsius higher than the air temperature on ground level in shade.

The newsletter from the main organizing implementation partner Dakbloemenweide already reports on this initiative (in Dutch).