RoofScape - A tool for rooftop activation strategies
High above the city sits another, emerging landscape. Our rooftops have immense potential to deliver a sustainable and exciting future. We need affordable housing, social spaces, mobility networks, and renewable energy!
RoofScape is a partnership of the City of Rotterdam and design firms MVRDV and Superworld. It is centred on an open-source software - a design and knowledge-sharing tool to envision the transformation of the rooftops.
Can we collectively imagine a RoofScape for everyone?
National
Netherlands
Municipality of Rotterdam
Municipality of Amsersfoort
Municipality of Den Bosch
Municipality of Zwolle
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): MVRDV b.v. Type of organisation: For-profit company First name of representative: Leo Last name of representative: Stuckardt Gender: Male Nationality: Germany Function: Senior Project Leader Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Achterklooster 7 Town: Rotterdam Postal code: 3011RA Country: Netherlands Direct Tel:+31 10 477 2860 E-mail:leostuckardt@mvrdv.com Website:https://www.mvrdv.com/
Name of the organisation(s): Superworld v.o.f. Type of organisation: For-profit company First name of representative: Thomas Last name of representative: Krall Gender: Male Nationality: Austria Function: Founding Partner Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Delftsestraat 9 Town: Rotterdam Postal code: 3013 AB Country: Netherlands Direct Tel:+43 664 4777255 E-mail:thomas@superworld.nl Website:https://superworld.nl/
RoofScape is an open partnership initiated by the municipality of Rotterdam alongside architecture and urban design firms MVRDV and Superworld. At the centre of the collaboration is the creation of a transparent and open-source design and knowledge sharing tool. Data and expertise from the public and private sectors are combined, educating and helping users to envision the transformation of the city’s rooftops.
Take Rotterdam as an example, with over 18 square kilometres of mostly unused rooftop space in the city. How much potential does this represent above the cityscape? Which additional programmes does a city need? And how can we negotiate the complex web of owners, steering their interests towards a common goal of a sustainable and resilient future city?
By approaching all of these questions, RoofScape is part of a larger interdisciplinary effort to intensify the city. The software builds on Rotterdam’s existing rooftop standards, such as colour-codes according to certain functions. Combining a wide range of datasets, it suggests appropriate uses for each building based on the city’s digital twin and data such as building function, age, energy label, heritage status, flood risk, and more.
RoofScape thus provides a data-based tool to create a bridge between speculative ideas and real-world possibilities. Aimed at professionals and citizens alike, RoofScape is intended to be detailed and informative enough to assist policymakers and urban planners, while also being so simple to use that individual citizens can play around to see what uses might emerge on their building and in their neighbourhood.
As a collaborative initiative, RoofScape allows all parties to radically rethink existing planning processes. How can we reinvent operations in the public and private sectors? What opportunities do the digitalisation of planning processes and rapidly expanding digital city twins create?
How can we collectively imagine a RoofScape by and for everyone?
Rooftop Intensification
Urban Policy
Pedagogical Tooling
Digital Twin
Design Scenarios
More intensive usage of existing rooftop spaces will have a strong impact across a wide range of topics under the sustainability umbrella. Structures with a high capacity for additional loads could support additional housing, offices, or other programmes, reducing a city’s need to sprawl outwards as it grows. Roofs with a lower structural capacity might still be used for distributed renewable energy production via solar and wind farms. Roofs can serve as rainwater buffers to reduce stormwater loads and flooding risks, while strategic use of green roofs can reduce the urban heat island effect and have tangible ecological benefits by establishing new microclimates and biodiverse habitats. A higher quality living environment sparked by new social, cultural, leisure, and community spaces that increase physical and mental health can lead to noticeable benefits in the realm of social sustainability.
Issues of ownership, structural capacity, governance, and technical possibility create obstacles to achieving these sustainable benefits. RoofScape exemplifies how urban data can be utilised to demystify and bypass these obstacles. The proposed, systematic approach to rooftop development can significantly contribute to social, economic and environmental sustainability at both the micro and the macro level.
By applying data-driven analysis and design thinking to the question of rooftops it enables smart governance in the earliest stage of development - the design of public policy. It uses simulations, scenarios, and simple visualisations to mediate between stakeholders, helping to build the consensus necessary for incremental sustainable adaptation of cities.
It is great to be on rooftops: wonderful views, daylight, air quality, protection from urban noise and traffic; rooftops hold an undeniable attraction for people from all backgrounds. We want to maximise access for everyone - a common RoofScape. This vision is not new to Rotterdam, but deeply embedded in its culture. In the last few years, new typologies and programmes have been prototyped here to make this beautiful layer of the city more accessible to its people. The Rotterdam Rooftop Walk (2022) and the Stairs to Kriterion (2016) designed by MVRDV and the impact of the annual Rotterdam Rooftop Days festival (2014-present) contribute to bringing people and rooftops closer together.
RoofScape contributes by visualising what benefits a rich landscape of rooftop activations could bring to the city, not only in terms of sustainable impact, but also in the quality for people. From public spaces and leisure activities to a new layer of homes on top of the existing city, there are manifold experiences for people that are envisioned and facilitated by RoofScape.
As a tool made for learning and communicating knowledge, RoofScape is designed as a simple and clear interface between data and humans. Showing the potential of the roofscape in an easily graspable, inclusive way was the main goal in the experience design of the tool - making it easy to use for the whole chain of development, from officials writing policy, to spatial planners, community workshops, and individual citizens. It can be explored on all levels of expertise, always allowing the rooftop student to go deeper into the tool, change its underlying calculation models, and compare results of its outcomes. It is a holistically open, playful, and accessible tool for knowledge transfer, and the reconnection of people with this almost-forgotten resource above them.
Inclusivity is a core focus of the RoofScape project. The flexible methodology together with the interactive application promote easy accessibility, collaboration, and mediation of stakeholder goals.
The RoofScape approach augments planning processes, which are traditionally sequential and closed, allowing collaborative models that include various experts and other stakeholders - from architects and engineers to developers, homeowners, and the general public. It can be used as a tool to create and communicate collective urban visions to the public before they become reality, thereby increasing transparency and trust.
The open-source nature and simple user interface of the digital tool maximises the accessibility of information and data to the general public, allowing citizens to see and act on the potential of their private rooftops. This encourages the formation of community groups to exchange knowledge on legal, economic, and technical challenges in the development and construction of rooftops. This increase in public awareness of planning processes, opportunities, and potential impacts educates the public, allowing them to make more meaningful contributions while stimulating individual action.
Furthermore, the flexibility of the methodology used to create the software allows for adaptation to different contexts and areas of expertise by integrating new metrics and parameters as necessary.
Civil society has benefited from large-scale activations of rooftops in Rotterdam before. In the 1970s, local housing corporations tackled the housing crisis of the time by systematically “topping-up” their existing housing stock, creating thousands of affordable and much-needed homes in the city.
In response to a similarly urgent housing crisis and the need for urban adaptation to climate change today, RoofScape aims to contribute to rooftop activations of comparable proportions. It does so by providing people, politicians and planners with data and information about how to activate the rooftop landscape. Bringing greenery into the city, creating new homes, generating renewable energy, and mitigating extreme weather events will make Rotterdam more livable and enjoyable for everybody.
Once a mature version of the software is implemented, citizens as well as experts will be able to use it to become informed about the potentials of rooftops on various scales, from their homes, to their neighbourhoods, and their cities. The software is designed for high-level use within minutes by everyone. It takes a laptop and a look into the report published with it to start exploring the vision of Rotterdam’s activated rooftops.
To date, the initial version of the tool has been displayed at the Stadsmaker Congress Rotterdam, the Smart City Conference in Barcelona, and workshops at various Dutch municipalities. Meanwhile the in-depth report and digital tool itself have been widely published and are completely open for the public to use, providing ample opportunity for testing by anyone interested in the initiative.
RoofScape is part of a larger ongoing movement for rooftop activation in Rotterdam and the Netherlands. A wide range of public and private stakeholders have recognised the vast potential of roofs for making cities more sustainable and inclusive, and are moving this agenda forward.
Local NGOs and NPOs like Dakdokters, Rooftop Revolution, and Dakdorpen have the ambition to make roofs more green, accessible, and delightful for citizens. RoofScape is connected to their missions and their expertise was utilised during the development of the tool. Furthermore, we can now facilitate their missions with data-driven knowledge about the capacities and potentials of the rooftop landscape. The tool also acts as a natural complement to the 2021 Rooftop Catalogue developed by the municipality of Rotterdam, MVRDV, and the Rotterdam Rooftop Days festival, which shows a rich collection of ways to intensify rooftops.
On a national scale, RoofScape connects to initiatives such as the Dutch National Roof Plan (Nationale Dakenplan) and has also received input and intentions of cooperation from other Dutch cities such as Amersfoort, Den Bosch, and Zwolle. An expansion of RoofScape into other Dutch municipalities is under development and will build upon the insights found within the first phase in Rotterdam. This scale-up and the direct link to the Dutch housing crisis will bring rooftop expertise to a broader audience of policy makers, planners, and citizens.
But RoofScape is by no means restricted to the specifics of the Netherlands. Since the initiative was displayed at the Smart City Expo World Congress 2022 in Barcelona, a number of cities outside of the Netherlands have shown interest to bring RoofScape to their cities. This interest and future collaborations with international stakeholders shows how a locally developed, digital tool like RoofScape has the potential to expand knowledge sharing and impact on a European and even global scale.
RoofScape is a cross-disciplinary project initiated by MVRDV, Superworld, and the municipality of Rotterdam. It is designed in an intense collaboration between public and private stakeholders as well as experts in the fields of structural engineering, sustainability and finance. Throughout its development, a wide variety of people were consulted through meetings, presentations, workshops, and casual discussions. Special input was also received from officials at the Dutch cities of Amsterdam, Zwolle, Amersfoort, and Den Bosch to ensure that the tool could be applied in other cities through open standards and open data principles.
The contributors can be roughly divided into three categories: the project team, internal contributors, and external contributors. The project team, comprising members of the initiating parties, was mainly made up of architects, urbanists, and urban planners. Internal contributors refers to experts from institutions that were not part of the project team, but contributed through regular feedback - a list that included experts on sustainability, structural engineering, biodiversity, computation, digital models, housing, and rooftops.
External contributors were the multiple stakeholders who encountered the project at various public events. This group includes designers, politicians, developers, activists, workers at non-profit organisations, and interested members of the public. In future development, the goal will be to expand this group with a special focus on public participation.
The spatial potential of rooftops is frequently neglected in the field of urban planning and design. When this potential has been addressed, most initiatives tackle their development through singular, exemplary pilot projects, a strategy that does not scale due to the wide variation of conditions and requirements on different rooftops.
RoofScape proposes a comprehensive methodology to deal with rooftop development on a systemic level via a data-driven approach. By combining smart algorithms with urban big data including roof shape, size, structural capacity, and ownership among others, RoofScape enables a nuanced insight into the current status and future possibilities of rooftops in a city.
RoofScape enables policy-by-design by introducing the creative, design-oriented approach specific to architectural practice into the domain of policy writing. Simultaneously, its implementation as an interactive digital application makes the methodology easily accessible to all stakeholders - citizens and experts, public and private. Apart from enabling collaboration and stimulating inclusive practices, the accessibility of the tool thus enables the general public to learn about the policy-making process, the specific qualities and requirements of rooftops, future potentials, and the impact for the city and the environment.
Also, as the tool is designed with an open standard, open data format it can be used - and further developed - by partners within the ecosystem such as cities, insurance companies, and urban developers.
Scalability and transferability were starting considerations of the RoofScape project. Data collection can theoretically be implemented in any city, and the type of data collection required to facilitate the RoofScape software is already becoming increasingly common in cities around the world. Our application is based on the analysis of building data, such as foundations, construction year and building height. These are universally applicable parameters when it comes to investigating existing building stock and are extensively utilised in RoofScape to analyse the usability of a city’s rooftops.
The methodology is completely transferable not only to new spatial contexts but also to different programmatic needs. Different cities might face different challenges, such as housing shortages, overheating, or lack of green spaces, but responding to these geographic particularities is already embedded in the tool.
The educational value of using digital, data-driven tools to engage citizens and communities in understanding their cities more deeply and participating more actively to create a future-proof and liveable built environment can be replicated in other places, just as the tool and method behind it.
The collaborative approach, in which designers work together with public stakeholders to achieve greater impact by crafting new, open resources with transparency and trust is also transferable and scalable.
The project fosters the communication between a variety of experts and stakeholders by providing a common framework for rooftop policy making. Simultaneously, it opens the design and policymaking process to the citizens through an easy-to-use interactive application, thus becoming a platform for education on the rooftop landscape.
In order to achieve these goals, Roofscape was designed alongside - rather than simply designed for - the municipality. RoofScape is therefore the result of a cross-disciplinary collaboration led by a team of architects and urbanists from MVRDV and Superworld, supported by a diverse set of experts from the municipality of Rotterdam with extensive knowledge of biodiversity, climate urgencies, housing, rooftops, and more.
On a technical level, the RoofScape tool combines four distinct functions: data collection and visualisation, analysis of rooftop capacities, design of rooftop scenarios, and quantification of potential impacts.
Data is collected from open-source data and linked to the digital twin of Rotterdam, which also provides the 3D model used for visualisation. Capacity analysis is carried out via a computational model that systematically evaluates individual rooftops and compares their properties with the requirements of different rooftop programmes to quantify feasibility. This is performed on the scale of the city, allowing users to explore possibilities on both a macro level and the micro level of individual buildings.
In the Scenario Builder, capacities can be linked to user-defined targets for individual programmes. Algorithms negotiate between the capacities of the rooftops and the desires of the user to help create a variety of plausible rooftop scenarios. Each scenario is visualised in the interactive 3D city model, which allows for qualitative evaluation by the user in addition to quantitative evaluation such as developable area, energy production, or water retention that is automatically provided by the tool.
RoofScape mainly addresses local solutions in response to three challenges - the global climate and biodiversity crisis, the housing crisis, and the exclusionary nature of built environment processes, in which people and communities lack the tools, insights, and power necessary to meaningfully participate in making their cities.
Within the climate and biodiversity crisis, RoofScape contributes to making existing cities more future-proof and sustainable. By utilising rooftops as opportunities for more green spaces, we foster more nature-inclusive cities, while tackling challenges such as urban heat island effects. By producing renewable energy, we decrease urban dependencies on, and consumption of, fossil fuels. By capturing and storing rainwater on roofs we reduce water usage in dry seasons and can reduce effects of extreme flooding events.
By identifying potentials for densification within the existing urban fabric, we can contribute to mitigating the housing crisis in Rotterdam. With this type of soft densification providing an alternative to the usual demolish-and-replace approach, RoofScape can help to maintain existing, established communities while creating new homes in the city. This approach also preserves existing structures and thereby the carbon embodied in them.
Today, the way we create and manage the built environment is a top-down system. The power to contribute and engage meaningfully in this system is limited for citizens, often due to a lack of the deep insight and expertise needed. RoofScape tackles this challenge by providing an open, accessible digital tool for everybody who wants to learn and engage with their own rooftops. It informs citizens, shows them quantitative impacts they can achieve, stimulates discussion and facilitates action by education. Thereby, we aim to bring people in closer touch with their cities and buildings, and empower them to create mutual benefits for themselves and municipalities.
Currently RoofScape exists as an interactive software in an early stage. This prototype required the completion of a number of key steps including the collection and compilation of available data for key central neighbourhoods in Rotterdam, which serve as the case study for the RoofScape tool. It also required a comprehensive development of the core methodology for the tool, which can therefore accommodate the different datasets that may be available in other neighbourhoods and cities to produce a comparable outcome.
Already now the prototype has been applied within the municipality of Rotterdam for the draft of the ‘Concept Omgevingsprogramma Multifunctionele Daken’ (Neighbourhood vision for multifunctional rooftops) and is helping to inform policy makers on rooftop potentials within their districts. The first quantifications of what impact can be achieved on the rooftops in different neighbourhoods is already proving to be valuable input in crafting new rooftop policies, and a range of stakeholders such as NGOs, urban planners, and interested citizens were able to use the tool to learn more. This first step of educating non-experts about the possibility of making a positive change by taking action themselves indicates that digital tools as a means to educate and engage can be valuable assets in the future development of our cities.
The team behind RoofScape has defined a number of key goals for further development. First, a geographic scaling-up is underway, expanding the tool to other cities within the Netherlands, and later to a European level. In addition, the tool will become more elaborate in its next phase. The core functions are already embedded in the current prototype, but increased interactivity, data improvement, and a way to automatically compare spatial scenarios will be features to develop in the next steps.
The RoofScape approach supports the development of new sustainability competences in multiple ways, including encouraging complexity and quantification, speculating on sustainable futures, and stimulating and supporting action.
Especially in the competence area 2 (embracing complexity in sustainability), RoofScape brings value as a tool to think systematically about the rooftop landscape, transitioning from individual prototypes towards scaled rooftop activation. Based on a wide variety of spatial and non-spatial data-sets, we quantify the impacts achievable by utilising rooftops systematically. Until now, this has not been accessible knowledge for the municipality. This complexity has been approached through collaborative thinking together with engineers and rooftop experts, and the results provide valuable insights into how the rooftops can contribute to making Rotterdam and other cities more future-proof and enjoyable.
Also in competence area 3 (envisioning sustainable futures), RoofScape contributes to the creation of a new kind of thinking about how to visualise a more sustainable and inclusive rooftop landscape. Both in terms of adaptability and exploratory thinking, RoofScape is in line with the vision of the GreenComp. We do not create a top-down masterplan of the rooftop landscape, but apply a method of generating various spatial scenarios, responding to different demand scenarios and showcasing versatile pathways towards an activated roofscape.
Overall, RoofScape is not a traditional design and education tool. It creates an alternative way of learning about the possibilities of rooftop activations, and aims to expand the traditional tool-set of policy-making and urban planning. It responds to complexity in achieving sustainability with an open and multi-disciplinary collaboration, a data-driven method and an explorative mindset.
