Wall Renovation and Renewal
The Context
About 200 kilometres of quay walls in Amsterdam have to be renovated in the coming years. These quay walls can be up to a 100 years old and often consist of a simple masonry wall on timber piles, making them unable to carry the increasing weight of traffic in the city. The unsafety of the quay walls, with some being on the brink of collapsing, requires urgency.
A quay wall renovation involves many stakeholders and requires a lot of research and construction. This makes it hard to speed up the process of renovation. More importantly, the liveability of a neighbourhood decreases during a quay wall renovation: houseboats have to move, some or all of the trees have to be cut, the construction work causes a lot of noise, mobility decreases, and often the view on the water is lost for long periods of time. This decrease in liveability, combined with all the different stakeholders involved and the required urgency, as well as the long process of research and construction, make a quay wall renovation a very complex problem for the Municipality of Amsterdam.
Quay wall residents show their frustrations about the impact of quay wall renovations and related safety measures. In some cases, these frustrations caused the residents to start a lawsuit against the municipality because they believed the measures taken by the municipality were too rigorous. Such frustrations, discussions or even lawsuits between residents and the municipality slow down the process of quay wall renovation, while the municipality is trying to speed the process up. This is why the municipality, and more specifically the Program of Bridges and Quay walls, asked our team to find a way to better involve residents in the process of quay wall renovation through a Living Lab.
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To read about the research, click here.