Future Lab NL2100

Looking towards the year 2100, we need to start reasoning from the basics: soil and water conditions as a leading principle and not as organisms to be manipulated. Rising water levels in both sea and rivers are causing the deep polders in the Randstad to gradually lose their function toward the year 2100. Between the line of dunes on the North Sea and the elevation gradient on the Groningen-Antwerp line, a rich inland estuary emerges. The major rivers meander with a natural course from east to west through this estuary.

Cities like Amsterdam and The Hague are protected as cultural-historical relics, but economic activities are increasingly moving toward the higher east and south. The proximity of industrial-economic clusters such as Eindhoven, Flanders and Duisburg-Düsseldorf metropolitan region, provides a logical basis for reorientation of residential areas and industry. The dune belt on the North Sea is preserved as a habitable storm surge barrier.

In parallel with this migration, a national smart-grid was explored with “energy biotopes” and “energy infra-corridors”. The “energy biotope” is seen as a geographically defined habitat, in which environmental conditions from soil and water are optimised for renewable energy generation. Energy infra-corridors combine energy, data and electric transport, connect energy biotopes and urban clusters, and exchange shortages and surpluses. By combining the corridors with green-blue structures, they gain additional significance as supra-regional ecological links.

Read more about the FutureLab on the special website
Download (Dutch only) onze reports for Energy and Data and the report for FutureLab NL2100

Year: 2022
Type: futurology, research by design
Client: Board of Government Advisors
Status: finished, published
In cooperation with: Board of Government Advisors, HNS and Rademacher/DeVries
Sequence of sea level maps based on study HNS