BlueCity, a business district in Rotterdam
19 July 2022
Climate adaptation is driving innovative enterprise and urban development in Rotterdam, the largest business district seaport in Europe, transforming the second-largest city in the Netherlands into an avant-garde green and circular metropolis.
At the center of this endeavor is the so-called BlueCity, a model ecosystem of circular economy businesses. Rotterdam wants to significantly advance the national objective of having a sustainable, fully circular economy by 2050.
According to Jeanette Verdonk, the marketing manager for BlueCity, “This building was once a swimming pool, but it has been converted and is now the home of startup entrepreneurs who are working on creative blue economy initiatives.”
The BlueCity business incubator is home to 40 or so young entrepreneurs who work on innovative circular economy solutions and constantly search for new opportunities. It is located in a prime location in the former subtropical swimming oasis Tropicana on the banks of the river Maas and overlooks two of Rotterdam’s iconic bridges, Erasmusbrug and Willemsbrug.
The goal of the entrepreneurs’ work is to establish closed material cycles where trash is converted into raw materials, according to Nienke Binnendijk, director of BlueCity Lab, the first circular biolab in the world.
The World Bank defines the blue economy as the “sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs, while protecting the health of ocean ecosystem,” and Binnendijk noted that BlueCity is named after this growing macroeconomic idea.
The emphasis on sustainability and zero-waste activities in BlueCity represents a “dramatic departure” from conventional business practices, according to Binnendijk. Entrepreneurs can create and test their innovations for various industrial processes using microorganisms at the BlueCity Lab, in particular.
According to Verdonk, the structure itself is a spectacular illustration of creative cyclical development that is still undergoing transformation. Using reusable building components that the Dutch register on a database called Oogsdkaart, the abandoned swimming pool and its inaccessible, outmoded basement have been transformed into offices and production units.
According to architect Jan Jongert, co-founder of Superuse Studios, who assisted in converting the basement area into offices and production spaces, one guiding principle in circular building is “to use waste resources to look at which material is accessible as residual flow.”
The goal, according to him, is to build a little circular city that might be used in a larger city. Around 90% of the circular office wing’s 100 workspaces for eco-friendly business district owners were built using recycled materials, saving a combined 60 tons of CO2 (carbon dioxide).
According to Jongert, “you limit the impact on the environment by tying the waste to the need for materials.”
