During World War II, much of Rotterdam’s city center was razed due to a bombing by the German army. The opportunity for new construction gave architects and urban planners a blank slate to reinvent the neighborhood, whose crowded and impoverished quarters soon gave way to tree-lined avenues and modern high-rises with more than 150 million square feet of flat-topped rooftops. In 2008, the government started offering subsidies if building owners retrofitted their properties with green roofs—an incentive that soon gave way to experiments in stormwater management and harnessing solar power.
Now, the city is showing its imagination again by converting roofs into interconnected elevated parks.
Read more at Surface Magazine.