Wind as an opportunity - an exploratory and multidisciplinary study to map wind flows in Rotterdam

Wind plays an important role in the urban climate. However, the current Dutch practice only focuses on carrying out local wind studies for new high-rise developments to limit wind nuisance and wind danger. Little to no attention is paid to the way wind moves through the city on a larger scale and how it could be used in a positive way, e.g. for natural ventilation of our cities.

In this project, the city of Rotterdam cooperated with wind engineering company Actiflow to carry out a CFD-study for a large part of the city (5 km diameter), including several types of urban fabric. Results were generated beyond the standard wind comfort and wind safety pictures. During an iterative process of brainstorm sessions with a multidisciplinary group of designers and policy makers from the municipality, the results were studied, and new ideas were generated on how this data could impact future strategies on a variety of urban climate topics within the municipality. Among other results, maps were created of urban ventilation (related to heat stress and air quality), storm events and wind energy potential on rooftops. The maps can even be used to predict dangerous areas in the city in case of future storms.

Multiple technical challenges were faced during the project, e.g. in terms of computational effort for the simulations, processing of the data and combining the CFD-results with the local statistical wind data. As such, the project has been impactful both socially and technically.

This project is just a first step for the city of Rotterdam. In the future, the results will be combined with other types of data and information, resulting in further research, design implementations and validation efforts. But the impact of this study is already clear: wind will become part of Rotterdam’s new climate adaptation strategy.