Schoonschip: Europe's most sustainable micro-city on water

“Sustainable Cities and Communities” is the eleventh objective of the 2030 AGENDA for Sustainable Development (the action program for people, the planet and prosperity) that aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, durable and sustainable.

How do you make cities more sustainable? And who is responsible for this task?

In the climate emergency we are experiencing, the responsibility for the turnaround involves, albeit to a different extent, everyone.

This was well understood by a small community of people living north of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, who, starting from a dream, created a unique project of its kind, the Schoonschip Village, or the most sustainable floating neighborhood in Europe. In Dutch 'schoon' means both nice and clean

Schoonschip was created based on the circular community model, i.e. communities that are committed to creating multiple value in their neighborhood by co-designing interventions that aim to close resource cycles at the local level. At the center is the well-being of the community and not of the individual.

But it is worth stressing that the initial input started from a single person, Marjan de Blok, who was able to immediately involve friends and acquaintances and therefore an entire community. The people involved founded an association, the VvE Schoonschip, and were at the same time boldly promoters and pioneers of the project. Marjan herself said “the great news, which makes the project so special, is that Schoonschip was developed by a group of people and not by a

“Living on the water is a great solution for places, like Amsterdam, where climate change and rising sea levels pose an imminent danger. Not only does it protect people from increasingly impactful natural phenomena, but it also becomes a way to preserve nature itself,” said Sascha Glasl, Co-founder of Space&Matter, the experimental urban planning firm that signed the project's masterplan

The process that led to the completion of Schoonschip lasted 11 years, from 2010 to 2021.

The neighborhood is completely built on the water, consisting of 30 floating lots, on each of which a house has been built. Seven different types of housing have been developed and each house-boat is unique, because each family has designed their home with the help of a different architect, so that the neighborhood is not approved to a specific or imposed style, but protects the creativity and personal expression of each resident. Furthermore, “each house is positioned in such a way as to have an unobstructed view both on the water and on the neighborhood as a whole,” said Sascha Glasl

The floating lots are connected and held together by an intelligent pier, the real heart of the project, which encompasses all the technological infrastructures necessary for homes. The pier provides anchorage to the various housing modules and also acts as a courtyard for children's games, a solarium in summer and a 'square' for meeting and social sharing

The following infographics clarify all the services and utilities available in the city.

Schoonschip Village is able to self-produce the energy necessary for its needs and to limit water waste as much as possible. All homes have been equipped with connected smart grid photovoltaic systems

A smart grid is an electrical network that connects different users, in this case house boats, through intelligent technologies that allow advanced energy management.

The energy produced is stored in a battery and the excess energy can be exchanged between residents to purchase goods and services within the neighborhood. The exchange takes place with the help of blockchain technology; in short, it is a digital and shared register, through which to make secure transactions thanks to cryptocurrencies, which in this case is called Jouliette

The roof of the individual houses is also a garden roof, which collects rainwater and which, through a filtering system, is purified and then reused, for uses where rainwater is more than good.

For winter and summer air conditioning, every home is equipped with an innovative water-water heat pump, which obviously uses channel water as an external source to extract heat. In addition, careful waste management, including wastewater, is combined with green mobility: residents, in fact, share electric cars and bikes (those who join the project must give up their own

The evolution of Schoonship is still ongoing, residents have signed a pilot project with Waternet (the company that supplies water in Amsterdam) that will allow black water to be transported in a 'floating processor' where it will be transformed into energy.

Schoonschip demonstrates that local solutions can be the answer to global problems and that change can be initiated by courageous people who take matters into their own hands.

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