Where can the Netherlands still build? A newsroom asks the model

26 January 2023

Follow the Money and Cobouw published Tientallen grote bouwlocaties door klimaatverandering ongeschikt voor woningbouw, by Dimitri Tokmetzis and Nouska du Saar. The question behind it is simple and awkward: if the Netherlands takes flooding and soil subsidence seriously, where can the housing programme actually go?

They answered it with the RuimteScanner, in six scenarios that vary how much is built inside existing cities and how strictly climate-sensitive land is avoided. Eric Koomen and Jip Claassens did the modelling. The conclusion is that a substantial part of the current plan stock sits on land that floods or subsides, and that several well-known large locations, the Rijnenburg polder near Utrecht and the Zuidplaspolder near Rotterdam among them, are hard to defend under those conditions.

It is worth saying why this matters beyond the headline. A model built for a planning agency was used by journalists to test a claim the sector makes about itself. That is only possible when the method is documented and the assumptions can be varied by someone outside the building, and it is a large part of why we work the way we do.