Commissioned by the College van Rijksadviseurs, ToekomstatelierNL2100 is a collective strategic research and design project which aims to put long-term thinking in the spatial planning of The Netherlands central again. Many design choices that are being made today, will have consequences tomorrow, next year, next decade, and possibly even next century, and therefore need to be considered in time. Rademacher / de Vries has been asked to map out the movement of goods, resources and people and the networks of the future that facilitate them. By focusing on these networks in relation to the soil and occupation layers in the Netherlands, we developed new narratives and possible futures that anticipate on the long-term spatial and societal challenges to come.
Within the setup of a collaborative multi-day workshop we investigated how these networks, with a strong focus on the main energy infrastructure, should anticipate on the changing future water level dynamics in the Netherlands. We took the concept, soil and water are leading, central in thinking about new forms of central and decentralized urbanization, agriculture, energy and economic networks. Through investigative zoom-ins on the regions Rijnmond and Arnhem-Nijmegen, these concepts where rendered in time and gave productive insight in the certain shifting future between east and west, between peat and sand and between low and high ground.
