“Opting for low-traffic neighbourhoods is enormously beneficial”

Greening post-war residential neighbourhoods produces the biggest urban climate and biodiversity gains. Professor Urban Design and urban planner Tess Broekmans: “Making a neighbourhood compact, increasing population density, can actually make it more liveable.”

When asked if we know how to build a climate-proof and biodiverse neighbourhood, Tess Broekmans replies: "To get it right, you need to involve everyone - all the different experts - from the get-go, including people like an ecologist, a water board rep and a civil engineer to fit in all the pipes and cables. 

Greenspace standards are also becoming more common, in order to prevent other urban functions from swallowing up all the space. Take Cecil Konijnendijk's 3-30-300 rule, for example: everyone should be able to see three trees from home, 30% of the neighbourhood should be covered by tree crowns for shade, and every house should be no more than 300 metres from a green space. It’s best to see the standards as a way to level the playing field between the different stakeholders involved in urban planning.”

Read the full interview with professor Tess Broekmans on how we can design and layout the city with biodiversity in mind. This interview was previously published at LDE.

More information

View Tess Broekmans' professor page.

LDE is a collaboration between the universities of Leiden, Delft and Erasmus.

To learn more about biodiversity research at TU Delft and our faculty, check out TU Delft's press kit (Dutch only) featuring our experts and stories about their research.