Delft: The Green Village

On May 22, we started off with one-on-one writing workshops with our professors to edit our writing thus far and prepare to write the next section of our final reports.

After that, we recollected as a group to learn about how to measure and set goals in terms of social sustainability. In our biking groups, we planned out biking routes that we would be taking together in Rotterdam tomorrow to practice measuring social sustainability using a set metric.

In the afternoon, we biked to the TU-Delft campus to explore “The Green Village.” This is a living lab for sustainable innovations in home and work environments. The test site offers space for entrepreneurs, researchers, and students to implement projects to help develop, test, and demonstrate new sustainability-focused ideas.

Some of my personal highlights include the demonstrations of the Roofed Greentray and Modular Office Renovation (MOR). The Roofed Greentray is an innovation that enables people to implement green roofs (which help with the heating and cooling of houses and retain water) without plastics. The Modular Office Renovation explains the process of renovating empty, energy-inefficient office buildings into energy-positive buildings that provide affordable housing.

My day ended by going to the grocery store, to cook dinner and eat with my friends. We hung out in the common spaces of the hotel to do homework and chat until bed.