The day of the event was filled with lively exchanges, keynote speakers, breakout sessions and the opportunity to look at some interesting project-related sites in The Hague.

Nico Tillie, the opening keynote speaker teaching Landscape Architecture and Sustainable Development at the Delft University of Technology, took the audience on an inspiring journey through student projects. He made a case on why we should include the needs of our non-human fellow beings in city design. Integrating nature in our urban planning is crucial to keep our cities liveable in this era of climate change. Rather than replacing the natural landscape, urban infrastructure should be an addition to the landscape that suits the needs of both people, birds, insects and other species. Thinking and designing cities this way, means to work with the landscape to create breathing cities that can withstand heat stress and extreme rainfall better than most cities can do now.

After Nico’s inspiring opening Wiebke Klemm, The Hague’s project lead, took to the stage.

She shared the main lessons she learned from joining the Nature Smart Cities project, being:

• Dare to dream – and keep a list with regular maintenance and replacement projects that might benefit by joining an EU project.
  
  
• Co-design a positive narrative – with colleagues, knowledge partners and inhabitants. The more people spreading the same positive narrative, the better.
  
  
• Collaborate multi-departmental – especially within larger local authorities, many people from many departments hold knowledge or experience that is needed to keep a European project going.
  
  
• Set a good example – share and tell. Make your project tangible and understandable with clear visualisations.

For the morning sessions the participants split into breakout sessions. In one of the sessions Maíra Finizola e Silva and Wito van Oijstaeijen (who jointly develop the model) presented the NSCiti2S Business Model. Project partner Alistair Wilson moderated a breakout session where partners presented the pilot projects they worked on. The third session was hosted by Phil Back, he took the participants along in a reflection on the difficulties and opportunities in urban greening.

After lunch the participants set of on tours to see how green infrastructure is approached in The Hague. One of the tours visited the pilot sites in The Hague, walking past the Urban Waterbuffer in Wijkpark Cromvliet and the Van Musschenbroekstraat with enhanced tree-growing space. The other walking tour had multiple stops. They visited the Central Innovation District, where the challenge is to incorporate green measures in a dense urban landscape. The tour visited the Slachthuisplein, recently fitted with more trees, and Laakhavens, where a large scale make-over of the current industrial function is planned. The bike tour took the participants to the Binckhorst. An area where bottom-up initiatives for more green are combined with urban densification in a very large-scale industrial area. Showing them examples of how bottom-up initiatives and larger scale city planning can work together.

The last activity was the wrap up of the partners’ strategic commitments to implement more green infrastructure. Finally, the commitments were celebrated with a nice drink and some snacks.