Wetropolis

Update Dec 2023:

Wetropolis aims at building hands on models for demonstration and collaboration water related problems. The project started in 2016 after the Boxing Day Flood in Leeds and resulted in 2017 in the successful Leeds – Aire flooding model. Onno Bokhove (Leeds UK) and Wout Zweers (Enschede NL) cooperated in making an interactive model of the flooding of the river Aire that flows through Leeds. They noticed that hands-on in a model works very well to engage the audience. They noticed that a similar model might be usefull in the Netherlands, especially to be used in education and for demonstrating “Ruimte voor de rivier” (Space for the river) -like activities. This was the start of the Efro OPOost project Wetropolis with goal:

Improving engagement and participation through more interactive, tangible models especially for water related problems.

This collaboration project started in 2018 and ended in 2022. It was founded bij Efro – OPOost.

Wout Zweers was member of project. The project is completed now and the various partners proceed with their own projects.

You find the details of what Wowlab realized for the Wetropolis project on the Wetropolis pages at woutzweers.nl

The follow up; present activities will be documented by Wout Zweers as Wetropolis, as Fieldlab ( in collaboration with Saxion ) and in the form of NVON related activities (mainly with Jan Jaap Wietsma, PreU UTwente and chair of NVON )

Now, Dec 27th 2023, exactly 7 years after the boxing day flood in Leeds, the Netherlands had to cope with a major rainfall that almost toppled the rivers and alarmed all. In the nwspaper again articles were written about the water problems, but some still lacked a good insight in recent measures and proceedings, even after 15 years of “Ruimte voor de rivier” The job is not done yet, even though the focus shifts now toward mitigation intense rainfall and drought.