As Amsterdam marks its 750th year, the city’s rich history of climate adaptation stands out as a blueprint for resilient urban futures

On Amsterdam’s northern edge, a brand new island in the vast IJmeer lake is being readied for homebuilding. Called Strandeiland (“Beach Island”), this land will form part of a new archipelago of six islands that will ultimately house more than 60,000 residents, plus beaches and nature reserves.

In most cities, a project like this would be considered spectacular, unprecedented. In Amsterdam, it’s just a more proactive version of business as usual.

Such initiatives of formidable ambition have been part of Amsterdam life since the city’s founding in the 13th century. Celebrating its 750th birthday on Oct. 27 — the date it was first mentioned in writing — the Dutch capital has been laboriously cobbled together over centuries. Battling against unforgiving terrain and the ever-present threat of the sea — the city lies two meters (roughly 6.5 feet) below sea level — Amsterdam has from the outset had to invest huge resources, not just to keep itself safe and dry, but to reshape the landscape and make large-scale habitation feasible.

Indeed, if Amsterdam had not been drastically affected by extreme weather connected to global warming, it might never have become a city at all. The region’s more than seven centuries of experience managing water carry urgent lessons for other cities battling climate change.

Among places that still retain their historic importance as commercial hubs today, it might be called the first climate-adapted city. Throughout its history, Amsterdam has continually reshaped its geography to adapt to changing climate and economic circumstances, showing how a city can thrive in the course of overcoming existential challenges.

Born in Crisis

Amsterdam’s growth from a tiny marshy village would likely not have occurred without drastic shifts in its region’s weather. During the sea level rises of the Medieval Warm Period, what is now the Netherlands was reshaped by powerful storms. By the time of the catastrophic St. Lucia’s Flood of 1287, the sea had encroached so far that Amsterdam was a coastal property. The city’s name — meaning the “Dam on the River Amstel” — refers to the infrastructure built to manage the growing village’s precarious low-lying position.

Amsterdam’s new seaside location made it more desirable for trade, but as a place to build it was hardly promising. The city’s topsoil is a spongy, water-logged mix of clay and peat that’s about as suitable as a base for heavy buildings as a slab of Jell-O. Without major treatment and transformation, the city’s rise would simply have been impossible.

Thus began the city’s journey: an arduous seven-and-a-half centuries of draining, pumping and levee-building alongside distinctive construction techniques.

“Water management is the basis of Amsterdam planning,” says Ton Schaap, the island project’s original planner. “If they plan a part of the city, then there’s always not only the roads, but also the canals and the bridges. Because without that, you don’t have dry feet.”

Making the ground strong enough to support houses was a primary hurdle. The classic solution has always been to drive wooden pilings through the 12-15 meters of topsoil until they rest on the sand and rubble below — a steady base for buildings when not exposed to air.Until 1925, after which concrete pilings were phased in, all Amsterdam’s buildings sat on a pincushion-like base of wooden poles, hammered laboriously into the soil with limited mechanical assistance.

Keeping these pilings in good condition is another challenge. While high water levels mean the city floods, low water levels drying out the soil can expose the pilings to oxygen — creating rot and sag that can still be seen today in some buildings leaning at drunken angles along Amsterdam’s canals. This made the city’s locks on the River Amstel doubly important: They could protect from flooding but also keep water in if needed.

This system has proved successful, but at first glance, its complexity can make you wonder why they persevered with building here in the first place. The wooden pilings beneath Amsterdam’s buildings show how necessity can become a virtue. With no suitable timber in Amsterdam’s region, these mainly came from afar — by raft down the Rhine from Germany or by ship from Scandinavia. The links forged in that timber trade strengthened Amsterdam commercially, helping to make it the main hub through which Baltic wood and grain reached Europe’s Atlantic seaboard and the Rhine Valley.

This trade worked both ways. While you might find shipped-in Norwegian timber propping up Amsterdam’s canal houses, you can also find Dutch brick shipped out of Amsterdam in 17th and 18th century buildings across the broader North Sea/Baltic region. The high level of organization and outward-looking trade needed to develop Amsterdam delivered more than just solutions to environmental challenges — they helped forge a resourceful, mobile society at the vanguard of modernity.

Flush with growing revenue from trade taxes, the city deployed a phenomenal investment of wealth and energy in canal-digging, dike-building and drainage. Prosperity also incentivized citizens to contribute directly. Owners of canal-front houses, for example, who were legally responsible for their own quayside’s upkeep, were rewarded for their investment with access to cheaper goods purchased directly from barges and stored for resale.

Knitting a Society Together

Resourcefulness was never really optional. Before the medieval construction of dikes, canals and sea walls, people in this region lived restricted, amphibious lives in homes built on artificial mounds called terpen. As leaving these mounds became safe, villages needed to cooperate to build protective infrastructure.

Barriers like Amsterdam’s still didn’t guarantee safety. Floods were feared as the ravening “Water Wolf,” drowning people in their beds and swallowing fields that kept hunger at bay. Storm surges could still force Amsterdammers onto roofs, banging pots to attract rescue barges. When late-medieval Hollanders neglected dike maintenance during the civil strife of the Hook and Cod Wars, up to 10,000 people drowned due to poorly maintained levees, turning part of South Holland into salty wastes unfarmed to this day.

This strain gave the Netherlands something remarkable: water management systems even older than the Dutch parliament. As far back as 1248, Holland created its first water board (Waterschap in Dutch), a regional body ensuring joined-up flood protection and drainage — while Amsterdam and other cities built their own complex systems of defense and management. During Amsterdam’s 17th century boom, keeping the city safe meant monitoring an increasingly intricate, multilevel canal system.

It was “like a miniature mountain landscape” says Petra Van Dam, a history professor at Amsterdam’s Free University. “Some streets were higher than other streets, and as a result canals were not all at the same level. These flowed in to the Amstel and IJ rivers, but while they were all connected they were also separated by dams and sluices.”

The complexity of the canal system saw the city turning to scientific research for safety, and in 1675, the city established the Stadwaterkantoor (city water office). Following years of observation of water levels in the canals, this body established an agreed zero level — posted on city locks — against which high or low water could be assessed. A marker of Amsterdam’s precocious concern with water monitoring, this became established in the 19th century as the Normal Amsterdam Level, used across the country and much of western Europe.

A DNA of Adaptation

Not all these historic challenges continue today. In 1932, the city gave up its prime coastal location to further protect itself from sea level fluctuations, building a a 32-kilometer (20 mile) causeway that closed off the Zuider Zee at the mouth and ultimately transformed the bay back into two tamer lakes, the IJsselmeer and Markermeer.

The habits of managing and expanding the through draining, pumping, strengthened seawalls and — in some cases, by housing people in boats and floating homes directly on the water — still remain part of the city’s DNA. The new islands of the IJburg reflect this.

Schaap, the islands’ original planner, makes its construction seem ludicrously easy. “To build the islands, they simply get the land from the sea bottom and then transport it,” says Schaap, who himself lives in a former dockland converted to housing. “Then they add very thin layers, so that it takes two or three years to make it like this.”

This technique, used for most but not all of the islands, has a name that seems almost too Dutch to be true: the “pancake method,” where a thin layer of sand slurry is pumped into an island-shaped mold — resembling batter in a pan — then left to dry before another is added on top.

‘We’re Not Doing Enough’

As freak downpours increase, Amsterdam is now trying not just to channel water away, but also to soak up more without flooding. The city’s current planning is aimed at withstanding an extreme rainfall event of 70 millimeters in one hour — a huge volume of rain far heavier than anything Amsterdam has had to face, but which has occurred on rare recent occasions along the Mediterranean.

Following extensive modeling, the area’s streets were equipped with a network of rain gardens — stretches of water-absorbent, unpaved open earth planted with flood-tolerant plants. Referred to as WADIs in Dutch, these gardens conceal pipes that collect water run-off. Small holes in the pipes allow some water to seep back into the soil as it travels to an underground cistern nearby. Water-permeable paving has also replaced concrete sidewalks, making the area a more effective floodwater sponge. Meanwhile, new buildings now come equipped with an obligatory run-off tank — usually a pool or water feature in front that might be mistaken for decoration but is actually intended to temporarily store excess rain.

Despite these aggressive efforts, the city remains vulnerable.

“It looks like we we’re doing a lot, but I know we’re not doing enough just yet,” says Melanie van der Horst, the Amsterdam deputy mayor charged with environmental management. “We are not ready for that heavy rainfall or for flooding.”

This note of caution isn’t just modesty. Amsterdam may have experience tackling water, but it has at times failed — creating new areas of poor-quality homes prone to sagging foundations for low-income workers in the 19th century, then shunting some of these workers’ descendants out to unlovely dormitory towns on reclaimed land beyond the city limits in the 20th. The city is also a novice when it comes to new threats such as prolonged extreme heat. Still, its past challenges have helped forge a pragmatic and experimental approach — and deep experience accommodating their natural surroundings.

“The most important thing is this entrepreneurial attitude that people have,” says Petra Van Dam. “I think when you’re engaged in seafaring and so familiar with the water, it’s an environmental culture.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-25/amsterdam-750th-anniversary-showcases-centuries-of-climate-adaptation?srnd=phx-green