Schoonschip.
Starting new, on the water

Marjan De Blok is a well-known TV director in the in the Netherlands. In recent years she has cultivated an urban vision that she never thought would become reality.

Schoon schip maken in Dutch means start afresh, and at the helm of Schoonschip De Blok is charting a course towards a new sustainable life on water.

On Amsterdam’s IJ river, rising sea levels are starting to be a concern. In 2009, the city decided to dedicate a part of the formerly exclusively industrial northern part of Amsterdam to experiments in sustainability and low-energy residential development.

After 10 years of planning, design and construction, the community’s 30 houseboats are now moored along five interconnected piers, with two and three-storey buildings housing 46 families. 

All the houses in Schoonschip are made of sustainable materials and produce their own energy, making the neighbourhood the most sustainable floating community in Europe and a concrete example of a new way of urban living in the era of climate change.