KoetMeer – Building Connected Floating Habitats for Urban Wildlife

Amsterdam’s historic canals are shared by residents, wildlife, and millions of visitors each year — yet the waterways were never designed with ecological life in mind. As a result, birds like the meerkoet (Eurasian coot) often struggle to find natural materials and safe places to build their nests, especially in the busy inner city.

Project KoetMeer explores how small, community-led floating habitats can strengthen biodiversity, support urban wildlife, and create new ways for people to connect with the places they live in — or visit.

The project combines circular and bio-based making with digital tools that help people observe, learn from, and care for the ecosystems around them.

In this workshop, we will begin with a short visit to the Dobbernatuur installation on the Marineterrein campus — a local example of nature-inclusive design on the water — to understand how floating habitats function and what they offer to birds, fish, insects, and people.

We will then work together to co-design and build a floating garden using circular materials and natural building elements. The goal is not to create a perfected object, but to work with the innate architectural abilities of species like ducks and koets: providing the basic environmental features and materials they rely on for nesting, resting, and shelter.

Along the way, we will explore questions relevant to the city today:

– How can floating habitats strengthen biodiversity in the narrow canals of the historic center?

– What role do visitors and tourism play in shaping these ecosystems, positively or negatively?

– How can local networks and community care help sustain these small interventions?

– What could simple IoT tools teach us about activity on or around the gardens? And how useful is this data for long-term ecological learning?

Participants will leave with hands-on experience, a deeper understanding of nature in the inner city, and ideas for how humans and other species can co-design the future of the canals together.

Host

Daniel Klein

Daniel Klein is a designer and researcher with more than a decade of experience in placemaking, sustainable design, communications, and community engagement. His work focuses on how people connect with their environments and how cities can be shaped through collaboration between humans and the natural world. Daniel has lived in Amsterdam’s Red Light District for the past three years, where he observes canal and street life daily and studies how wildlife, residents, and visitors share the dense urban environment. His current initiative, Project KoetMeer, brings together circular making, ecological awareness, and digital storytelling to build small floating habitats that support urban birdlife and invite people to participate in caring for the city’s waterways.