We invite you to get to know the estates selected as model estates, already well adapted to climate change – mostly European but also Polish examples. Let them serve as good practices. We will not prevent many unfavorable phenomena in the 21st century related to climate change, but we can better prepare for them and redesign our housing estates.
We present solutions from various cities that bring many benefits, have proven success and can be an inspiration for others. One of the many solutions shown on the posters are actions to improve on-site management of rainwater. At the same time, the environmental conditions of trees that suffer from water shortage in cities are improved, and at the same time the costs of their maintenance, including watering, are reduced. Rain gardens prevent flooding of streets and housing estates and increase the number of habitats for butterflies and birds. Many examples also show that the aesthetics of designed greenery is changing – greenery is multifunctional, it is not only intended to please the eye, but also to work, provide benefits, be cheaper to maintain, support biodiversity and be resistant to changing conditions. Today, we approach the principles of maintaining greenery differently, with the appearance of wild plant species that have previously been treated somewhat disrespectfully. Other Nature-Based Solutions have a similar synergy effect. Filip Springer wrote that the ecological and climate crisis is a crisis of imagination. In this context, it is necessary to learn examples of good practices – settlements already well adapted to climate change, where pioneering solutions have been introduced.

To sum up the project, we invited over 80 people to Warsaw’s Zodiak Architecture Pavilion, organising two rounds of workshops for : (1) local leaders and NGOs on 25.04 from 5-7 p.m. and (2) officials and other people managing the spaces of estates in Poland on 26.04.2024 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. As part of the workshop, we invited people to play together the game “Neighborhood with climate”, the opportunities it offers for motivating local communities and the pro-adaptation solutions used. In addition, we had the opportunity to view our Exhibition and discuss the problems in motivating residents to take action on climate change adaptation. We hope that, as a consequence of such activities, there will be an increased awareness of the climate challenges and an increase in the actions taken to improve the quality of life of residents at the scale of not only the neighbourhood, but entire cities.

We would like to invite you to the Zodiak Architecture Pavilion, where we have opened the exhibition “Neighborhood with climate”, showing a collection of good practices from estates already well adapted to climate change, which we learned about through the CoAdapt project. These include solutions for capturing rainwater: absorption basins, rain gardens, retention ponds, vegetation favouring the reduction of the urban heat island and biodiversity in housing estates in Oslo, Copenhagen, Malmo, Berlin, Philadelphia, but also Warsaw, Gdansk or Krakow. The exhibition can be seen until 12.05, Saturday and Sunday 12-7pm, Tuesday-Friday 3-7pm.
The exhibition was created thanks to the fantastic work of the CoAdapt team including Agata Cieszewska, Kasper Jakubowski, Gabriela Maksymiuk, Renata Giedych, Krzysztof Gadomski and Hanne Cecil Geirbo. The posters were prepared by Natalia Horak and Karolina Mosieniak. The beautiful plant decorations were made by the invaluable Małgorzata Mirgos from the Department of Vegetable and Medicinal Plants at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, and the animation inviting people to the exhibition was created by Marta Kulińska from Hellomotion. We would also like to thank our 3rd year Landscape Architecture students at SGGW for their help.

For two days, we hosted dozens of people interested in discussing how to activate city dwellers in climate change adaptation cha¬racteristics. As part of the conference, we presented what we had implemented as part of the project and listened to several very interesting speeches by our guests on playing serious games and motivating residents for the environment. Marcin Łączyński and Gabriela Maksymiuk tested our game with two Warsaw schools, which came to the University of Warsaw Library to learn about the computer version of the game. The game was also tested by the conference participants and in both digital and paper versions. There was cake and toasts at the end. The conference took place on 18.04 at the University of Warsaw Library, and on 19.04 at the UW Senate Hall on the University of Warsaw main campus. The conference was organised by the UW team under the direction of Agnieszka Dudzińska-Jarmolinska, PhD.

On Thursday 11.04.2024 in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania-one of the best in the world (Ivy league)-our team representing the CoAdapt project carried out another playtesting of the game ‘Estate with Climate’. This time we worked with landscape architecture students from the Stuart Weitzman School of Design. The meeting was led by Billy Fleming – director of the Ian McHarg Centre. The students played a board game in the first approach and a computer game in the second, discussing the involvement of neighbourhood communities in pro-adaptation activities in the USA where the bottom-up approach of implementing green-blue infrastructure prevails and in Europe with its characteristic top-down approach (here cooperatives and city authorities usually decide on the neighbourhood space). This cooperation is a further step in the field of landscape architecture and environmental planning, as researchers from SGGW have been working together with Prof. Frederick Steiner, dean of the institution, for over 40 years. Anna Ostrowska Steiner, a graduate of our university, has made a significant contribution to this cooperation.
On Tuesday 9.04.2024, our team representing the CoAdapt project conducted a playtesting of the game ‘Estate with Climate’ with students and staff from Urban System Lab in New York. The aim of the meeting was to exchange experiences with Urban System Lab, which, like CoAdapt, is working on a serious game for climate change adaptation – EKOS. Our new colleagues, under the guidance of Timon McPhearson, enthusiastically changed the spaces of Warsaw housing estates using the solutions of our game. We hope that this will be the beginning of a fruitful collaboration.

On the morning of Saturday 6.04.2024, our CoAdapt team in New York on Roosevelt Island participated in the planting of Microlas together with hundreds of Manhattan residents. A Microlas is a multi-species tiny forest of 100-200m2, planted using the Myawaki method on specially prepared compost: dense, multi-storey, fast-growing. Here, species native to New York were introduced, and the first tree was planted by an Indian chief representing the first inhabitants of Manhattan. We gave two interviews and planted 8 different species of trees, and we hope to plant another one on the SGGW campus.