Think regreening your city requires fancy urban redevelopment plans? Think again. This country-wide tile-flipping contest is showing that all you need is a shovel.
One hot summer’s day, Eva Braaksma caught herself wondering why cities aren’t greener, after noticing the cooling effect of a nearby park. The answer was all around her in the form of grey concrete pavement tiles. What if she could de-pave some of this?
It was the first seed of a movement that has become so wildly popular in her home country of the Netherlands that it now has its own entry in the Dutch dictionary: ‘tegelwippen’ which translates as ‘tile flipping’. The idea couldn’t be simpler, removing pavement tiles and replacing them with small urban gardens.
The concept has grown into a nation-wide competition to see which city can remove the most gray and replace it with green. Since 2021, some 15 million concrete slabs have already been removed.
Fun fact: the Dutch word ‘wippen’ is also slang for the f-word, so for every tile flipped, you’re basically giving a big fat finger to the lifeless grey heat islands that define so many of our cities.
Eva Braaksma shares her story here.
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