The world is facing an escalating environmental crisis marked by major socio-ecological losses. Human-induced environmental threats, like biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution, underscore the onset of the Earth's sixth mass extinction, recently termed ‘ecocide’. Despite the urgent warnings from the scientific community and growing public awareness, inadequate and insufficient action has been taken to address the environmental crisis. In addition, recent research has shown that people are increasingly experiencing anxiety and feelings of hopelessness concerning these environmental issues, which prevents meaningful engagement with these topics. Yet, the role of emotions is often neglected in the Western discourse, impeding public acknowledgement of ecological grief (eco-grief).
This study recognises eco-grief as a legitimate response and the process of eco-grief as a catalyst for true engagement and pro-environmental attitudes, demonstrating how this alternative approach can inform the governance and planning of eco-centric cities. A conceptual framework based on Latour’s cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic virtues, the process of eco-grief and the X-curve for societal transitions is used to understand how people perceive the ongoing crisis.
Rotterdam Noord is taken as a case study, and a survey is used to gather citizens’ perceptions of nature, their experiences of ecological loss and grief, and their attachments to their local environment. In combination with a spatial and a governance analysis, a governance strategy is designed to create both physical and mental space for eco-grief to exist and be acknowledged in the urban context in order to contribute to a societal change towards eco-centric values. The strategy involves three elements focussed on building the relationship with our environment, revealing environmental losses and coping with the corresponding feelings.
This research contributes to debates around eco-grief by providing empirical insights from an urban setting while addressing urban-specific challenges like the “anti-urban bias” and the “shifting baseline syndrome”.

Humans are consuming resources at a rate that the natural world can not sustain. Nations around the world are grappling with large amounts of possible interventions that can stop or at least delay the battle against environmental degradation. While we may not notice it, hard infrastructure (energy, transportation, water management and communications), have a outsized effect on the negative impact that humans have on the natural environment. It is a representation of the backbone of modern society that can both enable, and disable, our ability to transition to a more sustainable future. Directly linked to this our loss of connection with nature. Infrastructure is a critical piece of the puzzle that is the creating of a sustainable future. Thats why this project will focus on using hard infrastructure to enable us to live within the planetary boundaries in the context of South Holland in the Netherlands. An inventory of the existing infrastructure network is completed to understand the scope of the problem. Subsequently, a literature review, analysis of similar case studies and industry research was completed to understand potential solutions. Then, using the existing natural structure as a backbone, a series of green, connected and smart interventions are proposed. These interventions occur on provincial, municipal and local scales and work together to enable the human sphere and the ecosphere to exist in symbiosis.
The following is a proposal on how to achieve a sustainable, innovative, just, accessible and resilient South Holland by the year 2060 through a reimagining of the hard infrastructure system.