This is the Big Five, the companion series to the podcast Water Talks, with five one-on-one interviews with some of the extraordinary speakers from the main episodes.

Matthijs Bouw is a Dutch architect and urban designer who has lived in New York now for eight years. With his studio One Architecture he is working on ‘The Big U’, ten miles of infrastructure works around the tip of Manhattan which are not only meant to protect the island from storms, but also to provide the local communities with valuable public space. In addition, Matthijs is a professor of climate resilience at Penn University and the first Rockefeller Urban Resilience Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation.

You can hear him in episode 2 of Water Talks, ‘Too Much’. This is the longer version of my interview with him during the New York Water Week and the UN Water conference in 2023.