HARBOR is a working summit for the people who build at the edge of the sea — port and coastal engineers, municipal adaptation leads, habitat designers, insurers and the communities living behind the wall. No keynote about the year 2100 without a drawing of it on stage, in the room, at 3pm on a Wednesday.
Werkhallen · Wilhelminakade 173 · Rotterdam · NL
HARBOR exists because coastal work is stuck between conferences: too technical for policy rooms, too political for engineering ones. Four editions have produced something else — a room where the person who specifies the sheet-pile depth sits next to the person who signs for it and the person whose street floods.
Sessions are capped, panels require a completed project, and every keynote ends with a live method — drawings, assumptions, numbers. The average delegate leaves with eleven new contacts and one written commitment with a date on it.
Delegate mix at Harbor '25 (Yokohama), n = 1,204
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The format
Full speaker list publishes 2 Mar. Below, the confirmed headline programme so far.
Tue 14 Apr · 09:00 · Main Hall
Thirty metres of storm-surge safety margin, and the honest part: the models that underwrote it were calibrated on a century that is now the floor. Halvorsen opens HARBOR with the delta's revised load tables and the two assumptions they have stopped defending.
Ingrid Halvorsen
Chief Engineer · North Sea Delta Works Authority, NL
Keynote · Day 04
What Jamestown kept, what it had to release, and the property register that made it legal.
Kwame Osei-Bonsu · Accra Metro, GH
Day 02 · 09:00
Nine years of sediment augmentation on a subsiding delta, with the cost per cubic metre.
Dr Mei-Lin Zhao · Pacific Sediment Lab, CN
Day 03 · Finance
A live read of the withdrawal map, and the three evidence standards that change a premium.
Rafael Duarte · Iberre Re, PT
Day 02 · Studio crit
Rewiring a working waterfront for the people who live behind the fence — including the cranes.
Noor el-Fassi · Tangier Port Authority, MA
Day 01 · Technical
Structural assumptions written in 1978, and the retrofits that cost more than the code.
Tomas Lindqvist · Arctic Harbour Studio, SE
Day 03 · Field
Borrowing Dutch water engineering for a Brazilian hillside settlement — badly, then well.
Ana Beatriz Salles · Estúdio Marés, BR
Day 01 · Workshop
Uncertainty shown by default. A dashboard demo that admits what it does not know.
Jared Koopman · TideGrid Systems, US
Dissent session · Day 02
A commissioner's rebuttal of three projects defended earlier this week. Traditionally the best-attended hour.
Ayesha Rahim · Karachi Coastal Dev., PK
Day 01 · 10:15 · hard stop per city
Two tracks run in parallel each morning, one in the afternoon. Field labs leave by coach from Door 4. Save sessions to your itinerary — we'll send the list to your calendar before you travel.
Tracks
Tue 14 April · 9 sessions
Ingrid Halvorsen · North Sea Delta Works Authority
Showing 0 saved sessions · tap “save” on any session
Four things, each one measurable, none of which require a follow-up email campaign.
“I came back with a method for the culvert debate I'd been losing for two years. It was written on a napkin by a woman from Gdańsk.”
Programme committee, HARBOR '25
You write it Friday morning. Someone else in the room signs it. We email it to both of you at 30, 60 and 90 days — and ask whether you did it. Last edition: 71% answered yes to at least one clause.
Every technical session closes with the working material: load tables, detail drawings, spec language, tender clauses, failure logs. Published to the ledger within 24 hours, licence-free.
Opt-in only, printed on paper at the door. We do not sell, scrape or “sync” the delegate register, and vendors cannot see who attends. Fifteen years of that, uninterrupted.
Nine clauses, adopted in the room and sent to the signatory bodies on Monday. The two previous Notes are cited in eleven procurement documents. That is the only metric we report to ourselves.
Included with the Field Lab pass (two labs) or added à la carte (€85 per lab). Coaches leave from Door 4, twelve minutes after the bell, once. Sizes are small because the sites are not large.
Control room, the supercomputer that decides, and the 1997 near-miss log read aloud. 90 min · coach +20 min.
Out-of-hours access to the 407 m lock, then the bypass that nobody thought would work. 2 h.
A street that stores its own rain, and the eleven-year argument that produced it. Walk, 90 min.
Walk the amphitheatre that floods on purpose, with the designer who lost the first three rounds.
45 km by hire bike through six water levels, one pumping station still on diesel. Bring legs.
Traffic control for 420 km of waterway. Passport check at the gate; allow 40 min buffer.
Attendees per edition
“I have stopped saying “networking”. I came back with two co-authors and a contractor who had already built the thing I was specifying badly.
“The dissent session on day two was the most uncomfortable and most useful ninety minutes I've spent professionally. Our scheme changed twice after it.
“We arrived as four people from one municipality. We left with a joint drainage agreement with the municipality upstream, drafted in a workshop, signed in the corridor.
of delegates return for the next edition
would recommend it to a colleague
procurement documents citing past Notes
delegate records ever sold. Also: zero vendor keynotes
Hosted with
Prices below are early rate (until 15 January). Public-sector and studio rates exist because the people who most need this room are not always the ones with conference budgets.
Currently
Tranche 4 of 5
1,480 seats · 396 remaining
Delegate pass
Early rate · +€180 after 15 Jan · excl. 21% VAT
Field lab pass
Limited to 120 · 41 left at early rate
Public sector
Cities, provinces, water boards & port authorities — same rate for all governments.
Studio & student
Practising studios under 10 people, PhD candidates & early-career (< 3 yrs).
Tide pass · remote
For colleagues who cannot travel — includes the Q&A, which most streams cut.
Team table · 5 seats
Five delegates, one invoice, one shared debrief room for the week.
A former hockey hall on the Wilhelminakade, four hundred metres from the water the whole week is about. Nothing here is a hotel ballroom: the main hall has a loading dock, because the field-lab rigs come in by forklift.
Address
Werkhallen
Wilhelminakade 173
3072 AP Rotterdam, NL
Doors & times
08:15 – 18:00
Tue–Fri · Day 01 runs to 21:00 for the reception
By transit
28 min from Centraal
Metro line D to Rijnhaven, then 600 m along the quay. The Hague 22 min direct.
By air
Schiphol → 45 min
Direct train to Rotterdam Centraal. No shuttle — you won't need one.
Hotel block
Code HARBOR26 · until 1 Mar
Accessibility & care
“Professional development directly related to an active infrastructure programme: 38 technical sessions across four days, including cost-modelling and procurement workshops.” Invoices are issued same-day with VAT separated and PO references supported.
Yes, and within two working days of registration. We issue signed letters with your programme role, invoice reference and venue address. 174 were issued for Yokohama; all were accepted. Write to visas@harborsummit.org.
Field Lab pass holders choose at registration, so they do not sell out underneath you. À la carte seats are released in three drops from 2 March; the waitlist historically converts at 60%, usually for Lab B and F.
Recordings plus the drawing pack are available for 12 months. Internal sharing inside your organisation is expected and permitted. Public re-upload is not — several speakers share unpublished failure data.
Sponsors support travel grants and are named on the site. They do not get stages, keynote slots, delegate data, or booth positions in the lunch hall. There are eleven product demonstrations across the week, each chaired by an engineer who uses the thing.
Published in full at registration. Two named officers, independent of the committee, reachable by phone all four days. Three incidents at the last edition: two resolved on site, one removal. We publish the counts after every edition.
A third of the room each edition works in policy, finance, community or design. Sessions are technical by intent — the assumption is that you will ask, and the room will answer. Harbour Tables are deliberately mixed.
Rotterdam · 14–17 April 2026
Tranche 4 closes when the seats go — there is no date. Get a pass, or get the tide letter and decide with the calendar in front of you.
Your order
1 × delegate pass · 0 sessions saved
Total ex. VAT
€985