Dutch skill at water management goes back to the dikes, dams and windmills with which they reclaimed much of their land from the seas and rivers starting in the Middle Ages. In the 1950s, they constructed the Delta Works, a revolutionary series of storm-surge barriers along the North Sea coast. But thinking has evolved since then. With the increasing threat caused by climate change, Dutch engineers have developed strategies that go beyond simply trying to keep water out. The city of Rotterdam, for instance, is building floating houses and office buildings and digging craters in downtown plazas that will be basketball courts most of the year but will fill up with runoff during high-water periods, taking the strain off the surrounding streets.

The plan being put into place in Nijmegen and 38 other sites is called Room for the River. A wide trench is being cut through the city where the river bottlenecks — 50 farms and a number of residences are being relocated — and by summer 2015 an island will come into being. The island will form a new section of the city: Higher areas of it may contain apartment buildings; other, lower-lying sections will be developed into parks and beaches. During flood periods, the lower sections of the island will simply be engulfed by water. The new embankments in this lower area will be stepped, in part so that people can relax there and enjoy views of the city center, but also to encourage daily awareness of the ever-changing water level.

When the plan was first presented, the reaction in the community was anger. To the Dutch, dams and dikes mean security. Actually allowing the water in went against centuries of ingrained thinking. But after a collaboration between city planners, community groups, the national ministry in charge of infrastructure and the region’s water board, the town as a whole came around to the idea that because the world had changed, water management had to change as well. “Technically this isn’t a very innovative project,” Mathieu Schouten of the city’s development office said. “It was the process that was innovative.”

When the final design was unveiled at a community meeting in 2009, it included both expansive recreation areas and a level of security from water that promised to make the city attractive to new companies. Those who were initially most resistant to the project — residents of Lent, the community that was to be trimmed to make way for the river — started to clap. “The Applause of Lent,” as the local newspaper called it, signaled what Ovink and other Dutch planners had been working toward: the acceptance of climate change as a way of life, and the dawn of a 21st-century approach to living with nature.

As we stood at the river’s edge, away to the east behind us scenes of chaos were unfolding as unprecedented late-spring flooding caused deaths and mass evacuations in eastern Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria and Hungary. But here, at perhaps the river’s most flood-prone spot, all was calm. When the project is complete, it should ease flooding concerns not just in Nijmegen but in Germany and beyond.

Last October, six months after Ovink came to the U.S., he stood onstage in an auditorium at New York University and gazed out at more than a thousand people: mayors, engineers, urban designers, power-company representatives, students and community activists. They jostled shoulder to shoulder to study large panels colorfully outlining approaches for dealing with beaches, rivers and cities. The crowd for the breakfast gathering was so much bigger than organizers expected that there was near chaos when the coffee ran out.