From the deserted center where you could shoot the proverbial cannon without hitting anyone, to a bustling city center full of life and conviviality. In the last decade, Rotterdam made an intermediate sprint to shake off the image of an empty, ugly and boring city. With some success, because even abroad they find Rotterdam hip, fun and – let it be said again – cosy.
Cosy. Martin Aarts occasionally dropped the word at the town hall, a bit teasing. For many born and bred Rotterdammers, it almost sounded like an insult. For fun you went somewhere else. Rotterdam was raw and rough and had to stay that way. An attitude that someone like Jules Deelder cultivated: “Rotterdam is not cosy. Rotterdam is Rotterdam.”
Aarts did not believe in this when he became head of Spatial Planning of the municipality in 2004. But his ideas to breathe more life into the city center did not remain without resistance. This is not necessary for us, you know, Rotterdam is just like that, he was told by colleagues. “Even then I thought: Rotterdammers are not that different from other people at all, we are just Dutch people who like to have fun and want to sit on a terrace.” The realization that Rotterdam has too few people living in the city center is older. Already at the end of the sixties, a widely shared feeling dawned that something was missing in the modernist ‘downtown’ in the American style. Yet it took a long time before targeted policies were implemented to remedy this omission of reconstruction. That went by trial and error.
Initially, there was the political reflex to spruce up the center with pavilions, shops and restaurants. That hardly worked. Aarts: “If a planner says that a restaurant should be built somewhere, you know one thing for sure: that he doesn’t want to be there. You can’t plan nice places somewhere if you don’t have nice city dwellers going there. It’s the other way around: if those nice city dwellers are there, those nice shops and pubs will also be there.”
City Lounge
One of the first municipal plans in which the conclusion was drawn that more residents should be in the city center is the Inner City Plan from 2008. The term City Lounge is used. Four years later, the study Rotterdammers make the city was published, a study into the possibilities for densifying the city centre. If in other Dutch cities 10 percent of the population lives in the center, is that also possible in Rotterdam, where it is only 5 percent? With a population of 600,000, is a doubling from 30,000 to 60,000 realistic?
The answer in the study was a resounding yes. But is that still the case now, eight years later? The municipality’s policy as laid down in the Housing Vision and the Municipal Executive Agreement is still aimed at growth in the city centre. But there are also protests against further densification. Some of the current residents fear hazing and petrification of their environment. Hear the protests against the construction plans in Het Park, or on the lawn next to the Markthal.
If you look at the figures, you will see that Rotterdam is only just getting started. Although the number of inhabitants in the city centre has risen from 30,000 to 35,000 in the past year, at the same time the total number of inhabitants rose to 650,000. If that 10 percent is still the goal, Rotterdam has in fact made little progress. Yet many people get the feeling that the center is now full. That is also what the now retired Aarts heard when Rotterdam suddenly became popular after 2014 – the year in which the city put itself in the spotlight with the opening of the Markthal, Central Station and Rotterdam. “Well done, but stop now. Proven success does not guarantee that everyone will want to continue in this way. But if we stop now, we will be behind again in ten years. That is my biggest concern now.”
But is there enough space in the center for 30,000 new residents, or about 20,000 homes? In Rotterdammers maken stad, an exploration was made of places for ground-level homes (on the street), water-bound homes, air-bound homes (additions to existing buildings), high-rise buildings, transformation of offices, DIY homes and so-called infill buildings. The total potential amounted to 20,250 homes in the center (including Kop van Zuid), of which more than half of which provided residential towers.
According to other studies, this is still an underestimate. At the same time that Rotterdammers make the city was being drawn up, Studio Hartzema was conducting a study into only topping up flat roofs and infill areas, small-scale housing in open spaces, the ‘holes in the city centre’. In the report Rotterdam Klein & Fijn (Small & Fine) hundreds of locations were identified, accounting for thousands of homes: 30,000 in total. “Of that potential, only a maximum of twenty projects have been realized since then. So there are still hundreds of opportunities,” says founder Henk Hartzema, architect and urban planner.
The reason why these gaps have not been filled for a long time is because there is something wrong with them, says Hartzema. “It is not for nothing that parts are empty. The soil is contaminated, or there are pipes and pipes. Moreover, the efforts that developers have to make to make a small project are disproportionately large, namely the same as for a large project, only for a smaller number of homes. But the city will become more pleasant and living more expensive, so developers can charge more money per square meter. So more and more of these types of locations are coming into the picture as profitable. I think that will be the next wave.’
Thickened city = nice city?
The reason for the research was a project by Hartzema on the Wijnhaveneiland that did not go ahead due to opposition from local residents. He experienced first-hand that a fuller city with smaller margins between buildings and people can be perceived as threatening. Is that still the case, or are Rotterdammers now convinced that a denser city is also a nicer city? “That is the question we must all continue to ask. The sum of all the projects and the conflicts that they can cause, we don’t always have a clear idea of that. Increase in density brings with it an increase in traffic. If we don’t manage to curb that, we will end up with a city that is stuck. Then people lose the feeling of freedom, which in my opinion is the best quality of Rotterdam.” Aarts is also of the same opinion. According to him, a car-free city is also possible, because the inner city resident is a runner, cyclist and public transport user. “These are not people who go to the supermarket by car. That’s why they just moved to the city center, so they don’t have to do that anymore.” In Rotterdammers maken stad, densification was therefore already linked to greening and sustainability. There is still room for that too, says Aarts. “Just add up the surface area that cars take up. If you limit that space a bit, how many football fields of green can you create.”
Aarts and Hartzema both cite the construction of the ‘green lung’ from Hofplein over the Coolsingel to the Westblaak as an example that Rotterdam is on the right track. Aarts: “Previously, I thought that Rotterdam will not get away with densification if it is not also greened. Only cities that are truly healthy, clean and safe have a good future ahead of them. Now I am even more radical in this: if the city does not become greener, no people will come to live there. We have to prevent that, because if it is green and clean but hardly anyone lives there, it will become a boring city again.”
Under the conditions of green and sustainable, Hartzema also considers a further growth to 60,000 inhabitants in the center feasible. “That will work. Although I think that with higher density you should also do placemaking: small parks, courtyards, squares, waterfronts, so that the dichotomy between private and public, which is very sharp in Rotterdam with all its high-rise buildings, gets a kind of intermediate layer. The feeling of home is what keeps people in their place of residence, and that is also in the outdoor space where you meet neighbors. If that works, I think we are building the city of the future.”
Frank de Kruif, NRC handelsblad, 9 October 2020. Image: Walter Herfst
