Our experience of the city is created in motion. While walking, cycling and driving, we string the experiences together into our image of the built environment. Whether a city is green, formal, open, watery or cozy, it is always the streets that give you this image.
And that’s why Rotterdam is so different from, say, The Hague or Amsterdam. The culture of the cities is mirrored in the arrangement of the streets. The Hague has straight streets, in all shapes and sizes. The streets are more formal than in other cities due to symmetrical profiles, the central placement of statues and stately buildings in the streets’ axis. The Hague is the royal city.
The streets of Amsterdam make more of a network, they lay the foundation of a Libertarian city. Nowhere is an important building in a line of sight or streets leading directly to the heart of the city. The whole of canals, streets and alleys seems to hold everything together like a web and with an unconscious precision, whereby differences between rank and class are effortlessly incorporated. The fundamental sharpness of building in the building line makes a precise distinction between public and private. Perhaps this is the key to the high degree of collectivity that can be felt on the street. Amsterdam belongs to all of us.
Rotterdam has a much less recognizable street pattern than The Hague or Amsterdam. Rather, the city seems to be a succession of a number of smaller street patterns, each telling its own story. It is difficult to draw a direct conclusion from this or it should be that the city is difficult to comprehend. Rotterdam takes the city dweller less by the hand.
It is also striking that the number of streets in Rotterdam is much smaller than in Amsterdam and The Hague. As a result, the city is coarser and there are fewer routes to choose from. This in turn can result in the image of the city being greatly simplified. Where the simplicity can be seen as both welcome clarity and shabby simplification. When the surface area of the public space is divided by the length (the streets), this results in the average width of the public space. And then the difference with other cities suddenly becomes measurable. The streets of Rotterdam appear to be on average up to 1.5 times as wide as in the other two cities. In the city that does not embrace, there is a precarious balance between sense of freedom and that of emptiness.
Fragment from Rotterdam Klein&Fijn (Rotterdam Small&Fine), 2012
Image: De streets of Rotterdam, Studio Hartzema
