Rotterdam in the spotlight: from dismal mega-port to 'Dutch Brooklyn'

If Unilever plc’s recent announcement about moving its corporate HQ out of London rang with the dread air of Brexodus, it was drowned out by the buzz already emanating from the company’s new home: Rotterdam. The Netherlands’ gritty second city once struggled to maintain even that ranking in Dutch hearts, as revealed by the well-worn motto: “Amsterdam to party, Den Haag to live, Rotterdam to work.” But the last decade has put paid to that dismissal, with showstoppers such as Rem Koolhaas’s De Rotterdam and the horseshoe-shaped Markthal bulwarking the city’s reputation for adventurous architecture, cheap rents pulling in the creative crowd, and the rest of the world finally clueing up to life beyond the container port. Vogue recently called the city nothing less than “the Dutch Brooklyn”.

Life after freight

Rotterdam is reaping the benefits of prescient policies set down to give it a new lease of life when its vast wharfs – once the world’s biggest port – started feeling the strain of global competition. This transit hub was to become a destination in its own right, with a revivified centre, parks and – following its 2001 stint as European Capital of Culture – beefed-up cultural assets. As a result, the unthinkable is now happening in this relatively affordable city, says Rotterdam-based bestselling novelist Ernest van der Kwast. “People from Amsterdam are desperate to live here.” The demand is such that he’s been asked by real-estate agents whether he’ll sell up; a frequent enough occurrence in Rotterdam these days that a satirical spoof of the typical Amsterdammer property trawl recently went viral. But despite its new status, this city of 630,000 retains its no-nonsense character. “There is a feeling of, ‘Don’t be too proud,’” says Kwast. “Don’t scream from the roofs that we are No 1. Because we’re still No1 on some other lists, like poverty.”

Rotterdam in numbers

11^th Ranking in list of the world’s busiest container ports, the highest in Europe

50.3% Residents with non-Dutch origins, the highest of any Netherlands city

€144 Average office rent per square metre in 2016 (compared with €197 in Amsterdam)

90% Amount of the city below sea level, by as much as six metres in places

History in 100 words

Hobbled from the start in the glamour stakes when it took its name from the Rotte (“muddy water”) river it reclaimed land from, the city set off towards its cargo-laden destiny in 1350 with the gouging-out of the Rotterdamse Schie canal. Jostling for position with nearby Schiedam and Delft, this linked it to the northern Dutch cities. The heftier Nieuwe Waterweg, built in 1872 to ensure steamship access to and from the Meuse and Rhine rivers, gave Rotterdam continental and – through the Dutch East India Company – global reach. The city centre was almost completely destroyed by the Luftwaffe in May 1940 in order to cow the Netherlands, but it bounced back with a stridently modern postwar reconstruction. The port was in fine fettle too – the world’s busiest from 1962 until 2004, when Singapore overtook it. Rotterdam hasn’t quite given up, though: the Nieuwe Waterweg is being deepened this year.

Rotterdam in sound and vision

Techno’s answer to the Jägerbomb, the gabber subgenre started in the 1990s as Rotterdam’s middle finger to relaxed BPMs on the Amsterdam house scene.

Icelandic 2008 big-budget feature Reykjavik-Rotterdam (remade with Mark Wahlberg as Contraband) saw the shit hit the fan against a backdrop of multi-coloured Dutch freight.

How liveable is Rotterdam?

If you don’t believe the Amsterdammers, it’s starting to pick up prizes. The Urbanist awards voted Rotterdam best European city in 2015, praising its commitment to “innovative architecture, urban design and new business models”. In Metropolis magazine’s roundup of the world’s most liveable cities, it was commended for its sustainability – with initiatives such as a heat-sharing network that distributes energy from the port to the city; the planned Dutch Windwheel, another piece of flagship architecture that, unusually for a high-rise, generates more energy than it uses; or its long-lasting plastic bridges, now nearly 100 in number. But there are hanging questions about whether Rotterdam’s progressive sheen is partly window-dressing. Last year, the municipality abandoned its broader CO2 reduction targets – perhaps because its industrial sector remains heavily reliant on fossil fuels.

Inside city hall

Geert Wilders’ nationalist Party for Freedom (PVV) was reduced to one seat in Rotterdam’s municipal elections, after its local leader was exposed as a former member of a far-right student fraternity. But there are still concerns that racial tensions are rising in this multicultural hotspot. Moroccan-born mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb is obliged to split the difference: immigrant poster boy on one hand, but ready to wield the heavy stick with his own community. He recently claimed every Muslim was “a bit of a Salafist”; following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015, he told would-be jihadists planning similar things in his city that they could “fuck off”. That kind of forthrightness, and his perceived toughness on crime, has made him unexpectedly popular with the conservative Leefbaar Rotterdam (Liveable Rotterdam) party. Van der Kwast admires Aboutaleb’s balancing act: “He’s able to be strict addressing problems among certain groups, because he’s from that group. But he’s the only one who can say those things. It would be discriminatory otherwise.”

Biggest urban risk

Delta-squatting, low-lying Rotterdam has a soggy future if climate change continues. But true to its postwar history of innovative urban planning, it’s turning calamity into opportunity. As well as traditional flood defences such as the giant Maeslantkering storm-surge barrier, it has begun incorporating the “sponge city” concept into its infrastructure. The principle is to let water in, not try and keep it out: into sites like the Benthemplein plaza, able to soak up 1.7m litres, or the storage facility underneath Museumplein parking garage, which provides 12% of the city’s holding capacity. If all that fails, then it could be time to float. There’s currently a floating pavilion in the Rijnhaven, and plans for an entire buoyant neighbourhood there; part of creeping gentrification south of the Maas. Construction has also begun on a floating farm due to weigh anchor in Merwehaven, north of the river – a world first. The €2.5m project will house 40 cows, producing 1,000 litres of milk a day.

What’s next for the city?

The tide of gentrification money is now lapping over into the southern half of the city, historically the poorer. But that doesn’t mean inequality is finished. A 2016 referendum on plans to replace affordable housing with units for middle- and high-income earners flagged up fears that the poor are simply being shunted elsewhere. Van der Kwast believes that more effort is needed to bridge this entrenched gap, and cites the once-failing Hugo de Grootschool in Charlois district. It was notorious for 40% pass rates until a new principal, Eric van ’t Zelfde, rallied teachers and pupils to drag that figure up to 100%, a feat recounted in his book Superschool. “People think that when you’re poor, you’re stupid,” says Van der Kwast. “He proved that it’s worth giving people a chance, and I hope there’s more awareness of [what can be done] now.” Rotterdam can’t congratulate itself until it addresses this segregation, Van der Kwast says. “It’ll be No 1 city when they can call the southern part our Brooklyn. Maybe in 10 years’ time.”

Close zoom

DutchNews.nl covers Rotterdam, among other places, for English-language speakers. This New York Times piece gives the multimedia treatment to the city’s flood-defence panoply, while Fast Company break down the local penchant for outside-the-box thinking in housing and business.

• This article was amended on 9 April 2018. An earlier version suggested Ernest van der Kwast thought people in his street had been collectively approached by a real Amsterdam property-buyer; it was, in fact, a spoof article.
  

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