Rotterdam is situated in the Dutch province of South Holland and forms part of the Randstad conurbation. The Port of Rotterdam is one of the world’s largest and busiest harbors.
With nearly 600,000 inhabitants it is the second largest city in the Netherlands. The metropolitan region has nearly 1 million inhabitants (2008). Rotterdam and its satellite towns form the Netherlands’ most heavily urbanized district.The presence of the huge harbor has made Rotterdam into a city of immigrants. Over half the population comes from abroad, and much of the rest consists of communities from the surrounding region who have chosen to come and live in the city. This make-up gives the city a complex, diverse character.

Since its reconstruction in the 1960s, Rotterdam’s inner city has been wrestling with an image as an empty, visitor-unfriendly and unsafe place. The Municipality has followed a strategy from the 1970s onwards of eliminating that uncongenial image. The central area, which has only 30 thousand residents as opposed to an employee population of 80 thousand, has consequently undergone major changes in recent decades.

The city has been trying to combat the sense of emptiness and the lack of a distinct identity in many different ways. On the one hand, it has tried to cultivate a clean, healthy and safe living environment by encouraging a high level of social control and management; on the other, it has loaded the city with countless amenities for leisure shopping, special events, theme years and festivals.

Repression and festivity

As regards its public domain, Rotterdam is known for three specific phenomena.
Rotterdam has a huge amount of public space. The large-scale, modern layout of the city, both in the center and in surrounding neighborhoods reconstructed after the war, has yielded public spaces which are often so large that a person can scarcely feel at home there or identify with the location. The postwar street plan was mainly designed with vehicle traffic in mind. There is good reason why Rotterdam is sometimes dubbed the city with the best car access in the Netherlands. It is not at all difficult to reach the middle of the center by car, and you can even find a parking place there.

In 2006, the city suddenly found itself blessed with the Rotterdam Code. Following years of heated debate about cultural differences in the city, the municipal executive decided to set standards for behavior and appealed to every resident to comply with them. The most curious stipulation of the Rotterdam Code is that Rotterdam residents are expected to speak Dutch in public places. The number of surveillance cameras has mushroomed to an alarming level since 2001, and these and other means are deployed to keep the city clean, undamaged, safe and ‘target-group oriented’. One way of achieving the last of these is a rash of Mosquitos, devices that emit high pitched sound to repel unruly youths whose young ears are peculiarly sensitive to the frequencies involved.

With its abundance of public space, Rotterdam has made it its business to foster the holding of festivals. Originally spontaneous phenomena such as the Summer Carnival and the Dance Parade have become part of the city branding. The inner city hosts 150 festivals for a mass public during the summer months.

Hofplein. Traffic infrastructure or party venue?

The epicenter of Rotterdam’s traffic plan is the plaza of Hofplein. At uninhibited (but strictly monitored) moments, the biggest inner city transport intersection changes into a platform for the unbridled festivities of various population groups. Hofplein is the Rotterdam resident’s party venue; the occasion might be a victory for Feyenoord or for the Turkish national team, or equally a Hindu religious festival. The smooth flow of traffic gives way to an unruly tangle of people and vehicles. It is the infrastructural space that makes this possible.

The urban design of Hofplein is on the whole that of a dignified gateway to the city, with beds of tulips in spring and geraniums in summer. But as a concession to the celebrating masses, the pool in the middle of the traffic circle has been enhanced with LED illuminations whose color can be changed to match whatever festival is in progress.

Schouwburgplein. Controlling the void

The famous design of Schouwburgplein has always been promoted as a ‘celebration of the skyline’, a place destined for colonization by the new urbanite. It was a design which did its best to emphasize space – or emptiness, rather.

Following years of different programmatic tryouts, among them the BeatBus, Schouwburgplein became so popular with the younger generation that storekeepers complained of hordes of unruly teenagers interfering with their weekly late-opening evening. Loitering youths were not a desired ‘target group’. Various repressive measures were tried, culminating in the Mosquito.

300 km/h, the Urban Leisure Landscape

In the wake of so many successful events, the Extreme Event has arrived: dashing along the city boulevard of Coolsingel or racing through the Rotterdam skyline at 300 kilometres per hour. The Bavaria City Racing festival is a Formula 1 demonstration and a parade of international racing cars and their drivers. Rotterdam also hosts a round of the Red Bull Air Race in 2008, after three years of absence. Hundreds of thousands of spectators are expected to crowd the banks of the River Maas to witness the flying skills of the world’s ten best racing pilots as they compete for points in the World Air Racing Championships, the fastest and most extreme motorized sport on wings.
It is this and many other mega-events that impart some big city allure to Rotterdam. But after the last round, the arena changes back into an empty lot. Is Rotterdam a city with inhabitants or merely a gathering point for temporary visitors?

Euro 2000, Cultural Capital of Europe 2001, Waterlife 2003, Sport Year 2005, City of Architecture 2007, Green Year 2008 and European Youth Capital 2009

Theme years have been a great success. The municipal executive has launched seven of these years dedicated to a specific theme since 2000. Rotterdam hopes that year-long festivals will attract visitors to the city and give a higher national and international profile to the corresponding thematic qualities of the city. The public space lends itself well to these events, although one may question whether an artificial theme really works. When will there be a Year of Rotterdam?

Binnenrotte. Europe’s largest street market.

Twice weekly, Rotterdam’s emptiest public space changes into its fullest. With over 1,000 stalls offering a wide range of products such as foods, garden plants, fabrics and secondhand furniture, the market attracts people from every walk of life. With the additional draw of the public library, this is one of Rotterdam’s liveliest locations.

A new covered market hall is projected alongside the existing street market, partly in response to anticipated EU directives on the preservation of fresh foods.

Beyond repression and festivity

Rotterdam is faced with a choice: carry on attracting new target groups such as mass, middle-class and elite tourists, or exploit the diverse cultural capital in which the city is already so rich. Fanatical persistence with programming huge numbers of festivals for specific target groups has its attractions as a way of bulking up the huge numbers of tourists and visitors, but it does little for the city’s internal social coherence. Rotterdam’s multicultural society and its abundance of open space produce an inherent vitality which cannot be turned to profit with festivals.

Elma van Boxtel en Kristian Korenman (ZUS)