It took a while, but you can even get there now by metro to the beach. From the center to Hoek van Holland in 37 minutes. Yes, the city was once again proud of it: yet another example of Rotterdam’s drive for innovation. Is it sometimes possible to take the metro to Zandvoort from Amsterdam Central Station? Well then.
In Rotterdam, where the declared Ajax fan who is our head of state makes his appearance today (his wife is, graciously, for Feyenoord), city marketing an art form. When you arrive at the station you can immediately stock up on Rotterdam mugs, socks or T-shirts with funny folk wisdom from ‘Roffa’ (formerly ‘Rotjeknor’). The city of ‘rolled up sleeves’ and ‘yes, isn’t it?’ stands been on the list for years by Lonely Planet. And so Rotterdam, as Tom Wolfe once gloomily remarked about his own New York, is also threatening to become a city ‘playing itself’.
But what is the reality? There’s a lot that’s at odds with the shiny travel brochures. Dissatisfaction. Poverty. ‘Extractors’ in the harbour, accounts in the drug economy. Youth who with stabbing weapons into the street. The excruciatingly slow renovation of South Rotterdam, where the municipality has been trying to get its hands dirty for decades now. Gentrification and impoverishment at the same time. And then another one lighter as a projectile in the cockpit.
It is the city where the multicultural society is no longer a debate, but a daily reality
Yet you can also see the flip side differently. Rotterdam is the canary in the coal mine among the big cities, a social thermometer in times of crisis. The bridgehead of Fortuyn in 2002, but also the city where the multicultural society is no longer a debate, but a daily reality. The city of harsh measures such as the Rotterdam Act, but also the city where Housing protest and other resistance raises its head first. Also no coincidence: Feyenoord, the broken leg of football in spoiled decades, miraculously revives in troubled times.
In short, it is a bit further to walk from one café to the next – or, for the crowdfrom one pat on the back to the next – but Rotterdam is where it happens.
Journalist Arjen van Veelen already wrote a beautiful, contradictory book about that side of the city last year, Rotterdam. An ode to inefficiency, in which he takes the reader through the less sparkling Rijnmond regions. One side note: he writes that Rotterdam has no ‘melancholy’. Take action and don’t look back is the motto. When I read that, I choked in my hair salon for a while. The attitude to life of Rotterdammers – all imports from Zeeland, Brabant, Friesland, Anatolia or the Rif – is phlegmatic (‘you can’t do anything about it anyway’), but patience is not endless. Melancholy and protest, a great combination for a city with a heart.
Sjoerd de Jong writes a column here every Thursday.