Wif you haven’t been paying attention
Then there is already another flat in Rotterdam
Where there used to be something from before the war
The song Urban Renewal van Kees Torn is singing around in my head now that the city has a new college, from Leefbaar Rotterdam, VVD, Denk and D66. Parties that all want to stand up for entrepreneurs: is that their greatest common denominator? It’s just a label: entrepreneurship can be done in many ways and if you’re not for entrepreneurship, are you against it? I am also an entrepreneur myself.
A map is of little use to you
Although it was issued in this year
No neighborhood is the same anymore
It was a ‘club of entrepreneurs’ that received radical proposals in 1946 in the municipal reconstruction plan, ‘whereby the new Rotterdam was completely disconnected from the existing, historic city map’. write like this historians CJM Schuyt, Ed Taverne in their book 1950: Prosperity in black and white†
That influential club turned out to have “a very different view of a modern city than the geographers, architects and urban planners who were simultaneously working on the city of the future.” As early as 1940, immediately after the bombing, these entrepreneurs were pre- pared to receive large development funds from the US (later Marshall Aid) in order to be able to carry out their plans for Rotterdam as an economic engine.
People renovate and dig and demolish and build
And thinks what is a year old already
(The rest of Kees Torn’s song can be heard on the album Death and Destruction† And then let’s talk about a tribute to the comedian in this city where he himself lived. Maybe a statue that keeps popping up in different places and can never be found on a map).
After the war, Rotterdam did not receive a replacement heart, such as Middelburg, for example, where the old city map remained valid. Rotterdam became a city without a heart with a diamond:
“A new tangent of highways projected around the city that was to link Rotterdam to the national and international network. (…) For the traffic experts at Rijkswaterstaat, it was the basis for the creation of a new phenomenon: a city without a recognizable form, without metaphorical content and without moralistic meaning: Stad Nederland. A city that they did not really want, but that they simply saw emerging from the fully motorized society.”
In 2022, the college parties find each other “in their frustration about the traffic jam in the city, caused by GroenLinksige runway closures and parking lot offers”, wrote Rosanne Hertzberger this month. NRC†
Also read this article about the most important plans and all aldermen of the new colleg
A city without a heart that suffers from a traffic jam: is that because of parties that try to make the gears turn slower? The ‘pro-car parties’, such as Rijnmond VVD, Leefbaar and Denk featured, are investing 20 million euros in a ‘car-free’ Rotterdam, according to the municipal agreement. Fewer cars in the city is apparently a widely supported idea.
The big question: where do we put those millions in? Are we going to keep the machine running, in which people are ‘hr’, human resourceshuman resources that we need to better manage to avoid congestion: ‘Kilometers of traffic jam due to two patients: tunnel at Rotterdam open again after solving staff shortages†de Volkskrant† And just when you have a day off, someone else blocks the machine: ‘Long Pentecost traffic jams, woman (23) died in a serious accident A15†AD† Will we continue to serve the machine? In which the Minister of Health after two years of Covid says that hospitals ‘have to step it up a notch‘, as if they were gearboxes?
The Netherlands as an efficient, increasingly profitable machine: this is the image of our country from the modernist heyday: almost a century old. And it’s a choice to think in that imagery, though it’s so ubiquitous that you’re constantly forgetting it. But it is a choice: in which language and terms we think about ourselves, other people, our city, Rotterdam.
Thalia Verkade wrote here about traffic and the streets in Rotterdam, how we talk about it and how that way of talking influences how we think about it. This was the last episode.