October 30, 1968
ROTTERDAM, HOLLAND — Contrary to popular opinion, the Dutch have not completely repulsed the sea. In Rotterdam, they have captured it and put it to work.
The bent for the sea is so strong here that the entire city seems ready to sail with the next tide. Rotterdam — sitting at the mouth of the Rhine-Maas, Europe’s busiest river complex — was willed by geography to be a port. But that Rotterdam today should be the world’s greatest port has been willed only by strong and determined Dutchmen.
“Waiting for the ships…”
A century ago, ships bound for Rotterdam struggled through the Maas river estuary from the North Sea. Its winding route and continuous silting made this a slow and costly connection. Then, in 1872, work was finished on a new waterway cut straight to the sea through the coastal dunes. Rotterdam’s course was plotted.
By the eve of World War II, Rotterdam had become a busy port, though not one of Europe’s biggest. The war found Rotterdam occupied by German troops and the port at a standstill. To make things worse, the Nazis, as they retreated in 1944, blew up more than a third of the wharves and destroyed about 40 per cent of the port equipment. When V-E Day came, rebuilding the harbor was the first priority. But the work started then has never stopped.
Today, the port stretches from the center of the city nearly 25 miles eastward to the North Sea itself. Not content to take the port to the sea, Rotterdam is now building an 8000-acre island in the sea, which will provide new industrial sites and docking space for supertankers of 250,000 tons or more, which are being planned. (The Queen Elizabeth, the world’s largest passenger liner, weighs 83,000 tons.) And to make it possible for the mammoth tankers to reach the new island, Rotterdam is making a deeper channel in the sea.
With each new shipping technique, Rotterdam has expanded and reshaped its harbor in time to land the new business. Providing space for the jumbo tankers is one example of Rotterdam’s foresight. Another was the quick action to suit the port to handle containerized shipping. Explained one official, “When new ships are developed, we’ll have quays waiting for them.”
First, Last and Always
To say that Rotterdam is the “world’s biggest port” — one third larger than second-place New York — is inadequate at a time when superlatives are almost trite. A ship arrives here about every seven minutes, more than 30,000 a year. Beside the ocean-going craft, 250,000 or more inland waterway craft ply Rotterdam’s water annually.
The city is a grey skyline punctured by the black silhouette of cranes with great steel arms cocked in a salute to commerce. Seen from the land, the port is refineries after warehouses after truck terminals after rail yards, stretching on and on over a flat landscape throbbing with hidden pipelines. From the water, you see a nautical rush hour with tugboats dwarfed by barges dwarfed by freighters dwarfed by the huge tankers. And you see shipyards with towering cranes, which look strong enough to lift the earth below them.
The air is filled with the smells of salt and cereal and oil and chemicals and those sounds peculiar to ports — toots and whistles and clanks and roars and groans. In the parts of the harbor that have no factories or docks, construction workers are busy building them. One project is the development of the world’s largest refinery for Shell. They say here that the port will handle double its current volume in a few years. What is its current volume? Well over 300 billion pounds of everything from everywhere.
Rotterdamers like to say, “Other cities have ports. Our port has a city.” A journalist here adds, “The city’s first priority is the harbor. The city’s second priority is the harbor. And the city’s third priority is the harbor too.”
Ships come in all sizes in Rotterdam, Here, in the Botlek section of the port; parking space is at a premium where bulk goods are handled.
Where does the emphasis on the port leave its city? No one is boosting it for first place. But Rotterdam’s leaders say they are trying to build via city of the size and scale corresponding with its significance as port of the world.” The reconstruction of the war-torn harbor produced spectacular results. War’s devastation of the city spurred the building of a new Rotterdam.
The Rush and the Pause
Germany attacked the Netherlands in the spring of 1940. At Rotterdam’s eastern edge, the Nazis were met by tenacious Dutch defenders and their advance was momentarily checked. Finally, on April 14, the Dutch offered to negotiate a surrender of the city. But a few hours after the surrender offer, German bombers hit the city. (The Germans later termed the bombing a mistake. The Dutch were convinced that Hitler wished to use Rotterdam to prove German power.)
The bombing — heavy explosives followed by incendiaries — turned the historic triangular city center into a holocaust, which burned for days. When the smoke cleared, 642 acres of the city’s heart were gone.
With a remarkable display of cool headedness, the Rotterdam City Council met only four days after the bombing and authorized City Architect W.G. Witteveen to prepare a plan for reconstruction. Expropriation of all the land and the remaining buildings in the town center was also approved. (Unable to pay property owners for the expropriated land, the city gave them the promise of new land when the war ended.)
Rotterdam’s people felt strongly for the city they had lost and the Witteveen plan, finished in December of 1941, reflected this. It proposed rebuilding the old city core, with only slight modifications. The city had no money to implement the plan but did begin preliminary work. The center was cleared of rubble, canals were dug and some roads and bridges were built. Temporary houses and shops were erected and more than 5000 apartments were constructed. Meanwhile, work started before the war was finished on the Maas river tunnel and the Blijdorp Zoo (one of Europe’s nicest and prettiest zoos.)
In July of 1942, the Germans ordered an end to all construction activity. This decision, bitterly received at the time, was a break for the city. Rotterdam’s leadership began meeting secretly to continue reconstruction plans and had second thoughts about the Witteveen plan. They saw their opportunity to build a new, more modern Rotterdam. The Witteveen plan, it was decided, was not ambitious enough. Under Witteveen’s successor, Dr. C. van Traa, new plans were made.
“Stronger through Struggle”
Before the end of the war, Rotterdam had been bombed again — by allied forces. On March 31, 1943, allied bombers, attempting to destroy the port so the Germans could not use it, misjudged the wind and dumped their bomb loads on a workers quarter in west Rotterdam. More lives were lost to the allied bombs than to the earlier German attack.
The words “Sterker door Strijd” — Stronger through Struggle — were added to the city’s coat of arms in 1948.
“ The period of the enemy occupation,” recalls J. T. Smits, general secretary of the Town Planning Department, “had caused a breach with the past that was beyond repair.”
Van Traa’s reconstruction plan, looking to the future instead of the past, was approved by Rotterdam’s City Council in 1946. The plan said that the core area should be rebuilt as a commercial, cultural and administrative center. Industry should be kept out and residential buildings greatly reduced in the center, the plan proposed. Essentially, the 1946 plan is still being followed even though the center is now about 90 per cent completed.
Today, some 115,000 people live in the center of Rotterdam where 100,000 lived before the war. Industry has been located in other areas.
You might say that Rotterdam has become a wide-open town. Of the 25,000 buildings demolished in the war, only 8000 have been rebuilt. The new buildings, because they are taller than those destroyed, give the city about the same amount of floor space as it had pre-war. Density of the center is now only 31 per cent, compared with 65 per cent before the war. The result is that Rotterdam has one of the airiest city centers in Europe.
Surprise, Surprise?
The new city center has been divided into sectors where similar functions are clustered. At the riverfront, the land is devoted primarily to inland shipping with docks for barges and warehouses and administration buildings for shippers. Another sector contains the stock exchange and the major banks. Shops and department stores run through the center east and west and cross the city’s main street, the Coolsingel.
Around City Hall, which escaped the war, are grouped most government buildings. Cultural activities like Rotterdam Theater Hall, built with bricks taken from the rubble, and De Doelen, the city’s new concert and convention hall, are together. The large central train station is also the start of the city’s new subway system and next to it sits the bus station.
The new city center has a traffic pattern not bound to historical outlines. Three main north-south streets and three main east-west streets cross the center. Rotterdam’s widest pre-war street was 150 feet. Today, the streets range from 180 to 300 feet wide. In their redesign, the planners included a short service street inside each major block. These service streets provide unloading space for delivery trucks and keep the arterial streets free of truck traffic. The public is not permitted to park on them. The new street system reduced the amount of conflict between private cars and public trams a little but not nearly enough.
“We wanted to limit the reconstruction primarily to low rise buildings to give the center a human scale. So 14 stories was as high as we went. Now we are planning for buildings of 30 stories,” explains Smits. “I don4t think we would segregate functions now, if we could do over. The center lacks surprise now. You know where everything is and you can’t walk around a corner and find something you didn’t expect.”
The merchants of Rotterdam rebuilt its center together. Without places to sell their goods, they were forced to look for a mutual solution. One example of this is the Groothandelsgebouw — or Wholesalers building. More than 1,300,000 square feet of floor space makes this Europe’s largest commercial structure Inside, the building has parking for 400 cars, a mile of service roads for deliveries, and the offices of 230 wholesaling firms. About 5000 Rotterdamers work in the building.
Around the Lijnbaan
In another case, the city brought together 72 shopkeepers and helped them form a corporation. The corporation, in turn, hired an architect and work began designing the famed Lijnbaan. In 1667, Rotterdam businessmen built a covered ropewalk for their shops. The modern Lijnbaan occupies the same site, just west of the Coolsingel. A pedestrian-only shopping mall, it has a main promenade two-and-a-half blocks long and 20 yards wide and a shorter one, a block long and 13 yards wide, which ends in a plaza facing the old City Hall.
The two-story buildings along the Lijnbaan house many of Rotterdam’s finest shops and the shopping street has come to be called the city’s “Fifth Avenue.” What makes it unique are its special features-like overhanging roofs to protect shoppers from the weather, liberal placement of greenery and flowers, sidewalk cafes, sculpture like “Two Little Bears” by Anne Grimdalen, and pleasant benches for foot-weary shoppers. If two streets had not been allowed to cut through it, the Lijnbaan might have been even better.
The cooperative approach was not limited to commercial buildings. Rotterdam has built three large “collective buildings” for small workshops and service industries. These buildings are essentially similar to apartment buildings, with flats for companies instead of families, with flexible interiors that can be arranged to meet the needs of different activities.
Looking back, city officials realize that more housing should have been built in the city center, housing like the Lijnbaan apartments. Adjacent to the Lijnbaan is a public green larger than a football field. On one side is a row of shops with apartments in two stories above them. Facing the green on two other sides are apartment buildings of nine and 13 stories. Living here, you are but a minute or two from shops, the theater, the concert hall, fine restaurants, and your office. Because of rent control, the Lijnbaan apartments today are cheaper — with a monthly rental of about $70 — than new apartments in the suburbs. Needless to say, there are no vacancies. The Lijnbaan apartments seem to prove that city living has a future.
Reserved Places
Nowhere is the foresight of van Traa’s plan more evident than in its insistence that some land be reserved in the center for future growth. He refused to permit building on all the land parcels despite the immediate pressure for new construction. Today, the center of Rotterdam is still less than 90 per cent rebuilt. While most cities must tear down older buildings to accommodate new functions vital to the center city, Rotterdam can easily find space for them and still retain a large amount of open space. This policy of reserving land forces those functions not vital to the center to locate in other, less congested areas. The idea of reservations of land might be considered by American planners dealing with urban renewal projects.
The pressure brought by the automobile was not entirely anticipated in Rotterdam. While car ownership here is much lower than in many European cities — about one car for each six residents of Rotterdam — it is growing 20 per cent a year, In the reconstruction, the planners tried to strike a balance between the capacity of the streets entering the center and parking capacity there. Recent studies indicate that street capacity was underestimated and parking capacity was overestimated. As a result, driving in the center is easy and parking is difficult. And the auto is rapidly eating away at the surplus space.
One of the city’s better solutions to this problem — though a small one-is the Schouwburgplein underground parking garage in the cultural center. It contains space for 850 cars and auto service facilities on two underground levels. Because of the soggy soil, the garage cost was about $4200 per parking place. On ground level, the city is building a plaza with a restaurant, cafes, a speaker’s corner and reflecting pools.
“Not a motor car town…”
Traffic planner Bas N. de Koning says that Rotterdam is trying to deal with the growth of motor oars but “We are not building a motor car town. We are building a town for both motor cars and public transport — a European city.”
Despite the peripheral growth of the city and new industry in the port area, about 75 per cent of Rotterdam’s workers hold jobs in the pre-war core of the city. The highly automated harbor industries employ only about 15 per cent of the work force and about 8 per cent work in the new communities. So moving people in and out of the traditional city is the main traffic task.
In the public transportation sector, this job is handled by some 600 trams and busses and the new Metro, Holland’s first subway system. While the reconstruction plan took some steps to reduce the conflicts between private and public transport, the busses and trams still must compete -with cars and trucks for street space.
The Metro is a story in itself. To date, Just 3.7 miles of Metro line have been constructed — at a cost of 250 million guilders or $69 million, about $18 million a mile. Building a subway in such wet soil was an engineering marvel. To oversimplify, it was done this way: A canal was dug where the tracks were to be laid. The Metro tunnel was built in prefabricated sections. The sections were capped at each end to make them airtight and then floated up the canal. At their proper places, the sections were sunk. Then the canal was filled in.
The existing line runs from Central Station in downtown Rotterdam south under the Maas River to the city’s near south side. Work has already started on an east-west line and plans call for several lines to the suburbs before the end of the century. Though the first line is too small to make much of an impact, the Metro seems certain to help Rotterdam deal with its traffic growth.
The Maas River creates the city’s greatest traffic problems. Today, it is crossed via two bridges and two tunnels. Plans are underway for the older bridge to be replaced by a six-lane tunnel. This may take some of the pressure from the Maas tunnel, which creates 30-minute bottlenecks during rush hours.
ROTTERDAM REBUILDS — Just a few major buildings remained in the city center following the war, dominated by City Hall (with domed clock tower). The historic St. Laurens Church kleft center), begun in 1409, was only a shell. Today, the city is 90 per cent rebuilt and St. Laurens has been restored. This aerial view (below) shows the large surface spaces devoted to automobiles.
And then there is the bicycle, Holland’s answer to Henry Ford. Nearly 80 per cent of the Dutch used bicycles for transportation before the war but, as distances have increased with urban sprawl, the number has dropped. Still, 45 per cent of the trips made in prosperous, industrial Rotterdam are made on two wheels — either the traditional bicycle or its modern cousin, the motor-assisted “bromfiets.”
Naturally, the city’s traffic planners would prefer to have people behind handlebars rather than steering wheels. Bike traffic is both cheaper and easier to handle. To encourage continued use of bicycles, the city is studying plans for more special bike paths and the possibility of building covered tracks to protect riders from the weather.
If you ask a Dutch-man how long it takes him to commute to work by public transit, he may say “Oh, about 35 minutes.” By car? “Perhaps 20 minutes.” And by bicycle? “Quicker, much quicker. And it’s easier to park.”
Not too many years ago, owning a bicycle was a status symbol. Today, having a car carries a certain amount of prestige here. This fact often tends to override convenience. So city officials are resigned to the fact that the 25 per cent of the people now commuting by car will grow much larger.
Polderization?
The City of Rotterdam had about 600,000 people in 1940. Now the population is nearly 750,000. Many sleepy farm villages nearby have mushroomed into cities so that today Greater Rotterdam has 1,100,000 people. Unfortunately, the growth of the population has not received the same attention as the growth of ships.
Immediately after the war, new housing estates began to grow on the fringes of the old city. First came Zuidwijk. Then the communities of Pendrecht, Lombardijen, and Groot-IJsselmonde. These are divided from the older sections by a belt of green and are less dense than the traditional neighborhoods.
The growth of small villages is best evidenced in Hoogvliet, near the refineries. It once had 1900 people. Today it is headed for 60,000.
The most ambitious attempt to provide for the growing numbers is the satellite city called Alexanderstad, being built jointly by Rotterdam and the city of Capelle on the IJssel. A community for 200,000 people is being built on the Prins Alexanderpolder, which was a lake in 1857 and is the lowest point in the Netherlands at some 20 feet below sea level. By 1985, it is expected to reach full development. Covering nearly 4100 acres, Alexanderstad will include light and river industry, an educational park, a major commercial center, and even a cemetery.
The development of these new areas has often been rushed to the point where good planning has been overlooked, say some critics. “We’re building communities now the same way we did right after the war,” asserts one Dutch expert, “despite the fact that people’s needs have changed.”
A view of Rotterdam’s Lijnbaan with apartments in the background.
The nature of Holland’s landscape presents a problem in itself. The flat, often treeless landscape makes high-rise buildings loom larger than life-size, dominating both smaller houses and people.
The Dutch penchant for orderliness makes them stick to grid patterns in laying out the new communities, despite the often dull result. “I sometimes think they plan housing like they plan their bulb fields,” says an English planner with long experience here. “You know, everything of one variety here and everything of another variety there.”
He continues, “The Dutch planners often seem to think that if an idea is good for four buildings, it will be equally good for 400. Well, it doesn’t work that way.”
In designing new communities for Rotterdam, the city has been reluctant to give them any of the functions now common to the city center. As a result, they remain bedroom communities rather than communities with a life of their own.
There is now a very small, but growing, body of opinion that the city should slow down and better evaluate its actions. As a journalist here put it, “We’re building a port to meet the latest needs. The city fathers wouldn’t think of doing anything in the harbor that isn’t first class. I think they should have the same attitude toward the growth of the city.”
The Power to Mold
Rotterdam has the power to shape the now communities as it wishes, thanks to the broad use of expropriation. “Good planning is only possible when the city owns the land,” asserts planner Smits.
Virtually all land developed here is city-owned. Rotterdam is continually expropriating undeveloped or underdeveloped land for expansion purposes. When land is acquired by the city, the planners study it and determine how it shall be used. They calculate the costs of developing the land with streets, sewers, parks and the like.
Then the land is offered for sale to private developers for a price, which includes the public installations. The developer whose offer is selected (usually the first submitted) is obliged to follow the scheme outlined by the city planners. The price is valid for 18 months.
After being selected, the developer has six months to pick an architect (who must be approved by a special city panel) and submit preliminary plans for his project. Once these are approved, he has another six months to come up with detailed plans. After the city OKs the detailed plans, the developer has a final six months to begin construction. When construction begins, the city deeds him the land at the agreed price. If construction does not begin within the 18 months, the city increases its price by seven per cent.
Since the developer is given a reservation on the land at no cost to him, the city may take it away at any time before the deed is signed with no compensation to the developer.
New blocks of housing begin to rise in Alexanderpolder, where boats once sailed. The sand is used to provide a foundation for the buildings. This is the lowest place in the Netherlands, about 20 feet or more below sea level.
Another device aimed at discouraging idle speculation in housing is that residential developers seeking building permits must generally live and work in Rotterdam.
Since the city’s price for land includes basic services, residents of the new areas are assured of having the fundamental facilities when they move into their new homes. Even temporary quarters for shops are provided in the new housing areas.
While residential properties are sold by the city, it leases industrial sites for periods of 75 years. Such leases may not be transferred from one firm to another. When a company wishes to move, the property reverts to the city which decides who will occupy the site next.
The purchase and sale of property here is handled for the city by a government-owned land company, The Board of Aldermen — similar to the mayor’s cabinet — must approve all deeds.
Sprawl and Cooperation
To deal with the growing sprawl of Rotterdam, the 23 municipalities in the area have established a regional body known as the Rijnmond — Mouth of the Rhine — covering 231 square miles. The organization has 81 members, half of them from Rotterdam, elected by popular vote. To date, the Rijnmond has made little important progress. Rotterdam, because of its size and economic importance, continues to shape its neighbors’ fortunes.
National planners have suggested that perhaps Rotterdam and the area around the city should have a maximum population of 1,750,000. City planners think Greater Rotterdam can grow to as many as 3,000,000 people. The latter figure may be more realistic considering population trends in the Netherlands. The nation now has 12.5 million people crammed into an area just a shade bigger than Maryland. (They say that if the United States was as densely populated as Holland, it would hold nearly the entire world’s population.) Most of the growth is expected to occur in the U-shaped agglomeration called Randstad Holland, which includes Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam, and forecasts say it will top 15 million by 1980.
One factor limiting sprawl to some extent is the reluctance of Rotterdam residents to devote time to commuting. The average travel time now is about 20 minutes and 45 minutes is the maximum acceptable. To the Dutch, a trip of more than 10 miles is a major expedition.
Fitting In
Some critics call Rotterdam “The City of Missed Chances.” With the benefit of hindsight, they say that the city did not take full advantage of the opportunities reconstruction offered. Planner Smits replies, “Of course there are many things we probably should have done differently. We need more green space, more sculpture and more quiet little squares. Some of these things we can still do and we are trying to do. But, while we have made some mistakes, I think we’ve done a lot of things the right way. And we still aren’t finished, remember.”
A jumbo oil tanker backing out of Rotterdam’s harbor toward the North Sea. The port refineries and pipelines will handle about 80 million tons of oil this year. The center of Rotterdam lies 25 miles up the New Waterway at left.
Adjectives like “charming” or “picturesque” which are commonly applied to many European cities do not fit Rotterdam. Aficionados of medieval towns would be disappointed with this city’s clean, glass-and-steel lines. But the new Rotterdam is beginning to look its part as the world’s greatest port. It conveys the image of a city with its sleeves rolled up.
The Dutch feel strongly about their cities, continually engaging in a friendly rivalry over them. In this city, they like to say, “Rotterdam works, Amsterdam plays, and The Hague sleeps.”
Cover Picture: “The Devastated City” by French sculptor Ossip Zadkine memorializes Rotterdam with its heart missing.
(Photographs courtesy of the City of Rotterdam)
Greater Rotterdam
Received in New York November 4, 1968.
Mr. Meeker is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner, on leave from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This article may be published with credit to David A. Meeker, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Alicia Patterson Fund.
