“Ams­ter­dam is a city with a har­bour, Rot­ter­dam is a har­bour with a city”, goes a pop­u­lar say­ing. How­ev­er, the port of Rot­ter­dam has been shift­ing away from the city for sev­er­al decades, leav­ing behind half-desert­ed areas close to the cen­tre. These urban gaps offer spa­tial poten­tial which is used in dif­fer­ent ways: the urban­ist approach varies from rad­i­cal top­down rein­ven­tion to more grad­ual bot­tom-up transitions.

The Eras­mus bridge, icon of chang­ing Rot­ter­dam, leads to Kop van Zuid, a for­mer har­bour area. The devel­op­ments on the south bank final­ly give a cen­tral posi­tion to the riv­er Maas with­in the city.

Now the project is near­ing com­ple­tion, and gen­tri­fi­ca­tion is extend­ing to the adjoin­ing Katen­drecht penin­su­la, which used to be the red light dis­trict of Rot­ter­dam. High­light on the penin­su­la are the Fenix Lofts: the trans­for­mati­no and top­ping-up of an old ware­house with apartments.