“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, new 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.