In the Minds of People: Port-City Perspectives, The Case of Rotterdam

Following the geographical ‘Any-Port Model’, urban design has stipulated and enforced the disunion of port and city over the recent decades. In conjunction with other disciplines, the emphasis has laid at dislocation of production activities in favor of logistic-productive dynamics. At the same time, professional focus was on the urban areas...

The Port-City Portrayed in its Public Spaces: Introducing Micro Biographies of Places

This article aims to extent the notion of port-cities and counter the mainstream narrative that port and city, in cases like Rotterdam, have become disunited by reviewing its public spaces in their unique port-city characteristics. These characteristics can be found by systematic approaching and describing public spaces as biographies of place,...

“The Hoist of the Yellow Flag”: Vulnerable Port Cities and Public Health

Port cities have long played a key role in the development, discovery, and fight against diseases. They have been laboratories for policies to address public health issues. Diseases reached port cities through maritime exchanges, and the bubonic plague is a key example. Port city residents’ close contact with water further increased the chance...

Straddling the Fence: Land Use Patterns in and around Ports as Hidden Designers

Ports are clearly demarcated structures on land and water. They are fenced in, easily recognizable on satellite and orthophoto images, and they have specific functions. This apparent clarity of ports, their function and outline, in relation to nearby urban and rural areas, becomes more complex when explored through the lens of land use, that is...

The Legacy of CIAM in the Netherlands: Continuity and Innovation in Dutch Housing Design

This article discusses how CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) influenced Dutch housing and urban planning. It starts by looking at programs and policies of the 1920s and 1930s Dutch housing design, and the way in which the new ideas of CIAM were there incorporated. In this history, the design of the AUP (Algemeen...

Deconstructing Rotterdam's modern city centre

In the 20th century, the Dutch city of Rotterdam was radically transformed from a historic town into a modern city, becoming the selfacclaimed 'city of architecture', home to international architectural design offices, publishers and institutions. Although it is already 60 years after the destruction of the Rotterdam inner city, the city still...