The Rise And Rise Of Rotterdam

For An Object Lesson In How To Pivot, Look To This Post-Industrial City That's Putting Climate Resilience And Creativity Front And Centre

- Chris Schalkx

On one of those drizzly Dutch mornings in Rotterdam— too cool for shorts, too warm for a jacket—I’m on tiptoes behind a block of grimy warehouses, staring into a giant sphincter. It’s connected to a colon and intestines, all veins and pimples, and tapers to a tongue on the ground. Unlike most digestive systems, though, this has windows and room for a cocktail bar. Made of Lieshout—a feted artist-designer in his 50s, with short curly hair and a puckish glint in his eyes—and part of his sculpture park, in the heart of the Merwe-Vierhavens district on the western fringe of the city.

The park, which spills from Van Lieshout’s atelier and borders an experimental garden growing vegetables for the local food Amsterdam’s NDSM Wharf—a former shipyard turned design hub— this harbour enclave has now become a locus for the city’s creatives.

Before the area became M4H—as locals now call it—Rotterdam was one of the largest fruit ports. But the upsurge in refrigerated shipping containers during the 1990s made much of its cold storage redundant and condemned the city to a peripheral wasteland. Cycling here along the Westzeedijk road leading from the city centre, I see apartment blocks thinning out, to be replaced by cranes and vast trucks and petrol stations; car parks pockmarked with dross and weed.