Previous state
Before the Second World War, the area around the Hofplein railway station in the central district of Rotterdam was a bustling, lively place with such well-known venues as the Pschorr jazz club and the Grand Café Restaurant Loos. However, German bombing attacks razed the whole city centre, which was not restored after the war. Instead of the compact urban fabric consisting of streets on the human scale and blocks of semidetached houses, the post-war City Council decided to construct a new modern development with free-standing buildings and tower blocks separated by excessively large and hence unwelcoming, insecure, and high-maintenance public spaces. One especially barren zone was a twelve-hectare strip in a marginal position between Weena Avenue and the raised railway lines. By the end of the twentieth century, it had become a kind of no man’s land taking in Pompenburg Park, several office blocks including the Schieblock and the remains of the old railway station.
Nevertheless, after 2001, the advent of the high-speed train linking Amsterdam and Paris was the impetus for the renovation of the station and a veritable explosion of urban planning proposals for its surrounds. The new Central Station was now to be a metropolitan transport hub, and so much so that, in 2006, the City Council presented a project called “Rotterdam Central District”, an ambitious plan of urban renovation aiming to attract big multinationals with the construction of almost half a million square metres of office space surrounded by “top-of-the range public spaces”. But the operation, which was to be funded by real estate capital gains, was shelved after the onset of the economic crisis in 2008. Barely a fifth of the planned buildings had been constructed and the public space, far from its purported excellence, was taken abandoned to marginality and delinquency.
Aim of the intervention
Given the economic uncertainty of the times, years could have gone by before private investment would resume its business. The city could not allow the decadence of the place to drag on much longer, although the Council seemed unable to take on alone an exercise in remedying urban planning that had totally counted on the resources of big private operators. In 2010, the team of curators of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) brought together several tactical urbanism proposals that were especially conceived with a view to reactivating the zone and decided to implement them for the fifth biennale in 2012 which was to be called “Making City”. The run-down strip of land, now called “Test Site“ was to be one of the main venues of the biennale. Coordinated by the City Council, landowners and potential developers embarked on a cultural process which, with public-private investment amounting to seven million euros, aimed to recognise the qualities of the site, critically review its urban planning, and to test it by means of a series of temporary interventions trusting in the possibilities of the “meanwhile”.
Description
It took three years to implement the twenty interventions of the Test Site. Of very different scales and nature, each intervention had its own specific group of development agents and form of funding. Some were made possible thanks to the drawing up of collaborative business plans while others were the result of crowdfunding campaigns open to citizens. Some fitted into the abandoned office buildings, while others took over the public spaces between them under municipal auspices in the form of licences for temporary structures. In the former group, Annabel is a new café-restaurant with an underground club which has become a key point in the map of Rotterdam’s night life. The Schieblock office building has now accommodated the BAR, a cultural centre with space for conferences and debates, GROOS, a shop selling objects designed and made in Rotterdam, and the Fabrique Urbaine, a semi-public workshop fully equipped for making models, furniture, and interior finishes. On the flat roof of the Schieblock building, the Dakakker was also planted, this being the Netherlands’ largest terrace vegetable garden and also one of the biggest in Europe. Experiments have been carried out in order to find ways of constructing green roofs and using different techniques of apiculture and urban gardening. Among its healthy seasonal, and kilometre-zero products are fruit, vegetables, herbs, and honey, which are sold in local bars and restaurants, especially in the Op het dak (On the Terrace), a bistro with panoramic views which, located in a restored pavilion on the rooftop, offers organic meals made with fresh products.
As for the interventions outside the buildings, they are also highly diverse. The bleak carpark behind the Schieblock was equipped with informal, temporary street furniture to become the Biergarten, a pleasant place for picnics or drinking beer, with views of Weena Avenue. Next to the railway lines, a flat explanade used for storage became an extension of Pompenburg Park with grassy fields, sports areas, and two plots of 1,200m2 ceded to local residents for use as self-managed vegetable gardens. In one of the accesses to the Test Site, a sculpture called Spaceframe has been installed as a way of denouncing the excessive functional specialisation of the area and calling for a more mixed and compact urban fabric, which would also include housing. But perhaps the most emblematic of all the interventions is the Luchtsingel, an elevated 390-metre-long bridge exclusively for pedestrian use. It consists of three arms coming together in a circular rotunda. One arm, in the north, crosses above the railway lines to reach the Hofplein station, another stretches westwards to the Schieblock building, crossing through the middle of it, while the third arm, heads southwards over the Pompenburg Park. The wooden structure, which is yellow, the colour of transience, was gradually built as the thousands of donors in the crowdfunding campaign were acquiring the components, on which they had the right to inscribe their name or a message. Once the footbridge is totally finished, it will be donated to the city of Rotterdam.
Assessment
Opened in June 2015, the Luchtsingel footbridge has a temporary licence that only allows it to occupy the site for five years, with the possibility of obtaining a five-year extension. Faced with the impermanence imposed by the bureaucracy, the initiators of the project delivered to the City Council a provocative “declaration of love” which, signed by a multitude of users, suggested that the Test Site project should be given continuity in a joint project with the City Council. Meanwhile, as it awaits an answer, the intervention has been able to demonstrate the extent to which tactical urbanism, agile and economical, can complement strategic urbanism, slow and expensive. When the fiction of urban planning clashes with the contingencies of stubborn realities, it is not always able to respond, engage in self-criticism, or adapt to unforeseen situations. It is on these occasions that tactical urbanism can play a Jiminy Cricket role, not so much to replace strategic urbanism but to remedy it in a provisional way.
Although it tends to be rejected for its inconsistent, unfinished and even ugly or shabby appearance, tactical urbanism should not be subjected to the same aesthetic criteria as those used to evaluate “definitive” endeavours. Rather, it should be understood as a cultural product that stimulates a critical gaze, catalyses necessary debates, and tests places that are not working in order to activate them. In Test Site, this potential for activation becomes clear in two main senses. First, the intervention has unblocked a dead-end process by engaging a wide range of agents in a public-private co-production which has even included micro-sponsorship involving thousands of citizens. Second, it has worked with a place that was previously not advisable to visit and managed to activate it to the extent that it now appears in tourist guides. The connection over the railway lines has linked the central district with northern neighbourhoods so that all kinds of users come to the zone at all hours of the day. However, more than being a mere place to visit, the Test Site has become an attractive area to go to and linger in. The activation of empty buildings with vegetable gardens and workshops has raised the question that, apart from competing to attract third sector multinationals, cities must strengthen their local small-scale productive networks. Even cultural and recreational spaces have been capable of reactivating the central district by returning to it part of the nightlife it had lost with the disappearance of Pschorr and the Grand Café Restaurant Loos.
[Last update: 18/07/2025]
