Kop van Zuid

    
On Wednesday we visited Rotterdam for the second part of our project. It was in many ways a more convenient day than the day we spent in Antwerp. The weather was nice, we knew what we had to do and one of our group members was familiar with the neighbourhood that we were investigating. The project in Kop van Zuid has been finished for some years now and the difference with the still developing Eilandje area in Antwerpen couldn’t have been bigger. 

The neighbourhood used to be an industrial port area, but now houses have been built around the old docks (that are now used for leisure).  It has brand new higher and middle class housing on the left side and some older social housing on the right side of the docks. We walked around those docks, starting in the part where social housing is located. There is an apartment building called ‘the paperclip’ because it is formed like one. It had a large field of grass with a large playground in the middle. We could also see several basketball and football fields. We talked to a man who lived there (from how he looked we concluded that he probably was from a Turkish or Moroccan descent), and asked him if he had noticed change since Kop van Zuid project had been finished. He told us he certainly had and that the crime in the area had decreased significantly. Also, students had been placed in the social housing building, which had increased social control. He told us that the municipality reacted quicker when  there was a complaint about for example youngsters hanging around. It turned out that this first interview had brought us much of the information that later interviewees would give us. We continued walking to the newer part of the neighbourhood and we felt that the transition between both parts was very smooth. You could obviously feel that this part was more high class, but there was no sharp boundary.  We later found out that this was purposely created. The municipality had placed housing available for relatively low income groups on the outside of the new part, and the housing for relatively high income groups on the inside. Inhabitants told us they found this very convenient. Another thing that was very apparent, was that the inhabitants of the newer (and thus more expensive) area were clearly coming from different ethnic groups. When we were reminiscing the things that we had seen and heard, a third thing struck us: in Antwerp we hadn’t seen any playground/communal park, not even in the plans. We concluded that the project in Rotterdam had indeed been developed from  a more social point of view: for the community instead of from the community.