This is just a start, but perhaps it will get much interesting after a while. Today we start the new action plan, and our plan is to put ideas in ZoHo. Quite a weird name ZoHo you say? Yes, well it wasn't always ZoHo. Zomerhof Kwartier has been an interesting part of the city of Rotterdam since very many years ago, and now we are trying to make it even more interesting, ergo this rather interesting name too. Before getting into the action plan itself, lets first get acquainted with the location. ZoHo is a neighborhood in Rotterdam that has been neglected, abandoned, or perhaps just forgotten for some time.
ZoHo is a very hidden section of the city. Roads go around it and not through it, people don't come here because they don't have to. Yes, there are people living here, there are small businesses, like any other neighborhood. But again, it was also so different from any other neighborhood. At one point there was a half-way home for recently released convicts. This place had an air, a reputation of being unsafe.
During the 1990's the Dutch social housing agency, Havensteder, bought five buildings around this area with the intention to demolish and rebuild into housing units. However, thanks to the economy, rebuilding was almost impossible and thus the idea was dropped. This brought about new challenges, as the buildings were deteriorating and the tenants were moving out. As the original settlers moved out, the area kept degenerating. There was an urgent need for low-cost interventions to keep the area intact. So, there is an ongoing effort by many communities and organizations together to invest not just finances but rather ideas, and look for potentials to organically develop this area, while keeping its interesting history alive.
A part of this effort is the Action Planning workshop with the students of Urban Management and Development (UMD10) at IHS, Erasmus University. We are working on this site for a week, in the hopes of figuring out this very complex situation and neighborhood in this very limited time and finding some very interesting possibilities.
How this moves on...we shall know in a week's time. As for now, we are all just happy to experiment!
ZoHo is a very hidden section of the city. Roads go around it and not through it, people don't come here because they don't have to. Yes, there are people living here, there are small businesses, like any other neighborhood. But again, it was also so different from any other neighborhood. At one point there was a half-way home for recently released convicts. This place had an air, a reputation of being unsafe.
During the 1990's the Dutch social housing agency, Havensteder, bought five buildings around this area with the intention to demolish and rebuild into housing units. However, thanks to the economy, rebuilding was almost impossible and thus the idea was dropped. This brought about new challenges, as the buildings were deteriorating and the tenants were moving out. As the original settlers moved out, the area kept degenerating. There was an urgent need for low-cost interventions to keep the area intact. So, there is an ongoing effort by many communities and organizations together to invest not just finances but rather ideas, and look for potentials to organically develop this area, while keeping its interesting history alive.
A part of this effort is the Action Planning workshop with the students of Urban Management and Development (UMD10) at IHS, Erasmus University. We are working on this site for a week, in the hopes of figuring out this very complex situation and neighborhood in this very limited time and finding some very interesting possibilities.
How this moves on...we shall know in a week's time. As for now, we are all just happy to experiment!
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