The Port of Rotterdam in a Regional and Supra-regional Context

Abstract

This article explains the spatial challenges that face the world's largest port in the context of national spatial planning and the resulting regional spatial transformations caused or enabled by the port and urban development. By embracing a long time-horizon, the article shows how fundamental long-term prospects conflict with the investments required for major projects for spatial development of the port. Within a window of twenty years, the Netherlands has passed through the stages of economic crisis, a strong national spatial economic strategy and an intensive but delaying public debate (the “Polder model”) to arrive at a stage of international disorientation and renewed economic crisis. Yet, in the course of these two decades we have become the owners of some major projects. Following the crisis of the early 1980s and the emergence of European optimism, the Netherlands used new money to finance spatial planning, large infrastructure and urban projects. These projects were held to be a vehicle for transforming the Netherlands from an industrial and agricultural economy into a distribution country connected to main ports, with a services and knowledge economy leaning more towards urbanisation. At the same time, the mono-centric urban areas developed into urban regions, urban wings heading towards a Delta Metropolis—a networked city in the Delta.