ABSTRACT
In Rotterdam, the Netherlands' second largest city after Amsterdam, the upheavals of the late twentieth century manifested in similar ways as in Glasgow. The city is a typical commercial hub whose economy has developed around the port for centuries and in the 1970s was hit by economic decline. Two local specificities were essential for the genesis of Rotterdam's new tenement city—and that of the Netherlands in general. The first is a scarcity of space due to high population density. The second specificity is a strong planning tradition. Forward-looking Rotterdam, to a certain extent like the Netherlands in general, has a staunch modernist tradition and tends to build with geometrical forms and high-tech materials. The new buildings were mostly modern perimeter-block buildings that matched height and dimensions of the demolished nineteenth-century houses. The most fundamental change, already laid out in the Reconstruction Plan, was a different use of the block structure.
