EUKN - European Urban Knowledge Network - ‘People make the City’ programme

‘People make the City’ programme - Rotterdam

Introduction

‘People make the City’ is the implementation programme of the Social Integration Project in Rotterdam.

Problem

How to create a friendly, secure, social and inhabitable street with active citizens?

Description

It is directly oriented towards the restoration of integration and active citizenship, focusing primarily on districts in the City of Rotterdam which score badly on the safety index. ‘People make the City’ presents an ideal opportunity to adopt an assertive social policy. It is a realistic way of putting the government's position on the 'strong neighbourhood' into practice.

Approach

The four cornerstones of ‘People make the City’ are:
1. Approach focused on the street. People make the City strengthens social cohesion and active citizenship in Rotterdam by working from street to street.
2. The residents are key. The programme does not view the city from the world of managements, institutions and services, but uses the vision and ambitions of residents as a basis.
3. Employing and increasing the social and cultural capital already present in the street. People make the City uses the talents, skills and knowledge of Rotterdammers to make their street a friendlier, more social and more inhabitable place in which to live.
4. Streets develop social cohesion and active citizenship in phases. The programme assumes that streets have different stages of development and need time to develop.

Results

In late December 2005, the People make the City programme was on course to achieve its targets. The results have now been controlled by the local authority's audit office.
Results are partly produced by the Opzoomer campaign. This low threshold and straightforward campaign successfully mobilises social and cultural capital in Rotterdam on an increasingly large scale. The campaign does not focus alone on the generation of street activities, but also on encouraging sustainable collaboration with institutions and services.
Other results are produced through a new working method for community workers and youth workers in streets where inhabitants are seldom if at all active.
People make the City provides new tools such as the street approval scheme. Here, street that have drawn up agreements are approved at least once a year by inhabitants and representatives from institutions and services.
As well as being an approach the People make the City programme is also a methodology. Methods that have been developed and tried and tested in Rotterdam are brought together and developed into a cohesive practical method. The tried and tested methods are 'Opzoomer' and 'Stadsetiquette'.

Contact info

City of Rotterdam
F. Hengeveld (Programme manager People make the City), tel. +31 10 4172109

Project start date

01/07/2003

Links

City of Rotterdam

'People make the city' programme in brief (PDF, Dutch, 700KB)

Report development phase: Social integration in Rotterdam: this is how we do it (PDF, Dutch, 272KB)

Document type

case

Themes

Urban Policy > Social inclusion & integration > Community development

Keywords

Citizens' participation