How do you activate a place at the edge of the city by making its undiscovered qualities visible?

Poort van Noord is a threshold: the point where Rotterdam's density lowers and the Rotte river opens up the landscape. Right now it's easy to miss – the site is tucked between roads and infrastructure; very urban, and somehow not urban at all. Look at it carefully though, and you see quality: a spot to warm up and meet, the start of a good walk or ride, a quiet moment of reflection, a view of the skyline as a small reward. Those qualities are still undiscovered by most passers-by, and frankly, also by us. The Veilingweg intervention is how we set out to bring them into view.

Within the Municipality of Rotterdam’s plan to redevelop the wider Poort van Noord area, we developed a temporary, low-cost tactical urbanism intervention to test how this liminal space at the edge of the city could actually work. Placemaking to explore, on the ground, how an infrastructure-heavy edge could become a green, social place that brings the neighbourhood back to the water.

But how do you create a place in an area full of unknowns? The real task was not to decorate the area, but to build something that activates the hidden potential of the place, while giving us information on how it is and could be used.

Developed in collaboration with Aanpact, we designed a modest intervention featuring logs and metal frames with trigger questions in a new “Buiten branding”, marking the Veilingweg as the starting point of a longer green route through the north of the city. We treated the site as a tussenruimte, an unfinished, in-between space – what stays unfinished can still become something, once people show us what they want.

The intervention features a starting point with a bike-repair station, social seating, a stretch-and-warm-up spot, and a lookout that frames the city against the open landscape. Each one is a small hypothesis about what the Veilingweg could be. Who stops, who lingers, who walks past - that's the first data. The project also features an online questionnaire – a simple Buiten app to capture the routes, favourite spots, hidden gems, barriers and mobility routines of people along the Rotte.

Through this, we offer the municipality a method: build something modest, make its hidden qualities visible, watch who arrives, and ask - then design the permanent place from evidence rather than a document. And the listening doesn't stop on opening day – through 2026 we're planning activities on-site, each one another chance to meet the people this place is for. So if you live nearby: come by, say hi, tell us what you think.

The pilot is there to test our conviction: an edge like this does not have to be a hard line between city and nature - softened well, it becomes a place that belongs to both.

Images by Loes van Duijvendijk