COLONIAL RUINS UNDER HIGH RISE BUILDINGS

On May 14th 1940 the complete inner city of Rotterdam was destroyed by German bombs. These bombs destroyed an inner city full of traces of Dutch colonialism such as warehouses, offices, houses of admirals and shipyards. Not all of the colonial architecture was affected by the bombing, for instance Delfshaven which is a part of Rotterdam is still full of colonial traces in the sense of architecture for example a Dutch East India Company (V.O.C.) warehouse and the house Dutch East and West India Company (V.O.C. and W.I.C.) Admiral Piet Heyn was born, but by walking through the inner city you will notice almost only high rise buildings, and almost no traces left of the colonial history of the city.
How did the bombing of Rotterdam in World War Two hide the colonial traces of the city, and which are still visible?

I started this research because while growing up in Amsterdam the colonial history of the city was always very visible. Rotterdam which also had a huge role in Dutch colonialism had lost a lot of the visibility during the bombing of the city in World War Two. This sparked my interest to see which traces of a colonial period in Rotterdam would still be visible and which had been lost. To give an answer to this question: Rotterdam still has architecture deriving from coloniality, but most of this architecture is located outside of the city center because the bombing mostly affected the city center. In the center street names and monuments are the biggest visible trace, whether these are
remembering or glorifying colonial atrocities is another question that also depends on every street name.




​While my first two design outputs are very much focussed on which colonial traces are still visible in Rotterdam, my last design output is about the traces that have been lost in 1940. It is a time based city map of Rotterdam zooming in on different parts of the city where before the bombing of Rotterdam there was colonial architecture. I choose five places where you, while looking at the map, get more information about the architecture that was there before bombing. When the map is zoomed in you will see a 3d model of the building with pictures telling the original buildings colonial history wrapped around it.






The people these colonial traces have the most influence on are the people living in Rotterdam. To make more people in Rotterdam aware of the streets they bike through and the monuments they walk past I thought it would be a nice idea to subtly change places in public space to make people think about these things.
On the 8th of June I went to Rotterdam again to put stickers on the metro map. They were transparent stickers so you could still see the metro map and people could still use it to navigate through the city. On the stickers I printed some of the street names that have a link to the colonial history of Rotterdam. I choose to use only the street names that were in my eyes problematic, most of them because they are celebrating people and companies who enslaved people, looted and colonized lands and murdered people. There was also a QR-code on the sticker which led to a website I created that gives more information about the people and companies that have streets named after them. Also on the sticker was the following text:
These street names in Rotterdam shamelessly celebrate people that established colonies, enslaved people and looted lands. Scan the QR-code for more information.

​When I saw a plaque hanging in Delfshaven which has a description of the V.O.C. where the square where its hanging is named after, I noticed the plaque was not complete and also celebrating a company that has transported, enslaved and employed between six hundred thousand and over a million people. So I decided to stick another plaque over it that would tell the true story of the V.O.C.