Imagine a Metropolis

The cultural climate of Rotterdam changed radically between 1970 and 2000. Opinions differ as to what the most important changes were and when they occurred. If the Rotterdam of 1970 was still a city with an identity crisis, that wanted to be small rather than large and cosy rather than commercial, by 2000 Rotterdam was perceived as the most metropolitan of all Dutch cities. Artists and other cultural practitioners were the first to advance this metropolitan vision, thereby paving the way for the New Rotterdam that would begin to take concrete shape at the end of the 1980s. Imagine a Metropolis looks at this transformation, and goes on to show that this New Rotterdam is returning to its nineteenth-century identity and the developments of the inter-war years and the period of postwar reconstruction.