Time After Time: Community‐Led Participation in Urban Development Practices in Rotterdam

Source abstract

Community-led initiatives are increasingly recognised as contributors to sustainable and socially just urban transitions, but their capacity to shape formal urban development processes remains insufficiently understood. This article examines a grassroots case in Rotterdam, TheSpace_Coolhaven (2021–2024), and its nomadic successor, the Coolhaven Beating Heart Participatory Quest (2025), to explore how temporary commoning can configure city-making over time. Grounded in theoretical work on urban commons, temporary urbanism, and participatory governance, the study applies the access, membership, and ownership (AMO) framework within a longitudinal action-research methodology, drawing on participatory observation, internal documentation, workshop outputs, communication material, and six semi-structured interviews with community and institutional actors. Findings indicate that temporary access to vacant social housing enabled urban commons to be prefigurative, characterised by intensive socio-cultural programming, shared stewardship, and informal knowledge infrastructures. This temporary commons fostered collective learning and proximity-based governance. Yet, it also demonstrated fragility under property-led redevelopment, facing a nomadic condition in between institutional time frames. The article argues that community-led initiatives should be recognised as urban commons infrastructure with the potential to inform more inclusive, collaborative, and reflexive approaches to urban development in the Netherlands and comparable contexts.