Improvement ≠ erasure

In the early 2020s, the housing corporation Vestia and the municipality of Rotterdam started demolishing the Tweebosbuurt, a small and dense block in the Afrikaanderwijk neighbourhood, in Rotterdam Zuid. The buildings were not at the end of their structural life, they were also inhabited, predominantly by long-term, low-income tenants. The operation was framed in the language of urban renewal: improvement, mixed incomes, resilience. The actual operation was a clearance.

The Tweebosbuurt is the case that gives this note its title, but it is one among many across European cities. Improvement, in its official definition, is “an occasion when something gets better or when you make it better” (Cambridge Dictionary). Intuitively, this something would be a basis, a primary state aimed at evolving for the better. In today’s spatial register, improvement is more and more used as a cover for erasure and substitution. These words have become synonyms in contemporary urban policy. The Civic Anchors project, submitted to the 2026 Prix de Rome and the most developed argument about the future of Rotterdam Zuid, was conceived against that amalgam.
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A standardised practice

The standard model of urban renewal proceeds in three moves. First, a ‘problematic area’ is identified, statistically, through indicators of income, education, employment, or building stock condition. Second, comes the vision, a picture of the dreamed state of the area - a masterplan, renderings and a program - and this dream usually conflicts with the existing. Third, the existing fabric is cleared to make room for this vision, to enable the dream to happen. The clearance is presented as a necessary precondition for improvement. The displacement of residents is treated as collateral, or, in the most polished versions, as an opportunity.

This model is embedded in planning culture and questioning it can feel like questioning the possibility of urban improvement itself. But it rests on two assumptions, both debatable. The first is that the existing fabric is a problem rather than a resource. The second is that improvement requires erasure. Both are tabula rasa thinking, and both have a specific urban tradition through history running from Haussmann, Le Corbusier, Moses, and Ceaușescu through to the post-war reconstruction logic that still orients much European housing policy. In Expulsions, Saskia Sassen has called the global version of this logic by its right name: not renewal, but a “savage sorting of winners and losers”, a structural vision for separating the people a city wants to host from the people it does not.
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The city as a stratigraphy

The civic anchors project proposes a different reading of Rotterdam Zuid. It does not consider it as a problem to be cleared, but as a stratigraphy to be worked with. The project’s central model, a physical, three-dimensional object, reads the territory through four layers.

The underground, a city’s physical support. The geology of Rotterdam Zuid is largely made of silt and clay deposited over peat. Many of the buildings are anchored to a firmer layer by wooden piles. Those piles, kept underwater for a century thanks to the high groundwater table level, are now rotting as the water level decreases. The “sinking neighbourhood” problem is real, and it is geological as much as it is social. Any honest urban project here has to engage with the ground.

The paper reality, the city’s frame, guidelines and ambitions. Decades of plans, visions, frameworks, and pilot projects are shaping a layer of dreams and expectations. It exists in documents but not always in built form. Residents read this layer as ambitious yet broken promises as they never fully landed in their own reality. Designers read it as inheritance, a pile of ambitions and programs that needs to land. Either way, it conditions what is possible.

The social sediments, as the city’s real makers. The superposed patterns of use, occupation, community structure, mutual aid that develop in a neighbourhood over generations. This is the layer the standard renewal model considers absent, whose erasure cannot be made up for in decades.

The civic anchors, as catalysts. Specific places where the other three layers converge, and where a precise intervention can produce meaningful change. Not a masterplan. Not a vision. A small set of catalysts placed with care.

------What lithopuncture proposes

The word lithopuncture comes from the Slovenian artist Marko Pogačnik. In the 80s and 90s, he developed a practice of placing carved stones at specific points in a landscape. Initially, he found these points through an esoteric language, but these can also be read soberly as places where multiple territorial systems intersect. The term could be borrowed into urbanism, where it sits inside a longer tradition of urban acupuncture actions (the superblocks of Barcelona, the BRT and Câmbio Verde in Curitiba, the Medellín cable-car interventions amongst others).

The shared insight across these practices is the same. Massive interventions are not always more effective. Where a place is dense with overlapping systems, the right small intervention can become a lever, unlocking many potentials.

Civic Anchors borrows the technique to adjust the politics. Urban acupuncture can be read as a way for the municipality to act as a soft power, without committing to anything structural, a small public infrastructure can act as a substitute for housing policy. Lithopuncture follows this thinking while adding a layer, working from and with the structural layers of a neighbourhood. The point is to act with precision, anchoring the program in the territory, enabling social and economic opportunities, giving residents collectively a right to shape and develop it.

------Improvement = engagement

If improvement is to mean anything other than erasure, three things have to change.

First, the existing fabric (physical and social) has to be treated as the starting condition, not as the problem. This is a methodological change before being a political one: it changes what you survey, what you draw, what you propose. It is the difference between arriving with a vision and arriving with questions, thinking short-term or long-term.

Second, the timeline is extended. A two-year renewal project cannot improve a neighbourhood that has taken decades to become what it is. Real improvement happens with engagement, over the same timescale as the conditions it is trying to address. This process points to the real problems: the rules of engagement (budget, politics, procurement). None of these can be solved by design alone but design can act as a negotiator between actors.

Third, the residents have to be treated as the main clients, not as stakeholders, nor only for community input or participatory phases. Henri Lefebvre’s Droit à la ville, further sharpened by David Harvey in Rebel Cities, voices this claim as a collective right to “the freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities,” a right to shape the processes of urbanization rather than powerlessly receiving their outcomes.
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Towards a systemic re-evaluation?

Cody Hochstenbach gives that abstract right operational content. According to him, adequate housing is affordable, appropriate to the household, secure against arbitrary eviction, healthy, safe, in locations that give access to work, schools, family, and social networks. Six minimum conditions. Civic Anchors is, finally, a design proposal built on the claim that these are the conditions a renewal project must protect, not the conditions it is allowed to disrupt in the name of improvement.

The Rotterdamwet is one instrument of a longer policy track. In Uitgewoond, Hochstenbach traces its origin back to a 1989 paper by then state secretary Enneüs Heerma: a deliberate, thirty-year project, supported across the political spectrum, subsidising home ownership, courting real estate investors, and progressively shrinking and stigmatising the social housing sector. Housing corporations were stripped of their mandate to invest in neighbourhood liveability and reduced to last resort housers.

The clearance of the Tweebosbuurt is not an accident of that policy. It is its logical product, the disposal mechanism for a population that policies had already marked as unwanted. The discipline of landscape architecture has, mostly, stayed silent through this. It is time the discipline used its voice.

Improvement ≠ erasure.
Untangling them is part of what design is for.

FURTHER READING
Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville (Anthropos, 1968).
David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso, 2012).
Cody Hochstenbach, Uitgewoond: Waarom het hoog tijd is voor een nieuwe woonpolitiek (Das Mag, 2022).
Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Belknap, 2014).

ARTICLES & RESOURCES
David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (2008). > Link
Saskia Sassen, “A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers,” Globalizations 7, no. 1 (2010): 23–50. > Link
Cody Hochstenbach, interview with Julia Maria Keers, “Uitgewoond” (2023). > Link
Veerle Alkemade & Catherine Koekoek, “A place to dream. Infrastructures for activism,” Archined (September 2021). > Link