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Created page with 'The Dutch city of Rotterdam was the world’s busiest port through much of the 21st century – only about 2080 was it surpassed (by Shanghai) in sheer volume…'

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The [[Netherlands|Dutch]] city of Rotterdam was the world’s busiest
port through much of the 21st century – only about 2080
was it surpassed (by [[Shanghai]]) in sheer volume of traffic.
As the primary shipping gateway to the industrial heartland
of Europe, it is one of the most important and wealthiest
cities in the world.

== Overview ==
Although Rotterdam is centuries old, its pre-eminence
as a world-class port city is more recent.

=== History ===
Rotterdam was founded in the early 14th century, near
a dam on the small Rotte River (hence the name). At first
it was overshadowed by nearby ports such as Antwerp and
Delft. As the Netherlands became a great seafaring power,
the superior Rotterdam harbor enabled it to match and then
surpass its rivals. In the late 1800s access to the sea was
further improved by the Nieuwe Waterweg canal.

Rotterdam suffered terribly in the German invasion
of 1940. The heart of the city was firebombed,
and most of it was abandoned and razed to the ground over
the next year. Very little prewar architecture remained,
except in outlying districts such as Delfshaven and Rotterdam
Zuid. Rebuilding began only after World War II. For
many years Rotterdam was a city in chaos – new construction
was ceaseless, and chronic traffic problems
plagued the city.

In 1957, the Netherlands began the construction of
Europoort, a shipping center south of the Maas River.
Construction involved manipulating the course of the river,
as well as building the artificial Maasvlakte (Maas Plain).
By the end of the century, Rotterdam-Europoort was handling
over 300 million metric tons of cargo per year. Most
of this traffic was in bulk goods: coal, grain, ores, petroleum,
and so on. Container shipping of manufactured goods
was also significant.

Rotterdam prospered through the 21st century. The
decline of the petroleum industry caused a minor local
recession in the 2030s, but the expansion of local digital
and biotech industries soon took up the slack. The city also
became a major center of land-reclamation technology in
the 2050s, exporting equipment and expertise to regions
threatened by the global rise in sea levels. Since the late
2080s several important nanotechnology firms have
appeared near Rotterdam, making it a world-class center
for nanotech research.

=== Rotterdam Today ===
The population of Rotterdam is officially just over
600,000. Naturally, as the city has grown it has effectively
merged with several smaller towns; these suburbs include
Schiedam and Vlaardingen to the west, Ridderkerk to the
southeast, and a scatter of smaller suburbs south of the
Maas River.

Actually, much of the central Netherlands can be considered
a single urbanized area. This Randstad or “Rim
City” includes Amsterdam, Den Haag (The Hague), Rotterdam,
Utrecht, their suburbs, and a number of smaller
independent cities. The whole Randstad area is less than 40
miles across; its citizens effortlessly take advantage of
everything the various cities of the region have to offer.
The overall population of the region is about 5-6 million,
depending on how one defines its borders.

The average income for Rotterdam residents is about
$125,000 per year (or about 125,000 euros, given the
usual exchange rates). This is very close to the highest
average for any metropolitan area in the world. The typical
resident is Wealthy and has Status 1, in accordance
with p. TS128. Dutch social choices and affluence prevent
the existence of a significant fringer class in Rotterdam.
Those few individuals living on the street are probably
foreigners, and simply haven’t been taken in by city
police or social services yet.

Land and housing costs in the city are very high,
close to 8 times the base cost. Even fairly wealthy citizens
are likely to live in a small bungalow or flat, albeit
one with the full range of Fifth Wave services at hand. A
detached home with several thousand square feet of space
and a significant garden area can easily run in the millions.

The overall Control Rating in Rotterdam is 3, indicating
a moderately intrusive government. Local law is loosely
based on the Napoleonic Code, but has evolved
considerably through liberal reforms and an overlay of
E.U. common law. The Rotterdam city police are very
well-trained and scrupulous about the civil rights of the citizenry.
As is typical for the Netherlands, local law is socially
liberal and permits many activities that are forbidden
elsewhere. For example, prostitution is legal so long as
brothels obey certain licensing restrictions and no one is
coerced into working in them. Local weapons laws are
rather strict, the equivalent of CR 5.

Most of Rotterdam’s population is (unsurprisingly)
Dutch, although as a major port it has an unusually high
proportion of immigrants. There are significant Arab,
Malay, and Turkish communities in the city. Almost all residents
are at least bilingual in Dutch and English.

Most citizens of Rotterdam have at least superficial
genetic upgrades in their ancestry, clearing out genetic
defects and diseases. LAI and SAI cybershells are fairly
common in the city, since many of them are employed in
the Europoort complex. There is a small population (about
2,000) of emancipated bioroids and bioshells in Rotterdam;
most of these are refugees from overseas who have
managed to smuggle themselves in through the Europoort.

== Places ==
Despite being a relatively small city, Rotterdam is
extremely busy. Many Europeans find it to be more American
than European in flavor, with its recent architecture
and constant bustle. Here are some of the centers of that
commercial and social activity.

=== Hofplein ===
The Hofplein (or “Court Square”) is the administrative
and commercial heart of Rotterdam. Most of the
buildings in the district are relatively new, having been
built either in the post-World War II construction boom
or the renovation era of the 2050s. Older buildings tend to
be taller, examples of a steel-and-glass style. More recent
construction is usually low and rounded, using architectural
coral or other “organic” materials to give a naturalistic
appearance.

South of the Hofplein is the Coolsingel, a wide street
lined with offices and shopping centers. Rotterdam’s city
hall is located here, along with police headquarters and an
office building used by the local branches of several European
Union agencies.

===Oude Haven===
The “old haven” on the River Maas is one of the
city’s favorite recreation areas. There are many bars,
restaurants, small dance halls, and other venues in the district.
Most of these use exclusively bio-sapient labor for
service, as they are selling atmosphere as well as food and
entertainment.

Just north of the waterfront in the Oude Haven district
is Het Witte Huis. The “white house” is just over 200 years
old, built in 1898 as one of Europe’s first skyscrapers. It is
an 11-story building, notable for its thick, bright-white
walls. It survived the German invasion of 1940 and
remains in good condition. In 2071, it was purchased by
the British venture-capital firm New Foundations Ltd.,
which wished to create an “incubator” for new digital technology
business. Today the first floor of the building is
given over to a restaurant and tourist center, while
the rest provides office and laboratory space for over a
dozen small software-design and AI-training companies.

===Port of Rotterdam===
The heart of Rotterdam actually lies some 30 miles
from the North Sea. The Port of Rotterdam is a vast commercial
and industrial complex lying on the south bank of
the Maas River. It stretches from the old municipal port
facilities in the heart of Rotterdam, all the way to the
Europoort facilities right on the coast. The whole complex
covers hundreds of square miles of artificial harbors,
sludge depots, warehouses, chemical refineries, pipelines,
distribution parks, railheads, truck depots, factories, hotels,
offices for hundreds of shipping lines – all the other features
of a major trade center.

The entire port district is operated by the Rotterdam
Municipal Port Management (RMPM). This is a major
corporation with both public and private ownership; the
national and municipal governments are both stakeholders,
along with a number of private firms and individual
investors. In turn, RMPM not only operates the port, but
holds shares in a number of other corporations in Europe
and beyond. As of 2099 the RMPM employed about 1,400
sapients (about 25% of whom were AI cybershells). Annual
revenues were about 1.4 billion euros. Income has
declined somewhat in recent years as world shipping patterns
have shifted to the Far East.

The port is operated on a day-to-day basis by the Rotterdam
Port Authority, a division of RMPM. The Port
Authority schedules and directs traffic through the port. It
also handles port security, running a number of harbor
patrols and small armed detachments for “incident control.”
Port Authority personnel are very polite, very firm,
and frighteningly competent. The Rotterdam harbormaster
himself is human, but much of the port’s everyday business
is handled by a powerful SAI named Beheerder.

Aside from RMPM itself, the Port of Rotterdam hosts
offices, factories, and distribution facilities for hundreds of
other corporations. Overall, the port district and its tenants
employ over 50,000 sapients.

===Vrijstad===
Vrijstad, or “Freetown,” is a district in Vlaardingen
about six city blocks on a side. This is the home of most of
Rotterdam’s refugee bioroids and bioshells. The name is a
play on words, referring to both the freedom enjoyed by
the residents and the tolerance displayed by city police in
the district.

Vrijstad is widely known as a place where all manner
of entertainment can be found: music, shows, gambling,
alcohol and other intoxicants, sex, and so on. The genetic
constructs of Vrijstad enjoy their notoriety and make a
good living providing fun and atmosphere. They also look
out for each other – woe betide the outsider who lifts a
hand against even the weakest resident of the district.

Certain drugs are easy to get and use in the Vrijstad,
despite being illegal in the Netherlands. The police are
accustomed to looking the other way so long as no one is
harmed and the drugs don’t leave the district. Most of the
drugs freely available in the Freetown are mild euphorics
such as marijuana or [[Metatron]].

There are several brothels in the district, all run
as employee-managed businesses with each worker
owning and voting a share. Although these enterprises are
mildly notorious for employing bioroids, city police are
quite certain that no coercion is taking place. Organized
crime has several times tried to move in on the Vrijstad sex
trade, only to be confronted by determined and very physical
resistance from the residents.

== Current Events ==
Jan Preesman, a popular former mayor of Rotterdam,
is planning to run for the European Parliament in the next
elections. He was expected to do well until a scandal
erupted involving the possibility that he had purchased
illicit genetic upgrades for his children. Whether the
scandal will cost him the election is unclear; it is
certainly provoking a great deal of heated debate
in the region on the proper scope of human
gengineering.

The RMPM’s Consultancy division is preparing
to host a major conference of port authorities later this
year. Most of the invited groups are from “emerging”
nations such as those in southern Asia or sub-Saharan
Africa. The conference is ostensibly part of the Consultancy
division’s ongoing project to assist new port authorities
elsewhere in the world. Observers suspect that the RMPM
plans to use the opportunity to pull as much business as
possible back to Rotterdam.

Several small nanotech research firms have just purchased
a large tract of open land south of the Maas River.
They intend to open a major industrial park, including
extensive facilities for research into molecular nanotechnology.
Many of Rotterdam’s older, more conservative citizens
are vehemently opposed to this venture. They fear
that the facilities may lead to an uncontrolled outbreak of
“gray goo” disassemblers or metamorphosis nanovirus, and
are willing to take any legal means to stop the development.

There has recently been an upsurge in racial tensions
in Rotterdam. A small but vocal minority has taken to
speaking out against the growing bioroid community in the
city. There have been no violent demonstrations so far, but
hateful literature has appeared on local web nodes and there
has been some vandalism in the Vrijstad district. Municipal
authorities and the informal bioroid militia have both begun
preparations for more serious racist attacks.

There has been a string of unsolved murders every four
to six weeks as far back as the spring of 2099. Rotterdam
police are chasing a number of leads, but have settled on no
one suspect as yet. Whoever is committing the crimes is
almost supernaturally good at erasing forensic evidence.
The victims have all been women in their 40s or 50s, but
there has been little else to connect them; none of them
appear to have known each other. Unfortunately, there is
evidence that the killer (if there is only one) is possessed of
much greater than human-average strength. This fact hit the
local news media late in 2099, and has exacerbated
already-tense relations with the city’s bioroid community.

Rotterdam - Revision history

Ecb: Created page with 'The Dutch city of Rotterdam was the world’s busiest port through much of the 21st century – only about 2080 was it surpassed (by Shanghai) in sheer volume…'