Rotterdam

From Gothpoodle

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 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.