The evolution of a temporary community practice in Rotterdam - from Space to Beating Heart

by Alice Jelmini

This article is a collaboration between Alice Jelmini (Institute for Urban Excellence), Francisco Santos (peer protocol), Chiara Mazzarella , postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft (NOMAD project), and Pierre Simoes Kauter (Creative Regenerative Dynamic). It draws on their experiences, insights, and ongoing engagement with “The Space”, its new mandate, and other temporary use initiatives in Rotterdam and beyond.

THE ISSUE OF VACANCY AND TEMPORARY USE AS OPPORTUNITY

Across many European cities, a growing number of properties stand empty. In 2011, an estimated 38 million properties, including residential, commercial, institutional, and historical buildings, remained vacant across the EU (EC, 2016), a figure that grew to 47.5 million in 2024 (FEANTSA, 2025).  While the housing crisis intensifies, with cities facing increasing populations and a growing demand for affordable housing, vacancy rates continue to rise.  

This is due to a number of factors: sometimes buildings are left empty for speculative purposes, waiting for values to rise; others are in transition between owners or tenants; some are held as long-term investments with no intention of immediate use (Van Putten, 2024). Whatever the cause, the consequences are tangible, often resulting in neighbourhood decline and neglect, reduced street vitality, loss of safety and decrease in social cohesion.  

Meanwhile, urban development continues “business as usual”, prioritising demolition and new building construction over renovation (HouseEurope!, n.d.), contributing to high levels of resource use and environmental impact, while limiting more adaptive and flexible urban reuses.  

In this context, as this dominant development model fails to provide short-term solutions to the shortage of affordable housing, temporary use initiatives of vacant buildings emerge as situated opportunities. They can act as potential intermediaries within the housing sector by supporting redevelopment plans, or ideally, by activating properties during periods of transition as alternatives to disuse and neglect (Madanipour, 2018). By filling up (speculative or structural) gaps left by market and public actors, such initiatives offer alternative modes of urban management and help consolidate non-institutional, bottom-up, commons-based practices (Calzati et al., 2022). At the same time, they enable residents and collectives to repurpose unused spaces for social aims, creating room for experimentation with urban governance, while fostering social networks, cultural activity, and local ownership (Mazzarella et al., 2025). 

In the face of ongoing housing shortages, persistent vacancy, and a demolition-driven development (Van Putten, 2024; OPEN Rotterdam, 2024; HouseEurope!, n.d.), this article looks at The Space – a temporary initiative in Rotterdam, to explore and highlight the potential role of integrating experimental, temporary use strategies into real estate and urban management as a means to bring more inclusive, adaptive, and community-driven forms of urban transformation.

THE SPACE IN ROTTERDAM

In Rotterdam, where between 2018 and 2024 an average of 17,430 properties stood vacant each year (Van Putten, 2024), a number of temporary use initiatives have emerged. One example is The_Space_Coolhaven, a temporary community space set up in the IJzerblock in Rotterdam’s  Coolhaven neighbourhood. This grassroots initiative transformed a vacant apartment into a co-working, gathering space and cultural commons, which later evolved into an initiative advocating for shared spaces in Coolhaven’s urban development.

"INFORMAL" BEGINNINGS

The Space emerged through an informal process of access and activation. In the summer of 2021, 10 people from different backgrounds and unknown to each other, came together to fix an old apartment within the artistic “IJzerblock” community - a social housing complex in Rotterdam’s Coolhaven area. The apartment had been vacated by the housing association in anticipation of future demolition and redevelopment. Due to delays in this trajectory, the unit remained empty and was loosely managed through networks connected to a local art and design academy. It was under these conditions that the apartment became accessible for use. 

The initiative did not begin with a clearly defined vision or long-term plan. The first steps were improvised: entering the place, storing a few items, and gradually inviting others to join. Within a short time, a group formed around the idea of turning the apartment into a co-working environment. Many of the participants were already involved in small-scale community practices and projects, and this existing energy fed into the transformation of the apartment building.

FROM CO-WORKING TO COMMONS: USE AND ACTIVITY 

As more people became involved, the idea of a community space expanded. Renovation was carried out collectively and incrementally: walls were painted, furniture rearranged, minor construction projects, like an outdoor stage, were initiated. The simple act of adapting and refurbishing the place with the collaboration of volunteers became in itself a form of value creation for a social circular economy (Mazzarella et al., 2025).  

Two months after its opening, the apartment was already familiar to neighbours, artists, university students and other Rotterdammers. In its rooms and garden, people explored concepts like self-organised administration, community development and grassroots business models to create and test open-source tools and practices for collaboration and digital innovation.

Throughout its active period, The Space hosted a wide range of activities: informal dinners, concerts, exhibitions, workshops, and weekly gatherings. The events were inviting and welcoming to the neighborhood and grew largely through word of mouth and social media.  

Participants crossed paths throughout the different events, while students and researchers joined out of curiosity. Amid gatherings of grassroots collectives, The Space also hosted international artists like Arka Kinari (USA, ID), Rico Patrick (MZ) or Mpho Molikeng (LS) as well as local acts such as Kretek Beats, Chris Blok or Lifeless Past, always on the basis of free donations. In a culmination of its practice, the neighbourhood’s wider community joined in for the naming of its garden’s trees.

Although governance remained informal, basic agreements were made to guide use of the place. These included internal rules about how activities were framed, how the place’s identity was used in relation to external groups, and its non-commercial stance. Decisions were discussed collectively, and roles were distributed among active members. To support coordination, the group developed a website and Instagram presence, along with a ticketing system for event planning. The evolving balance between openness, structure, and care was a defining characteristic of how the place functioned over time.

CLOSURE OR CONTINUITY?

The Space came to an end in the summer of 2024 as demolition plans for the IJzerblock moved forward. Over time, both internal tensions and external frictions began to surface, adding pressure to the situation. The housing association re-engaged and issued a general notice to vacate, giving the group three months to leave. While some artists staged a symbolic protest, and squatters briefly remained in the building, the place was eventually cleared. At the end of August 2024, the sidewalks around the IJzerblock filled up with chairs, furniture, sofas, and all sorts of objects that once furnished the interior spaces, as the occupants said goodbye to a place where, for at least three years, bonds and memories had been created. Demolition began shortly after. 

The closure marked the end of the physical space, but much of the energy, tools, and connections generated by the project continued beyond its occupation. Although The Space was dismantled, networks formed as the project continued to grow, and many of the practices developed in that period were taken up elsewhere. Rather than a single legacy, what remains is a set of evolving relationships, shared experiences, and practical knowledge that has continued to circulate.

COOLHAVEN'S PARTICIPATORY QUEST!

The project’s core ideas and community-building efforts have since moved into a new exploratory phase - referred to as the “Coolhaven Beating Heart Participatory Quest”. Workshops, regular meetings, and the development of new tools continue to shape this next step, which centres on the idea of making neighbourhoods more responsive to those who live in them. Rather than advocating for a single space, the aim has shifted towards identifying, weaving and supporting a network of shared spaces that can function as commons. 

A key focus lies in encouraging institutions, public, cultural, or educational, to share underutilized spaces and to recognize the value of informal, community-led use. This also involves identifying existing, often invisible, resources within neighbourhoods that could be activated as shared infrastructure. The approach emphasizes shared governance over isolated access: not just borrowing space, but creating long-lasting frameworks for collective use. 

While this work remains experimental, there is a growing ambition to formalize how community-building opportunities are pursued - without losing the adaptability of informal organizing. The longer-term goal is to build sufficient community and institutional connections to support more stable, distributed commons, moving beyond one-off experiments toward broader territorial strategies.

THE LEGACY

COMMON VALUES AND OUTCOMES

Over the course of three years, The Space operated as an open laboratory of co-working and commons-based collaboration. Rooted in principles of sharing and circular economy, it served not just as a physical location but as an evolving ecosystem where people, projects, and practices converged. The Space offered co-working facilities but primarily functioned as a third place, i.e. a social environment distinct from home (the first place) and work (the second place), where individuals gather for informal interaction and community building (Oldenburg, 1999). This third place facilitated interactions, relationships, and shared responsibility that produced forms of social, economic, cultural, and symbolic value.

The value created during The Space project was based in its constant practice of open activities. The social value emerged in trust and cooperation in the abovementioned activities, i.e. workshop, events and informal gatherings, building cultural commons based on mutual trust (Gielen, 2024). The co-working space was kept regularly open, designed not only productivity, but also to foster spontaneity and connection. Economically, while not focused on monetization, The Space incubated collaborative projects that leveraged non-monetary exchanges: skill-sharing, reuse, barter. This practice enabled economic activity outside traditional market logic, creating resilience through diversification of resources. Culturally, the workshops and events amplified local knowledge and artistic expression. As the programming was porous (allowing different events to be co-created with guests and the neighbourhood), symbolically, The Space became a reference point and a place of possibility that spontaneously realized innate spatial tactics of circular commons (Egger et al., 2024), i.e. a place where improvised ways of interacting activated commoners to share resources, and governance. Its visual identity from the street and the idea that it was there and open were part of a shared imagination of what an inclusive urban commons could look like.

The true legacy of The Space lies in what continued after the project’s formal end. Evolving relationships, practical knowledge, and shared experiences live on through peer_protocol - the founding collective behind The Space initiative, which has since become a foundation. It  continues to network and seek new opportunities for co-creating alternative practices of urban development. This work shifted some perceptions. The local council (Wijkraad) began to recognize the existence of a group of people looking for co-working and commons-based spaces, and awarded a small grant for residents to engage with urban development and the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design (Rooterdamse Academie van Bouwkunst). This allowed the group to have a space for an exhibition about the history of The Space and a room to start the new exploratory phase: the “Coolhaven Beating Heart Participatory Quest.”

EVOLUTION OF THE PROJECT

The Space adapted and evolved into The Coolhaven Beating Heart Participatory Quest. The workshops brought a new layer of inquiry into value creation, centred around a new collaborative process. Whereas The Space laid the groundwork for a shared physical commons, its evolution into the Coolhaven Quest leaned into a nomadic participatory co-design and collective decision-making, to envision new urban development practices with the community. Through co-designed workshops and iterative exercises, shared values began to materialize: inclusion, ecological stewardship, local storytelling, mutual care, active participation. These values did not just guide decisions; they became tangible outputs in themselves to be embedded in the process. This “how” is essential. Co-creation methodologies like roleplay prototyping, collaborative mapping, and co-evaluation of the design outputs, enabled a deep engagement with workshop participants. Rather than problem-solving, the approach was about collective sense-making, holding space for disagreement, and open debate. Participants developed a language of mutual respect and political imagination, again sharing food, knowledge, and time.

The Space and its evolution into Coolhaven Quest demonstrate that value in commons-based projects is not just about producing outputs but about an evolving process. Social capital, cultural confidence, and collective autonomy are all forms of value that, while difficult to quantify in traditional metrics, have been transformative for the Quest, its collaborators and occasional participants.

THE QUEST ROOTS AND FUTURE CHALLENGES

The Space and The Coolhaven Beating Heart Participatory Quest have shared the inevitable tension between vision and constraint. Resources, whether time, funding, or institutional recognition, were always limited. In The Space, this scarcity spurred a high level of inventiveness but also caused burnout. Facilitators had to learn to set boundaries while keeping openness alive. Similarly, the Quest initiators had to reconcile some divergent goals of local public authorities and neighborhood groups. Networked collaboration proved vital here. Existing relationships from The Space helped Coolhaven Quest quickly build trust and engage people. The horizontal structure, based on shared values rather than fixed hierarchies, enabled a more resilient form of governance within the group activities and organizations (workshop, messaging groups, shared activities and goals). It was not without friction, but the willingness to revisit ideas and decisions allowed the project to remain responsive.

What the initiatives teach us is that participatory spaces must be seen as ecosystems of open(-ended) projects. Like seeds, they require time to root, relational care to sustain, and a physical space as a reference place. Scarcity and uncertainty will always exist, but so too will the possibility of generating new forms of wealth grounded in trust, reciprocity, and imagination. 

The challenge ahead lies in the sustainability of the project, and scaling this ethos without replicating extractive logics. A physical space is necessary not only to provide workspaces and a commons, but also as a place for spontaneous gathering where new projects can emerge. Yet, in a city like Rotterdam where rents continue to rise, how can a starting foundation run by a group of volunteers find an accessible and secure space? Is it enough to settle for yet another temporary and precarious space to foster active and creative participation? As institutions begin to integrate participatory methods and as the group continues to develop, the question is not whether these approaches are valid, but how to catalyse their radical potential. The value of these practices stems not just from the places they have transformed, but in the people they empowered to carry the commons forward, into their neighbourhoods, their policies and their ways of being.

CONCLUSION

The case of The Space_Coolhaven and its evolution into the Participatory Quest offers insights over both the potential and the challenges of temporary use in addressing urban vacancy and enabling community-led transformation, in Rotterdam and beyond. Particularly, the initiatives show how temporary use can create value from unused spaces in meaningful, inclusive, and creative ways. Rather than offering a fixed model, these projects show that temporary use can function as a platform for experimentation, mutual care, and collective responsibility. They reveal that commons are not just about shared spaces, but about the relationships and practices that sustain them. Even if short-term, such initiatives can generate long-lasting effects and impacts - new relationships, tools, imaginaries and practices that continue to evolve and circulate shaping local urban transformations.  

Across European cities, the paradox of rising housing demand and persistent vacancy reveals the limitations of the current market and public-led real estate and urban development models, and underscores the urgency of rethinking how empty buildings are accessed, governed, and valued. Temporary use, when rooted in collective governance and social aims, can reframe vacancy from a symptom of disinvestment and neglect into an opportunity for adaptive, commons-based transformation. By temporarily opening properties to community use, cities can provide spaces for cultural activity, collective governance, and neighbourhood revitalization, while testing alternatives to dominant market-led models.  

To support the potential of such initiatives, it is essential to move beyond isolated experiences and toward more structural change in how vacant space is accessed, governed and valued. Enabling conditions for more inclusive, adaptive, commons-based urban development are needed, and as such, municipalities, public institutions, and other stakeholders should:

• Recognize (social) temporary use as a valuable practice, not just an interim solution - especially in contexts of vacancy and transition. 

• Actively counter the private ownership of vacant or underused properties in Rotterdam, introducing regulatory and fiscal measures that discourage passive real estate speculation and instead promote the reuse of spaces for social and community purposes. 

• Resist the commodification of temporary use by ensuring that public support and access to place are directed towards initiatives grounded in collective governance, community care and long-term public value; rather than profit-oriented or extractive models.  

• Support vacant or underutilized properties in adopting a proactive asset management strategy, aimed at optimizing the use of real estate through commons and community-oriented allocation systems that can flexibly respond to emerging local needs. 

• Develop sustainable funding mechanisms (from dedicated grant schemes to tax incentives) to ensure continuity for initiatives that often operate in precarious conditions.

Finally, embracing temporary use as a strategic, adaptive approach also means valuing the intangible benefits these spaces generate, including trust, solidarity, creativity, and shared responsibility, and not only efficiency and concrete outputs. It means accepting exploration and uncertainty as essential parts of the process, allowing value to emerge through collective engagement.

// All photos taken by the authors. //