Who keeps a neighbourhood going? In Rotterdam, much of that work is done by residents who run community spaces, support their neighbours and look after shared green spaces. Yet this care often goes unnoticed, and many initiatives depend on volunteers, temporary funding and buildings they can only use for a limited time. Care-full Citymaking, supported by the Resilient Delta initiative, sets out to make this work visible, connected and valued.
Care as a political, spatial and ecological practice
The project (December 2025-December 2026), is a collaboration between IHS, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft, and Urbanistas Rotterdam. Reframing care as central to a just city, the project draws on feminist ethics of care and the idea of “caring cities”. Care is understood as everything we do to sustain life, human and more-than-human, but also as contested: it can reproduce inequality, falling disproportionately on gendered and racialised people. The team therefore asks: who cares, for whom, under what conditions, and at what cost?
Counter-mapping and radical spatial imagination
Working with residents and community organisations, the team combines participatory counter-mapping, storytelling and radical archiving to document care that usually goes unseen. Visibility brings recognition for some initiatives and risk for others, so only what emerges through shared consent is mapped. Radical spatial imagination complements this by inviting communities to imagine alternative pasts, presents and futures, and to ask how the city would change if it were designed from care.
Three workshops, two initiatives
Three consortium workshops shaped the approach: conceptualising care, mapping examples across Rotterdam, and developing the methodology. Along the way, the team found that the line between formal and informal care is blurry, initiatives are at very different stages of formalisation across the city, and that gaps on the map may reflect gaps in researchers’ knowledge rather than an absence of care.
Because care is networked, the city as a whole became the scale of analysis.
Two contrasting initiatives were selected: De Groene Connectie, a coalition of 26 green initiatives along an eight-kilometre route around Delfshaven, and Het Wijkpaleis, a residents’ initiative based in a single building in Middelland. Each is studied across three layers: the institutional (what is care for the state?), the community (what is care for those providing it?) and the individual (what is care for those receiving it?).
Knowledge from the neighbourhood
For the researchers, the project has been a reminder of the depth of embodied care knowledge among Rotterdam’s residents. As researcher Mariya Nadeem Khan puts it, "residents know best what makes a city thrive”. They have guided the development of the work, and the team hopes that making these competencies visible can bridge gaps in academic and professional understandings of care.
What comes next
The project will produce maps, catalogues and workshops for both policy and activism, feeding a locally rooted knowledge repository for mutual learning and solidarity. By linking siloed care practices with one another and with the institutions around them, it aims to put care at the centre of how Rotterdam is planned.
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Researchers: Mariya Nadeem Khan, Bahar Sakizlioglu Uitermark (IHS, Erasmus University Rotterdam); Irene Luque Martin and Julia Schasfoort (TU Delft); Tenesha Caton, Vera Kuipers, Anna Kozera and Juliana Giraldo Sanabria (Urbanistas Rotterdam).
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