Of “city lounges”, “bans on gathering” and macho policies - Gender, class and race in productions of space for Rotterdam's post-industrial future

Like many other former industrial cities, Rotterdam (the Netherlands) is engaged in a reinvention for a post-industrial future. The consensus among Rotterdam policy makers, entrepreneurs, economists and politicians has been for some time that the city needs to depart from its industrial, masculine and working class heritage and invest in what is commonly referred to as a post-industrial economy: one of consumption and services. In policy efforts towards this imagined Rotterdam, desired and undesired populations are outlined and targeted, amounting to a reconfiguration of the Right to the City. In this article we outline two particular spatial interventions to investigate the gendered, classed and racial logic of the production of a post-industrial Rotterdam and concomitant gendered Rights to the City. The first is what is called the “City Lounge”: an urban planning programme outlining productions of space in the city centre of Rotterdam for leisure and consumption. The second is what is commonly referred to as a “ban on gathering”, a safety measure meant to disperse 'problem groups' socializing in public space. From this analysis it appears that what is conceived as lounging for some in thought of as loitering for others and that both target groups are opposites on the axes of race, class and gender. Moreover, using content analyses of policy documents, legal proceedings, urban planning programmes and media reports, we show how in neoliberal urbanism, femininities are actively used as symbolic instruments in entrepreneurial strategies.