Is This Your Good Place?
As part of InclusiveCity's ongoing research in Rijnhaven, Rotterdam, Robin Cox of Good Place joined us to ask the users of the Rijnhaven how they feel about this rapidly developing part of Rotterdam
Robin Cox of Good Place patiently waits for his first conversation
Good Place started as Robin's podcast on a bench in The Hague and has since grown into a wider project, A City Made By People, built around the idea that good citizens make good cities and that connection happens in the everyday, unnoticed corners of urban life, such as a bench, a library or a café.
The bench interviews are the project's original format: sit down with strangers and ask what makes a place good. In Rijnhaven, we transformed the InclusiveCity cargobike into a bench to ask people how they experienced the place.
A recently-arrived resident called it her "sense of home." Longtime Rotterdammers reminisced about the metro rides past the old container ships, now replaced by Fenix, the new photography museum, and a city beach that opened this past summer.
Gentrification came up unprompted, more than once. One resident acknowledged the area skews toward higher incomes but felt there was still room for other kinds of people. That tension is the same one running through InclusiveCity's work on Rijnhaven: rising property prices, cultural space oriented toward visitors, and the gap between "inclusive" branding and everyday exclusion.
What stood out across the conversations was how much people's sense of a "good place" rested on public, shared space rather than anything commercial: the city beach, the park, the walkability, the fact that open water and open ground both remain accessible.
It's a small, informal piece of research, a handful of doorstep conversations rather than a survey, but it captures something the InclusiveCity project keeps circling back to: social sustainability isn't an abstract policy goal, it's whether people feel they belong somewhere, and whether that feeling survives the area getting nicer.
Watch the full conversations: Good Place bench interview, Rijnhaven
More on the project: InclusiveCity
