Rotterdam’s New Waterway: The Iconification of an Infrastructure (1860-1947)

Rotterdam is not just a port city defined by its significance as a transit, petroleum or container port, but also by the heterogenic images and narratives that surround it. In this paper, we use images of the New Waterway – a nationally engineered infrastructure – to analyze its process becoming an icon of the globalized progress that made the port city of Rotterdam the leading port of the European continent at the beginning of the twentieth century. In order to better understand why and how the New Waterway was used as such an icon, we analyze the discourse that was represented in works of art during three phases: a monument for the Waterway’s instigator and engineer Caland in 1906, a diorama of the Waterway for the World Expo in 1931, and two theatrical plays during the Second World War and reconstruction of the port city (1941, 1947). We find that these iconic works appropriated the national plan of a new waterway between the North Sea and the hinterland, to an urban narrative that represented values of modern Rotterdam: resoluteness, progress, and resilience in times of hardship.