Article: Friday, 19 December 2025
The heart of a city will always be its people, but the digital aspects of the way a city runs are evolving, and somehow the human infrastructure and the digital infrastructure must co-exist. Rotterdam is already working on the relationship. This article is a result of a Moonshot Thinking event with Roland van der Heijden, manager of Rotterdam’s Citiverse Programme. Van der Heijden was originally a city planner with a strong interest in data and digital transformation. His work is centred on exploring how cities can evolve into human-centred social-physical-digital environments while balancing the roles of municipalities, private partners, and citizens.
Here, he explains Rotterdam’s aim to create an ecosystem of applications in which solutions interact with one another. But instead of isolated pilot schemes, the data and outputs from Rotterdam’s applications are shared across services. This enables them to be scaled up and integrated, and addresses the curse of ‘death by pilot scheme’ – a common failing that sees even successful trials fail to progress into operational use because of the challenges of governance and data management.
The idea of Rotterdam becoming a digital city was suggested between 2015 and 2016. Early questions focused on what a digital city actually is, the challenges it presents, and the role of the municipality in this transformation. At that time, there was little appetite for municipal involvement. The preference was to leave responsibility to large technology companies.
By 2019, attitudes had shifted. The concepts of digital autonomy and digital sovereignty gained traction, and Rotterdam launched a dedicated Digital City Programme to reclaim a role for the municipality in shaping the digital future. The city’s vision was articulated through the platform www.rotterdam-oup.nl.
Now,Rotterdam sees itself as an ecosystem where digital, physical, and social realities are no longer separate but interwoven into a single, shared reality.
Traditionally, digital solutions have been viewed either as tools to enhance the physical world or as disruptive, stand-alone realities. Rotterdam rejects this dichotomy, instead arguing that all systems developed for the physical world must now be reimagined for an integrated social-physical-digital environment.
In the traditional privatised model of municipalities, they manage their physical infrastructure, but leave the digital infrastructure for big tech companies to organise. But this forces cities and citizens to accept the conditions set by corporations such as Google and Microsoft, with little space for public oversight.
However, Rotterdam recognises its responsibility to shape its own digital infrastructure. It developed an Open Urban Platform (OUP) in partnership with private organisations, and central to this is the Digital Twin: a 3D model of the city that integrates real-time data to provide insights into urban life. It’s a shareable view of the city’s current state, and it enables stakeholders in different sectors to collaborate. It breaks down silos and fosters cross-disciplinary innovation.
Rotterdam’s digital twin underpins a range of applications, including:
Better than the usual 2D maps, the digital twin has detailed, real-time 3D data for building structures and the risks that might be nearby – like cruise ships moored on the Nieuwe Maas River. This can significantly improve planning and response times.
Partners contributing data and expertise include automotive manufacturer BMW, housing organisation Woonstad Rotterdam, and the government emergency response organisation Veiligheidsregio Rotterdam-Rijnmond. For example, BMW shares passenger numbers and interior temperature data that helps the emergency services anticipate risks like fires involving electric vehicles in garages.
Currently, digital platforms tend to be either entirely privatised or entirely state-controlled, with the EU struggling to find a middle ground, but the digital transformation will require governance structures that balance public and private interests.
Rotterdam has already adopted a transparent, accountable partnership between public and private actors in a public-private governance model that creates trust in the ecosystem and among participants as well as an architecture that ensures interoperability between data sources, structures, and applications.
There’s also oversight from a governance board that has representatives from the municipality, private partners, academia, the Chamber of Commerce, and citizens. They make sure there’s compliance with rules for transparency, privacy, and fair competition – while acknowledging that regulation often lags behind technological developments.
In the next two years, the Rotterdam Citiverse will take shape. This is part of a broader European and human-centred alternative to the American-led Metaverse, an interconnected network of 3D virtual worlds.
The Citiverse is designed to integrate physical, digital, and social realities. It’s a public-private model that prioritises citizen interests, and combines Rotterdam’s digital twin with extended reality (XR), but aspires to move beyond these technologies to create a holistic ecosystem where people move seamlessly between physical and digital spaces.
Its key principles are:
Human-centred design that emphasises citizens’ rights, inclusivity, and equality.
Public-private development through co-creation for innovation and accountability.
Holistic impact that recognises that digital developments are interconnected and that there’s a synergy when systems work together.
There are three perspectives to the Citiverse:
Its building blocks identify, amongst others, the green economy, the port economy, and the future of education.
Its workplaces include experimentation hubs and include projects like Digiderius, an avatar of Desiderius Erasmus used to experiment with digital humans and AI in interaction with humans in the Erasmus Centre for Data Analytics, and data ownership initiatives like Web 3.0 – the next, de-centralised, evolution of the internet – and datavaults. Is it possible for citizens to be more in control of their own data and could a datavault help in that? And if so, could the municipality adjust its services to it?
The Rotterdam Citiverse is also creating an ecosystem of applications and building an app store of applications and services in addition to Open Urban Platform with underlying data sources. The next step is to make it possible that these applications can also talk to each other: the output of one application will be brought back as a data source to the OUP, which can then be picked up by another application.
It's looking into the best digital tools for participation and co-creation – for seeing issues to be raised and the target group – and has created a Future Society Lab, a knowledge network with broad participation from regional ecosystem partners like knowledge institutes, companies and the Veiligheidsregio Rotterdam-Rijnmond.
And it’s part of x-CITE, an EU-project for experimenting with physical-digital districts with services. What would physical-digital schools look like? How are neighbourhoods affected by the shift from social-physical networks towards social-digital networks?
The Rotterdam Citiverse looks at all of these issues through the ‘lenses’ of (1) digital infrastructure, governance, compliance, (2) digital economy, (3) digital inclusion, equality, and (4) public services. So while the digital twin provides the technical foundation, the governance model ensures trust, transparency, and accountability.
Rotterdam also insists on mandatory use of open standards, though not necessarily open source, to ensure interoperability and fairness across the system. The Rotterdam Citiverse represents a bold step towards a resilient, inclusive future where digital, physical, and social realities converge into a cohesive whole.
Rotterdam’s vision for a digital city will continue to have human needs and public responsibility at its core. By redefining digital infrastructure as a shared civic asset, the city is moving beyond fragmented pilots towards integrated, sustainable systems.
Digital City Rotterdam
Science Communication and Media Officer
Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) is one of Europe’s top-ranked business schools. RSM provides ground-breaking research and education furthering excellence in all aspects of management and is based in the international port city of Rotterdam – a vital nexus of business, logistics and trade. RSM’s primary focus is on developing business leaders with international careers who can become a force for positive change by carrying their innovative mindset into a sustainable future. Our first-class range of bachelor, master, MBA, PhD and executive programmes encourage them to become to become critical, creative, caring and collaborative thinkers and doers.
