Client: karres+brands (design lead) + SITE Urban Development, with SPIN Unit as data analyst — for Gemeente Schiedam and the Dutch Creative Industries Fund
Location: Schiedam, Netherlands
Year: 2016–2017
Sector: Retail Decline · Social Media Data · Space Syntax · National Design Programme
As Schiedam’s shopping streets emptied out, this project used social-data analysis to find what could replace retail as the city’s connective tissue — winning a national Dutch design open call.
Like many small and mid-sized Dutch city centres, Schiedam faced rising retail vacancy and a shopping street losing its reason to exist. The question wasn’t how to save retail, but what could take its place.
Selected as one of five winning proposals in “Ontwerpen aan Stedelijke Centra” (Designing Urban Centres), a national open call by the Dutch Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie. It built on an earlier Stadsatlas Schiedam (Dec 2016), a 192-page cross-departmental data atlas SPIN Unit and karres+brands produced for the municipality’s 2040 housing strategy, and was later profiled in the national retrospective “Vier jaar ontwerpkracht in Nederland” and presented at IABR 2016.
A 100×100m grid analysis combined space syntax (via Rhino/Grasshopper), a Shannon-Wiener diversity index of amenity mix, “perceived density” measured from actual street viewpoints, and social data — over 7,000 geotagged Instagram photos, Foursquare/Google Places check-ins, Twitter mobility patterns, and Airbnb pricing — to map how Schiedam is really used, not just how it’s zoned.
Delivered as a 57-page A3 report (10 November 2017) proposing three test-case interventions for underused sites: Open Magazijn (an open warehouse/logistics concept), Zorg Dragen (a wellness/health hub), and Ertussenin (niche-cluster in-between spaces).
- Schiedam splits into three morphological zones — sprawl-pattern Kethel, an industrial East that acts as a physical barrier, and a dense historic South — separated by highways and rail.
- The industrial belt structurally cuts off the historically strongest part of the city from the rest of the urban fabric, even though the train station (tying Schiedam tightly to Rotterdam) is the single most-visited spot in the city.
- Kethel’s 1990s shopping centre sits meters from the older Kethel village but the two don’t relate to each other spatially or socially.
- Informal data produced genuinely counter-intuitive findings: “sauna complex” was the top Google search term associated with Schiedam over a decade, and a local fishmonger turned out to be a major, “unofficial” destination per check-in data — both used to justify the new programmatic concepts.
Delivered as one of five national winners of a Dutch government design-innovation call, later showcased in a national four-year retrospective of the programme — a rare case of SPIN Unit’s data analysis feeding directly into an internationally visible design competition outcome.