Mapping Walking Interviews in a Gentrifying Port City Neighborhood through Space-Time Paths

Contemporary redevelopment and gentrification of urban waterfront areas has stimulated research on local residents’ recollections regarding changes in their direct living environment. The peninsula of Katendrecht in Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ main port city, constitutes a peculiar case in this respect, as its legacy of notorious maritime pleasure quarter has been overtaken by the neighborhood’s recent urban renewal and waterfront regeneration processes. This article investigates how residents who have witnessed Katendrecht’s decline as pleasure district experience walking through the redeveloped neighborhood nowadays. This case study demonstrates the potential for interdisciplinary synergy between different scholarly fields, through a specific mapping approach that links together the methodologies of walking interviews and time geography. By focusing on spatio-temporal ‘standstills’ in mapping the walking interviews’ non-predetermined routes, overarching interview patterns are uncovered and participants’ matching observations are identified, revealing a range of responses to a waterfront area’s characteristics caught up in processes of gentrification.