Schiebroek-Zuid is a post-war social housing neighbourhood in Rotterdam that faced comprehensive redevelopment. Except applied the full SiD framework in a co-creation process with over 100 stakeholders, residents, and project partners to design an integrated regeneration strategy.
Schiebroek-Zuid: Co-creating Neighbourhood Regeneration
The challenge
The neighbourhood suffered from overlapping problems: aging building stock with poor energy performance, social fragmentation, limited green infrastructure, and failing water management. Previous interventions had addressed these issues separately, producing incremental improvements that never reached the systemic change residents needed. The question was not how to renovate buildings, but how to redesign the neighbourhood as a functioning system.
Co-creation through SiD
The SiD process began with a comprehensive systems analysis across all ELSI dimensions. This revealed connections that stakeholders had never mapped: the relationship between drainage problems and social isolation, between energy costs and community health, between green space and both ecological performance and social cohesion.
Over a series of co-creation sessions, residents, housing corporations, local government, water authorities, and energy companies worked through the method cycles together. The structured process gave each group a clear role while maintaining focus on system-level outcomes.
Results
The process produced a comprehensive outline for local energy production, water supply redesign, and waste-neutral operations. Residents became active participants rather than passive recipients, giving the project the social resilience to withstand the political and financial challenges that typically derail neighbourhood-scale interventions. Schiebroek-Zuid demonstrates that SiD's value extends beyond analytical rigour: the structured co-creation process builds the social infrastructure that makes systemic change durable.