Kop van Zuid, Rotterdam

Kop van Zuid is Rotterdam's docklands regeneration scheme, which won government approval in 1991. Although greater Rotterdam remains the world's largest port, the docklands regeneration area is a compact 125 ha, just one tenth of London's. Lying opposite the city centre on the bank of the River Maas, Kop van Zuid has been planned as its extension, linked by the new Erasmus Bridge.

The accent is on compact, high-density development, and most of the 5300 new dwellings take the form of medium-rise slabs and megastructures that are unmistakably urban and hard-edged. One of the first housing projects was the conversion of a 19th-century bonded warehouse into Rotterdam's answer to Liverpool's Albert Docks, though with a richer, more vibrant mix of uses. As well as the inevitable dockside shops and cafés, the Entrepot conversion includes four floors of flats with internal access decks overlooking a supermarket.

The highest density housing stands close to Kop van Zuid's office complex around the bridge approach. Landtong, a longitudinal quay between two docks, has been filled with 600 flats, mainly in three extended ziggurat blocks that step up to 12 storeys and enclose tennis courts and car parking, through which poke small rectilinear copses of birch trees. Flats facing Laan op Zuid, Kop van Zuid's spinal boulevard, are of a similar scale.

At the back of the high-rise housing stretches an oblong public park, Stadstuinen, which is surrounded by more domestic-scaled terraces of houses with rear gardens and front doors set between projecting bays. Facing the park are three-storey blocks of live-work units with concave facades of patterned brickwork, but amid the rectilinear architecture these look somewhat contrived.