Overschie - which translates roughly as Across-the-Schie - grew up at a Y-junction in the river Schie, the medieval waterway that linked Delft to the sea. The Dorpsstraat, the old village high street, still runs along the dike that organized everything: a curving line of brick houses, a white-washed Reformed Church with a slender tower, a few cafes whose interiors haven't been touched since the Sixties. The A20 motorway now cuts across the village's southern edge, and the airport noise reaches the gardens, but the Overschie that existed before Rotterdam annexed it in 1941 is still visible from the church square. The village retains its own coat of arms. Locals will correct you if you call them Rotterdammers.

Schiebroek began as a peat colony - a settlement of laborers cutting and drying turf for Rotterdam's hearth fires. By the early twentieth century the peat was gone and the colony was nearly abandoned. Then in the 1920s, planners influenced by Ebenezer Howard's British garden-city movement saw an opportunity: empty land within bicycling distance of central Rotterdam. They drew up Schiebroek as a tuinstad, a garden city, with low brick houses, walkable streets organized around schools and parks, and front yards facing the road. Most of the original layout survives. Walk down the Peppelweg on a Saturday morning and you will still see the geometry the 1920s urbanists drew: a measured, deliberately low-key middle-class neighborhood that anticipated suburbs by half a century.

Hillegersberg grew around Ten Berghe Castle, a stone keep that stood on a low rise - the berg, hill, in a country that has very few - until the year 1426. That spring, in the late phase of the Hook and Cod Wars that tore Dutch politics apart for over a century, Jacqueline of Bavaria's forces took the castle and slighted it. The walls came down stone by stone; the stones were carried away and the rise was leveled. Today only the name and a small mound near the Hillegersbergse Plas remind passersby that a castle ever stood here. The village rebuilt itself anyway, around a still-standing Reformed church, and Hillegersberg is now the wealthiest residential corner of northern Rotterdam - large detached houses along Straatweg, sailboats at the local jachthaven, and a high street of restaurants that close early.

North of the airport, on a patch of land that property developers had long earmarked for a business park, the project collapsed during the 2008 recession. The site - Polder Schieveen - sat unbuilt. By 2016 someone had noticed that the same wet, low-grass conditions that made the polder hard to develop made it perfect for breeding birds: black-tailed godwits, lapwings, oystercatchers, the meadow birds that have vanished across most of the modern Dutch countryside. The polder was reclassified as a protected cultural landscape. Cycle paths were threaded through it. Sections close to the public from 1 March to 1 July, the breeding season. Stand on the dike at sunset with the Rotterdam skyline rising in the distance over the airport's single runway, and you can hear the godwits calling in a soundscape that should have been a logistics warehouse.

East of Hillegersberg, the Hoge Bergse Bos park rises about thirty meters above the surrounding polder - which, in this resolutely flat region, counts as a mountain. The hill is not natural. From the 1960s onward it was the dumping ground for Rotterdam's demolition debris: broken concrete, brick rubble, the wrecked guts of older buildings. The city kept piling on until the rubble formed a usable terrain, then capped it with topsoil and let trees grow. By 1970 it had become a regional park. By the 1990s it had ski slopes, a cable park for water skiing, a climbing wall and mountain-bike trails - the only place in the Rotterdam region where you can do any of those things. The Lage Bergse Bos to its south is flatter and older, a true forest of 216 hectares laid down in 1970. The two parks share a name and almost nothing else: one is what the land was before the city; the other is what the city threw away.