Open space is vitally important. We need open space to safeguard our food supply and biodiversity. The open space also provides our urban society with many other services. It mitigates the effects of climate change, has a cooling function, offers buffer capacity for water shortages or excesses and is needed to generate renewable energy. What’s more, the open space affords us moments of calm, silence and experiential aspects that serve as an essential counterweight to hectic urban living. Over the course of the past century, the open space has been under pressure. We are increasingly eroding the open space for additional urbanisation, for living and working, for recreation or infrastructure. Open space has become a scarce commodity. In Flanders, seven hectares (or ten football pitches) of open space disappear every day. Despite the ‘concrete stop’ – or ‘construction shift’ – announced in the Spatial Policy Plan for Flanders, we continue to swiftly devour the open space.  → more

Citizens are once again demanding right of way on the streets. They are outraged: the quality of the air their children breathe every day at school is downright bad. Parents are joining forces and take action every week, all over the country, under the name ‘Filter Café Filtré’. What is special is that this citizens' movement doesn’t get mired in criticism, but suits the action to the word. Committed architects develop alternative design proposals on how the design of school environments can be different and better.    → more

Building for Brussels breaks with the laws of the classical architectural exhibition. It doesn’t show beautiful, special or spectacular buildings that are a statement by themselves. Instead, it argues that architecture can be a lever to tackle major societal challenges (such as demographic growth, mobility, urban economy). The selection of international, innovative city projects gives you a taste of how things can be done differently and better. Or how architectural culture can provoke and inspire Brussels policy makers.    

Atelier Brabantstad is part of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam of 2014, which is all about Urban by Nature. The Atelier makes us look at the city with different eyes: no longer as an independent environment, but as part of a wider urban landscape. Suddenly, the space that connects cities takes centre stage. This space appears as a richly varied urban carpet, in which keys are hidden to work on the future of the urban landscape.  → more

A Good City Has Industry, is the provocative title of an exhibition we organised in Brussels in 2016. That was four years ago, when such an idea was tantamount to sacrilege. What do we mean, a city needs industry? Didn't we do our utmost in recent decades to clean up the city and transform abandoned industrial sites into hip, vibrant urban districts? Wasn't our aim to restore the quality of life in cities, free of pollution or the din of trucks? And wasn't our economy irrevocably transformed into a tertiary economy? Manufacturing was something based in low-wage countries, wasn't it?