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Operation Open Space 2.0

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

2010: Building for Brussels

2014: Atelier Brabantstad

2020: Take Care!

2019: Air for Schools

A Good City Has Industry

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?    

 
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2017: Kortrijk 2025

As far as urban renewal is concerned, Kortrijk has long been known as one of the best students in the class. Nevertheless, the city is struggling with a stagnating population growth, while currently houses are steadily being built and open spaces still being taken over. Kortrijk decided to convert the need into a virtue, and opted for a radical upgrade of the existing urban fabric. The urban development of the grandiose - with large-scale infrastructure projects - is no longer central. It is an 'urban development of the everyday', with a lot of attention for the improvement of the daily living and working environment of the Kortrijk residents. Hundreds of residents debated with each other for a year and drew a bold vision for the future of their city.  → more

2015: Gent Muide Meulestede

2013: Open Space Platform

2016: Atelier Brussels – Productive Metropolis

The next big thing will be a lot of small things

2011: Towards visionary housing production

The Visionaire Woningbouw Study (Visionary housing production study) is not about exemplary housing projects, which, as an exception, merely confirm the rule. The housing issue in all its complexity is central. What is needed to counter the spatial fragmentation of Flanders? How do we bring collectivity and urbanity back into living? What does living look like in the future? Insights from the study continue to live on, including in initiatives of the Vlaamse Bouwmeester, such as the Pilot Projects Collective Housing or the transformation of well-located allotment neighbourhoods.  → more

2012: Parckdesign — GARDEN

Parckdesign 2012 radically reassesses what we can understand by a park. It is so much more than a traditional park or other forms of cultivated nature. Urban wastelands are central to this outdoor event. Bits of the city where nature, not man rules. A series of artistic interventions show the value these kinds of places have to offer, both for the city as an ecosystem and for local residents. → more

2018: You Are Here - Pilot Projects Desealing

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