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?    

In 2020, Architecture Workroom Brussels celebrated its 10th anniversary. This was a good opportunity to look back on a decade of working on practice innovation in architecture and urbanism. In this overview, we present 11 projects, one for each year of work from 2010 to 2020. It shows the range of themes and contexts within which we have developed our expertise. Through cultural production, policy support and design research, Architecture Workroom Brussels puts new issues on the agenda of design practice, a search for a positive impact on the transformation of our living environment.  The accompanying video portraits illustrate the partnerships and forms of collaboration with designers, policymakers, experts and social actors that have helped shape our operation. Year after year, the community of practice that together makes space for accelerating social transitions grew. → more

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