News
Brussels is breeding on a future-proof city
15. Nov 2022
Who helps to build the city and society of tomorrow? To answer the many societal challenges of today, we need physical space in the city. Many organisations are looking for a space to locate themselves, without success. At the same time, there are organisations that have space available, in which they would like to house creative and social partners. However, they are still lacking a network to find connections like these.
As an answer to this gap, the Flemish government released the call for projects ‘Gemeenschapsinfrastructuur als Broedplek in Brussel’, to connect Brussels organisations, focusing on a (cross)sectoral collaboration across community responsibilities. After an intensive working process towards the submission of subsidy applications, twelve plans for breeding sites got approved. In 2023 we will further support the selected sites to learn from the trajectory and from each other.
‘Broedplekken’ (‘breeding sites’) are working grounds existing of bricks and people, in which local communities and organisations build on new collaborations, by means of which they can provide answers to societal challenges in Brussels. In these physical spaces, they empower each other’s functions, develop new initiatives, and plant the seeds for urban future places.
Architecture Workroom has taken on a coordinating role in guiding the subsidy applications. In the first phase, we matched organisations according to their wishes and needs. By organisations a matchmaking session, we connected the organisations with each other, facilitating their search for possibilities to share their infrastructure. Together with the clusters of matched organisations, we worked towards concretising and sharpening their subsidy applications, together with a pool of spatial, financial, and organisational experts. In the summer of 2022, twelve proposals for new ‘breeding sites’ in Brussels were approved.
In 2023 we will commence a new trajectory with the selected infrastructures. Our goal is to develop a future-proof framework and methodology to further develop more efficient and purposeful ways of tackling the many societal, social, and spatial challenges in Brussels.
