The Spatial Planning Department of Flanders is preparing a new Spatial Policy Plan for Flanders (BRV) as a follow-up to the current Spatial Structural Plan (RSV) for Flanders. Architecture Workroom Brussels is collaborating on the project to support innovative and coherent vision formation and concept development in the transition from the Green Paper to the White Paper of the Spatial Policy Plan.

A number of studies have already been elaborated in Flanders to serve as material when compiling the new Spatial Policy Plan for Flanders. However, there are a number of gaps in the existing expertise. There are important, internationally accepted concepts with which spatial planning in Flanders is insufficiently familiar, or that are insufficiently applied when elaborating a long-term vision of spatial planning. In order to develop this vision for 2050 the RWO published a tender to organise three international concept studios around three pertinent challenges related to spatial policy in Flanders.

Architecture Workroom Brussels was selected to design and lead the three concept studios. During two-day workshops, international experts and designers will be invited to develop concepts related to these three specific themes: the first will focus on landscape development in Flanders, the second will try and compile a life cycle analysis for spatial development, and the third will study the economic developments needed for a healthy and qualitative living environment. The resulting ideas will subsequently be worked out in detail by the design agencies GRAU and H+N+S Landscape Architects using research by design. This allows the concepts to be tested with regard to their translation into policy, and finally be processed into building blocks that can be used to elaborate the Spatial Policy Plan for Flanders.

To ensure that the international experts are able to conduct a specific substantive discussion, and to guarantee that the developed concepts and visions are in line with the Flemish reality and the BRV’s design, Architecture Workroom Brussels proposes a working method characterised by: the three studios being embedded in a continuous process of design-based analysis and translation, the input of expertise using actual cases, and the emphatic connection with the governance issue and the political-social debate.

Type: Concept studio

Commissioning party: RWO

Partners: Department of Spatial Planning Flanders