Today's climate and societal crisis urgently confronts us with our modes of production of suburban housing, places that are both problematic as a consequence of a much-criticized model, but also potentially part of the solution as a place of transformation and reinvestment in the project. At the crossroads of models and theories from the history of urban planning and the history of collective housing policies, there is a series of projects, situations, and arrangements that form a body of experiments and productions constituting a certain culture of collective housing in Wallonia and which can feed into this transformation project. Delving back into these materials from the past, among the figures and themes of these landmarks inherited from our history of collective housing, the research will investigate places of transformation, changes in practices, habits, and imaginaries. Based on this reinterpretation of collective housing as intrinsically linked to the garden city model, case studies will serve as fields of exploration that seek to open up, particularly through the tool of project-based research, concrete proposals, alliances to be rethought, and concrete tools and levers to be identified in order to rethink “suburbia.” Envisioned as a large garden territory, the urban peripheries of our Belgian suburbs offer fertile ground for rethinking ways of living together.
exhibition financed by ICA-WB
published in Dérivations 10, urbagora, Liège
photographs : © Michiel De Cleene