| team: |
studio
M.Devolder, E.Giannotti, M.Girelli, C. Liang, C.Pisano, A.Rafful, V.Saddi, W.Wambecq, Q.Zhang
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Brussels needs an innovative and radical project. The challenges for the future, de demographic, work, formation, education, environmental, social inequalities, internationalisation require a completely new frame : a spatial vision, a structure of mobility, a way to practise urbanism that leaves behind de ideas of the past, but learns from what has happened in the last decades. Our project presents a city model of the 21st century: the Horizontal Metropolis, located in the heart of the North Western Metropolitan Area. It is a city of which the limits are vague and uncertain that in this case is structured by the three valleys of Dender, Senne, Dijle. A definition of the Horizontal Metropolis : an enlarged urban condition, typologically diverse and well equipped, structured by three valleys and by a dense and branched network of public transport ; articulated by a series of urban and territorial figures that form the reference points. Inside the Horizontal Metropolis, Brussels is an intensification of this condition. The elaboration of these elements form a new vision for the city of Brussels and radically redesigns it. Three strategic spaces can be identified in which these aspects build up a specific relation. The Garden of the West, the Lively Canal and Metropolitan Space of the Woluwe. A fourth space crossing the others is the requalified public space in relation to the mesh, the intensified network of public transport. The Garden of the West is based on the extension of the fertile landscape of the Pajottenland inside Brussels. A new culture of equipments in a seemingly untouched landscape strongly improves the image of the west of the city, often marginalised. The Lively Canal deals with the requalification of the public space along the canal and recuperation of the built mass. The canal, for centuries the populist industrial centre, regains its liveability. the Metropolitan Space of the Woluwe is the continuation of an extremely well equipped valley that forms an important ecological continuity between the Sonian forest and the airport in the north (with the forest Floordambos). Again, the relation between services of the city and the ecological landscape is the frame of an amazing metropolitan lif. |
