Unlocking the potential of collective spaces in All City/All Land.

This research focuses on the collective spaces in the dispersed urban condition of Flanders, a condition we started to name All City/All Land. The aim of the research is to develop a theoretical understanding of these collective spaces in the dispersed urban condition and to develop an attitude for design interventions.

A first part of the work deepens the knowledge of All City/All Land, interpreting it both as an existing condition and as a future project. All City/All Land is not to be described as sprawl or suburbia but as a deliberate economic, social, and political project that originated in the 19th century as a response to the industrialisation. By an ‘in-situ urbanisation of a manmade landscape’ the whole territory was included in an urbanisation that dissolved the dichotomy between urban/rural. Moreover, in the research it is made clear that the territories of dispersion are in many cases not a recent emerging phenomenon but can be inscribed in a long tradition, provoking a shift in the urban paradigm and describing All City/All Land as an urban condition.

At present this urban paradigm of dispersion has however reached a tipping point by which the supportive strata are no longer able to coop with a continuation of the urbanisation and provoke the need to redefine the urban form of All City/All Land. In this redefinition the collective spaces will play a key-role as places where a living together is expressed.

Building upon the insights and evaluation of a competition held for Hoog-Kortrijk in the 1990’s, a competition that addresses public spaces in the dispersed context and that was followed by a realisation of the winning proposal, it became clear that the vocabulary, the lens of the traditional city cannot be used in All City/All Land. Deepening this insight in a second part of the work, gives rises to the statement that the use of frameworks, notions, and concepts for public spaces based on the traditional city but applied in All City/All Land leads to an Agraphia & Dyslexia, or a state of incorrect reading and writing.

Applying the lens of the traditional city in the context of All City/All Land even so addresses the wrong spaces. Focussing strictly on the consolidated public spaces of All City/All Land excludes an enormous variety of collective destinations, destinations indicated by the inhabitants as the spaces were there public life takes place. These spaces are public in their use and appropriation, spaces of gathering and a confrontation with lifestyles and visions beyond the own, spaces of political expression and freedom speech, but also places without a traditional formal expression and definitely not corresponding to the traditional dichotomies of public/private. They are therefore called collective as a third term breaking up the traditional oppositions between public and private. These destinations underline the extremely complex, individual, non-hierarchical and above all ad-hoc sequences of the use of the territory, completely contradicting the concepts of centrality and hierarchy as found in the traditional urban/rural models. These collective destinations are places that that give a structure to the territory through the memory and act as reference point but are hard to grasp. Analysing more in depth a number of these destinations revealed a number of common elements that can be used to spatially describe these collective destinations. Each of these elements are relating to the dispersed condition and can be interpreted as a starting point for the new form of the territory.

Picking up this new form for the territory, in a third part of the research, the question on intervention is put on the table. Through the research three types of spaces were detected, each of them with a particular attitude and momentum for intervention, each of them addressing a different question. These spaces relate to either to the consolidated public spaces such as the church square, the contemporary forms of collective destinations, or to new to develop collective spaces. For each of them this research proposes an adapted attitude, not as a checklist but as potential vocabulary. A vocabulary supporting the daily and the exceptional in the consolidated public spaces. A vocabulary that valorises the functional needs in the collective destinations but simultaneously uplifts the individual elements to a stage in which they no longer answer in a direct relation the functional needs but are open enough to encourage different forms of appropriation. A vocabulary that benefits from future investments related to a rethinking of the reciprocal relations and introduces collective spaces to give shape to the new urban form by specific places of living together.

This vocabulary is an optimistic vocabulary that builds upon the qualities in the dispersed territories and seeks to valorise them however without being blind for the challenges ahead. It is a vocabulary focussing on the small and middle scale as an appropriate scale for intervention. It focusses on the open spaces of All City/All Land, as those spaces that are a key in the understanding of the dispersed territories and defines a new shape for them in order to express this new form for the city.