Auteur: Liesbeth Huybrechts

Re-wilding is a small-scale public space project in the historical social housing settlement of Winterslag, located on the outskirts of Genk. The project seeks to counter problems with street encroachment caused by lack of enforcement of urban regulation in the neighborhood. Situated in a context characterized by Flemish social housing typologies dating back to the 1940s, a cluster of families have appropriated part of the public space by transforming it to private parking outside their plot boundaries.

As the informal street-scape does not have formal boundaries between public and private, the physical divisions are produced by negotiations between residents and local authorities, resulting in encroachment on the streets, whereby the residents slowly alter the physical barriers marking their plots to take over parts of the street space. 

This development causes a multitude of problems for the residents, including decreased social interaction in the public sphere, informal voids with underdeveloped potential, and issues of formalizing the landownership. Accordingly, street encroachment leads to the degradation of the garden city as great heritage value.

With three different proposals of intervention, based on site mappings and interviews, we try to engage the locals into taking leadership and furthermore taking back their street in order to regain a manageable relation between private and public.

 

The social housing in the Krokusstraat is an ensemble of 8 buildings and 68 apartments. There are several challenges in this multicultural neighborhood of Winterslag: e.g. the lack of parking, storage and common spaces, even though the area in between the buildings is owned by the municipality and its usable by everyone it is only used as circulation and traffic area and in the green areas solely grass is growing and social interaction is lacking. 

Given those challenges the international student group of four is redefining in their project the public area by redesigning circulation pathways, parking area, storage spaces and introducing private areas to distinguish common public areas to allow social interaction and nature to grow. The result will be visible for a very short time until the next rain will erase it.

This project wants to establish a link between different worlds in the neighbourhood in Winterslag, seeing beyond a boundary/wall, using a self-build periscope. By taking pictures via the periscope the project aims to enable a reconnection with the horizon beyond the fenced gardens: some places are controlled, others wild, some surprising in nature.

The neighborhood center presents as an opportunity to foster and deepen relations between the inhabitants in this low density residential neighborhood of Winterslag. It is also the starting point of the necklace forest surrounding the build environment. The neighborhood center is currently an introverted infrastructure with no relation to the lush forest and hidden from the inhabitants. Walls, fences, dense bushes and a vast array of built elements are used to assert private and public functions in the area which limits the possibility of engagement with the center and between neighbors.

After discussions and drawing activities with the youngest residents (6-8 year old) and their parents, it was evident the need for spaces to play and the interest in exploring nature, but als – mainly – to rest and sleep. Our aim will be to show the possibilities of integrating nature into the Center as a way for children to find a place to rest, reclaim the forest as a site for enjoyment and relaxation and, question the role of fences in the community.