Green with Grey

L4WATER

Green with Grey

Project description

Flanders is one of the best-known productive regions of Europe. Concentrating the majority of the Belgian industry and workforce, the Region features a continuous and dense infrastructure throughout its landscape: slabs of asphalt and concrete, tiles, sheds, wide roads, unused vegetated remnants of space, industrial platforms. These elements cover approximately the 4,5% of the ur-banisation of the region and the 15% of its overall land take, becoming a major question when it comes to the soil impermeabilization and water management question. This work looks at indus-trial platforms as umbrellas spread all over the Flemish territory. Umbrellas that every year re-ject approximately millions of m3 of rainwater. What if this water would be retained instead? GreenWithGrey is one of the strategic projects of the “Proeftuinen Ontharding”, a programme aiming at tackling the very diffuse—and land consuming—urbanization of Flanders through stra-tegic desealing actions. Within this framework, GreenWithGrey explores possibilities for deseal-ing Flemish industrial platforms to tackle questions such as providing more room for water and strengthening the regional water cycle. GreenWithGrey achieves the ongoing transition through a mix of doing and undoing, of actions and policies, of top down and bottom-up strategies.

Keywords, main expertise

desealing; softening; land consumption; water managment

Funding bodies

Omgeving, Flanders

UCLouvain promotor(s)

prof. Chiara Cavalieri
Prof. Daniela Perrotti

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Andrea Aragone; Daniel Otero Pena

External partners

Latitude platform for urban research and design , main coordinator), KULeuven (prof. Bruno Nottenboom)