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)