Urban [IM] Plants

By Kang-Hsin Fan

In this case study, it discusses the tactics for recombining landscape and collective space in Bonheiden, Belgium. Bonheiden, a town in the province of Antwerp in Belgium, lies in a region known for its exceptional national beauty, and was approximately estimated at 14,000 inhabitants in the Flemish periphery in 2005. It is one example of many Flemish towns undergoing the aftereffects of the countryside’s massive postwar suburbanization. It has become a prime case study of urban dispersal, and has rooted in the political history and economic of the region in recent years. Bonheiden is an insignificant suburban island, and is floated in a peripheral void in between lager urban cores that connected by highways and train. According to Verbakel (2008), the purpose of this case study is to turn this situation around by creating public spaces that use the town’s “original landscape as the material”. Bonheiden was selected for the proposal to provide strategies, and to increase the built density of the suburban town which could reintroduce and strengthen its connection to landscape and nature. In other words, the author explains that “the proposal brings the landscape to the public spaces, pulls the public into the landscape and creates hybrid living typologies between urbanity and nature, thereby creating a collective landscape”(Verbakel, 2008, p75). As a result, they present a “design toolbox” as an alternative conventional master plan instead of a matrix of pinpointed interventions of various scales and budgets. The advantage is the design toolbox can be flexibly implemented and modified on demand, and can control its own progress. There are two project examples to illustrate the function of recombining landscape and collective space.

The first project employs a technique of urban plants which recombines some segments of public space and landscape in punctual interventions of changing scales. This purpose is to reintroduce the wild healthy landscape back into the city by specific design interventions. These images display the landscape become the main component of the renewed public space. To allow the inhabitants direct interaction with the primary natural condition of the place, the project is to replace and erase the identity of recognizable public spaces. With the transforming the existing public spaces, the reintroduction of combining a wild health landscape into a new type of urban space will successfully to stimulate new urban life, and attract a mixture of inhabitants.


Urban plants = Landscape as collective

The hybrid intervention is the second project that describes the relationship between built fabric and nature produces new hybrid urban conditions. In this project, urbanity and nature are merged into an irreversible hybrid of structure and vegetation. The hybrid implants are organized by three spatial characteristic of the urban configuration of Bonheiden: fields, lines, and points. Fields of the urban configuration stand for the surfaces such as squares, parks, and natural domains; Lines stand for the continuous spaces along streets and paths; Points stand for the structures and art installations. Each of elements can be a stimulator to implement the surrounding urban space. In this example, a floating pergola can be added on undeveloped sites to shape a new vertical landscape. A café-terrace can be added on existing serving buildings to provide outdoor seating areas, to promote the living quality, and to create a green collective street façade.


Urban plants = Hybrid interventions

In conclusion, the recombining landscape and collective space in Bonheiden is to create public spaces by using the town’s original landscape as the base material, and to employ the design concept of toolbox strategies to reach the goal which achieve flexible and innovative design according to location, type of intervention. These strategies can be connections between urbanity and nature as a collective landscape to improve the living quality, and to allow the inhabitants interaction with the natural environment.

References:
Segal, R. & Verbakel, E. (2008). Architecture Design: Cities of Dispersal. NY: Wiley.