Dogma

The Opposite Shore – Dender Valley

This project addresses the valley along the Dender River and proposes a transformation that includes both gradual demolition and densification of existing suburban settlements. The proposed plan begins by reordering the anatomy of the valley by devising a set of small-scale intervention in the form of public facilities. These interventions form a ‘ladder’ made of paths that brings together the settlements within a more cohesive urban structure. After carefully surveying the Valley, we selected two type of settlements – the ‘block’ and ‘garden city’ – that offer great potential for retrofitting, based on their current demographic and morphological configuration.

The ‘block’ settlement is characterized by discontinuous rows of houses whose back gardens form a large void. We propose a densification process that is made possible by the residents’ commoning of their gardens in order to consolidate these fragmented spaces. As this process would make available a large quantity of land, the residents’ cooperative can allow the construction of housing containing, at the ground floor, working spaces and communal facilities shared by existing and new households. The new housing units are based on two-rooms flats whose linear arrangement allows for the potential formation of smaller or larger households depending on the users’ needs. Flexibility in the household makeup is facilitated by the fact that residents do not own a specific house, but rather a share of the whole communal system.

The ‘garden suburb’ settlement consists of two-story or three-story detached houses with front and back gardens. We propose to densify this pattern of detached houses by adding workspaces on the front garden and in between houses. Moreover, by commoning their back gardens the residents gain space to build longhouses that can contain communal facilities such as workspaces, kitchens, kindergartens, laundries and clinics. The building of these extra-spaces allows retrofitting of the single-family houses into smaller units, thus allowing for the increase of demographic density and intergenerational households.