Openstreets organises summerstreets, a summerschool and physical micro-interventions in Brussels.
During summer, Openstreets transforms the streets of Molenbeek into a learning lab for a climate-friendly and inclusive city. The car-free summerstreet travels through one of the most dense, low-income and polluted neighbourhoods of Brussels. Openstreets invites neighbours to participate in a wide range of free activities. They are also invited to rethink their streets and the public space, by implementing micro-interventions and by participating in holistic design workshops and a summerschool.
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Filter Café Filtré Atelier Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Annekatrien Last name of representative: Verdickt Gender: Female Nationality: Belgium Function: Director Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Jubelfeestlaan 79/15 Town: Sint-Jans-Molenbeek Postal code: 1080 Country: Belgium Direct Tel:+32 477 25 86 38 E-mail:info@fcfatelier.be Website:https://fcfatelier.be/
Openstreets is a Filter Café Filtré Atelier recurring project (2020, 2021, 2022..) that aims at developing new designs for climate robust streets in Molenbeek, one of the most dense, low-income and polluted neighbourhoods of Brussels. During the summer months, it transforms the neighbourhood into a learning lab for a sustainable city and a low-traffic neighbourhood. Car-traffic is removed from the streets for a given time, and citizens are invited to enjoy the freed up space. Openstreets brings a wide range of free activities from dance performances (in collaboration with Brussels Art institutions) to a circus initiation, a future imagination workshop to preparing a meal together. Every street is temporarily furnished and transformed into an outdoor living room. More than that, citizens are involved in rethinking their streets and the public space from a climate and inclusion perspective. To do so, the project acts in different time frames from short to long term impact. Firstly, in the short term, the organisation of summerstreets gives the streets back to citizens over summer. Secondly, in the medium term, positive change is implemented by constructing small, climate robust or inclusive interventions. Thirdly, envisioning the long term, citizens participate in holistic and inclusive workshops that feed into the work of architects and urban planners. In a multidisciplinary summerschool the expertise from neighbours is translated to low-threshold visualisations that feed back into the conversations and public and urban debate.
About Filter Café Filtré Atelier: Originating from the citizen movement Filter Café Filtré in 2018, the Atelier has set itself the goal of developing concrete solutions and spatial visions of the future through design research, expert and participative workshops with linked actions in public space, in which better air quality, traffic safety, more liveable and child-friendly cities are the objectives.
Street Transition
Power of Imagination/Experience
Learning Lab
Inclusive Streetdesign
Micro-Interventions
Openstreets aims at a more climate-robust, healthy, social, safe and more liveable city. In doing so, it discourages car use, promotes cycling and walking, focuses on softening and greening, reduces the space occupied by (parked) cars, focuses on shared mobility, strives for quality public and social space, accessibility (children, women, the disabled...). The Mariti(e)me neighbourhood in Molenbeek is one of the most densely inhabited, low-income and polluted neighbourhoods of Brussels. Here, multiple urgent needs in terms of sustainability come together. The project tackles these sustainability objectives in multiple time frames:
Short term - During the summer streets inhabitants experience the benefits of a car-free street and a low-traffic neighbourhood. In a very positive way, the summer street promotes a shift in mind and behaviour towards sustainable modes of mobility and uses of the street.
Medium term - In 2021, we planted roses against the facades of Picardstreet. In 2022 Openstreets investigated and executed, together with the municipality, how a modal filter could relieve the neighbourhood of transit traffic and thus improve liveability all year round. By these (micro-)interventions we aim to implement change and work towards the future vision of the street in small, positive improvements where ‘no one can be against’. After successful interventions last year, these micro-interventions will become our main focus this summer.
Long term - In every summerstreet citizens participate in co-creative workshops that then feed into a summerschool. With a 10-strong multidisciplinary team this resulted in an ‘quick-win’ action map of the neighbourhood and co-creative visualisations of long-term visions for every street. The output is used to promote the positive effects of sustainable transition and to set in motion an open debate by both citizens, professionals and city authorities. Openstreets also organises these debates and conversations in the streets.
Openstreets aims for a high level of aesthetics and architectural and graphical quality as we believe that a good and beautiful design makes the difference.
This starts with the temporary architectural setup of every summerstreet:
Painting the street - Painting white dots in chalk paint marks the start of the summerstreet and literally shows which space is being repurposed. At this moment neighbours and kids come out and start helping by picking up a paint brush
Friendly furniture - The closure of the street ends made up by colourful barrels with flowers and trees instead of metal barriers.
Heart of the street - In the middle of the street stands the bar and toy-library. FCFa renovated a caravan with a colourful, multi-language intervention by a local artist. An educative, colourful air quality carpet and a few chairs complete the atmosphere around the ‘heart of the street’.
Streetlayout - Furniture like tables, benches are carefully put in place every day. FCFa experimented with furniture settings to see which settings work best.
As we think the power of imagination and images are important, we developed:
A strong graphic identity in all communication, production of low-threshold visualisations for every summerstreet by architects to show the positive effects of a climate robust and inclusive design, design of a newspaper with these visualisations, testimonies and telling pictures from the summerstreets. The newspaper was printed in 5000 copies and spread in the Mariti(e)me neighbourhood on the fore-eve of a public debate on the last day of Openstreets.
The program in the summerstreets aims for experimental, qualitative cultural activities in the summerstreets. For the cultural component we work together with important cultural figures in Brussels such as Kanal Centre Pompidou, Ultima Vez, Brussels2030… We aim for inspiring, provoking or unsual activities to broaden the imagination of what the street could look like.
Openstreets has an important social component. Traffic pushes social life behind closed doors. Opening up the street brings people from different social backgrounds together, especially in Molenbeek where more than 100 different nationalities live together. By organising Openstreets in this neighbourhood, FCFa wants to create societal access in places where inequality is rampant.
Open program - The activities are aimed at all types and ages. They are freely accessible, open and inviting. From children to older people, women and men, able-bodied and disabled, rich and poor.
Active inclusion - FCFa does not only provide a very wide variation of activities, it also actively invites vulnerable or harder-to-reach target groups. When selecting the summerstreets we take in account a variety of the street audience. We collaborate for example with a care housing for people with a mental disability, with an elderly home for people with dementia, with a youth center and we crossed our program with a summerschool for kids to catch up on maths and languages. In every street, together with neighbours and local organisations, we set up our ‘imagination workshops’ to get their expertise that feeds back into our visualisations for the long term visions of the streets and neighbourhood.
Inclusive micro-interventions - This year, FCFa is working together with a Brussels non-profit that strives for better wheelchair accessibility. Together we evaluate every planned intervention on its inclusive qualities.
Conversation/debates - Openstreets worked on opening conversations by creating low-threshold, co-creative visualisations of what the future could look like, for every citizen. FCFa also organises "mediations”, debates and conversations with specific communities in specific streets. They allow people to feel heard about the transition.
Engaging active citizenship - Neighbours from the different streets are activated to think and shape the public space in their neighbourhood. The summerstreet works as a common starting point to question the mobility and living questions in their surroundings. Throughout several workshops, the neighbourhood coalitions are brought together. Here we define the summerstreet program together. Bringing different actors together brings about new alliances and opportunities. In the summerstreets a sense of community and mutual care is built.
From one summerstreet in 2020 to an entire neighbourhood in 2022 - What started as a one-street-project from a few neighbours together with FCFa evolved into multiple coalitions of neighbours in 7 streets. When the idea of closing a street seemed impossible the first year, today, the Openstreets summerstreet project has become self-evident to neighbours and the municipality. As Openstreets travels from one summerstreet to another, the participants grow toward the end of the summer where inhabitants from different streets get to know each other.
Anchorage in the neighbourhood - Like the number of neighbourhood coalitions, the number of partners also multiplied in recent years. From about five partners, it took an exponential growth with a programme comprising about 40 local partners.
LOCAL/REGION
FCFa takes the lead in the coordination of the project with planning, organising workshops, communication, contacts, administration and lobbying with the municipality of Molenbeek.
Streetcoalitions of neighbours - In each street, a group of 3 to 5 motivated neighbours from every street participate in a series of workshops during which to co-design the week program in their summerstreet is shaped. The streetcoalitions are very important stakeholders in the project. They handle communication on street level, go door-to-door and during summer, they take on an active role in the social, planning and logistics aspects of the project.
Participants and visitors of the streets - Openstreets is free and inviting for everyone. FCFa invites everyone in the street to share their insights on the issues and opportunities in terms of mobility and design of the street. This feeds directly into the design process for the long-term visualisations and middle-term interventions.
Youth Work - Through a local non-profit some 30 kids around 16 years old took on a role in the logistics and permanence in the summerstreets. Openstreets aims to motivate active citizenship and introduce sustainability topics.
Program by Openstreets partners - Around 40 various organisations bring workshops, performances etc to the summerstreets. They range from Brussels cultural houses, local initiatives like the circus school, city and regional initiatives services, social workers to a volunteer initiative for local youth. All partners contribute to the project by bringing their activities but also their own ‘public’ to the streets.
EUROPEAN
In an international call FCFa invited architects, urban planners, landscape designers, sociologists… to reflect on the future of the neighbourhood in a summerschool. They produced a long-term vision for each street, visualisations and a neighbourhood mapping of ‘quick-wins’ that lead to the micro-interventions we will execute this year.
The collective around FCFa started from a concern for better air quality. The road to improving air quality is a complex issue in which many disciplines intertwine: health, taxation, mobility, planning, traffic safety, air quality… FCFa collaborates with these different disciplines and uses its own expertise as architects to provide a spatial response to this issue.
The team of FCFa consists mainly of architects and urban planners. In the making of the program and the organisational structure of Openstreets we work together cultural, institutional, social, professional and other partners and disciplines.
The summerschool is a transdisciplinary 5-day workshop. Architects, urban planners, landscape designers, sociologists and one historian worked together on designs for the transition of the streets and neighbourhood. All of the expert or participative workshops are prepared with expertise from neighbours who bring their day-to-day knowledge to the table.
For the volunteer project within Openstreets we worked with a non-profit organisation. The head of this organisation is a social worker. Together with them we set out the lines for this collaboration.
The ‘ordinary’ street has not changed since the rise of the car and car based infrastructures and will become the main subject of transition in the next 10 years. The percentage of space occupied by ordinary streets in cities is enormous. The struggle for the street is an urgent matter, Openstreets acts on this climate urgency.
The Openstreets project consists of many strands. It is both a locally anchored project and at the same time, the project finds resonance in international/regional circles due to its strong photographic reportage and message. We believe the success of Openstreets is due to the combination of different types of methodologies (see question about methods) that act in multiple time frames.
As for those methodologies, design and research (long-term) is combined with linked actions in public space (right now) and followed by micro-interventions (middle term).
During the summerstreet, citizens experience what the benefits of a low-traffic neighbourhood entail and how different activities apart from motorised traffic change the neighbourhood in terms of safety, air and noise pollution, social cohesion… In holistic design workshops, citizens take an active role in rethinking their neighbourhood in the long term.This expertise feeds into design research of architects and urban planners in the summerschool that designed low-threshold visualisations for every street. In the middle term, micro-interventions such as plants against facades, bike parking or a beautiful bench bring positive small nudges towards the long-term visions in the images.
Another important aspect from the Openstreets, summerstreet experiences is that it is not an event but rather an experience lasting long enough to create new small habits. Openstreets demonstrates in a positive and playful way a new kind of (future) living.
The street as a typology is present in every city. All of the 3 methods described (see question about methods) could be replicated in another city. The summerstreet as a methodology works best in an urban context. Particularly in neighbourhoods like Molenbeek, where the challenges are urgent and multiple, the project becomes very relevant.
At local level, the summerstreet project started in one street and was, within Brussels, already scaled up to 8 streets. What started as a one-street-project from a few neighbours together with FCFa evolved into multiple coalitions of neighbours in 7 streets. When the idea of closing a street seemed impossible the first year, today, the Openstreets summerstreet project has become self-evident to neighbours and the municipality. As Openstreets travels from one summerstreet to another, the participants grow toward the end of the summer where inhabitants from different streets get to know each other.
At regional and national level, the project is picked up by the press. FCFa is regularly invited for lectures or guest lectures around its practice and Open Streets. FCFa engages with policy but policy is also actively seeking these kinds of bottom-up initiatives that prepare the ground for transition. Openstreets inspires and pushes ambition higher.
At the European level, Openstreets became part of the LINA European Architecture Platform in 2022. Following that, FCFa held an Openstreets-inspired workshop on the streets of Tirana around Micro-Interventions. This was part of a Copenhagen Architecture Festival summer school.
Originating from the citizen movement Filter Café Filtré in 2018, the Atelier has set itself the goal of developing concrete solutions and spatial visions of the future in which better air quality, traffic safety, more liveable and child-friendly cities are the objectives.
The methods used to reach this goal are as follows. Firstly, FCFa always combines (1) design research and linked (2) actions in public space. With Openstreets a third component came to be (3) micro-interventions.
Design research
FCFa uses her expertise from architecture to imagine and design provocative visions for the future. This is done in expert and participative workshops in the streets where we gather expertise from citizens about their neighbourhood. At the end of summer, the neighbours' expertise is fed into an international, multidisciplinary summerschool. Producing low-threshold visualisations open up a positive regard towards the necessary transition. The power of imagination is central in this method.
Actions in public space
Living and experiencing something counts for much more than simply learning about it. By taking the streets and literally showing an alternative future of the street, Openstreets works on the mind shift and inclusion of all citizens. Working in the public space and actively searching for the involvement of citizens makes the project much more grounded.
Micro-Interventions
Reconstructing an entire street takes time, large budgets and is sometimes difficult to digest by residents. Micro-interventions are manageable changes that make room for a mindshift in terms of mobility and transition to a liveable and healthy city. Interventions as well-placed needles in the neighbourhood give a positive boost to long-term change. The interventions are such that no one can be 'against' them. By implementing micro-interventions Openstreets works on improving the neighbourhood in a medium term.
Throughout FCFa's work, we noted that the street is the key space for transition and thus key to tackle global challenges. In Openstreets, local communities gather around the street and new social networks are created. The project is committed to set in motion a positive ‘mindshift’ regarding global challenges among local communities. Climate challenges are visualised and shown on the level of the inhabitant's own streets. Firstly, inhabitants experience what the street could offer in the future in their car-free summerstreet. Next, they can contribute their own expertise and see it incorporated in future visions. Finally, these visualisations focus on the specific local needs in a street. For example how the effect of (summer) heat waves can be softened by a more green and blue street profile, or how a street with a lot of schools can improve traffic safety. Micro-interventions like the implementation of small ‘facade-gardens’ are positive nudges towards these visions in the intermediate term. By doing this, global challenges become much more tangible for citizens. Apart from this mindshift in communities, the visualisations are handed over and communicated to decision- and policymakers, to put the importance of the street in the climate transition on the political agenda.
While solutions to some global challenges might be already available, it is important to make the change in people’s minds as well. This is exactly what Openstreets aims for.
The project started in one street in 2020 and grew to 8 streets. From a few neighbours, now coalitions spread over a whole neighbourhood are engaged. The summerstreet offer an experience that makes a mental switch in seeing the potential of the street and creating social cohesion.
This year will also see an even greater focus on actively engaging with people. The summer streets are changing the way of thinking but we are going even further to get neighbours on board in the necessary transition.
The project takes place during summer. In 2021, Openstreets started working on micro-interventions and thus leaving traces of change. (Small gardens against facades, a traffic filter, small sport installation…) The project will this summer focus on this intermediate term and implement more of these small positive nudges.
FCFa responded to a call from the Brussels Region in 2020 ‘Brussel on Holiday’. The Openstreets project became an inspiring example for the ‘Brussel on Holiday’ call and other projects. Today, FCFa is invited by the Regional administration as an expert on sustainable mobility to shape policy together. As a bottom-up initiative it does the ‘groundwork’ and prepares the way for progressive government policies, urgently needed in the urgent global climate challenges.
The project has relevant contributions to the developing 'European competence framework of sustainability'. Specifically, trough the summerstreets, micro-interventions and hollistic design workshops it works on creating supportive learning environments for sustainability and hands-on and interdisciplinary learning in a local context. It also helps to create a shared understanding on the deep and transformative changes for sustainability and the green transition. The summerschool actively involves students and local authorities. In Openstreets, also youth organisations take on a role as young active citizens.
