Abstracts > Ursula Wieser Benedetti

Of Park Systems and Minigolfs, From Athens to Anderlecht - Ursula Wieser Benedetti (CIVA, Brussels)

Initiated by the destruction caused by World War II and increased by the baby boom that followed, Brussels faced a critical housing situation. In response to this need, beginning in the 1960s the municipality of Anderlecht developed an ambitious urban planning strategy. With its land still primarily agricultural, the municipality had extensive grounds at its disposal, and in its development the planners employed a housing strategy based on the Athens Charter’s call for “sunlight, vegetation, and space.” Green spaces would occupy the core of the new construction to form a “park system” consistently enlarged over the decades. Based on the concept of an “inhabited green belt,” the system integrated construction with semi-natural areas to create the feeling of “a city built in the countryside.” The innovative funding model that required private developers to finance the green spaces around their projects resulted in a park system exceptional in its coherence and scale of implementation. A succession of neighborhoods mixed housing types with new schools, churches, playgrounds, and sports fields. Following modernist planning principles houses and apartments were separated from road traffic and dispersed within the string of parks and green spaces that cohered as a vast green promenade. As a result of the plan between 1945 and 1963 the surface areas of parks in Anderlecht tripled.

Georges Messin, Anderlecht, Commune verte, Administration communale d’Anderlecht, 1963 (CIVA)