A cross-border playground for landscape experimentation

Het onderstaande abstract is een inzending voor de landschapscontactdag van het agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed en de Rijksdienst voor Cultureel Erfgoed.

Borders are objective constructs, arbitrary lines on a map impacting a lived space in reality. Nearly 200 years after Belgium and the Netherlands were drawn apart, the rural territory between their shared metropolises remains a largely overlooked landscape. Squeezed between two metropolitan systems, the BrabantStad and Antwerp, this in-between region faces a structural erosion: villages losing their multifunctional character, an agriculture serving the global economy and young populations slowly living. On both sides of the border, communities are becoming residential satellites, affordable backyards of larger cities looking the other way. 

At first, these territories might look different, from scattered ribbon development on the Flemish side, to compact towns and open fields on the Dutch side. In reality, they are both driven by the same power: large scale agriculture with mainly intensive livestock productions oriented toward export and metropolises, not toward the territory itself. The result is a hollowed out landscape, dwindling villages, a sharply reduced legibility and lack of territorial identity. 

At the same time these conditions lead to affordable land and housing. This is both a symptom and a signal: these territories are undervalued. This is also precisely what makes them a fertile ground for experimentation. 

In a studio at the Fontys Academy of the Arts, students were invited to think without borders, treating the Kempen and Noord-Brabant as a single landscape, and the challenges that could be solved by doing so. Their proposals highlight two complementary levers. The first acts at the regional scale, revealing and embracing the region's latent natural structures as regional binders, transcending the border and reconnecting the territory to itself. The second one addressed the smaller scale by stimulating communities to reclaim and steward the heritage and resources of their own landscapes, shifting neighborhoods and villages from metropolitan satellites to productive, interdependent and mixed local networks. 

Together, these levers sketch a framework for turning two neglected backyards into a shared landscape: autonomous, multi-functional and coherent. They create a future where the landscape could sustain itself while becoming a complementary and qualitative counterpoint to the metropolises. The cross-border condition may be the very thing that makes this territory a productive ground for experimentation. 

Voor:
Landschapscontactdag 2026

In samenwerking met:
MSc. Philippe Allignet - LLA 

Jaar:
2026