QUALITY OF LIFE
CLAIMING SAFE STREETS FOR LIVABLE CITIES
Rue Picardstraat, Brussels, Belgium Filter Café Filtré Atelier imagined what this busy street in Brussels could look like without cars.
BY ANNEKATRIEN VERDICKT
How a citizen movement of parents of schoolchildren wanting clean air, safe streets, and more livable cities led to a nonprofit organization empowering architects and urbanists to show how the city could evolve.
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rchitects have a double role. On the one hand, we are practicing architects with a commission. We have a question, and you try to answer it as best as you can, taking into account all climatic and mobility challenges in your project. That is what we are doing at Architectuurplatform Terwecoren Verdickt. On the other hand, we have taken up a new role with Filter Café Filtré Atelier, and that’s an agenda-setting role where we ask for vision and a higher ambition, where there is no question or project. Society is our client. The second part started for us in 2018. A report on TV was talking about how bad the air quality was both outside and inside school environments. That really struck us. So we had a meeting with other parents, and we decided to close down the street and protest. We invited the press and politicians. It was much bigger than we could have imagined. It was everywhere in the press, on television, in newspapers. It was such a success. We knew we had to repeat this. So we then created a manifesto of 11 points where we wanted to see change: more public space, more public transport, better transport, more traffic safety, fewer cars, more measuring stations where you monitor the air quality, and so on. We did a call to action to other schools and asked
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for additional protests. Politicians love to come to our actions and drink coffee (that’s our name, Filter Café Filtré), and we explain what we want. The movement grew, and in the end, we had 170 schools. We saw a lot of creative actions coming up. We had someone who made the most beautiful and most creative actions. We also posted a lot of information online so that people could be more informed about topics surrounding air quality. We also had some bigger actions. For one, we gathered all the schools in the most dangerous and polluted space in Brussels. For another, we closed down the highway and biked from Antwerp to Brussels. Wim Vandekeybus’ Ultima Vez, a famous choreographer, made a protest dance. All the schools practiced this, and we did it together in the center of Brussels. After a while, a lot of architects and urbanists got involved in the movement, and so we created a workshop called Air for Schools, where we invited all these people that were standing every Friday closing down the streets to create dreamlike images of places in Brussels, along canals, in front of schools, busy traffic streets, and more. We imagined how the city could evolve and become more healthy and livable. In Molenbeek, a really dense part of Brussels, a lot of children live in small-scale
Brussels Canal Zone Filter Café Filtré and Architecture Workroom Brussels worked together on a green plan for the Brussels Canal Zone.
