Navez master plan

The project forms part of the strategic urban renewal programme instituted by the Masui Sustainable District Contract, previously prepared by Karbon’ in collaboration with the Ipé collective. It was extended with a series of complementary projects, the last and main one of which concerned the brownfield redevelopment to the north of the perimeter and a new set of homes and businesses on the edge of the neighbourhood on behalf of SDRB.

The definition of the project’s objective by the client (SDRB) provided inspiration but not much detail: a mixed project. Additionally, the Navez site is located in a singular part of the modern city. At the borders between the consolidated and continuous 19th-century part of the town and the fragmented 20th-century part, the site questions the differences in how the urban landscape is seen from a local and from a metropolitan point-of-view. The project takes on the form of a patch on the contemporary disparity of Brussels’ spaces, but even as an urban fragment, it also finds harmony with its surrounding urban conditions and materials, thereby taking part in building a more comprehensible town on a larger scale. From the methodology point of view, the thought process consisted of three stages. Addressing the issues with the space constraints by defining the conditions of the site; building various scenarios using this information with a forward-looking study of the programme; evaluating these scenarios and preparing the final project