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Tuin van Eten!

31. Aug 2022
’Tuin van Eten' in the Tivolipark, Mechelen, 2022. Photo: Raymond Mallentjer, De Grond der Dingen

To the table! In the coming year and a half, De Grond der Dingen will be forging plans with everyone who wants to strengthen the position of local food production in and around the city of Mechelen.

Architecture Workroom supports the 'Tuin van Eten' ('Garden of Food') cluster of ideas, which brings together initiatives from De Grond der Dingen working on food and inclusion. 

The Tivoli Park is a special crossroads in Mechelen. It is a programmed park with an orchard, big children's farm, play forest and a little castle where festivities are organised. It also forms the border of the social housing estates Otterbeek and Oud Oefenplein / Mechelen-Noord, of the villa district on Tivolilaan, the AZ Sint-Maarten and the residential care centre Roosendaelveld. Tucked between two busy brick roads, the park is also the most obvious crossing point between the centre of Mechelen and Sint-Katelijne-Waver. In this special location, the city of Mechelen is working together with De Grond der Dingen to explore how the initiatives proposed in 2017-2020 can resonate with the needs in the neighbourhood.

Through a track concerning 'art in public space', ARSENAAL/LAZARUS, the heritage service of the City of Mechelen, AWB and RADAR are exploring how to put food and inclusion higher on the agenda and how this can be translated into co-creative interventions in and around Mechelen's Tivoli Park. Together with artists Jelle Annie Michiels and Chloé Dierckx, we are currently working on three tracks.

A first track works around a public bread oven, building on a proposal of an intercultural bread oven, where bakers within different cultural traditions can work and pass on knowledge. Offering baking opportunities at various neighbourhood festivals throughout the year will create a dialogue between local enthusiasts and the original submitters. In the coming months, we will organise inspiration sessions in Brussels and Ghent, to explore sustainable management models.

A second track focuses on the park's silent forest, where civic organisation Klimaan organised a tree-planting campaign. Here, artists Chloé Dierickx experiments with the tension between expropriation and appropriation of a piece of land.

Finally, these first tracks are the reason for bringing several separate initiatives around the 'food and inclusion' umbrella to fruition; for instance, we are working with the heritage unit and the residential care centre to (re)activate the public vegetable gardens, and there is an ongoing trajectory with local sports organisations to install a public punching bag.

In this way, we dissect the original proposals so that together they can respond to local dynamics and add value to the neighbourhood.

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WORKROOM

Since 2010, Architecture Workroom Brussels has focused on the future of our living environment. The organisation began as a safe haven to address the link between space and societal transitions, aimed at fostering a futureproof design practice, commissioning and building culture.

It has now become evident that the transformation of our streets, neighbourhoods, and landscapes is both a prerequisite and a lever for achieving societal goals in synergy. Yet we observe that these transformations remain difficult to imagine and implement. They span so many sectors and involve so many actors that responsibility falls on everyone, and therefore, ultimately, on no one.

That is why we make it our mission to create the space that connects them. And with this refined mission comes a new name: WORKROOM, House for transformation. WORKROOM is the shared space where the future of our living environment is not only imagined but also organised.

We are currently taking the lead on three mission-driven transformations:

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To make these transformations a reality, WORKROOM works shoulder to shoulder with pioneering designers, local authorities, organisations and businesses, governments, knowledge institutions and impact investors.

Through co-creative design, we imagine shared pathways to the future in exhibitions, publications, innovation programmes and public programmes. These are the workrooms where we connect the actors capable of realising these transformations. From there, we design shared ownership and the organisational, funding and policy models that lead to real change.

The name is simpler. The stakes are higher. WORKROOM is the shared space where we tackle the social and spatial transformations that no one can achieve alone. In an era of polarisation, compartmentalisation and instability, that is perhaps the most radical thing we can do.