Happy to announce that Latitude’s proposal for Europan 14 – Productive Cities was singled out for Special Mention. The project submitted for the site of Tubize (Belgium) and entitled “Twofold Nature” (Alessandra Marcon, Andrea Aragone, Marta De Marchi, Fabio Vanin, Andrea Bortolotti) proposes an incremental development that takes advantage of the strategic socio-economic potentials of the area to tackle key environmental and societal issues at multiple scales.

The vision for the site builds on a mixed scenario for the next economy that bounds civic and productive activities: what if the area of the Forge de Calbecq would offer the space to accommodate competitive and complementary activities within the sphere of influence of Brussels? What if these activities would be related to the construction industry, where, at present, many SME are active? What if the site could offer the space and infrastructure to stock, store, sort, recycle, display and sell materials and products? What if that would be in a close relation to the education of low skilled labour, high-tech experimentation, workshop and atelier spaces? What if those productive spaces could be highly integrated with living spaces?