From the 14th to the 22nd of July, Latitude will be part of the leading group of the the summer school Water vs Urban Scape? Exploring Integrated and Decentralized Arrangements of Water in the Brussels Capital Region organized in collaboration with the Faculty of Architecture of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Tongji University of Shanghai, as a momentum to further investigate the complex water challenges that Brussels is facing.

How to reduce the dependence of the urban environment on external resources and the discharge of exceeding and polluted waters to downstream sinks? Is it really possible to create the conditions that allow absorbing the pressures and requirements of the water system within Brussels’ urban region? How more sustainable water cycles can concretely support the process of city regeneration?

In Brussels the authorities are already working in this direction applying principles of sustainable water management/sensitive water design in their plans. However, what the spread of such an approach concretely means in the urban physical arrangement and how space can be carefully and specifically organized to contribute to the overall water sensitive strategy have still to be further explored.

The intensive program of the summer school is held in Brussels at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre-Horta and involves both European and Chinese students, who are asked to investigate the functioning of water in the urban landscape and to invest their skills in design explorations of integration of water at different scales.