The Heyvaert district is a special place, defined by a heavy industrial heritage, it has been gifted a rich built heritage (sometimes with the presence of pollution). In Brussels, it has a strategic location. Located between the new parks of the Porte de Ninove and the Beekkant station, adjacent to the commercial and productive pole of the Abattoirs, close to the Southstation, crossed by the Brussels - Charleroi Canal, and served tangentially by the intermodal hub of the West station. Despite this strategic location, the district retains an insular character in places, wedged between the same infrastructures that connect this district to the rest of the region: the inner ring road, the canal, the Chaussée de Ninove and Rue Ropsy-Chaudron. These are both arteries and boundaries to cross. Similarly, the apparent clarity of the street grid is in constant conflict with the chaotic organization of mobility within this urban grid.
Yet Heyvaert can also be defined as a neighborhood in which many newcomers to Belgium settle - despite the general quality of the housing. Where the accessibility of the public transport system, the opportunities for low-skilled work (especially in the market or in connection with the used car trade) and the robustness of the social networks create a springboard effect and intervene for the emancipation of its inhabitants. It is, in short, a creative and attractive place to live, work and visit that innovates while building on a unique industrial heritage. It is also a district for which there is little certainty about its future mutations. Guiding these mutations through time, facilitating the transition of this neighborhood to a sustainable model should be the goal of the Heyvaert PAD. New housing and workplaces are at the center of this transition, as much as qualitative streets and green spaces.
In the face of uncertainty, we propose a pragmatic PAD, which manages the transition on the basis of the existing assets (patrimonial, morphological and productive) and capacities in the neighborhood. It seeks to build on the following levers of change:
- Programmatic disruption (RORO) and the need for a new productive identity beyond the productive fiction proposed by the Canal Plan.
- New parks as a tool for revitalization and value creation.
- To allow to act more quickly to the opportunities that emerge from the development of this site.
- To install reversible projects, experiments of the global plan, which can be perpetuated or substituted by other projects.
- To assist in the phasing of the applicability of some of the PAD's prescriptions, which may evolve according to their relevance to the general objectives of the development plan.