- Living in-between the Folds of the City    444 kb by    Geeraert, Steven | stevengeeraert@gmail.com    Short Outline Starting from prof. P. Viganò’s “No Vision?” we suggest that urban-minded young families with little children do exist and try to show how their percolation strategies could become a tool to stimulate individual initiatives as strategic project. Abstract Taking Antwerp as case study this paper wants to go into the common thought that ‘young families with children leave the dirty, noisy, unsafe, never green city for the holy suburbs because, in the city, they cannot find a decent place to live’, showing that urban-oriented families do exist. Starting point is ‘A micro history: The re-use of Antwerp’s 19th century belt’. A research by Prof. Paola Viganò (No Vision?, in M/Stadt, Kunsthaus Graz, 2005) dealing with porousness that has opened up in the urban fabric to host new dwelling practices, suggesting the existence of a slightly appearing, statistically non existing ‘scenario from below’ of young families with little children deciding to live in the city even though they can afford a suburban dwelling. Starting from interviews, available statistical data and researches this paper wants to go deeper into some suggestions made by Prof. Viganò, trying to answer how the cases from the micro history research can be seen as ‘prototypes’ and if we are dealing with a ‘scenario from below’ based on individual initiative; showing the reasons for people to stay or come back to consciously live and raise their children in the ‘dangerous’ city and looking to what there living needs are. We ask ourselves if and how these individual percolation strategies could become a tool -using the porosity of the urban fabric that seems to be the driving force for those projects on family scale- to stimulate individual initiatives as strategic project. Suggestions that also might be interesting for the policy makers and politicians. Interesting comparisons will also be raised starting from other researches on the contemporary urban condition in the Flemish cities addressing cultural, social and economic changes in the urban tissue. Keywords porous city; urbanity; urban condition; multiculturalism Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2007: Urban Trialogues   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper