Ghent - the inspiration
The Ghent pioneering
Imagine your neighbour knocking on your door: “Hi, how are you? Do
you have a few minutes? I have an idea I want to share with you… Imagine
that we could temporarily transform our street into a beautiful green
meeting place for the neighbourhood? We would remove the cars, just for a
few months and see what happens. What do you think?”
In 2013, precisely these kind of simple questions inspired the
inhabitants of the first two Living Streets. In the meantime, the Living
Street triggered the imagination of hundreds of citizens and led to
more than 50 Living Streets in Ghent and inspired many other cities.
Kozijntjesstraat Ghent, reinforcing social links by multiplying interactions among citizens (spring 2014) © www.livingstreet.org
Dreaming of a sustainable and social future
Thanks to Living Streets, hundreds of citizens in Ghent could work
together to create a street of their own. After dreaming and coming up
with ideas, the residents rolled up their sleeves, unrolled the turf,
set up barbecues, created meeting places and so much more. By
creating their own Living Street, these citizens were experimenting with
the sustainable mobility of the future, creating a new approach to
urban space and reinforcing social links by multiplying interactions
among citizens
New ways of co-creation
The Living Streets explored and developed new ways of collaboration
among the citizens in Ghent, municipal services, companies and many more
city stakeholders. They were doing this by challenging each other in a
smart way in terms of thinking, acting, understanding one another and
learning.
The Ghent Living Streets demonstrated how to put co-creation in practice to find creative solutions for social challenges.
All parties involved have always seen Living Streets as an experiment:
successes and failures provide lessons for anyone keen to continue
building Living Streets.
For the citizens, a Living Street functions as a common project and
as such, an impulse for dialogue and dynamics with their neighbours,
other street users and the municipality. During the experiment, they
look for answers and solutions to problems that arise while organising
the Living Street. Knowledge, experience and concepts are tested in a
learning-by-doing approach that will make life easier in the unfolding
sustainable and sociable city.
Meibloemstraat Ghent, creating a new approach to urban space (spring 2015) © www.livingstreet.org
It all started in Ghent
The Living Street is the result of a project initiated by the City of
Ghent. In 2012 the City asked a group of citizens, entrepreneurs and
civil servants to imagine a sustainable future for their city. Their
vision can be found in their agenda for the future: a network of
car-free zones built around central squares, with rapid transit bike
lanes, public transit, and neighbours talking in the street (“The Trojan bike”). The
group realised that only a vision by itself would not change the world.
To make it really happen, they launched concrete experiments, such as
the Living Street (“Leefstraat”) and tried to make their dreams of the
city of tomorrow visible today.
The power of a temporary network
The front-runners of the first hour organised themselves for a couple of years in a temporary network: The Trojan Lab.
The Lab connects collaborating citizens, businesses, city services and
organisations in Ghent to bring about a new way of city governance. The
Lab -through its unique approach- demonstrates that structural changes
are possible and that experimenting and envisioning are solutions which
can take away humans’ innate resistance to change. This approach can help to achieve sustainable, sociable and climate-neutral cities in a better, faster and co-creative way.
Pussemierstraat Ghent, one of the two first Livingstreet-experiment (spring 2013 © www.livingstreet.org
