"At the beginning of this graduation year, there is a theme: Glaneurs, Glaneuse. ‘We are concerned with the city as a man- made landscape. The studio intends to reap and sow pieces of the city, to work with the existing and make use of its resources and potentials.’ In this case, gleaning is interpreted as an attitude to valorize residues, leftovers, what people would consider as non-space. By looking more deeply, diving into the site, and progressively identifying different layers of value (political, economic, architectural, etc), this research aims to discuss the image of industries in urban districts. Sometimes discrete, sometimes prominent, we often only remark their existence once they are gone. ‘There is a need to invent new processes and business models, more gradual and cooperative transformations working with existing building stock {…}.’ What Markus Schaefer (Hosoya, 2021) suggests in the book “Industrious city” is to better consider the value existing buildings instead of too simply decide to tear them down. He suggests elaborating new reconversion strategies, especially in urban environments which consider social, cultural, and societal parameters, more than only looking for financial profitability. Looking at former" "industrial campuses anchored in urban tissues, too often their reconversion has been oriented towards a tertiarization of city districts, somehow replacing a monofunctional industrial campus by another one. In that respect, the case of Maastricht is particularly interesting to investigate. Considered for a long time as the first industrial city in the Netherlands, such slogan as become more a marketing strategy to develop tourism than a real representation of what the job market looks like. In December 2021, one of the biggest employers of the city, Sappi, a South-African paper company, announced leaving its historical situation in North Maastricht (Philippens, 2021). The departure of the paper mill, beyond the social disaster the loss of more than 600 jobs represents, also brings back on the table the status of industrial spaces in urban environments. It also offers an opportunity to draw a more inclusive strategy, as suggested by Markus Schaefer, for the redevelopment of this testimony of the industrial prosperity of Maastricht. In that respect, this research aims to evaluate the potential interest in redeveloping productive activities in the Sappi campus and to elaborate a strategy for the reprogramming of the industrial site into a more inclusive productive urban environment."

In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic forced an important part of the population to stay home and to experience the telework. This context of major crisis was an opportunity for utopists and idealists to speculate about the future of the general organization of our civilization. On June 9th 2020, the New York Times wrote “What If Working From Home Goes On… Forever?”. In such climate of uncertainty, especially at the beginning of the crisis, this question was relevant to ask. One year later, the generalist utopia gave the floor to a more nuanced reality. The most common tendency suggests a hybrid solution between the office and the home working with one major argument: Flexibility. What is sure now is that the concept of office building will deeply change in the next years. Or did it already? In 2016, Carlo Ratti was already asking the question “If work is digital, why do we still go to the office?”. It is because an office space is much more than a place where employees work individually behind the screen of a computer. Otherwise, telework would be commonly used since its apparition in the 1990’s. There is a need of social interactions, of knowledge sharing. The intention of this paper will be to take a step back in the history of workspaces in order to analyze and highlight its evolution as well as the changing consideration of the employee and therefore the investments made to increase his comfort at the office. Focusing mainly on the situation in Belgium, the intention is to precisely understand the social, economic and political dynamics that influenced the evolution of work environment. An emphasis will be made on the New Ways of Working strategy (NWoW), a recent approach of the office space mainly developed in Belgium and the Netherlands.