Maastricht has a long history as an industrial city and used to be well-known for its ceramics, rubber and paper industries. Due to the decline in industrial production, workspaces and industrious activities are leaving the city and are becoming increasingly secluded from the public sphere. With the Studio theme being gleaning, the project is looking to find value in the existing while giving it a new meaning through interventions and adaptions. It therefore aims to introduce workspaces into the urban fabric of Maastricht and make them meaningful for the urban environment on the site of a former paper mill. Through the lens of philosophical anthropology, these workspaces become essential spaces in the city, facilitating a plurality of activities, allowing encounters and exchange and enriching the urban experience.

Context

The studio’s site is located in Boschstraatkwartier, in Maastricht. Historically, the city was strongly connected with industry, however during the last decades, it was facing many shifts. The industrial sites are gradually redeveloping, and the society has become more heterogeneous because of the migrants and expats. Its diverse population is creating vibrant communities, however, the municipality’s policy and general image of the public space do not reflect this character. Instead, the functional range rather follows the global capitalist tendency. The streets of the centre are built with shops and gastronomical venues and the possibilities for non-consumption time spending are quite limited. Furthermore, this charming city is not free from common issues. The global crises are also visible in the housing shortage, inflation, gentrification, etc. The current politics is not fulfilling in sufficiently overcoming them. Today, the city of Maastricht is awaiting for the new redevelopment, the Sappi factory slowly moves up north and leaves the post-industrial site ready for the new purpose. The municipality plans to create a new housing and cultural neighbourhood, turning the quarter into a more hip destination. Unfortunately, this approach is creating a threat of growing gentrification of the area and, what is the most significant, the loss of one of the most interesting culture providers in the whole city. The plan covers also the Landbouwbelang demolition and further development of the dwelling facilities. The Landbouwbelang (LBB) is a vibrant and diverse community of artists and activists that around twenty years ago squated the abandoned, old building of the grain storage, located next to the factory site. The community is not fully legal inhabitants or owners of the property and according to the municipality’s project is doomed to leave the building in the near future.


Gleaning

The studio’s theme - Glaneurs, Glaneuses and gleaning means reusing and giving a new life to what was left behind. One of the first encounters on the topic was Agnes Varda’s documentary “Les glaneurs et la glaneuse”. In the film, Varda travelled throughout cities and villages in France to document various types of gleaners. It shows how the at of gleaning evolved and how diverse it can be. In the past, it was a natural act of compensation and an opportunity for the less privileged. The landholders did not become less wealthy by leaving some of the harvests on the fields and the poor could benefit from a gratuitous feed. Nowadays, this is no longer a tradition, in many places, the law and the private owners prohibit it. In many situations, the crops stay on the fields and get wasted by letting them rotten or burning them or destroying them in any other way. This procedure is a capitalistic turn relying on increasing the value and controlling the product focusing on the economic aspect, and neglecting the social impact.

The act of gleaning related to architecture links with the accessibility of spaces, distribution of resources and social rights. Those echoes are strongly visible in the urban context as growing issues of inequalities. In the built environment, using the leftovers is associated with the redevelopment of spaces and giving them a new life and purpose. The act of gleaning could be an organised shift as adaptive reuse or an almost spontaneous procedure of appropriation and occupation as an act of different purposes: political, economic or social. It can be seen as a sustainable approach and a response to the throwaway culture of the Anthropocene - the easier thing is to start from the carte blanche than deal with the complex dependencies and achieve the compromise.


Position


Care
- the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something

Empathy
- the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s position


After analysing the context and observing the global trends based on capitalistic system, it was striking how the aspect of empathy is invisible in the spaces that are surrounding us and also in the architectural discourse and practice.

It can be stated that caring is at the very core of architecture itself, since the dawn of time, it has been orientated on creating a shelter and protecting humans from the outside world and its threats. However, today we do not have to fight the elements to survive, so what could we consider caring architecture? 

The interpretation of care is vast. But to get into the core of its meaning, we could say that the goal of care is to put more attention to everyday life. People still have to work, travel, shop and do all the other chores, but with a bit of empathy put into designing those scenes, it can be done with more comfort and dignity. However, today, this value is strongly underrated as a general feature and also as an architectural approach. 

Done under the Urban Architecture Graduation studio, this graduation project based in Maastricht, the Netherlands, delves into the theme of renewals in the city’s urban history, followed by a theoretical exploration of interstitial sites in areas which are in the process of transformation and simultaneous de-industrialization. Learning from the past renewals and present conditions of the northern industrial fringe of Maastricht, the design intervention on the former Sappi factory terrain, looks at how existing structures and the spaces between them can be repurposed and reused rather than direct demolition. It also looks at how careful architectural interventions can create harmonious relations between old and new developments and reshape urban environments while preserving traces of the site’s industrial past.