The neighbourhoods of Hoboken and Kiel, located in the south of Antwerp, form a complex urban patchwork; an assemblage of industrial remnants, modernist social housing projects, fragmented polderscapes, and winding residential streets lined with family-owned shops and row houses. This spatial collage is both eclectic and uneven, reflecting layers of historical investment, socio-economic shifts, and cultural overlays. Within this context lies the Blikfabriek, a former can factory turned cultural enclave, now inhabited by artists and alternative collectives. It is a heterotopic space, where exhibition halls transform into party venues, flea markets, and community festivals overnight, and where studios and shared fabrication spaces enable creative production and collaboration.

However, this apparent openness is not equally experienced by all. Through direct observation and informal dialogue, it became evident that the immediate neighbours of the Blikfabriek, largely families of Moroccan and Turkish descent, seldom accessed the factory’s social spaces. Their presence was limited to two peripheral zones: a homework class and a food cabin positioned along the site’s edge. Despite its claims of inclusivity, the Blikfabriek remained, for many, a closed circuit.

In collaboration with residents and social workers, and through immersive urban fieldwork including observational mapping, ethnographic interviews, and narrative workshops with youth aged 13 to 24, the research surfaced a nuanced cartography of social space in these neighbourhoods. This exclusion was felt most acutely by the youth—especially racialised youth—who were often positioned as threats within the public domain. Subject to hyper-surveillance and routine police interventions, their presence was read as risky, transient, or out-of-place. This raised a fundamental question: what spatial qualities make a place feel safe, comfortable, or claimable?

Can risk and belonging be traced, not only sociologically, but architecturally—through thresholds, boundaries, adjacencies, and affordances?

Emerging from this research was a shared desire among local youth: not just for a place to go, but for a space they could own, adapt, and make their own. Not a programmatic fix, but a spatial offering. The youth center unfolds slowly. The architectural response reframes the notion of safety—not through enclosure or control, but through layered spatial conditions that support informal use, retreat, and collective visibility. Spaces are layered, not labeled. Functions blur. Light filters through existing skylights, tracing patterns of occupation and change across walls touched by graffiti and memory.

Surveillance is inverted, youth are no longer the watched, but the watchers. The architecture offers them vantage points, agency, and ambiguity. Cultural and emotional resonance threads through material and color. A bathhouse, redolent of shared heritage, sits quietly to the side, its warmth radiating outward, literal and symbolic. Tapestries, screens, and patterns drawn from the language of home soften the industrial frame. Appropriation is not only allowed, it is encouraged: hooks for hammocks, walls for football nets, spaces that shift with the seasons, the users, and the moment. Risk is no longer about being exposed, but about being visible on one’s own terms.

In this reimagined youth center, architecture makes room, literally and symbolically, for becoming. A space that dares to trust the messiness of occupation, and the poetry of shared, negotiated futures.